“Don’t do that! Bad luck! Shhh!” I tapped out in a frenzy.

“Can’t help it!” he responded.

A clammy wave of fear and irritation washed through me. “But what about the Angel of Death?” I typed, before promptly erasing it. The Angel of Death? In stark black-and-white pixels, on a screen powered by electricity and chemicals and human ingenuity, it looked crazy. I shoved the phone into my bag and slid my gloves back on.

I used to live firmly in the observable world. When it came to my physical wellbeing, I trusted the power of medical technology to establish cause and effect. Twisted ankle? A quick X-ray shows whether anything is broken. Sore throat? A culture determines whether or not it’s strep, and antibiotics cure it. Tests identifying a cluster of pre-cancerous cells? There’s surgery to scrape them away, and close monitoring to trigger a repeat if they return. Things are, or they are not, and that’s that.

Pregnancy, I assumed, would work the same way. After all, it was a litmus test that confirmed it in the first place: two pink dashes on a plastic stick, easy as handing over $12 at the drugstore. A few weeks later, we heard a heartbeat, transmitted via sonogram, and a few weeks after that got our first visual confirmation via ultrasound that the bump in my belly housed an actual baby, who has two arms and two legs, 10 fingers and 10 toes, two little ears and a tiny button nose.

Then came the genetic tests, which I was startled to discover offer results in the form of percentages, rather than certainties. Our numbers were good, but if we wanted guarantees, we were told, we needed to do an amniocentesis—a test whose chances of hurting the baby were higher than the outside possibility that something was actually wrong. In other words, it was riskier to pursue a definite answer than to trust the statistics—a choice that, for us, was no choice at all. But that little seed of uncertainty took root in my mind and has been steadily watered by a cascade of “wait and sees” on everything from how big the baby will be to how labor will go. Now, with less than a month before delivery, it’s blossomed into the idea that the baby is like Schrödinger’s poor cat: simultaneously perfect and afflicted, not one or the other but both, until he emerges from the black box of my belly into the world, where we can see him for ourselves. Knowing a little bit turns out to be as good, or bad, as not knowing anything at all.

The fact that we live with the uncertainty for nine whole months—and that the evidence of the mystery is always right in front of me—is why, I’ve discovered, pregnancy is a particularly ripe condition for spawning superstition. “Whenever you have a situation where there’s a lot at stake, and you’ve done everything you possibly can to make sure there’s a happy outcome but there’s still a lot of uncertainty, it’s a perfect circumstance for superstitions to emerge,” Stuart Vyse, a professor at Connecticut College who specializes in the psychology of irrational beliefs, told me. “Establishing some kind of ritual or lucky thing you do makes you feel better, because it gives you the illusion of control.”

And Jews have spent centuries accumulating a vast catalog of practices surrounding pregnancy and childbirth: a trove of off-the-shelf totems to fit any anxiety that, for someone as determinedly secular as I am, has the added appeal of coming wrapped in echt Jewish authenticity. “You can trace the magic to the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, you can see the common denominators,” said Michele Klein, an expert in Jewish birth folklore and customs. “But the Jews have a written heritage and have channeled it and processed it and turned it into a way to maintain Jewish identity, separate from other peoples.” So, expectant Jewish parents can rely on charms like the hamsah to ward off the evil eye or tie red strings around their wrists for good luck—or resort to time-honored tricks like not saying a baby’s name aloud before it is formally bestowed at the bris, eight days after birth, to avoid attracting notice from vindictive spirits.

Which is why, despite there being nothing in the Talmud about my omnipresent Angel of Death, it felt like a distinctly Jewish thing to fear. Along with the evil eye—ayin hara—it’s a concept that has become woven into the warp of Jewish observance, so much so that it can be thought of as “superhalachic.” (Another is the habit of wishing a pregnant woman “b’sha’ah tovah”—“in good time”—rather than a standard mazel tov.) “The overwhelming majority of these things are not legally or textually based,” said Rabbi Dr. Edward Reichman, who teaches Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University. Superstitious habits like not revealing a baby’s intended name before the bris, or not outfitting a nursery until a baby is born, dovetail with other legally sanctioned practices, like not planning a funeral until a person has died. “There is a belief that you don’t want to prophesize or look to the future in ways that are inappropriate,” Reichman told me. “There’s nothing in halacha about not calling a mohel before a baby’s born, but you don’t want to anticipate God’s work—so you wait.”

Continue reading: Psychological incentives

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Mitt Romney pulled $24 million in straight campaign contributions, which was more than the other three remaining candidates combined. That included contributions in late December from important Jewish Republican donors who, as I reported last week, had stayed on the fence throughout the pre-season. Among Romney’s new supporters are hedge fund manager Paul Isaac, one of the 30 biggest individual donors to the Republican Party; Cheryl Halpern, a former backer of Gov. Rick Perry; and Hudson Institute board member Nina Rosenwald. Romney also got a big boost from Paul Singer, a hedge-fund manager and one of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s biggest cheerleaders, who gave the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future $1 million in December.

But Romney hasn’t managed to convince everyone. George Klein, a longtime party stalwart, gave Romney money in November, and then switched to Gingrich’s side at the height of the former Speaker’s December wave. Earle Mack, a real-estate developer who sits on the Republican Jewish Coalition’s board, gave $10,000 to the pro-Gingrich Super PAC Winning Our Future—though that was of course small beans compared to the reported $10 million contributed in January by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam. In December, Miriam Adelson’s daughters gave Restore Our Future $1 million—nearly half of the $2.1 million total raised through the fourth quarter.

And still some major players remain on the sidelines. Duty Free Americas COO Simon Falic and his family were among Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biggest financial supporters for yesterday’s Likud primary (which Bibi won easily). Yet they have yet to pick a candidate after their early favorite, Perry, dropped out. Ronald Krancer, a GOP heavyweight based in Pennsylvania, has likewise not given any money aside from an early donation to his former senator, Rick Santorum. These are folks who, we feel sure, can expect some phone calls today.

Quarterly Candidate Fundraising, 2011 [OpenSecrets]
Who’s Financing the ‘Super PACs’? [NYT]
Presidential Fundraising in Key 2012 States [USA Today]
Related: Withholding [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Key Netanyahu Funders Also Back Rick Perry

With the potentially decisive Florida primary less than a week away, that same phenomenon appears to be playing out among Jewish party heavyweights. A Tablet review of campaign-finance records for 175 major Republican Jewish donors shows that, according to the most recent campaign filings, more than 55 percent have yet to give to any primary candidate. Of that 55 percent, nearly two-thirds—64 donors—had already given to a candidate by this time in the 2008 presidential cycle. Among them, more than a dozen have not repeated their support for Romney this year, a group that includes high-profile figures like Richard Fox, a Pennsylvania developer who co-founded the Republican Jewish Coalition; California real-estate mogul Fred Sands; and Ronald Krancer, an heir to the Annenberg fortune who has been a major Republican player in Pennsylvania.

“I like him, but I’m just not sure which Romney’s going to show up, and I think that’s a problem a lot of voters have with him,” said Joel Hoppenstein, an attorney in Miami Beach and Republican Jewish Coalition board member who was among Romney’s earliest donors in January 2007. Hoppenstein said he only recently made what he described as “a very insignificant” donation to the campaign. “Most people are looking for a Reagan figure who can bring social conservatives and fiscal conservatives together, and Mitt Romney is supposed to be that person today—but the public electorate hasn’t embraced him.”

That reality appears to have given some big donors pause. There certainly are major donors who are sitting out the primaries because of other commitments—among them, James Tisch, the CEO of the Loews Corporation and an early Giuliani donor, who is now on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But others who gave early and generously in 2008—not just to Republican primary candidates, but to the party—have yet to emerge from the wings. Sheldon Kamins, the Washington developer who chaired Gingrich’s PAC in the late 1990s—and who gave to Romney in the 2008 primaries—declined to comment on his lack of involvement this year because he has relationships with too many of the candidates. When I asked whether that was also why he had so far declined to give, he replied: “That would be a good surmise.”

The difference between this primary campaign and the last is striking. In the 2008 cycle, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was the early favorite among the Jewish donors reviewed by Tablet. Giuliani won primary support from nearly as many of the donors as Arizona Sen. John McCain and Romney combined—partly because of his hometown status among Republican Jewish donors from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but also because he seemed like a credible candidate from the outset. “There were more clearly viable candidates in 2008 than today,” said Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, who has attended fundraising meetings between Republican presidential candidates and potential Jewish donors. “So, people had a choice between people who had a real chance, rather than four or five people who might have a chance.”

In June, Gingrich’s campaign imploded with the mass resignation of his staff, in part because the former speaker had decided to go on vacation in Greece instead of heading to Iowa. It seemed, briefly, that he might not make it into autumn. But as former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry faded out, Gingrich re-emerged as a popular favorite in the final weeks of 2011. People who might have been ready to plump for Romney before the primary season now had another option.

So far, Gingrich’s main benefactor has been Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $5 million to the pro-Gingrich super-PAC Winning Our Future earlier this month. (Adelson is also a generous backer of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and, like so many of the Jewish donors we reviewed, was a Giuliani supporter in the 2008 primary.) He has also enjoyed the backing of Lawrence Kadish, a Long Island real-estate investor who was also a founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Gingrich wasted no time canvassing for support once his star began to rise after restaurant mogul Herman Cain dropped out of the race in December. Before Christmas, Gingrich attended a meeting of Jewish leaders in New York and reportedly won backing from another key figure: George Klein, an investor and a Republican Jewish Coalition board member who had been expected to back Romney.

On Monday, following the speaker’s South Carolina win, Adelson’s wife Miriam ponied up another $5 million for the same pro-Gingrich super-PAC her husband had supported. Abetted by the Adelsons’ largesse, Gingrich’s persistence has inspired donors who had been on the fence to take a second look. “I’ve given a contribution to Romney, but I intend to give to Gingrich,” said Kenneth Bialkin, a partner at Skadden, Arps in New York who has been chair of the Conference of Presidents. Last fall, Bialkin gave to Texas Gov. Rick Perry—the price of attending a private meeting, Bialkin said—but he was loath to commit. “I think Romney is a fine candidate, and if he were the candidate, I’d cheerfully vote for him,” Bialkin told me. “I also think the same of Gingrich,” he added.

Still, Romney has received steadfast support among some formidable Jewish donors, including Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping-center developer who chairs Romney’s Florida finance committee, and Sam Fox, a George W. Bush Pioneer who helped underwrite the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 and gave $90,000 to Restore Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Romney, last spring. He has also won significant backing from Boston philanthropist Ted Cutler, one of Sheldon Adelson’s original business partners, who has given $100,000 to the pro-Romney super-PAC in the past year.

And while Romney might have preferred to be the crowd favorite from the outset, he has steadily won support by attrition, beginning in August when Pawlenty departed the race. In December, Roger Hertog—initially a Pawlenty backer and a major donor to Jewish causes—held a $2 million fundraiser for Romney in Manhattan with hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a partisan of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who declared in October that he would not run for the presidency this year. Pawlenty backer Bernard Marcus, the Home Depot founder and Republican Jewish Coalition board member, recently agreed to give to Romney’s campaign after spending months declining to engage with the remaining candidates, according to Fred Zeidman, a Texas oilman and former McCain finance chairman who is spearheading Romney’s Jewish outreach.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the overriding consideration is that we have to beat Obama,” said Zeidman. “So, there has to be a kumbaya moment at some point, because this can’t go on.”

Divided Assets
Which candidates are Jewish Republicans supporting? A sample of 20 prominent donors.

List includes major donors and board members of the Republican Jewish Coalition; campaign donations as reported by the Federal Election Commission as of Jan. 24, 2012, via OpenSecrets.org.
*Does not include donations not yet reported in Federal Election Commission data provided by OpenSecrets.org as of Jan. 24, 2012. Adelson and his wife have given an additional reported $10 million to the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future super-PAC.

The family has long given generously to American politicians—more than $900,000 over the last two cycles, according to OpenSecrets. As is relatively common for canny businesspeople, they give across partisan lines, supporting both national committees as well as individual candidates who are diametrically opposed to each other. This year, for example, Jerome Falic, CEO of Duty Free Americas, maxed out his giving to Rep. Eric Cantor, a Republican and the House Majority Leader, and to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee.

But when it comes to presidential politics, the family has consistently gone Republican. In 2007, several family members supported former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s primary bid, and then ponied up for Sen. John McCain in the general election. And, now, Perry. The erstwhile Texas governor raised $20,000 from two generations of the family last September, and, so far, remains the only presidential candidate to win their support. This despite the fact that he has not been considered a seriously competitive candidate since about October.

It’s not clear that their enthusiasm has had any effect on Bibi’s affections. Only a few days after their donations cleared Perry’s accounts, Bibi went on CNN to criticize a member of his own party, Deputy Knesset Speaker Danny Danon, for appearing alongside Perry at a pro-Israel campaign event in New York. “When I get to the point that I can control Knesset, including in my own party, it’ll be a good day,” Netanyahu told Wolf Blitzer. His donors, though, not so much.

One U.S. Family is Responsible for Half of Netanyahu’s Donations [Haaretz]
Earlier: The Company Rick Perry Keeps

The closest Mitchell came to making news was on the subject of Iran, about which he told moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor who has reported extensively on this question, that there is not yet a sufficient case to be made for bombing. “One thing we’ve found in recent years that is true historically is that it’s awfully easy to get into wars, and very hard to get out of them,” Mitchell said. “If you think that they are unstable enough to launch a possible first nuclear strike on Israel, you certainly have to believe that they would launch a massive missile attack, if they themselves were attacked, in retaliation.”

Fair enough. But Mitchell now speaks as a private citizen, not on behalf of his former employers—a fact that gave the entire proceeding a certain weightlessness common to the endless, earnest caravan of Middle East seminars and fora hosted week in and week out in Washington. This one, held at the Atlantic’s headquarters at the Watergate, was distinguished by the presence of Danny Abraham, the billionaire inventor of Slim-Fast who has put the proceeds of America’s diet craze into a center devoted to Middle East peace headed by former Florida Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler, a key Obama Middle East/Jewish surrogate. (The S. Daniel Abraham Center has published a Special Report on the Atlantic‘s Website titled, “Is Peace Possible?”) Organizers said representatives from the State Department, the Israeli embassy, and the Palestinian Authority were also present, but they were indistinguishable amid the regulars—journalists, analysts, former diplomats, Hill staffers—who came and solemnly listened as Mitchell explained that however dim the prospects for peace seem, it’s worth our efforts to keep at it for the sake of everyone involved.

What Mitchell did not do was take any real responsibility for failure. That he rather laid on the shoulders of the parties—and perhaps more the Palestinians than the Israelis, for their histrionics on the question of the settlement freeze. “The real mistake that we made, and for which we bear responsibility, is that we did not make clear that the proposal was one in isolation to the Israelis, as opposed to in the context of requests made to all three parties,” Mitchell said of Israel’s 10-month freeze of settlements in the West Bank toward the beginning of the Obama Administration. “We did not make clear as we should have that none of those were preconditions to negotiations, but were, in fact, an effort to establish a context in which negotiations could occur and have a reasonable expectation for success.”

In the question-and-answer period, someone asked Mitchell why he left the region last spring instead of sticking it out longer, as he had in Northern Ireland. Mitchell laughed and said he gave the Levant less time precisely because he had spent so long in the Emerald Isle. “I said to the president, ‘I can’t do five years here, and I can’t commit to you even a full presidential term,’ ” Mitchell said. “He said to me, ‘What would you do?’ I said, ‘Two years, and we’ll see what happens.’ And I stayed two and a half years.” And, he didn’t add, we’re still waiting to see what happens.

Israel-Palestine Conflict [C-SPAN]
Is Peace Possible? [The Atlantic]

Lew, who is 56, is widely known as a straight-shooter and, during his time in the Clinton White House, has earned a reputation as an able go-between for the White House on Capitol Hill. Last summer, he played a key role in the fraught debt-ceiling negotiations—a critical point in his favor when it came time to selecting Daley’s replacement, administration officials told Politico. Obama, speaking from the Dining Room of the White House, said he expects Lew to continue working on economic issues: “I have every confidence that Jack will make sure we don’t miss a beat and continue to do everything he can to secure our economy and help the middle class and keep America safe.”

A Queens native, Lew got his start in Washington working for Bella Abzug. He will be the first Orthodox Jew to hold such a senior West Wing position, according to Nathan Diament, the director of the Orthodox Union’s Washington operation. “That is a wonderful testament to Jewish life in America, as well as to his record and his experience,” Diament said.

Lew to Replace Daley as Chief of Staff [NYT]

Stark’s death, at 62, interrupted an encore performance in a Jewish career that began in the 1970s, when as a Brandeis University graduate student he worked summers at the Kallah youth camp run by the B’nai B’rith youth wing, now known as BBYO. He went on to teach at Schechter—always Tanakh, colleagues said, and always in the middle-school grades—and then, in the 1990s, traveled to the countries of the former Soviet Union to run Jewish outreach programs. Over the years, Stark, who never married and had no children, mentored hundreds, if not thousands, of young people, many of whom are now rabbis, teachers, or professionals in their thirties and forties working for major Jewish institutions across the country—people who have infused contemporary Jewish life with the legacy of Stark’s lessons.

Meanwhile, Stark’s death has turned what was meant to bridge generations of Jewish students at Boston’s Schechter school into a moment for those he influenced to gather in mourning. Tonight, many will return to their alma mater for a memorial service, capping a week of informal outpourings on Facebook, where many had reconnected with their old teacher, and in long email chains recounting Stark’s love of jokes and puns.

“He would ask us what the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet was—tough,” wrote Josh Blumenthal, a Schechter student who went on to work in Jewish education. “Twenty-eight years later, I can still recite tzedek, tzedek, tirdof.”

Stark, who wasn’t religious, came to Jewish teaching through his love of language and performance. “He was a zealot for Jewish learning and ideas, the arts, and Jewish peoplehood,” said Stark’s cousin, Scott Lasensky, also a former BBYO camper who now works for the United States mission to the United Nations. “He didn’t see them as any different, because he came from a family where love of the arts, Tanakh, and the stage were interwoven.”

Stark grew up in Freehold, N.J., and went to high school with Bruce Springsteen. At home, Stark spoke Yiddish with his father, Sidney, who was born in Estonia and came to the United States as a teenager in 1924, and his mother, Ida, who was born in Brooklyn but grew up speaking Yiddish with her Belarussian parents as a girl in Sioux City, Iowa. As a child in the 1960s, Stark attended the Kallah youth camps, where future luminaries like Elie Wiesel were featured as speaking guests years before they became famous. He became a staff member in the 1970s while pursuing his doctorate in biblical texts and ancient Semitic languages at Brandeis University and eventually became director of the BBYO summer youth programs, from 1984 to 1989, while teaching during the year at Schechter.

“It was a real dream come true for Peter,” said Robin Minkoff, who worked for Stark at the camp. “He was very romantic about the founding of Kallah and wanted the teens coming through in the 1980s to have the same experience the kids coming through in the ‘60s had.” That meant inviting guests like Aaron Lansky, who went on to win a MacArthur genius grant for his work preserving Yiddish books, and Marvin Tokayer, a rabbi and scholar who preserved the history of Jewish refugees in Asia. “Peter was a real Renaissance man, knowledgeable about every subject you could imagine, and I think he wanted us to be also,” said Marc Blattner, a former camper who is now the executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland. “He taught teenagers about the global Jewish world and what people were doing, to say, ‘Don’t think your bubble is the world, it’s larger than that and you need to connect to it.’ ”

Others recalled Stark—who acted in or directed more than three dozen light-opera productions with local companies over the years—making his charges act out scenes from the texts they were learning. “He thought we needed to understand what it felt like,” said Nadine Greenfield-Binstock, who now works for the American Jewish Committee in Washington.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stark began traveling across Eastern Europe for B’nai B’rith and other Jewish organizations to run outreach programs in cities like Vilna, Riga, and Birobidzhan. He left Schechter in 1992 to become principal of the Hebrew High program in Worcester and began taking students on annual trips to Lithuania, where he put on day camps modeled on those he had run for American teenagers. “He felt he’d tackled the Jewish youth in America and wanted to do what he could to help Jewish kids elsewhere,” Blattner said.

“He had no kids, and still he had so many kids,” said another former student, Ilya Fuchs.
Fuchs, a Soviet émigré who is now a lawyer in Boston, was among those who encouraged Stark to return to teaching last year, after a decade-long hiatus working as an Internet consultant and caring for his ailing parents in New Jersey.

In recent years, Stark was in ill health, overweight and suffering with a bad back, and initially he resisted. “Then out of the blue he says, ‘Write me a recommendation,’ ” Fuchs said. “He wrote me a recommendation for high school, a recommendation for college, and a recommendation for law school, so last month I wound up writing him a recommendation to get back into teaching.”

The head of the Schechter school, Arnold Zar-Kessler, quickly welcomed Stark back to his old position, initially filling in for another teacher who is on sabbatical. Zar-Kessler, whose own daughter was among Stark’s pupils in the 1980s, said he wanted the school’s current students, some of them the children of people Stark had once taught, to experience Stark’s teaching style—one that balanced intellectual rigor with delight in the subject matter. “He never lost his curiosity, and he was successful with the brightest kids, the ones who reach adolescence and get disenchanted with the texts,” Zar-Kessler told me. “His first class was to have been the next day, and the irony is painful.”

Then there’s an online-only segment where Cantor says of Jews voting Democratic, “This has been the bane of my existence for a long time.” Clearly, he means it as a joke, but Stahl—herself Jewish—chose to go after Cantor, asking repeatedly whether there isn’t “something in the faith” that pushes Jews toward the Democratic Party. It’s not really clear what she was after; there are plenty of people who point to the harmony between, say, Democratic concerns about the environment and Talmudic principles, but no one who seriously argues that voting Republican somehow makes someone a bad Jew. Cantor deftly parried, saying that the principle of tikkun olam could encompass Republican-style private charity (remember compassionate conservatism?) as well as government safety nets—and then immediately got back on message, noting, “It’s that way in the Christian faith and others as well, that you give back.”

Cantor, already a favorite of the right, also clearly tried to transcend the image Democrats have painted of him as Washington’s obstructionist-in-chief. His message with the Jewish stuff was that he knows how to go along to get along. In Richmond, he invited Stahl to speak with his wife, Diana, who allowed that she is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, and with his mother-in-law Barbara, a longtime stalwart of Florida Democratic politics who said—diplomatically if a little dubiously—that, when she met Cantor, “I saw that it’s good to be Republican, too.” His son Michael added that his dad likes rap, and Cantor responded that his favorites are Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne, and Wiz Khalifa. He wore a sweater and went biking around a manicured lake in the exclusive suburban development where he lives.

But that soft-focus footage came after a tense interview in Cantor’s Washington office, in which he gave his highly emotive eyebrows a workout and displayed an unfortunate tendency to roll his eyes skyward while thinking through his explanations for why Washington gridlock isn’t his fault. Things really went off the rails when one of his staffers interrupted Stahl to dispute the premise of a question about Ronald Reagan’s record of compromising on tax increases. On camera, Cantor and his wife froze on their couch; in the edit room, Stahl retorted with a clip of the Gipper himself talking about the need to make compromises in Washington. “We’ve seen the two sides of Eric Cantor,” Stahl says in closing: the ambitious would-be Speaker of the House and the friendly Southern gentlemanone sometimes at odds with the other.

The Majority Leader: Rep. Eric Cantor [60 Minutes]
Cantorland [TNR]
Related: The Gentleman from Virginia

Accordingly, there’s been a lot of chatter about anti-Israel and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories published under his name and about his isolationist foreign policy stance, which includes calls for cutting aid to Israel. Much of that chatter has come from Romney fans, and from Romney himself. “The greatest threat Israel faces and frankly the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran,” Romney told an audience in Muscatine on Tuesday. “One of the people running for president thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Romney, who one imagines is exhausted by months of playing whack-a-mole with the rest of the GOP field, is looking for the win on Tuesday, and while there aren’t many Jews in the Hawkeye State, there are many evangelical Christians. It’s to Romney’s advantage to push them away from Paul, though that increases the plausibility of Rick Santorum pulling off a Mike Huckabee and stealing the show.

But Romney and Santorum have both also said they would vote for Paul if he eventually clinches the Republican nomination. And there are still four long days between now and Tuesday night. In the meantime, as the general public focuses on the GOP field with an intensity that it hasn’t for almost four years, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—the highest-ever ranked Jew in Congress, and favorite for national office among many on the right—is going to be on 60 Minutes this Sunday taking Lesley Stahl back to his hometown, Richmond, though not, apparently, for Thanksgiving. Welcome to 2012, and beyond!

60 Minutes Preview: The Majority Leader [CBS]
Related: Romney, Santorum Say They Would Vote for Paul
Newt Gingrich’s Glory Days [NYT Magazine]
Earlier: The Haunting of Ron Paul

With Election Day less than a year away, the core of the Obama campaign’s play for Jewish votes is simple: Overwhelm what the Obama camp sees as Republicans’ bald emotionalism on Israel with a flood of facts and figures. Obama’s campaign website has a section devoted to Jewish issues that includes a seven-page PDF documenting the president’s support for Israel, with a six-page supplement titled “President Obama’s Stance on Israel: Myths vs. Facts.” (“Myth: President Obama believes that Israel is at the root of all problems in the Middle East today. Fact: President Obama declared Israel a source of inspiration for the American people as the sole true democracy in the Middle East.”)

Obama is heading into what promises to be a tough campaign, in which he will need all the enthusiastic support he can get—especially in crucial swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, all of which include substantial Jewish electorates. And while it’s hard to imagine a majority of Jewish votes going to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, a lukewarm showing among the people of the three Velts makes his task that much harder. A recent Gallup poll, conducted in September, showed Jewish support for Obama had plunged 29 points since his inauguration in January 2009. And this fall, in the most Jewish district in the country, disgraced Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s seat went to a neophyte Republican candidate, a result voters—albeit Orthodox and therefore not representative of the Jewish vote nationwide—there said they intended to be seen as a referendum on the Obama Administration’s stance toward Israel.

Ask anyone in Obamaland about what is now commonly referred to as the president’s Jewish problem, and the same answer will inevitably follow: “It’s not us, it’s you.” Or, more typically, “it’s them”—the vocal cadres of the Emergency Committee for Israel, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and similarly hawkish groups that, in the administration’s view, have turned Israel into an emotional wedge issue for Jewish voters, in much the same way right-wing groups used abortion to pull Catholics and evangelical Christians away from the Democratic Party in the 1980s. “To the extent we have a problem,” Wasserman Schultz told me last week, “it’s being created by individuals who know that Republicans can’t appeal to Jews on their domestic issues and are attempting to mischaracterize, distort, and lie about the president’s record to create enough distrust in the community to shave off a little bit of support here and there.”

But ask actual voters, and even ardent supporters of the president say the problem is acute. “You say he’s against Israel enough times, and eventually people believe it,” one Obama donor told me earlier this month in Los Angeles, where a recent cover of the local Jewish Journal featured the headline “Angry Jews” on an image of mad-as-hell Howard Beale. “In this town,” the donor went on, “he’s got a Jewish problem.”

Some Jewish voters have sharp policy disagreements with the White House, whether over the president’s early decision to condition Israeli-Palestinian talks on a settlement-construction freeze or his initial commitment to engaging the Iranian regime in talks over its nuclear ambitions. But it is the seemingly endless series of diplomatic and rhetorical faux pas that has reinforced an anxiety among many Jewish voters—including lifelong Democrats—that Obama is somehow not on their side. There was the notorious photo op-less summit between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2010. Just this month, the administration’s ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, the son of a Holocaust survivor, gave a speech drawing distinctions between classical anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was criticized by Obama antagonists as blaming Israel for contemporary Muslim antipathy toward Jews. Days later came Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s exhortation, at the end of an evening seminar at the Brookings Institution, for Israel to “get to the damn table.”

That these mini-controversies continue to reverberate suggests that Obama’s “Jewish problem” is, at base, an emotional one: a failure to connect with and respond to the concerns of his Jewish constituents. These are voters, it seems, who would find it easier to tune out Republican smears of Obama as anti-Israel if only they had an image of the president addressing the Knesset, or, better yet, splitting a hummus with Benjamin Netanyahu on Jaffa Road.

***

David Axelrod is still perplexed by how hard it was to sell his man to Jewish voters last time around. “We had to work for that vote,” he told me just before Thanksgiving, when we met in the empty conference room he uses at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago’s Loop. “There was sort of, you know, ‘Where’s he coming from?’ ”

Continue reading: Obama’s kishkes factor

His advisers have been suggesting such a peroration to a Jewish audience ever since his May speech calling for negotiating on the basis of the 1967 borders and the subsequent fallout. He couldn’t have asked for a better audience. This is the Reform crowd: the pre-game show was all about the history of the Religious Action Center and the crucial support Jewish activists lent to the civil rights movement—without which, Obama said, he probably wouldn’t be president. There was a warmup act of camp songs, which, as the delay wore on, extended to “Maoz Tzur” and “Great Balls of Fire.”

He discussed domestic issues like fair pay and he discussed Israel. But the overwhelming thrust was the journey—“journey” would dominate a word cloud of the speech—he has been on with this group since he first began to run for the White House.

In other words, this was the equivalent of a hometown speech. He gave a shout-out to AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, but also to NFTY, the organization for Reform teens. When I walked out, I heard one young man remark, “How about that shout-out to NFTY!” To which another young man replied, “I can’t wait to use that video clip.” Shabbat Shalom, bro.

Related: Disunion [Tablet Magazine]

1989, dir. Rob Reiner. We all know what this movie has going for it: Meg Ryan’s infamous fake-orgasm scene, over pickles and sandwiches at Katz’s deli. What it also represents is the moment when, anticipating Judd Apatow by 20 years, director Rob Reiner recast the contemporary Jewish man as a desirable romantic figure. Forget Woody Allen’s neurotic, passive-aggressive archetype; here instead is the kinder, gentler, funnier Billy Crystal, who can both be a friend and pull off a heart-stopping dip on the dance floor on New Year’s Eve, regardless of being shorter than his date in heels.

But what is there to understand, exactly? That it’s OK for teenage checkpoint guards to decide whether it’s safe to expose a fetus to X-rays? That it’s OK for them to treat an American journalist in a cavalier and cruel fashion without, say, stopping to consult with their superiors? Or that it’s OK for the apparatus of the military occupation to continue committing acts that, inevitably, bring shame and embarrassment on Israel, a country that is constantly striving to paint itself as a moral and just haven, one that American Jewish organizations, and the American government, spend millions of dollars and valuable political capital every year defending from delegitimizing attacks suggesting otherwise?

There are people who will say Addario—who earlier this year was taken hostage and mistreated while on assignment in Libya—should never have been someplace as unpredictable as Gaza in her condition at all, even though it’s her job. (Here are the pictures she went there to take.) There are people who will shake their heads at her for agreeing to go through the scanner once, instead of submitting to a strip-search, after it turned out that the crossing’s spokesman, Shlomo Dror, failed to relay her advance request for a low-tech pat-down. There are people who will say that this kind of thing happens in American airports, too, and that it’s unfair to expect guards at the Gaza border to be better-trained or -behaved than TSA screeners at O’Hare.

Let them say it. The truth is there’s simply nothing to excuse, justify, or even really explain why these guards decided to force Addario back through the machine twice, and then three times, “as they watched and laughed from above,” according to Addario’s complaint. Nor would anything make reason of the fact that, afterward, they forced her to strip down to her underwear and lift her shirt to expose her belly for additional inspection. This, from a country that treats women’s fertility and prenatal health as a paramount public policy issue. This, from a country that prides itself on the procedures used by its military. This, from a country whose soldiers should know better than to do anything that they wouldn’t want the world to see on YouTube, and whose commanding officers should know to watch their teenage charges like hawks. This, from a country that imagines itself as the kind of place where Addario, and any other person who posed no threat, is treated with fairness and perhaps even kindness. Thankfully, she seems to be fine. The rest of us should be apoplectic.

Times Photographer Complains of Israeli Soldiers’ ‘Cruelty’ at Border Crossing [NYT]
Defense Ministry Apologizes to NY Times [JPost]
IDF Treats Pregnant NYT Journalist ‘Cruelly’ at Gaza Crossing [+972]
Israeli Thuggery [Time]

The National Museum of the Jewish People, as the plans call it, would occupy a delicate structure tucked into a hidden courtyard between a new hotel in the hulking, turreted Old Post Office building and the equally imposing headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service next door. “We would be the tail wagging the dog,” said Julius Kaplan, a Washington lawyer who is chairman of the decade-old nonprofit devoted to the museum effort, in a phone interview last week. The museum’s website mentions support from prominent Jewish figures—Elie Wiesel, Itzhak Perlman—as well as less-obvious supporters like Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, Jamsheed Marker, who along with Wiesel and Perlman is listed as an honorary trustee. For the bid, Kaplan recruited Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the Berlin Jewish Museum, who imagined an angular building surrounded by a tiered garden that would include an elevated High Line-style bower over an arcade threaded between the two landmark buildings and out to the street, where visitors would be welcomed with a sign in Hebrew reading pardes—a word frequently interpreted to mean Eden.

What wonders might fill this particular Jewish paradise, should it come to fruition, are a little harder to discern. The project’s backers advertise a handful of existing public commitments—including a promise from Arlette Snyder, mother of Redskins owner Dan Snyder, to donate her late husband’s music memorabilia, described as “covering every genre from classical music to the Beastie Boys”—but the general curatorial approach seems to owe something to Field of Dreams: Build it, and they will donate. The museum will have to compete with the existing Judaica collections of Washington’s most august institutions, from the Smithsonian to the Library of Congress—and, for ephemera, with Philadelphia’s new National Museum of American Jewish History, which opened last year. “God forbid you create something mediocre and put it in Washington,” said Michael Berenbaum, who oversaw the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum two decades ago and is now a professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. “You either have to do something that is grand and world-class in terms of size, scope, and mandate, or you have to create a boutique museum, a small gem.”

The idea man behind the museum proposal is Ori Soltes, a lecturer in theology and fine arts at Georgetown University, who has been fighting for an independent Jewish museum in the capital since the late 1990s, when he was director of the small Judaica museum held by B’nai B’rith, a no-longer-displayed collection of donations made over the years by the organization’s patrons and items held in trust for other foundations. Soltes, who has a wild corona of salt-and-pepper curls and the didactic energy of a children’s show host, talks excitedly about multimedia or holographic installations that would allow visitors to bat against Sandy Koufax, and the museum project’s Web site mentions a similar idea for re-enacting chess matches played by Bobby Fischer—never mind the grandmaster’s later paranoid fantasies of being pursued by world Jewry. The list of proposed curatorial departments runs the gamut from art and literature to economics, media, and the law.

When we met earlier this month at a coffee shop in Georgetown, Soltes told me he also envisions space devoted to exhibits digitally recreating lost synagogues and temporary shows bolstered with public programs exploring the interplay between Jewish communities and the cultures into which they settled around the world, from Morocco or Poland or China to the United States. “We want to explore how the Jewish people have been involved in the societies where they’ve lived, which is everywhere,” Soltes said. “The job of the museum is to keep asking the question without an answer—what’s Jewish?”

Soltes cheerfully acknowledges that he and Kaplan don’t have much to start with by way of a permanent collection. Aside from the music memorabilia, announced commitments include an array of miniature menorahs collected by Kaplan, plus paintings by Jewish artists collected by Baron Oscar Ghez, the founder of Geneva’s Petit Palais Museum. But Soltes seems undaunted. “There is a lot of stuff out there,” Soltes told me. “People call me all the time saying they have stuff to give.”

There is an obvious prize: the B’nai B’rith’s now-homeless collection. In the 1990s, the Klutznick National Jewish Museum occupied the second floor of the B’nai B’rith’s former headquarters near Dupont Circle. It has not been formally displayed since B’nai B’rith sold that building, in 2002, and moved to smaller offices. But even before that, Soltes, who was director from 1991 until 1998, had ideas about the Klutznick collection’s potential as an independent attraction. He worked to raise the museum’s profile both in Washington and among Jewish institutions, joining museum associations and building an independent board to oversee dedicated fundraising efforts under the larger B’nai B’rith umbrella. One of those board members was Kaplan, a member of Washington’s Explorers’ Club who told me that, aside from representing Israel on trade matters in Washington, he’d had very little involvement in organized Jewish life prior to signing on with Soltes but had found himself captivated by a show at the Klutznick exploring Jewish influence on Moroccan culture. According to Soltes, he and Kaplan made repeated overtures to executives at B’nai B’rith in hopes of partnering on an independent museum, but the idea never gained traction. Gwen Zuares, chair of B’nai B’rith’s Center for Jewish Culture, said in an interview that the organization is actively pursuing discussions with potential partners for the Klutznick, but she declined to disclose details.

In any case, Kaplan says, his vision for what a Jewish museum in Washington could be has always been more expansive than simply repackaging the existing B’nai B’rith collection. “I’ve always felt from the beginning that the B’nai B’rith museum was an interesting undertaking, but it didn’t have the Weltanschauung, as the Germans would say, to complement the Holocaust museum,” he said in our phone conversation. “The Holocaust having a major presence in Washington only shows one side of the coin, the tragic side of Jewish history, and I thought the other side of the coin, the uplifting side of Jews’ contributions to world civilization, deserved equal footing.”

When the federal government moved early in the Bush Administration to redevelop the Old Post Office, Kaplan recognized the potential for a golden museum location in the courtyard. “I could not justify gobbling the entirety of the project, but I could see gobbling the site of the annex,” Kaplan told me. He struck up a partnership with Norman Groh, a Virginia-based hotel developer best known for building a $1,400-a-night suite at a Holiday Inn outside Washington in 1972. Groh brought Hyatt into the partnership. (Hyatt referred questions about the proposal to Groh, whom they described as its sponsor; Groh, when reached by telephone, declined to comment until after the government announces the winner of the bid.)

In 2003, Kaplan incorporated the nonprofit for the museum, then known as the National Museum of Jewish Heritage. Along with Kaplan and Soltes, the board included Janice Blumberg, who had been active in supporting the Klutznick at B’nai B’rith; Claude Ghez, son of the Swiss collector Baron Oscar Ghez; and Frank Abramoff, Jack Abramoff’s father, who had offered to help fundraise in California, where he lived. Jack Abramoff had tried to secure the Old Post Office site for one of his Native American tribal clients. That fact subsequently became the centerpiece of the federal government’s case against one of Abramoff’s associates, David Safavian, who was involved with the initial stages of the Old Post Office bid process as chief of staff of the Government Services Administration in the first Bush Administration. Once the Native American project foundered, Kaplan said, Jack Abramoff encouraged him to talk to his father about the museum. “He did mention to me that his father loved the idea of a Jewish museum,” Kaplan told me in our phone conversation. The former lobbyist was never involved in the Jewish museum project. “I wanted to be supportive, but it was a little far afield for me,” Jack Abramoff told me in a phone interview earlier this week. “I was never involved.”

The government solicited interest in the Old Post Office complex in 2005, but it never moved to a formal bid process, leaving the project in limbo. The next year, Claude Ghez and Frank Abramoff, who had been vice-president of the museum nonprofit’s board, both stepped down as directors, and the project’s funding dwindled to less than $6,000, according to tax records. Nevertheless, Kaplan and Soltes, by then emotionally invested in the Pennsylvania Avenue location, didn’t look elsewhere for space, even in the midst of the of the subsequent real-estate collapse. “We were waiting for Godot,” Soltes told me. “We felt that if we left this project, we’d be starting from scratch.”

The Old Post Office languished until earlier this year, when the District of Columbia’s delegate, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, pushed the General Services Administration to prioritize its redevelopment in response to President Barack Obama’s request that the government privatize $8 billion in federal real-estate holdings by the end of 2012. Now there is nothing to do but wait. “I don’t have any intention of pursuing this further,” Kaplan told me. “I am going to be 78 years old and I don’t have another 12 years to devote to the museum’s creation.”

“To the degree that I can educate people about what happened and how to fix it, I want to do it,” he said this morning in a brief phone interview with Tablet Magazine, part of a media blitz that started last week with a 60 Minutes interview and continued this weekend with a story in the New York Times detailing Abramoff’s plans for a Facebook app, a feature film, and maybe a TV show.

It’s partly a form of teshuva, or repentance, something Abramoff says he thought quite a lot about in prison. “As someone who is religious, every day, you do teshuva,” he said. “But the question is, what do you notice that you’re doing wrong?” At the time, he says, he thought he was a moral lobbyist: “The clients were benefiting, we were winning all our battles,” he said. “I didn’t set out to break the law, and I didn’t focus on it, which was the problem.”

But Abramoff also needs to make money, fast: he owes millions in damages to his former clients, and readily admits he doesn’t have it. “I can hardly survive now,” he told me. Will he, I asked, consider responding to the frequent laments of Washington’s observant Jewish political class and reopening one of his shuttered kosher restaurants in the city? “No,” Abramoff replied ruefully. “I lost millions on Stacks. I did it willingly, but that’s in the past. It’ll have to be someone else.”

For Ex-Lobbyist Abramoff, a Multimedia Effort at Redemption [NYT]
Jack Abramoff: The Lobbyist’s Playbook [60 Minutes]
Earlier: Jack Abramoff’s Post-Prison Gig

Justice Stephen Breyer said, explicitly, “The Court does not want to be responsible for deciding whether Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of Israel.” But Nathan Lewin, Zivotofsky’s lawyer, argued that he was requesting no such thing. Rather, he said, it was only a question of granting the 50,000 or so Americans to whom the law applies the right to note on their U.S. government identification that they were born in Israel—something Taiwanese are allowed to do, for example, even though the U.S. officially doesn’t recognize Taiwan at all.

But then Justice Samuel Alito asked why citizens couldn’t just put down whatever they wanted. Justice Antonin Scalia came in with an assist: what if, he asked, Congress said people born in Jerusalem could put down “Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East” on their passports? “Would that be OK?” Scalia growled. “It would be a foolish statute,” Lewin responded. Nevertheless, he said, ultimately his answer was yes, Congress could direct the president to have the State Department allow citizens to list “Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East” as their place of birth.

And then things took a darker, and more plausible, turn. “What if recognition of a breakaway province will clearly provoke a war,” Scalia asked, during the government’s response. “Can Congress stop the president?” “I don’t think that’s useful,” replied the government’s lawyer. “Let’s say we have a foolish president,” Scalia fired back, before adding, “something that has never happened in the history of this country.” The government’s attorney said, in that case, it was still up to the president what to do.

No one said “Palestine,” but, especially in light of the Palestinian push for recognition at the United Nations and the way the White House and Congress have reacted to it, everyone had to be thinking it. A few minutes later, during Lewin’s rebuttal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked him the same thing. “What if a dozen nations say, ‘If the United States does this, it’s an act of war?’” she asked. “Can the president override Congress?” Lewin paused, and then conceded that what he was arguing holds for little Menachem’s passport would logically have to go for bigger things as well. “When the Congress disapproves of what the president does,” he said, “the Congress prevails.” The justices thanked him for his time, and moved on to the next case.

Related: Status Update [Tablet Magazine]
Jewish Law [Tablet Magazine]

Luckily, Lewin’s new law partner—his daughter, Alyza, with whom he had founded an independent practice, Lewin & Lewin, a few months earlier—knew the perfect candidate. Her childhood friend Naomi Siegman, a pediatrician, was living in Jerusalem with her husband, Ari Zivotofsky. And in October 2002, a month after Bush signed the new law, their youngest son, Menachem, was born at Shaare Zedek, the oldest Jewish hospital in Jerusalem. “I’ve known Naomi my whole life,” Alyza Lewin said. “So, when she had the baby, I called her and said, ‘Go ask.’ And that’s how we got our test baby.”

On Monday, the boy, now 9 years old and only beginning to understand that his name is attached to a potentially landmark case, will be in Washington to watch Nathan Lewin argue on his behalf before the U.S. Supreme Court. It will be Lewin’s 28th appearance before the justices in the 50 years since he was admitted to the bar—a career in which he’s successfully argued for everything from the government’s use of informants in its case against Jimmy Hoffa to Chabad’s right to put up a menorah in front of Pittsburgh’s City Hall. “Nat is an absolutely off-the-charts brilliant lawyer,” said Alan Dershowitz, who has been friends with Lewin since the early 1960s, when both were young attorneys in Washington—Dershowitz as a clerk for Judge David Bazelon, chief of the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, and Lewin as a young hotshot in the Department of Justice.

In the four decades since he left the government, Lewin, an Orthodox Jew, has had some hotshot clients. In the 1980s, he gained notice as a lawyer for the actress Jodie Foster when she was called to testify against her stalker, John Hinckley Jr., after his assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan. Later, Lewin represented Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, and kept him out of court in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair.

But it is Lewin’s work for Jewish causes that will likely be his lasting legacy. His first client in private practice was a Holocaust survivor who was concerned about jeopardizing his U.S. citizenship if he were drafted into military service while visiting Israel; Lewin subsequently defended members of the Kahanist Jewish Defense League. In recent years he has argued for the right of the Satmar Hasidim to have their own public school district in the Catskills enclave of Kiryas Joel, and he has represented Sholom Rubashkin, the former official of Agriprocessors, the now-shuttered Postville, Iowa, kosher meatpacking plant, in appealing the 27-year sentence he is serving for fraud.

Even friends like Dershowitz question whether all of Lewin’s Jewish cases have been good for the Jews. “The difference between us is that he spends most of his time representing the Orthodox community,” Dershowitz told me. “So, we have differences on issues like the menorah, or aid to schools, and we both have our opinions on what is best for the Jewish community, as a whole.” But on the Zivotofsky case, Dershowitz said, “we totally agree.” A review of the amicus briefs submitted in Zivotofsky v. Clinton, including one filed by a broad coalition that includes B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and all three branches of Judaism, suggests that the preponderance of the organized American Jewish community is also on Lewin’s side.

Yet from Lewin’s perspective, the Israel aspect is the least interesting thing about the case. “This case is much more limited in a Jewish context,” he told me. “But it’s much broader in the separation of powers context.” The court’s decision will only apply to the 50,000 or so U.S. passport holders born in Jerusalem since 1948. But the precedent it sets will determine whether Congress has the authority to pass laws concerning foreign affairs that have binding power over the president.

***

At 75, Lewin has a gravelly voice, a close-cropped white beard and, behind round glasses, the twinkly eyes of a favorite uncle. He talks with his hands, often tapping the table in front of him for effect, and favors a green knit kippah and whimsical ties—Snoopy sometimes, graphic flowers the day we met at Lewin & Lewin’s modest offices in downtown Washington. The conference room there is haphazardly decorated with framed courtroom sketches, black-and-white Adrian Bonfils photographs of Jerusalem from the late 1800s, and an antique Amsterdam map labeled “Iudea et Terra Sancta.” Another wall holds a version of the Lawyer’s Prayer, in Hebrew and English, with a citation from Deuteronomy: “Justice and only justice thou shalt pursue.”

Continue reading: Supreme Court clerkship, Bobby Kennedy’s DOJ

The Truman Project, which Kleinfeld founded in 2004, is a testament to her ability to work the establishment while positioning herself outside of it. Modeled after conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation, which over the last several decades have functioned as clubhouses for policymakers devoted to advancing the ideas and policy proposals that underpin the modern conservative movement, the Truman Project’s goal is to provide a left-leaning counterpart, focused specifically on foreign policy. Its members-only network of insiders, known as Truman Security Fellows, share progressive views on security issues and are moving into positions to influence what gets done; it now links staffers scattered throughout various Beltway offices—the White House and Congress, the departments of State and Defense, various think tanks and advocacy groups. “It’s the best place by a mile to find out who are the young up and comers in foreign policy,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Truman adviser who until last February was the director of policy planning in the State Department. “There are Truman people all over the place.”

The roster of young Truman fellows in high places includes Matthew Spence, who co-founded Truman with Kleinfeld and is now a senior aide to Obama’s National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and Eric Lesser, who until he left for Harvard Law this summer worked in the White House, first as David Axelrod’s right-hand man and then as director of strategic planning for the Council of Economic Advisers. (He also organized the annual White House Seder.) Others have worked in the Department of Homeland Security, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the Pentagon offices of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There are journalists, like Patrick Radden Keefe, and analyst-bloggers like Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations. And there are people like Liz McNally, a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who worked as a speechwriter for Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq—and who, in August, wound up on the cover of Time magazine under the headline “The New Greatest Generation.”

But rather than following her cohort into government after Obama’s election in 2008, Kleinfeld says she turned down offers to join the administration, choosing instead to remain at Truman, bolstering her position as gatekeeper and ringleader of the Truman network. She earned a spot last year on Time magazine’s listing of the top 40 rising stars under 40 in American politics, alongside Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin (better-known as the wife of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, frequently mentioned as a future Republican presidential contender. In each of our conversations, Kleinfeld cited her penchant for juggling multiple projects at once—currently, writing policy briefs, op-eds, and books, consulting on international rule-of-law issues, and running Truman—as one reason she has stayed out of government service. “I do my best work when I’m juggling a lot of things,” she said when we met over the summer at her Truman office. “But when you take a government job, it is all-consuming.” And not just professionally. “I’m not a Washington workaholic,” Kleinfeld told me in a phone call. “I believe very much in stopping work at 7 p.m., at the latest.”

***

In person, Kleinfeld retains a hint of the gawky, precocious teenager she once was behind her polished, professional exterior of tamed brown curls, set off by luminous blue-green eyes. She grew up in what she describes as a log cabin off a dirt road in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her Harvard-educated father sits as a federal judge. She rode her considerable charm and intellect to the East Coast, where she matriculated as an undergraduate in Yale’s prestigious Directed Studies program. She went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and eventually earned a doctorate there in international relations before turning her attention to organizing her fellow academics and policy wonks—many of them young veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq—and connecting them with the people trying to reformulate progressive national-security policy for a post-Sept. 11 world. “It’s self-indulgent to just craft beautiful policy,” she told me in that phone conversation. “I was frustrated that good policy kept getting blocked by bad politics.”

Kleinfeld’s thoughtful, independent-minded, and contradictory personality was shaped by her Alaskan childhood. She describes herself as the kind of kid who both read everything she could and spent her free time writing away to humanitarian causes but also liked tools and drove a truck in the woods near her home—a self-possessed young girl in the mold of Ramona Quimby, the Beverly Cleary character. She was, her parents say, always an organizer. “Whenever anyone had anything that had to be managed or administered, they’d turn to Rachel,” said her father, Andrew Kleinfeld, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Her mother, Judith, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, tried for a while to get her only daughter interested in pursuing science, but failed. “She thought calculus would be useless,” Judith Kleinfeld said. “Then she realized she could use it to do the measurements for the curtains for her prom.”


First there was Herman Cain, fresh from his tête-à-tête with Mitt Romney about apples and oranges and income taxes, saying that he could see himself agreeing to the kind of prisoner swap that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted to free Gilad Shalit, but nevertheless insisting that he would never agree to a similar deal on Guantanamo Bay prisoners to rescue an American hostage. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann promptly agreed, saying, “We don’t negotiate.”

But then Rep. Ron Paul, Republican of Texas and self-appointed bullshit-caller, chimed in. “I want to ask a question,” he started, his shoulders disappearing into a suit jacket that looked a size too big. “Are you all willing to condemn Ronald Reagan for exchanging weapons for hostages out of Iran?”

Crickets. Iran-Contra? Really? seemed to be the collective thought bubble from the group. Finally, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum took the bait. “Iran was a sovereign country,” he began. Paul fired back, “So they were our good friends?” Santorum stammered back a reply that seemed to suggest he thinks the Palestinian Authority has sovereign status, and accordingly, is, like Iran, OK to negotiate with.

But at that point, Texas Gov. Rick Perry had just finished saying that the Palestinians had committed a “travesty” by circumventing the peace process and going to the United Nations with their statehood bid last month. This, he said, was an argument for de-funding the U.N. Paul hopped in there, too: “I would cut all foreign aid,” he said—including Israel. “I don’t think aid to Israel actually helps them,” he went on. “That foreign aid makes Israel dependent on us, it softens them for their own economy.” Then, the kicker: “They should have their sovereignty back. They should be able to deal with their neighbors at their own will.”

There was applause from the audience, some of whose more Tea Party-inclined members clearly agreed with Paul’s overriding insistence that American tax dollars stay in American hands. (Never mind that a large chunk of aid to Israel comes back to U.S. defense contractors.) Then Bachmann quickly, smoothly, stepped in to get everyone back on message. “We should not be cutting aid to Israel,” she said, smiling. “Israel is our greatest ally.” Again, the audience burst into applause.

Republicans Take Off Gloves in Vegas Debate [LAT]
Full Transcript CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate [CNN]

Well, that was then. Last week, just before Yom Kippur, the organization quietly removed one of the top ten vote-getters, Cecilie Surasky, the deputy director of the provocative Bay Area group Jewish Voice for Peace, from the ranks of eligible competitors. Federation spokesman Joe Berkofsky told JTA that Surasky was deemed ineligible because of her group’s support for the Israel boycott, sanctions and divestment movement (BDS), which Federation has invested heavily in countering. JVP countered that Federation changed its eligibility rules specifically to disqualify Surasky—and pointed out that the leader board currently includes Manis Friedman at number four, and that Friedman, a Chabad rabbi from Minnesota, made news in 2009 when, in response to a question about how Jews should treat Arabs, he told Moment:

I don’t believe in Western morality, i.e., don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle). The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East.

At the time, Friedman walked his comments back, saying they were “irresponsible.” His nomination statement doesn’t mention the brouhaha, focusing instead on a blurb Bob Dylan gave Friedman’s 1990 book on kosher sex, Doesn’t Anyone Blush Anymore?

Meanwhile, JVP is getting its own kind of award: a concrete example of the Jewish Establishment’s willingness to upset the apple cart when it comes to left-wing groups but not right-wing ones.

Here’s the thing: we all know that Americans generally, and Jews specifically, are splintering into ever-smaller interest and affinity groups. Instead of finding a way to make the case to younger, unaffiliated Jews for sustaining a single umbrella group that can claim to represent the broad interests of American Jewry, whatever they may be, Federation has instead, and with the best of intentions, succeeded in building a terrific soapbox ready for exploitation by the best-mobilized voices out there, however marginal or objectionable they may be to the vast majority of their fellow Jews.

Just look at the current top vote-getter in the volunteer category: Leah Rubashkin, who happens to be the wife of Sholom Rubashkin, who is currently serving a 27-year federal prison term for financial fraud in the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking scandal. Rubashkin has become a cause célèbre among Orthodox Lubavitchers, who believe he was unfairly sentenced, and it seems his wife’s nomination is entirely about getting some mainstream publicity: her brief nomination statement says she is a hero for staying positive through her husband’s incarceration, and adds that “we pray with Leah for the day when she will truly rejoice alongside her husband Reb Sholom Mordechai.”

This is not a way to increase Federation’s relevance to mainstream, maybe-observant Jews under 50—the people who the Facebook contest were presumably supposed to attract in the first place. Worse, it demeans the very real and very important accomplishments of other nominees, like Randy Gold, an Atlanta father who began advocating for more thorough genetic screening of Jewish couples after his daughter was born with a preventable genetic disorder. But, never mind, Federation has an app for that, too: the final winners won’t be picked by open online voting, but by a panel of judges that includes Tablet Magazine contributor Mayim Bialik and sister-of-Facebook Randi Zuckerberg.

JFNA Bumps BDS Backer from Heroes Contest [JTA]
Jewish Community Heroes
Related: Tribal Allegiance [Tablet Magazine]

Palm fronds are like Douglas firs: crops that have value only when marketed to a particular group of people at a particular time of year. Known as lulavs, palm fronds are as important to observant Jews during Sukkot, which begins tonight at sunset, as Christmas trees are to Christians in December. The tightly furled spears of immature fronds are one of the four species traditionally shaken during the holiday, a mimic of ancient rituals performed by priests in the Temple.

Egypt, as it happens, is the largest supplier of lulavs in the world, shipping as many as 700,000 fronds to Israel and about as many to the United States and Europe every fall. So, the threat of a potentially holiday-wrecking shortfall sent distributors—and politicians—into a frenzy. “Let my lulavs go!” exclaimed a press release sent out by Rep. Howard Berman, a Los Angeles Democrat, who is facing a tight re-election battle in a newly drawn—and heavily Jewish—district.

This isn’t the first time Sukkot observers have had to cope with lulav drama. The last big scare was in 2005, when Egyptian authorities curtailed palm-frond exports over concerns for the country’s date crop. The result was a run on lulavs in New York’s Orthodox precincts, where prices for the lowest-end fronds shot up from $2 to $10. (And that was after Egypt agreed to release about 450,000 fronds to Israel and another 100,000 to the United States, once aggressive lobbying from Jewish officials prompted the State Department to get involved.) But earlier panics featured villains closer to home: In 1999, Israeli authorities filed a complaint against an Arab-Jewish cartel suspected of cornering the market on Egyptian output, driving the price up. In 1986, American Jews were stymied by U.S. regulators who impounded a crucial 90,000-frond shipment from Tunisia, leaving them to rot in a warehouse for want of a proper certificate of origin.

This year’s episode has struck many as evidence of a structural problem in the lulav market that can’t be ignored any longer. “Why would anyone rely on a single source of anything?” asked David Wiseman, a Dallas-based distributor of Sukkot sets known as arba minim, which include an etrog, or citron, and myrtle and willow branches alongside palm fronds. “It’s crazy.”

The trouble for buyers like Wiseman is figuring out where else to go. Egypt is the world’s leading producer of dates, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan—all unlikely suppliers of lulavs for anyone looking to diversify. Israel ranks No. 17, producing a mere 22,000 metric tons to Egypt’s 1.3 million. Jordan, which helps boost Israel’s supply, doesn’t even rate in the top 20, according to the most recent U.N. statistics. Kosher lulavs, which must be straight and have unsplit green leaves, can only be obtained from particular varieties of palms that, today, are under relatively limited cultivation. And American demand, by all accounts, is steadily rising, from an estimated 270,000 fronds in the mid-1980s to at least 500,000 today. “The market has exploded,” said Yitzchok Summers, the rabbi at Anshe Emes, an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. “When I was growing up here, there were a couple of places you went to get your lulav and etrog, but last year when you went down Pico Boulevard there were kids sitting outside the Judaica stores who would do drive-up service.”

Israeli officials announced last week that they expected to satisfy domestic demand for about 650,000 lulavs, in part thanks to new preservatives that allow for a longer harvest window in Israeli date groves. Jordan provided a buffer shipment of about 110,000 palm fronds—including, traders told Ha’aretz, some contraband Egyptian lulavs. Special import licenses were also granted to Spanish growers, though Hamas nixed efforts to open up imports of 50,000 fronds from Gaza.

But everyone seems to agree that Israel’s patchwork solution has strained global supply—leaving American Jews to figure out their own plan for replacing the high-quality, low-price lulavs from the Sinai. The obvious solution, according to Summers and Wiseman, is to buy domestic— specifically, from California and Arizona, the top two date-producing states. Late last week, Wiseman said he was still waiting on a cut of the Egyptian supply, but he’s posted a notice on his website announcing that he is only selling California lulavs this year and for the foreseeable future. “As far as we know,” the announcement read, “we are the first major dealer to make this decision, and we have received the overwhelming support of our customers.”

The majority of dates produced in the United States are deglet noor or medjool, whose fronds tend to be too weak to meet halakhic standards. But Wiseman estimates there are enough trees of sturdier varieties in California—including the dayri palm, whose tight fronds command premium prices—to produce as many as 40,000 lulavs each year. “I got California ones last year because I wanted to wean people off Egyptian lulavs,” Wiseman told me. “But there is no infrastructure. The trees can produce, but you need a system of cutting them, packing them, sorting them, and distributing them.”

Calls to growers in the Coachella Valley, in the desert east of Los Angeles, suggested the first hurdle is actually explaining to growers what a lulav is. (“Are you sure? Palm fronds are really big,” said a woman who answered the phone at Brown Date Garden, when she heard about the ritual lulav-shaking.) Even among those who know about Sukkot, there is hesitation about getting into the lulav business. “We’ve been approached in the past and have never engaged,” said Albert Keck, the president of Hadley Farms, one of the best-known growers in Southern California. “I cringe at cutting off the central terminal of a young palm.”

That hasn’t stopped smaller growers from getting into the market. Arthur Futterman, a small grower in Indio, Calif., who was raised in a Reform Jewish household but is now an evangelical Christian, has worked for the past six years with dealers from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic community, which does not buy Israeli products. “At first I was helping them locate farmers around the desert who had dayris and helping them do their packing and shipping,” Futterman explained this week. It was slow work: Each grower who agreed to participate had fewer than a dozen of the high-end dayri palms. Futterman said most growers limit cuttings to four fronds per tree. “It’s like cutting your fingernail to the quick,” he said. “You can do it a little, but not too much.”

Now Futterman has leased several acres to brothers Shulem and Schmiel Ekstein, Satmar dealers who have planted several dozen dayri palms exclusively for Sukkot. Those trees, however, won’t mature for several years. In the meantime, Futterman said, there is an opportunity for people with less exacting interpretations of halakha. “The minutiae the Eksteins want are not present in most varieties—they will look at the last little leaf to make sure it’s sealed closed,” Futterman said. “But in my mind, you can take any center frond that’s not opened up, like a rosebud.” And, he went on, “if that’s your understanding of closed, then there are thousands here.”

Which is how Rabbi Summers of Anshe Emes has managed to satisfy his congregation’s needs this year. “I work through someone who said there was a big problem because of Egypt, but he was able to secure lulavim from Palm Springs,” Summers said last week. Still, Summers had a Plan B: “I have two date palms in front of my house, and you can see the lulav in the middle. It’s kind of high up, but I was thinking, this year, if I’m really stuck, I can always just get a ladder.”

Ross, as it happened, was standing on the right side of the bimah—really a low stage in a ballroom at a Hilton hotel, appropriately decked out with an ark, flowers, and banners emblazoned with the congregation’s name: Kol Shalom. The podium on the left was occupied by Ross’ fellow congregant, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who grinned at the diplomat’s joke.

Most synagogues try to fill the dead hours between Yom Kippur morning services and the evening shofar blast with some kind of discussion—or, in recent years, yoga or meditation. Synagogues in Washington have the unique advantage of counting among their ranks people who hold what Ross’ wife, Debbie, has somewhat deprecatingly referred to as “the Big Job.” But what sets Kol Shalom apart from the capital’s other influential Jewish institutions is that here Big Job guys aren’t just members: They’re the founders.

Ross and Friedman helped start the congregation 10 years ago this month, along with a handful of families who had been members at Congregation Beth El, in Bethesda, Md. “We wanted a synagogue where there was a lay-professional partnership, where there was a learning congregation,” Marilyn Wind, the founding president and current board chair, explained to me last week. For the first half-year, the roving congregation was entirely lay-led and met in facilities rented from the 4-H Club or from churches—an experience Friedman memorialized in a December 2001 column.

Friedman, who had been at Beth El, joined Kol Shalom at the urging of organizers who were old friends from Des Moines, where Friedman’s wife, Ann, grew up. Debbie Ross explained that for her family, timing was everything. “It started right after September 11, and it was such a scary time,” she said over lunch recently. “No one knew what was going to happen, and this was something we could do, a way to use our own energy and talent to do something positive at that unsettled time.” Dennis Ross, newly in the political wilderness after years spent as President Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy, also signed up as a trustee. Other early members included Mitch Caplan, the former CEO of E*Trade, and the late New York Times columnist William Safire.

It was Safire, in fact, who was chiefly responsible for cementing Ross and Friedman’s joint ownership of the Yom Kippur afternoon speaking slot. “In 2004 or 2005, I asked Bill to do it,” Kol Shalom’s rabbi, Jonathan Maltzman, told me when we met over the summer. “I think Dennis and Tom were a little upset, and they said to me, ‘No, we’ll do it every year.’ ” Ross made sure to announce that they plan to continue the tradition next year, after Kol Shalom moves into the new sanctuary it is building in Rockville. “This is our thing, and we’re pretty protective of it,” he told me, with a slightly abashed smile.

It is, as things go, a relatively easy gig for two men who make their livings speaking extemporaneously about Middle East affairs. Both men’s wives, who said they have sweated out writing memorable blessings or the d’var Torah sermons members regularly volunteer to give—Debbie Ross gave last week’s, at the Shabbat service between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—just laughed when asked whether their husbands prepared their talks.

Ross, who was in Beltway-issue shirtsleeves, tie, and khakis and a large blue-and-white Bukhari-style kippah, kicked things off by talking about the Arab Spring. Both a panel of expert advisers convened by the Obama Administration in the summer of 2010 and, more tellingly, a group of Arab dissidents and democracy activists brought to Washington just a few weeks before the revolution began in Tunisia, had failed to anticipate the dramatic events. When his turn came to speak, Friedman—wearing a dark blue suit and satin kippah—pointed out that he’d actually gone on an Israeli television news show a year ago and warned, like Chicken Little, that a storm was brewing in the Arab world. “I said, get out of the West Bank, build the highest wall you can,” said Friedman. “I will personally come and put on the last brick, but there is a storm coming, and you need to get out of their story.” He has been on book tour, and it showed: There was much well-rehearsed talk about the flattening effects of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.

In some ways, they make an odd pair: Ross is a clear and concise speaker but gives off an almost diffident air, whereas Friedman is an experienced showman who lobs regular sound bites, many taken from his columns. (Kol Shalom members who are regular Times op-ed readers may have recalled his unfavorable comparison of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to former Egyptian Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak from a May 24 column.) But Ross and Friedman spoke mostly in parallel, dividing up questions from the audience rather than debating each other—a mark of familiarity as much as a sign of the solemnity of the day. At one point, in response to a question about Netanyahu’s reaction to the Arab Spring, Friedman stepped in to remind the audience that Ross couldn’t say anything controversial: “I’m free to talk, while Dennis isn’t.” The envoy remained pokerfaced, while the crowd, many of whom Ross called on by name, laughed knowingly.

Soon afterward, the two stepped off the stage and went back to chatting with friends about more pressing issues, like the lemon cake Debbie Ross had baked for break fast.

CORRECTION, October 17: Friedman wore a dark blue suit, not a brown one, on Yom Kippur. This article has been corrected.

ON SERMONIZING

Rabbi Jack Moline
Agudas Achim, Alexandria, Virginia

I’ve been at this 30 years, and for 20 of them there’s been some crisis around the holidays that demanded our attention. In 1993 when they had the signing of the Oslo agreement on the White House lawn we all had to rewrite our sermons. But there are very few things in this world that you have to consider if you’re going to be a Jew. One is God, one is Israel, and another is your relationship to the Jewish people. So it’s my responsibility when the largest number of people come together to be Jewish to raise all of those issues. People come to synagogue on the holidays for strengthening and introspection. They don’t need my opinion. They want orientation.

Rabbi David Wolpe
Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, California

The Palestinian statehood issue is this year’s crisis, but I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different from anything that’s gone before. My father began the holidays with the state of the Jewish world on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I’ve repeated that. And it seems to me that a great issue for human beings individually and for Israel as a country is to what extent you act on your own interest, and how much you act based on what other people think of you.

Rabbi Laura Geller
Temple Emanuel, Beverly Hills, California

Every year we have a contemporary-issues discussion on Yom Kippur afternoon. I have found that the advantage to doing it in that format is that you can bring in more than one voice, and it’s not a one-way conversation. Our theme this year is “coming home,” so the Yom Kippur forum will be framed in terms of coming home to Israel’s values in its Declaration of Independence, or in terms of asking whether Israel is our home enough to care what’s going on there. What responsibility do you have as a Jew to pay attention to Israel?

Rabbi Barry Freundel
Kesher Israel, Washington, D.C.

I do my year-in-review sermon on the second day of yontif. What I try to do is take the biggest issue of the year and discuss it with Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur eyes. But it’s a target in motion—because of the vote at the U.N., because we don’t know if there will be a new Intifada, because the old alliances are weakening, because the southern borders are less safe.

Rabbi Sidney Helbraun
Temple Beth-El, Northbrook, Illinois

I’m coming at it from both the standpoint of the Arab Spring and the internal movement in Israel. I heard a report on NPR a few weeks ago with a botanist who found out nitrogen can leach into plants directly through sedimentary rock, and that changes the whole nature of what people assumed about how botany works. And the researcher said, “Well, we have to throw out the textbooks.” The way science views changes of the status quo is that it’s very exciting, even if it uproots everything that your life’s work is about.

We’re always afraid of change. I’m one of the few rabbis from Chicago who did not vote for Obama but would today. He’s changed the dynamic after eight years of George Bush. Bush could not have been more in lockstep with Israel, but Gaza wound up with more missiles, and Israel wound up fighting a war.

ON ISRAEL

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg
Boca Raton Synagogue, Boca Raton, Florida

I feel like this is a pivotal time in Israel’s history. The honeymoon period where the world felt badly about the Holocaust and where people felt guilt and were willing to give Jews a pass has ended, and I think the world is returning to its animosity. We can disagree about policy all day long. If we are critical about Obama and the administration’s messaging on Israel, we need to be critical about our own messaging.

Moline: For too many people Israel has stopped being a value and become an issue instead. And the issues are always crises, which exacerbates the problem. It’s less important that we’re able to argue for or against settlements, or a unified Jerusalem, or a two-state solution than that we can make the case for Israel, period.

Geller: It is the function of the holidays and of a rabbi to remind people that Judaism is not just personal. It is a journey that happens among a people and brings us a connection to a particular place. And part of the challenge right now in North America is that for many liberal Jews, it isn’t.

Moline: It’s less to do with Israel per se than with a general disaffection with the institutions of Jewish life. But I’ve seen a polarization—people who are to the right are harder to the right, and people who are to the left are harder to the left. Maintaining the middle is very difficult.

Wolpe: Israel as a sovereign nation has to make its decisions based on internal considerations knowing that the world often judges it unfairly. But it’s dangerous for Israel to lose the sense that we have to care how the world sees us. Judaism recognizes the idea that a decent respect for mankind is a value—it’s called maras ayin. It is a Jewish value to care what other people think, and that Israel’s reputation in the world should not be a matter of indifference for us.

ON PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD AND THE ARAB SPRING

Freundel: On any issue you want to talk about, there are Jewish values, and most of the time what Judaism has to say doesn’t fall neatly into the Democratic or Republican side. So with the U.N. issue, I can talk about questions of international responsibility, and what allows you to be a player on the world stage, because there are examples in the Torah of nations that cannot. And there is in Jewish law discussions about covenants, and the two-sided nature of things—so while I don’t want to talk about policy, I can talk about attitudes in terms of how you look at people you’re in partnerships with.

Helbraun: We’re living in this world where everything is changing. Other religions are about control, but Judaism says no, we have to educate everyone, we have to give knowledge to the masses. And we’re seeing the ramifications of that—the Arab Spring is an example of people seeing they have power over their own lives. The question is how they’re going to exercise it. But you also see this generation in Israel that says, “We may not have power over the peace process, but we do have power over how we’re living our lives internally.” For decades people have said we’ll deal with religious-inclusion issues after we have peace. Well, waiting for peace is something none of us have control over, but there are other aspects of society that are 100 percent in our hands. So there’s also an awakening in the Israeli consciousness.

ON ISRAEL’S TENT-CITY PROTESTS

Rabbi Andy Bachman
Congregation Beth Elohim, Brooklyn, New York

We have hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets. That’s the largest Jewish protest movement for social justice in our lifetime. What is lost on American Jews is, hey, 6 million Jews live there and speak Hebrew every single day. There is a whole other Jewish reality going on.

Geller: It’s a watershed moment for Israel. It’s the Israeli Arab Spring, but it’s not clear where it’s going to lead—it’s easier to say, “We’re deposing a dictator” than “We’re reshaping society.” I think it’s a shift from the original vision of Israel to a different kind of social contract.

Goldberg: I use Israel as a springboard to get into questions of community. I wouldn’t tell Bibi what to do in the tent protests, but I can talk about what a reminder it is of Israel’s democracy that a quarter of a million people can protest housing prices while people in neighboring countries are gunned down for protesting in the street.

Bachman: I want to link it to the broader question of what ideas we have as a community about the organizing principles of our lives, and to what degree they translate into Jewish identity questions, and beyond that, to building a just society. I think it’s a really powerful opportunity to talk about Israel beyond the tried and true, and possibly alienating ways we engage in Israel.

Dermer’s title is senior adviser to the prime minister, and he’s a jack-of-all-trades—strategist, pollster, and speechwriter for Netanyahu, as well as his chief proxy in foreign affairs. A constant presence in Netanyahu’s meetings in Washington, he has helped shape Israel’s posture in the American capital most notably through Netanyahu’s spring speech to the U.S. Congress, which foiled President Barack Obama’s effort to pressure the prime minister into meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians. “Bibi doesn’t move an inch without talking to him,” said one person who has been in meetings with both men.

At 40, Dermer has a full head of dark hair under his small knit kippah and the hyperkinetic energy of a man who is still young. A Wharton-schooled economist and Oxford-trained political theorist with Machiavellian political instincts, Dermer comes across as equal parts George Stephanopoulos and Karl Rove. He is a ferocious competitor who quarterbacked Israel’s flag-football team in the sport’s World Cup three times. “He cannot abide anybody being better at him than anything, particularly physically,” said his friend Tom Rose, a former publisher of the Jerusalem Post. “He wouldn’t let a 3-year-old beat him at Ping-Pong.”

Dermer is in some ways a successor to the Americans and returning expatriates who figured prominently in Netanyahu’s first stint in the Aquarium, from 1996 to 1999. One was David Bar-Illan, the late newspaper editor and Juilliard-trained pianist who served as Netanyahu’s chief spokesman. Dore Gold, the Connecticut-born academic who was Netanyahu’s first-term ambassador to the United Nations and now runs a national-security think tank in Jerusalem, is another.

But the current Netanyahu government is perhaps more Anglo-inflected than any other in Israeli history. Gold’s one-time Columbia classmate, the historian Michael Oren, serves as Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United States, a post Oren renounced his American citizenship to accept. The MIT economist Stanley Fischer governs the Bank of Israel, a position that required him to take on Israeli citizenship and learn some Hebrew. Until last year, Netanyahu’s chief scheduler was a California-born immigrant named Ari Harow, who first met Dermer a decade ago when the two squared off on opposing Israeli flag-football teams.

Yet of all the Americans in the Aquarium, Dermer is uniquely fluent in Israel’s convoluted coalition government system, and he is adept at defending Netanyahu’s partisan flanks. His professional political background gives him another asset: exceptionally deep and longstanding relationships with Washington’s Republican establishment, particularly its neoconservative wing, which are entirely independent of his connection to Netanyahu. The youngest son of a Miami Beach politico, Dermer took a job right out of college in Washington as an assistant to Frank Luntz, the Republican consultant who engineered the watershed 1994 “Contract With America” House campaign for Newt Gingrich. His second was in Jerusalem, as a pollster for the Soviet-dissident-turned-Israeli-politician Natan Sharansky, a connection forged with help from Richard Perle, the Reagan (and, later, George W. Bush) Administration defense specialist.

For a young, ambitious wonk there was no question where the better action was. “In those years—1993, 1994, 1995—public policy was fairly insignificant,” Dermer said in an interview last month in his Jerusalem office. “When I came to Israel the excitement about it was that the decisions ahead of it were so consequential to the future of the country and to the Jewish people.”

He arrived in the shadow of the Oslo Accords and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination to find a country divided: not just between doves and hawks, he said, but between secular and religious Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, between native-born Israelis and newcomers from the former Soviet Union. It was, in other words, exciting. “I wanted to do something where every day I could do what I wanted to do, not something where maybe 20 or 30 or 40 years later I could maybe have some influence on some decision,” Dermer told me, leaning back in his chair. “I wanted to have an impact in some way, and an influence in some way on a country that was making these great historic decisions and that still had to make those decisions.”

Armed with luck and excellent connections, Dermer enjoyed an accelerated ride into the heart of the country’s power structure that would have been difficult if not impossible to match stateside. “He made the right choice,” said Luntz, his former mentor. “He maintains his American sensibilities but he always had an Israeli mind, and he could function there in ways many of us could not. You’ve got to be tough to not just survive but to thrive.”

Dermer still thinks of himself as an American, and he still defines his political decisions by Washington standards. “When I think about Israel, I always ask myself, I call it the WWAD question: ‘What would America do?’ ” he said, smacking the desk with his palms for added effect. “As somebody born and raised in the United States, I have absolutely no doubt that America would take more forceful action if faced by the threats facing Israel.”

Netanyahu, who lived in New York and Philadelphia as a kid and went to college and graduate school at MIT, hardly needs an American like Dermer to help him speak American. Dermer offers the Israeli prime minister something deeper. He embodies the ideal combination of intellectual pedigree, physical prowess, and family commitment prized by Israelis of Netanyahu’s generation. He shares—and, by his choice to become Israeli, affirms—Netanyahu’s conviction about the outsize role that Israel plays in the grand sweep not just of Jewish history, but also of Western history. Perhaps most important, 15 years after moving to Israel, Dermer retains the brash confidence of a born Yankee—a quality that’s harder to pick up than an accent and precious to a politician like Netanyahu, who plainly yearns for his fellow Israeli Jews to feel they share the same superpower birthright as their American cousins.

Now, just in time for the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks and their wedding, the Scheiners have fulfilled another mitzvah. They’ve opened a new synagogue in Soho, a Manhattan neighborhood that Scheiner says hasn’t had a dedicated Jewish sanctuary since before the Civil War. The opening of the Scheiners’ shul, called simply the Soho Synagogue, caps a story that began with the couple’s decision, in early 2002, to leave their insular Hasidic community—both were raised Lubavitch, she in Crown Heights, he in Borough Park—for Lower Manhattan. They felt it was their responsibility to help their new community rebuild. “The neighborhood had very little Jewish infrastructure, as opposed to the Upper West Side or the Lower East Side,” Dovi Scheiner said. “And people needed people.”

The newlyweds found an apartment on Chambers Street, just north of ground zero. The first thing Esty did was start delivering home-baked challahs to her neighbors on Fridays. “I’d just knock on the doors,” she said. Her husband recalled: “It’s hard to remember now, but people opened their doors with smiles.” The circle of regular challah recipients eventually included Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his City Hall staff, who referred to Esty as the challah lady. Meanwhile, the Scheiners also started inviting near-strangers for Shabbat dinners. “Most of those conversations were, ‘Where were you?’ ” he said, referring to Sept. 11. “Just telling, re-telling.”

Over the years, those intimate dinners morphed into Friday-night cocktail parties in lofts and vacant spaces around downtown that gained a reputation among young professionals as great mixers for Jewish singles. As of this summer, and with an assist from two of New York’s biggest Jewish philanthropists—Michael Steinhardt and Ira Rennert—the Scheiners’ synagogue finally has a home of its own, in a space that previously held a Gucci pop-up sneaker store.

When it held its first Friday night service, the Soho Synagogue joined a blossoming landscape of Jewish life in lower Manhattan, which is now home to hubs like the 92nd Street Y’s three-year-old outpost at Tribeca’s northwestern edge, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and the Jewish Community Project, an educational center geared to young families just around the corner from the Odeon, the famous bistro that was at the vanguard of the neighborhood’s resurgent nightlife in the 1980s. In the past few years, Chabad has also assigned staff to serve residents in Tribeca and nearby Battery Park. “We wanted to be involved in a community, and it felt like things were shifting down here,” said Zalman Paris, who left his posting in Midtown Manhattan three years ago to become the rabbi at Chabad’s Tribeca outpost.

***

Two full-time synagogues—the Wall Street Synagogue and Synagogue for the Arts—and a small Chabad center were established in New York’s financial district decades ago to serve observant office workers during the business week. But the first real effort to organize Jewish life in the area came 25 years ago with the independent Battery Park Synagogue, started by Jews attracted to the area’s first residential developments, in Battery Park City. “There was nothing else,” said Norman Kleiman, a research ophthalmologist at Columbia University who is the synagogue’s president. “We all had kids and felt it was important to have a community, and it was an opportunity to build a congregation that was not in our parents’ image.”

By 1993, Battery Park synagogue had established itself in a meeting room at the World Trade Center—one that happened to be directly above the garage where a truck bomb exploded that February, in the first terrorist attack on the complex. The synagogue’s prayer books were destroyed in that attack, Kleiman said. In 2001, the falling twin towers crushed the Marriott hotel where the group was scheduled to hold High Holiday services. In the aftermath of the attacks, many members simply left—especially those with young children. Of the 100 children enrolled in Hebrew school classes before the attacks, only 10 eventually came to classes. “It was a huge blow,” Kleiman said. Today, the synagogue has bounced back. It has a part-time rabbi and cantor to conduct regular services in a converted two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park for a membership that has grown to about 150 families. “They’re not very religious or interested in coming regularly to Shabbat,” Kleiman said. “But we handle the full birth to death, weddings, brises, funerals.”

It was the attacks, and the destruction of so much office space, that accelerated the neighborhood’s conversion from a predominantly commercial zone to a thriving residential one. In the past decade, the resident population of neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan—Tribeca, Soho, the Financial District, and Battery Park—has grown by more than 25,000, accounting for more than half of Manhattan’s total population increase in the period, according to the 2010 census. It’s not clear how many of those new residents are Jewish—the decennial census of the city’s Jewish population, conducted by UJA-Federation of New York, won’t be complete until next year—but the last study, in 2002, showed that the neighborhood was about 17 percent Jewish. The profusion of new Jewish groups, many of them catering to families with young children, speaks to the growing size and engagement of the community.

The Jewish Community Project, which grew out of a small group of Jewish families who decided to stay downtown after the Sept. 11 attacks, emerged from the wave of Jewish startups that began springing up in the neighborhood then. One project was a short-lived school called Tribeca Hebrew, established by a group that included Michael Dorf, the founder of the Knitting Factory, a former fixture of downtown nightlife, and another was a Conservative congregation called the Downtown Synagogue, which is now defunct, according to a former board member, Abbie Kozolchyk.

“People are moving down here for the lifestyle, the low density of the buildings, access to downtown culture and Wall Street, living closer to the river, and the schools, which have the best reputation in the city,” said Darren Levine, the Jewish Community Project executive director. Levine said his organization now has a budget of $4.5 million and serves more than 1,000 families, offering a range of programs from Tot Shabbats to Hebrew classes for teenagers. “It’s a combination of unaffiliated Jews and families who find themselves downtown and wanting to connect,” said Levine, a Reform rabbi who moved downtown from the Upper East Side in 2006.

As for the newest neighborhood presence, the Soho Synagogue, the Scheiners acknowledge they still have a long way to go to offer a comprehensive slate of Jewish services. Currently they have a Hebrew school for children ages 5 to 9, but formal religious services are being held only on Friday nights, using a self-written Orthodox-style prayer packet with a title page that riffs on the famous Magritte painting of a pipe: “(This is not a) Prayer Book,” it reads. After the High Holidays, the Scheiners plan to add services for young children on Shabbat mornings and a single Torah reading at noon. ”We’re serving people who move here from another state or another country,” Dovi Scheiner said. “Their first priority is the social scene, and then at some point they say, ‘What about Jewish stuff?’ ”

***

For now, the Scheiners head a few blocks south on Saturday mornings to the Synagogue for the Arts, the Orthodox congregation in Tribeca that was originally dedicated as the Civic Center Synagogue in 1938. Before Sept. 11, the synagogue mainly served artists who had moved downtown and had begun having children in middle age. “These are people for whom 9/11 was a profound, transformative experience,” said Jonathan Glass, who took over as rabbi in 1989. But the past few years have brought a wave of new congregants who fit a radically different profile: people Glass described as “ultra-Modern Orthodox”—people who might once have automatically moved uptown but instead have decided to bring their Jewish lives downtown with them.

The new crowd, Glass said, has the luxury of seeing their neighborhood unshadowed by the experience of terrorism, and brings a new energy to the synagogue. “It’s a whole different mentality,” Glass said of these new residents and the Sept. 11 attacks. “Intellectually, they relate to it, but at the back of their minds, they’ll be saying, ‘Why are you making such a big deal about it?’ ” Recently a new father volunteered to sponsor the post-service kiddush on Sept. 10 in honor of his baby girl, but Glass warned him that he plans to conduct a full yizkor memorial dedicated to Sept. 11 victims and then invite survivors to speak. “I didn’t want to overshadow the simcha, but I thought it was important,” Glass said. “We have to be careful not to forget it, of course those who went through it but even those who didn’t, because it’s part of who we are as a neighborhood, and really as a country.”

The astute viewer will notice that, in both of these interludes, Kosov is wearing a large Star of David pendant that dangles above her dramatically pushed-up cleavage. In a phone interview this week, she said the message she heard was clear: “I’m looking for a Russian Jewish guy.” But, on the show, the word Jewish never enters the dialogue—not in an aside to the camera, not with Kosov’s mother, and not, eventually, with Paul, who gets the heave-ho over a plate of tuna tartare. “My parents, they came to America for a reason,” Kosov says, earnestly. “To look for Russians?” Paul retorts. “Yeah,” Kosov replies, without elaboration.

The pattern repeats itself throughout Russian Dolls, which is centered in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, long a Jewish neighborhood and today dominated by Russian Jewish émigrés. Its characters, almost all of them Jewish, arrived in the largest historical movement of Jews in the postwar era—but aren’t explicitly introduced as Jews.

It’s tempting to chalk up the disconnect to the producers’ desire to expand their potential audience or, equally plausibly, to head off criticism from the Jewish community in Brooklyn, which circulated petitions last winter objecting to the program’s display of outrageous materialism. But it turns out this show, as trashy and juvenile as anything else in the reality genre, reveals a deeper sociological truth about its subjects: These Soviet Jews, singled out and in some cases persecuted in their native country for being Jews, didn’t come to New York for the freedom to live as Jews—or, for that matter, to assimilate as Americans in the tradition of their Eastern European predecessors. What Russian Dolls confirms is that, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its Jewish exiles have found in America a place where they can finally live freely as Russians.

“For most Russian Jews it’s so entangled,” said Alina Dizik, one of the show’s creators, about religious and national identity. “You really can’t separate one from the other, and most of us are so secular that a lot of the Jewish traditions get mixed up with the Russian traditions.” She added that getting a reality show is proof that the Russian community has arrived—as the show’s promo says, in block letters, “The Russians aren’t coming, the Russians are here.” The goal was to broadcast some hallmarks of Russian-American life without getting too deeply into the heavy details of the Cold War. Later episodes include nods to Jewish life in Brighton, including a fashion show benefiting an Israeli charity, Dizik said, but the show starts at the beginning. “We tried to explain as much as possible without being boring,” she said. “There’s no Russian history, but we explain what a banya is, and what some of the customs are in terms of going out to eat, and family relationships.”

Which seems to suit the show’s stars just fine. “There are people who are anti-Semitic who will say, this one is only half-Russian,” explained Michael Levitis, one of the show’s main characters, in an interview this week. “The only person who makes this distinction is anti-Semites and Communists.”

The Brighton Beach nightclub Levitis runs with his wife, Marina, is called Rasputin and operates in high Moscow style, with a cabaret dinner show and a menu of shellfish and other trayf luxuries. (Levitis was sentenced this month to three years’ probation after pleading guilty to lying to FBI agents about his involvement in an alleged plan to bribe New York State Sen. Carl Kruger.) “To American people, especially outside of New York, if you came from Russia, you’re Russian,” Marina Levitis said on the phone. “They don’t care if you’re Jewish or Christian or ethnically Russian or not.” But, she added, “We don’t pretend to be Russian Russian. We don’t pretend to be anything other than what we are.”

She’s right: As with Kosov’s Star of David necklace, there are plenty of subtle clues that the Levitises are Jews. They are introduced on the show with a montage that includes a wedding glamour shot in which Michael sports a large velvet kippah, and the camera pans over a mezuzah nailed to their front doorpost. But the show doesn’t explain that they met as students at Jewish high schools and send their own children to a yeshiva elementary school. Instead, the show plays up their mini-oligarch habits. In an on-camera shopping spree, Marina tries on a $28,000 pair of 11-carat diamond bangles, noting approvingly, “Big and blingy and definitely Russian style.” Meanwhile, Michael’s 56-year-old mother, Eva, reveals her long-dormant dream to be onstage and enters her Slavic belly-dancing act in a local talent show.

“I was in Russia engineer,” Eva tells Marina. “All my life I loved to sing and dance, but I never had a chance to do this in Russia.” In New York, she does.

Welcome to Jerusalem on the Potomac, or, if you like, Ramallah on the Hill, in which the political leaders of the fiscally challenged United States are playing roles long ago made famous by their stymied counterparts in the Middle East. In the last few days, the fraught negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling—which are really negotiations about what the government should provide for its citizens—have increasingly come to look and sound like nothing so much as the familiar, tedious peace process. “Out of many, we are one,” President Barack Obama reminded the American people after the collapse of yet another round of talks Monday night. “Peace would herald a new day for both our peoples,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced before him, in May.

And the debt-ceiling negotiations in Washington are failing for exactly the same reason the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have historically failed, at Camp David, Wye River, and myriad other retreats. The underlying differences—mutually exclusive claims to a finite piece of land in one case, mutually exclusive views of what government is for on the other—are arguably unbridgeable, even in the best of circumstances. As a result, the incentives for those in charge point toward minimizing personal losses over risking career suicide in service of achieving a sweeping solution that is politically risky and possibly untenable. In both situations the losers are the anonymous masses—Social Security recipients, mortgage-seekers, Israelis and Palestinians trying to live normal lives in Sderot or Gaza—but everyone knows who they would blame for a deal they don’t like, whether it’s Obama or Boehner, Netanyahu or Abbas.

Obama and Netanyahu have sought to cast themselves as the responsible adults in their respective rooms—the ones pushing harder, and risking more, to achieve the impossible. “I stood before my people, and I said, ‘I will accept a Palestinian state,’ ” Netanyahu said in that May address, before the U.S. Congress. “I’m willing to take the responsibility,” Obama said last Friday, in a hastily called press conference after Boehner broke off another round of talks. “That’s my job.”

And Obama could fairly be accused of making the same mistake in the debt negotiations that he has in his own efforts in the Middle East: moving too fast to concede ground in the center before reassuring his base that he won’t bend on their red lines, namely Israel’s security and primacy over mercurial Arab allies, or the principles enshrined in the New Deal and the Great Society and everything else the Democrats have spent the last 80 years building.

Nevertheless, the president’s real problem isn’t the fundamentalists on his own side: Nancy Pelosi is no Avigdor Lieberman, despite last week’s grumbling from the Democratic caucus. Just as Hamas holds the ultimate veto over any peace plan Abbas and Netanyahu could bring themselves to agree to, it’s the extremists in the Republican camp who are holding everyone else hostage to their demands. Like militants on the Palestinian side, these angry Republican ideologues have shown themselves constitutionally unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of the other side’s worldview, and perfectly happy to take down the whole ship rather than compromise their ideals.

It’s not surprising that, after last week’s breakdown of so-called grand bargain negotiations between Obama and Boehner, a conspiracy theory began making its way around Washington: that the big blowup was staged to give Boehner some plausible deniability that will allow him to ultimately make a deal. “‘It’ll help if we look mad at each other,’” Politico writer Mike Allen summarized Boehner’s supposed pitch. “If that’s the deal,” he added, “they should both get Academy Awards.” The episode echoed the constant refrain of Israeli diplomats: that the Fatah-aligned leaders of the Palestinian Authority are happy to talk about unity with Hamas in public, while in private they beg the Israelis for help controlling their sometime mortal enemies in Gaza.

So, now we’ve arrived at a place where, it appears, all parties prefer to remain in the limbo of no deal rather than agreeing to a deal they don’t really like, hoping that they might get a less bad deal, or at least make their opponents look worse, tomorrow. Just as the Israelis and the Palestinians perennially look to the Americans or the Europeans to come in and referee, the players in Washington have looked to Wall Street and the ratings agencies to come in and knock heads, but so far it’s the bureaucrats at the Congressional Budget Office—a more successfully nonpartisan analog to the United Nations missions in the Middle East—who have had the most immediate practical impact.

If Obama and Boehner can make a debt deal before next week, and head off the disaster that default would bring, it won’t be because the Republicans, and specifically the Tea Partiers, decided to compromise their position. It will be because Obama and Boehner either found the courage to stand up to the extremists or found a way to defuse their power. If not—well, we all know what it feels like to lament lost opportunities once it’s too late.

Now Jack O’Connell, the CIA’s Amman station chief from 1963 to 1971, writes in his wide-ranging and loosely argued new memoir, King’s Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, that the reverse is actually true: It was Hussein who alerted Nasser to the impending attacks, in two separate cables, the night before the Israeli Air Force struck. And how did Hussein get this intelligence? O’Connell knows: “I told him.”

It’s an astonishing claim. At the time, the United States was trying desperately not to get involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, mainly to avoid opening a new front against the Soviets at a time when U.S. forces were already fully engaged in Vietnam. The Israelis had sent a string of envoys to Washington in hopes of securing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s backing, and they’d all come away with nothing more than a tacit understanding that Johnson wouldn’t stop them from launching a war. Yet on June 4, after the U.S. embassy in Amman got word from the U.S. military attaché in Tel Aviv that the Israelis planned to start demolishing Egypt’s airfields at 8 a.m. the following day, the CIA man decided, on his own, to relay the information to a foreign head of state. “I was not authorized to tell him any of this,” O’Connell admits. “I didn’t report this to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

O’Connell wound up retiring from the CIA to go into private practice as Jordan’s lawyer in Washington, and his book is a courtier’s account—written, he says, to fill the gaps in the historical record left by King Hussein’s failure to complete a memoir before his death in 1999. It’s doubtful that, if Hussein had lived to write his own version, he would have included the hottest anecdote in O’Connell’s book: During a weekend retreat at the beachfront Jordanian resort of Aqaba in the summer 1967, shortly after the war, Tyrone Power’s ex-wife laced Hussein’s drink with LSD in a desperate attempt to get the married 31-year-old king in bed with her teenage daughter. “The way his aides described it,” writes O’Connell, who wasn’t present, “the king was seated in a chair but was no longer capable of discerning where his body ended and the chair began.” Help arrived in the form of a CIA medical team from Athens, dispatched with Langley’s approval.

But it’s also hard to imagine that Hussein would have authored such an angry book. Most of the stories involve what O’Connell reads as the repeated betrayal not just of Hussein’s efforts but of any commitment by either the Israelis or American Jews to achieve long-term peace. He tells a story about Arthur Goldberg, the labor lawyer appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the Supreme Court, who then stepped down to become Johnson’s ambassador to the United Nations. O’Connell writes that Goldberg took a threatening tone at a meeting in November 1967, and bragged about his “blank check” from the American Jewish community. “They will buy whatever I decide upon,” O’Connell quotes Goldberg saying. In O’Connell’s view, Goldberg—an official of the American government—had no business serving only the interests of the Jewish community. He writes that Goldberg not only reneged on the backroom agreement he made guaranteeing Hussein “minor reciprocal border rectifications” from the prewar lines in exchange for peace—but also somehow engineered the disappearance of the only written document that could have proved the reversal in the U.S. position.

Later, Henry Kissinger appears as a villain for his role in the run-up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. O’Connell goes through a complicated deductive exercise based on photographs and Kissinger’s memoirs to argue that, during a meeting in early 1973 outside Paris, Kissinger must have told the Egyptians they would have to “create a crisis” by going to war again with Israel in order to provide pretext for the Nixon Administration to re-engage with the Middle East. “We can never have a complete account of what was said at the meeting,” O’Connell writes. “But whatever words were spoken, I am convinced the Egyptians came away with the understanding that they had to go to war for the Americans to become involved in making peace.” (Kissinger did not respond to requests for comment.)

The work O’Connell has to put into making his case against Kissinger highlights the difference between history written by a historian and history written by a spy—someone who is party to events that are not generally recorded in publicly available documents, if at all. Many of the people mentioned are dead, a fact that O’Connell takes pains to point out in the text. Of those still living, one, the former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution (and Tablet Magazine contributor), flatly denied telling O’Connell what he is quoted as saying—that during the first George W. Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, asked the Israeli embassy to vet the names of her potential Middle East aides. (Rice’s office did not respond to a phone call left seeking comment.)

But the other hallmark of spy memoirs is the desire for attention after careers spent on the shadowy sidelines of world events. So, it’s hardly a surprise when, toward the end of the book, O’Connell shifts from lionizing King Hussein to seeking credit for his own unrecognized contribution to the peace effort: the idea for a pan-Arab agreement that eventually became the Saudi-led Arab peace initiative. He writes that he first raised it with officials in the Clinton Administration in 1998, before the Wye River Accords were signed, and later gave a version to Hussein’s son after the king’s death in 1999. The Jordanian diplomat Marwan Muasher, the kingdom’s first ambassador to Israel, said that O’Connell’s account on that score is true. “I have the original proposal,” Muasher told me in a phone call. But on other issues—including the account of what Nasser knew in 1967—Muasher said he only knew the stories he had heard from O’Connell over the years. “I have,” he said with a slight chuckle, “no independent documentation one way or the other.”

There are plenty of shots of Jewish kids and teenagers acting like brats—throwing stones to bait Palestinian schoolchildren their own age, talking back to elderly missionaries trying to intervene. But what really shocks are sequences like the one about ten minutes in, where a Jewish woman living in a settlement bloc guarded by IDF troops walks up to the chicken-wire fence surrounding her Palestinian neighbors’ house, puts her face right up to the barrier, and begins hissing, “Sharmouta”—Arabic for “whore.” The presence of the camera only seems to goad her on; she drops her voice to a sibilant whisper, repeating her curse over and over again. It’s difficult to watch. In the context of the film, it doesn’t really matter what set the woman off, or how just her irritation may have been. What matters is that she chose not to turn to the soldiers very expensively stationed along the road for help, but rather to be petty and mean: To engage in taunts for the sake of demonstrating her power—as bullies do.

To an American ear, it is particularly galling to hear the many Brooklyn and New Jersey accents, in English and in halting Hebrew, from people who insist repeatedly that God, the Torah, and the long, sad history of the Jewish people excuse their holding on to the land they so fervently believe is their birthright. “I’m not talkin’ to you!” one man shouts at a television journalist who interrupts him while he’s screaming at IDF soldiers that they, as fellow Jews, should be defending the holy, sacred children of the settlers rather than Arab residents of one neighborhood.

Those viewers who defend the settlers will find fault with the film, because it fails to take seriously the possibility that there are actual security threats to the city’s 600 or so Jews; because the unapologetically anti-settlement Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy is the movie’s voice of reason; because it gives equal time to settler leaders and to advocates from B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, two left-wing groups. But it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to seriously defend some of the slimier behavior discovered by the filmmakers, Giulia Amati and Stephen Natanson, from religious young Jewish men casually calling passersby Nazis and unleashing vile torrents of f-bombs and other multi-lingual verbal abuse, to parents employing their clearly terrified and screaming infants as pawns in front of the cameras. And it’s hard to avoid the tragedy at the heart of the film: That, more than 15 years after the American-born settler Baruch Goldstein committed his Purim massacre in a Hebron mosque, successive Israeli governments have failed to defuse a powder keg that could easily blow up even the most ironclad peace deal—when, or if, such a thing is ever reached.

The trailer below:

This Is My Land… Hebron [Film Linc]
Related: Among the Settlers [The New Yorker]

In the weeks leading up to the vote, Saland was heavily lobbied by the Agudath Israel, an ultra-Orthodox advocacy group, which appealed to Saland’s family tree—he is a relation of Shmuel Salant, the powerful late-19th-century chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Jerusalem—to sway him. But people familiar with the lobbying effort told Tablet Magazine in its final days that the group was less concerned with blocking the legislation than with making sure that if it passed, it would provide sufficient exemptions for religious groups opposed to same-sex marriage. (On Saturday, the Anti-Defamation League applauded both the exemptions and the legalization of same-sex marriage.)

Those exemptions were enacted before the dramatic vote, in no small part thanks to Saland’s quiet negotiations with Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Thus, late Friday night, Saland was able to tell the Senate, the public, and his wife that he was voting according to what he learned in his Jewish household. “My parents taught us to be respectful, tolerant, and accepting of others, and to do the right thing,” Saland explained in his floor speech. “I must define doing the right thing as treating all persons with equality in the definition of law as it pertains to marriage. To do otherwise would fly in the face of my upbringing.”

Saland: Decision ‘Rooted in My Upbringing’ [Poughkeepsie Journal]
All Eyes Were on State Sen. Stephen Saland’s Wife [NY Daily News]
NY Gay Marriages Can Begin As Early As End of July [AP/Yahoo]
Religious Exemptions Were Key to Vote on Gay Marriage [NYT]
Behind N.Y. Gay Marriage, an Unlikely Mix of Forces [NYT]
Related: Destination Wedding
Earlier: Jewish Lawmaker Holds Key to N.Y. Marriage Bill

One of those three pivotal state legislators is Sen. Stephen Saland, Republican from Poughkeepsie. Saland, who is Jewish, has been a particular target of a lobbying push mounted by Agudath Israel—an umbrella group representing the interests of ultra-Orthodox Jews—which argues that the same-sex marriage bill could curtail religious freedom for organizations bound to observe the new law—a touchstone of the case the group made to New Jersey lawmakers in 2009, when that state considered (and failed to pass) its own same-sex marriage bill.

Saland is himself Conservative, and his district falls both north and east of ultra-Orthodox strongholds in Rockland County and the Catskills. But he is, according to people familiar with the Agudath campaign, directly related to Shmuel Salant, a prominent rabbi of the late 19th century who served as the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem until his death in 1909. The Agudath has, accordingly, sweetened its appeals with references to the lawmaker’s family tree—and some enthusiastic supporters in Jerusalem are rumored to have gone so far as to have prayed at Salant’s grave in hopes of his intercession in the matter. It remains to be seen whether Saland, who said earlier this week that he is being bombarded with calls from both sides of the issue, will hear and heed their entreaties.

Republicans Urge Cuomo to Alter Same-Sex Marriage Bill [NYT]
Agudath Israel of America Goes Into Overdrive to Stop New York Same-Sex Marriage Legalization [NY Daily News]

The second thing he did was tell the audience about “Eight Days of Hanukkah,” the song he recorded two years ago for Tablet Magazine. It’s a good story, one that begins in 1999, when Hatch—an avid songwriter—treated contributing editor (and future blogger) Jeffrey Goldberg to a private performance of his Christmas songs. Hatch recounted that Goldberg had asked him for a Hanukkah song, and said the whole thing had been forgotten as a joke until a decade later, when he was invited up to New York to record the song, which was set to music by Madeline Stone. The only problem was that Hatch seemed to have forgotten both Goldberg’s name and the name of the “blog” that made the whole dream into reality. But, never mind: Here we are! And so, one more time, is the video:

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Related: Eight Days of Hanukkah [Tablet Magazine]
Ambassador Michael Oren Explains That These Are Perilous Times [Right Turn]

The scene came back to bite Schneier a year later when the marriage—Schneier’s fourth—disintegrated. Within months, stories appeared in the New York tabloids hinting at Schneier’s romance with a speech pathologist more than a decade his junior. The rabbi responded with a sensational disclosure of his own: He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “He has been dealing with a very serious illness, and we will have no comment on rumor or innuendo,” Schneier’s friend, the public-relations powerhouse Ken Sunshine, told the New York Post. A joke began circulating about what the rabbi’s new girlfriend could get him for his next birthday: “A bipolar bear.”

Schneier, who founded the Hampton Synagogue in Long Island’s summer playground, advertises himself as an 18th-generation scion of a European rabbinic dynasty. He is also one of the few clergy who occasionally turns up in the gossip pages, more often for his secular antics than for his religious pursuits. Last August, as Schneier’s divorce battle turned ugly, the New York Daily News published grainy private-eye images of the rabbi in workout clothes canoodling with his girlfriend, Gitty Leiner, during a Passover vacation in Israel. (His divorce from Tobi is still being litigated, and in the spring, he traveled to South Florida to celebrate Passover with both Leiner and his only child, 12-year-old Brendan, from his third marriage.)

In public, Schneier’s supporters and benefactors have dismissed his travails as a private matter disconnected from his professional duties as a religious authority and communal leader. “As far as what he does in interfaith relations, the personal side does not seem to have impaired his ability to do his work,” said Michael Schneider, the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress. “We’re not the morality police, and as far as I’m aware he has not committed any criminal act.” Schneier’s congregants have similarly closed ranks behind him. “We all know he has personal issues in his life, and he either got divorced or will be getting divorced, but that’s his personal life,” said Harvey Kaylie, a Long Island electronics manufacturer who has been among the Hampton Synagogue’s most generous donors. “The success and the feeling and the rewards people get from the synagogue—I can’t compare it to any other synagogue, so he must be doing something right.” Schneier’s friend Jay Rosenbaum, the rabbi of a Reform congregation in suburban Long Island and a former officer of the New York Board of Rabbis, introduced him at a Martin Luther King, Jr. event last winter this way: “He is an individual who does what is right. A courageous soul. A true religious personality. A leader not only of world Jewry, but truly, a world leader.”

Nevertheless, in the weeks after the photographs of Schneier and Leiner appeared, officers of the Rabbinical Council of America, the professional association of Orthodox rabbis—of which Schneier is a member—quietly asked Schneier to resign, a development reported by the Jewish Week. When Schneier declined, the group convened a formal board of inquiry to determine whether he had failed to maintain the standards of decorum expected of an Orthodox rabbi. (Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, the president of the RCA, told me that the inquiry remains open.) Around the same time, Schneier went on sabbatical from his synagogue, an off-season absence he publicly explained as a leave for a book project he is developing with the imam of Manhattan’s largest mosque. Jerry Levin, a synagogue trustee, told me, “We agreed on a sabbatical. I don’t know that we ever got into details of what it was for.” (Schneier says he has not yet signed a publishing contract for the book.)

In the past year, Schneier has been as visible as ever, jetting around the world to represent Jewish interests in a variety of forums. In October, he went to Qatar in his capacity as a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, of which he is a former chairman, to attend an interfaith summit and used his keynote to rebuke an imam in the name of his fellow Jews. “For millennia we have prayed toward Jerusalem,” the rabbi said. “It is therefore an insult to all of us to accuse us of illegally occupying the city.” The next month, he was in London speaking at the House of Lords. More recently, he’s met with Donald Trump about the developer’s abortive presidential campaign, and been consulted by the Los Angeles Times on the Jewish reaction to President Barack Obama’s Middle East peace plan. Virtually the only real price Schneier has paid for his indiscretion has been his conspicuous absence from Newsweek’s annual ranking of the 50 most influential rabbis in America, after he made the list in 2009 and 2010. In an interview, Schneier said that he had been ineligible for this year’s edition because of his pulpit leave of absence. (In response to a query from Tablet, Newsweek said that was not the case. “No rabbis under consideration were disqualified because of sabbatical status,” said Abigail Pogrebin, who helped compile this year’s list.)

Schneier has now returned to the pulpit in Westhampton Beach he has occupied for 21 years. Last week, more than a hundred congregants, many of them elderly, turned out, at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, to celebrate Shavuot. The rabbi, who wore a beige blazer and an open-collared shirt, led a lively debate about the specifically Jewish view of the biblical Ten Commandments. The synagogue’s full calendar for the summer season, featuring a performance by the Broadway star Tovah Feldshuh and an evening with political commentator Peter Beinart, testifies to the rabbi’s undiminished clout—and to the willingness of his colleagues and his wealthy backers to let him remain in place as one of the most prominent spokespeople for American Jewry.

***

At 52, Schneier cultivates a manicured presence. He wears eyeglasses from the high-end French brand Fred—which he usually takes off before speaking in public, because, he told me, he thinks he looks at least five years younger without them—and favors French-cuffed shirts accented with Hermès ties. He has a round face framed by receding curls, which on his stocky frame lends him more than a passing resemblance to Bert Lahr. Since his diagnosis as bipolar last year, Schneier says, he has become a “treadmill freak.” “I’ve lost 25 pounds since June,” he told me in March as we walked to a Washington hotspot called Bistro Bis, where we sat down for an extended interview over dinner. After being told that his favorite meal—tuna tartare—was unavailable on the dinner menu, Schneier ordered a beet salad and a mushroom risotto, which in deference to kashrut he asked to have prepared with a vegan base.

Even after going through the tabloid wringer, Schneier still prides himself on the attention he gets from the press. When I asked him about an old clip about a Passover Seder he celebrated in 1993 with Raul Julia, Schneier immediately nodded, saying, “Yeah, on ‘Page Six.’ ” When I said the item I’d seen had come from the Jewish Forward, he shook his head. “Also on ‘Page Six,’ ” he insisted, referring to the New York Post’s legendary gossip roundup. “No, no, it was ‘Page Six.’ ”

Continue reading: the family business, Modern Orthodox day school, and the Westhampton Shab-bus. Or view as a single page.

Gingrich gamely tried to project optimism. “I am running for president to lead a movement of Americans who will insist on changing Washington so we can renew America,” he announced from the podium. But he made no bones about the straits he is in, and he borrowed from William Faulkner’s Nobel speech to cast himself as a martyr.  “I will endure the challenges,” Gingrich said. “And with the help of every American who wants to change Washington, we will prevail.”

The dominant story line about Gingrich’s campaign implosion last week is that his aides had despaired of weaning him from the influence of his third wife, Callista, whom he chose to squire on a Greek cruise rather than going on hayrides through the cornfields of Iowa. But it is also clear that the mass defections were, as Politico put it, “all about the Benjamins”—or, more specifically, the lack thereof. Campaign finance records aren’t due to be released before July, but according to the Washington Post, the Gingrich campaign didn’t have the $25,000 it needed to enter the crucial Iowa straw poll in August, let alone another $30,000 to buy voter lists, while Gingrich was insistent on flying chartered planes for as much as $500,000 a pop. Gingrich had declined to set up a dedicated finance committee, the paper added, and he wasn’t used to fundraising under the rules passed since he left Congress more than a decade ago—and, in the meantime, he has grown accustomed to enjoying Adelson’s largesse.

In the absence of federal filings, it isn’t clear how much Adelson, who Forbes ranked in March as the fifth-richest man in America, has contributed to Gingrich’s campaign so far. But he has been the top donor to Gingrich’s political advocacy group, American Solutions Winning for the Future, giving more than $7 million, or about 13 percent of the $52 million the group has raised since its inception in 2007. Adelson has been sufficiently invested in promoting Gingrich, especially within the American Jewish community, that he took the time last month to call the editor of New York’s Jewish Week to complain about an article he found unfair.

Yet editorial decisions at local Jewish newspapers have far less chance of influencing the Gingrich candidacy than Adelson’s own fortunes—and, as it happens, Las Vegas Sands, the source of the casino mogul’s immense wealth, is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The probe stems from bribery allegations lodged in a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by the company’s former operations head in the Chinese enclave of Macau. Las Vegas Sands says it is cooperating, but since the disclosure, the company has lost more than $3.5 billion in value, or more than 11 percent, and last week Deutsche Bank booted the company off its list of short-term buy recommendations.

In other words, the largest single source of Gingrich’s backing is now, at least to some degree, both less flush than he used to be and newly at the mercy of the Obama Administration—a situation that can’t have improved the mood of Gingrich’s cash-strapped strategists as they wondered about where their next paychecks might be coming from. Last year, a person familiar with Adelson’s thinking told me that he wasn’t going to commit to new philanthropic expenditures until Sands stock hit a certain price, though it wasn’t clear just what that price was. At the time, Sands shares were hovering just below $30—a far cry from their 2007 highs of $140 but a vast improvement over their 2008 lows of less than $2—but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that, if the market really starts to tank, Adelson might wind up sidelining himself politically, too.

As it turned out, Adelson was a no-show at the Beverly Hilton Sunday night. His wife, Miriam, told the audience that he was fighting a bad flu—“He is really suffering, leaking from every corner of the eyes, his nose. Not his ears!” But she conspicuously failed to give Gingrich a shout-out during her turn at the dais, where she accepted the evening’s Ronald Reagan Award for her husband. Earlier in the evening, when Gingrich emerged from a VIP reception to face a horde of television cameras swarming the pre-dinner cocktail bar, she went the other way, a blur of ice-blond hair and brilliant white pantsuit click-clicking through the hotel lobby. “Pay attention to the speech. It is so good. He is such a lover of Israel,” Miriam Adelson told me, in a brief interview near the front entrance. But what about his presidential ambitions? “Let’s not talk about politics,” she said, giving a Mona Lisa smile and shaking her head as she walked away.

It was a response far short of the full-throated, fighting endorsement Gingrich might reasonably have expected from the wife and proxy of his biggest fan—at an event almost expressly designed to facilitate matchmaking between the candidate and Adelson’s fellow Republican Jewish Coalition board members and activists. Gingrich, who characteristically chose to give a 40-minute-long lecture about the history of the Middle East conflict rather than a barnstorming campaign speech, was warmly received by the audience, which obligingly booed mentions of Obama’s name and cheered Gingrich’s repeated statements about not brooking any accommodation with Hamas. But that doesn’t do much to answer the question of who, especially among fiscally conscious Republican donors, would start giving money to Gingrich’s campaign now, in the absence of a credible campaign team. (The pollster Frank Luntz managed to punk Republican Jewish Coalition head Matt Brooks into tweeting, just before Gingrich took the stage Sunday, that he would be taking over the Gingrich command.)

Which raises, for the Republican Jewish Coalition, the uncomfortable possibility that, just as Gingrich’s dependence on Adelson may turn out to be his Achilles’ heel, the group’s willingness to follow Adelson’s lead in favoring Gingrich so early on may ultimately leave it without the influence it craves over a GOP presidential field that remains highly fluid—and whose leading members like Mitt Romney and even the famously pro-Israel maybe-candidate Sarah Palin were elsewhere, enjoying other audiences.

An hour or so later, he took the stage. Everyone expected him to talk about Weiner’s scandal, and Breitbart, a consummate showman, obliged, after asking anyone under the age of 18 to leave the room. “The American political agenda is held hostage by a schmuck.” Laughter. “He could have said this is just another example of Jew on Jew crime. And I would have had to apologize for the cycle of violence.” More shtick, more laughs: “The best advice, given the situation up in San Francisco, is that he was trying to demonstrate the virtues of circumcision.”

But then Breitbart shifted tack, saying he didn’t want to spend the whole night talking blue. He said that, instead of sending pictures of his genitals into the ether, he had decided to fetishize fighting “the media”—his own all-purpose bogeyman. He cheered on the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, and booed liberal Jews for jumping on the former governor’s case for invoking the blood libel last winter, after (Jewish) Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, one of those whose districts Palin marked with a bull’s-eye in her literature, was shot by an apparently deranged young man. He added what some might construe as a sexist slam against Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, snarking, “No crotch shots from you, Madame Secretary.”

And then he pitched Big Jerusalem to the crowd. “What Israel has to deal with is worse than what conservatives have to deal with,” he said. “I’m willing to live half my year in Israel to draw attention to this.” Claps! “I need your help to create this.” More claps! He argued that press freedom in America is crucial to Israel’s public defense, and invited his interlocutors to join his brigade. “We allowed the American narrative and the Israeli narrative to be hijacked by the media.” Another round of claps, and, later, an endorsement via, naturally, Twitter. “Andrew Breitbart delivers a barn burner,” wrote Robert Avrech, the screenwriter behind the Brian de Palma thriller Body Double and the 1992 Melanie Griffith-as-undercover-Hasid romance A Stranger Among Us. “Discuss plans for ‘Big Jerusalem’ blog with Andrew.”

Gingrich Addresses Republican Jewish Coalition [WaPo]
Related: Understanding Weinergate
Earlier: Being Andrew Breitbart

Kassin pleaded guilty in March to taking “donations,” no questions asked, of money that he was told was made illegally and then issuing clean checks from the account of his Magen Israel Society—less 10 percent. The rabbi’s cut helped finance various social services in the Syrian community. Accordingly, he asked the judge to return the forfeited money to the charity so it could be used to benefit his constituents. “I want that money back to donate it,” the rabbi said this morning in court. “They kept it for two years almost—it’s enough.”

The judge, Joel Pisano, denied this request. “At the end of the day,” the judge said, “the reason the charity does not have the $367,500 is because of you.”

Rabbi Gets Probation in NJ Corruption Case [AP]
Earlier: Syrian Jewish Leader Pleads Guilty

This all comes in the context of the ongoing Republican-led fight to cut billions from the overall U.S. budget. So it’s worth noting that one of the people who attended a private, bi-partisan meeting with Netanyahu yesterday was casino mogul Sheldon Adelson—one of Bibi’s leading backers in Israel, thanks to his financing of the free right-wing daily Israel Hayom, and a key Republican donor who has given millions to former House Speaker, and now presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich. According to Ben Smith, the meeting devolved into charges from the Democrats in the room (like Debbie Wasserman Schulz and Steve Israel, two Jewish representatives that happen also to be the heads of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, respectively) that, in the aftermath of President Obama’s twin speeches last week, Republicans are turning support for Israel into a partisan wedge issue. Bibi, wisely, stayed out of it: “The [Republican Jewish Coalition] and [National Jewish Democratic Council] argued between them,” Israeli Embassy spokesman Jonathan Peled told Smith. “The Prime Minister stressed bipartisanship … and the importance of keeping Israel a bipartisan issue, as has always been the case.”

Bibi Present, Jewish groups Debate Partisanship [Politico]
Full Text of Netanyahu Speech to AIPAC [Algemeiner]
Earlier: The Top Issue for AIPAC? Iran.

It’s easy to forget amid the hype surrounding the big keynote speeches that the true point of AIPAC’s wonk-fest is to rally its activists for the final day of scheduled lobbying meetings, tomorrow, with members of Congress. And while all the external attention has been on the very public dialogue between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu about the terms of future peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, AIPAC’s internal message to the volunteers who will be fanning out across Capitol Hill is focused on another issue: The Iranian nuclear threat. (The dynamic at last year’s AIPAC conference was nearly identical: The presidential-level Israel-Palestine rhetoric got all the public attention while the activists cared most about Congress and Iran.)

The Iranian issue has the advantage of being an easy bipartisan sell and of direct security concern to the United States. “Make no mistake, this is a war of wills,” AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, said in a half-hour-long address to the full plenary session this morning. “Iran sees this moment as a chance to project its power—its radical agenda—into regimes across the region.” Accordingly, Kohr went on, “Are we in the West, are we in the United States committed to stopping Iran?” And, more specifically, to pushing the administration to punish the murderous (and Iran-allied) Assad regime in Syria and to ensuring that the post-transition government in Egypt remains committed to upholding that country’s peace with Israel? “It falls to us,” Kohr added. “We must re-focus our policymakers’ attention on what Iran is doing in this time of turmoil—its efforts to cultivate fifth columns in neighboring nations to advance Iranian ends, its use of terror-by-proxy, its relentless march toward a nuclear weapon.”

During regionally-focused breakout sessions, trainers will be instructing delegates to steer the conversation during their brief Hill appointments away from the disagreements between Obama and the Israeli government and toward the subversive influence Iran exerts in the region, not just on Hamas, but on Hezbollah and in Syria as well. They will leave armed with packets detailing three talking points, ranked in the following order: Support $3 billion in assistance to Israel to combat the threat from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah; get on board the already-circulating sanctions-focused Iran Threat Reduction Act; and vote to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority unless Iran-backed Hamas agrees to recognize Israel.

The last point shows that even conversations about the peace process can be structured to reflect the pressing Iranian subtext. In a videotaped “lobbying minute” lesson aired just before Kohr’s speech, AIPAC’s deputy director for policy and government affairs David Gillette highlighted the need for delegates to push their congressional representatives to oppose both the unilateral Palestinian push for statehood and any peace talks that include “unreformed” members of Hamas—incidentally, an identical position to the one Obama explicitly articulated in his address yesterday (and his speech Thursday). “That’s the message you need to take to Congress,” Gillette said, by way of signing off. The audience erupted in cheers.

Earlier: At AIPAC Summit, Obama Stays His Course
AIPAC Delegates Hit the Hill

In other words, anyone who thought the hue and cry from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the energetic conservative wing of the pro-Israel community over the past three days would cow Obama into backing off the framework he outlined in his big Middle East policy speech last Thursday—chiefly, using 1967 lines as a basis for negotiated land swaps—had another think coming. Indeed, the president went off-script to call out the solitary bellowing boo-er in the 10,000-strong convention-hall crowd in Washington, D.C.: “It was my reference to the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps that received the lion’s share of the attention, including just now.”

He went on sternly: “Since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what ‘1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps’ means.” Namely: Israel as a secure Jewish homeland; Palestine as a sovereign, self-governing, non-militarized Palestinian homeland next door in what are now the occupied territories. Careful listeners will have noted that he mentioned that the Palestinian state must be contiguous—a virtual impossibility if Gaza is to be included (although in his Thursday speech he also mentioned that the future Palestinian state would border Egypt). And he, or his speechwriters, demonstrated they have learned from past experience, scrupulously avoiding mentioning the settlements. He said that he thought the new unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas “poses an enormous obstacle to peace.” And he showed that he knows how to play to this particular crowd. “We will continue to demand that Hamas accept the basic responsibilities of peace: recognizing Israel’s right to exist, rejecting violence, and adhering to all existing agreements,” Obama said, to rising cheers. “And we once again call on Hamas to release Gilad Shalit, who has been kept from his family for five long years.” The crowd jumped, whooping, to its feet.

All of which served to highlight the built-in paradox of nearly all the major addresses this administration has made to the AIPAC crowd: The people who come to AIPAC’s annual policypalooza are activists who thrive on proximity to political power, but the rank and file have been dubious about, if not outright hostile to, Obama from the beginning. (It should not be forgotten that last year’s policy gathering was overshadowed by a similar diplomatic brouhaha over a curt telephone call between Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton, who had up to then been seen as a balancing pro-Israel force within the administration.) And so, Obama’s presence was a clear victory for the organization, which last year chose a close Obama friend and campaign activist, the Chicago music mogul Lee Rosenberg, as its leader—in large part, no doubt, because of the access he could offer.

Still, “Rosy”—as Obama referred chummily to Rosenberg—couldn’t dispel all of the awkwardness preceding the president’s speech, which capped three days of dramatic, and at times dramatically escalating, rhetoric from both Obama and Netanyahu. Reading the pre-conference punditry, it seemed clear that Obama’s doubters fall into two camps: Those who think his intentions toward Israel are actively malign, and those who think he is a well-intentioned Pollyanna figure. The president suavely ignored the former, likely reasoning that they are unswayable. To the latter, he addressed his closing comment. “The Talmud teaches us that so long as a person still has life, they should never abandon faith,” he said. “And so long as there are those who long for a better future, we will never abandon our pursuit of a just and lasting peace that ends this conflict with two states living side by side in peace and security. This is not idealism or naïveté. It’s a hard-headed recognition that a genuine peace is the only path that will ultimately provide for a peaceful Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people and a Jewish state of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.”

Whether he convinced anyone of anything remains to be seen; the facts on the ground are what they are. But the same people who, minutes before the speech, sat with their arms crossed waiting to be convinced showed no hesitation in leaping to their feet to show their gratitude the minute they heard at least some things they liked, even if there were other things they did not. Barack Obama left the room with a “God bless Israel,” a wave, and a standing ovation. The soundtrack: “Hail to the Chief.”

At the end of Palin’s speech, an Orthodox rabbi named Robert Shechter stood up to give a closing benediction on behalf of a year-old group called Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, whose supporters had bought three tables at the 300-person dinner. Like Palin herself, the group piggybacked on Heroic Media’s event to stage its own Washington moment: a Shabbat retreat, or shabbaton, for Jewish supporters of Palin. Ten participants gathered at an Aish HaTorah center near the Marriott for a kosher dinner and lunch accompanied by freewheeling discussions about the Obama Administration moderated by the group’s founder, Benyamin Korn.

Korn—who is known to his oldest friends as “Buddy,” but sends his emails as “Bert,” short for Bertram, his English name—is a host on Philadelphia’s conservative WNTP talk radio station, an affiliate of the behemoth Christian broadcaster Salem Communications. At a Friday night service before the retreat, his rich baritone carried the uneven chorus of the regular Aish membership. Korn, who is 55, chanted from memory with his prayer book closed in his hands.

Korn appears to have few direct links to Palin herself—in public, he deferentially refers to the head of her political-action group, Michael Glassner, as “Mr. Glassner”—and he admits he has limited financial resources, though he says he has received support from Saul Fox, a Bay Area private-equity investor who donated last year to Tea Party candidates Sharron Angle and Tom Campbell. (Fox, en route to the Palin event from his California office, was not available for comment.) To the shabbaton participants, Korn insisted that he was not in the market for a job with Palin’s political-action group, or in a future Palin campaign. “I don’t need that tsuris,” he said. But over the past few months, Korn has become a go-to Palin soldier for cable news shows. Federal campaign records show he has never given money to Palin, but he runs a website devoted to aggregating news about her, which he says gets upwards of 10,000 hits a month, including a few dozen from Wasilla, Alaska. (“It could be Joe McGinniss,” Korn says self-deprecatingly, referring to the journalist who spent last summer living next door to the Palins while working on his book about them.)

But Korn has a long history of trying to add a Jewish voice to political movements that seemed closed to some Jews—starting with his work in the left-wing solidarity movements of the early 1980s, which frequently adopted anti-Zionist positions in sympathy with the Palestinian cause. Korn became more observant as he grew older, and in the Tea Party he sees a movement that speaks to the broader cultural concerns of a generation of newly conservative Jews who feel “mugged by reality,” following Irving Kristol’s famous formulation. “I started Jews for Sarah to create a link to a wider community,” he told his group and described his dream of building a network of Jews for Sarah chapters on the back of local Tea Party organizations around the country.

Unlike most conservative Zionist activists, Korn says he respects Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of the dovish group J Street, with whom Korn worked in the mid-2000s during a stint as associate director of the nonprofit David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. (Ben-Ami is on the group’s board.) “These people, they want to fit Israel into a left-wing paradigm but they don’t want to fit their worldview into a Jewish paradigm,” Korn said. “I know it because I lived it.” In some ways, Korn is attempting to engineer the political mirror image of what Ben-Ami has spent the last two years building: a political home for a group of conservative Jews who feel that no one speaks for them.

***

“Buddy” is the son of Bertram Korn, the former rabbi of Philadelphia’s Keneseth Israel, one of the oldest and largest Reform congregations in the United States, and a well-known historian of Jews in the Civil War era. His mother, Rita, was an heir to the Pep Boys auto-repair fortune; her father, Emanuel Rosenfeld, was better-known as the chain’s mascot, Manny. As an undergraduate, Korn studied journalism at Temple University and began learning Mandarin in hopes of going to China after he graduated—a nod to his father, who served as the Navy’s only Jewish chaplain in North China during World War II. But visa restrictions were still in place five years after Nixon’s landmark 1972 trip, and as a devoted Maoist—“Oh, how I long to carry manure up the mountain, and all that,” as Korn now puts it—Korn decided to forgo either Taiwan or Hong Kong and followed his Indian girlfriend to New Delhi, where he enrolled in a master’s program at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “My dad had to defend me to the congregation, that I wasn’t losing my mind in an ashram,” Korn said, in one of several phone conversations.

He was still in Delhi in 1979, when his father, only 61, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Korn returned to Philadelphia and enrolled in a doctoral program at Temple. In his off hours, he volunteered with Central American solidarity movements, going on missions to Cuba and hosting radio shows featuring radical music from throughout Latin America.

At the same time, Korn says, he began feeling his way back toward Jewish observance. For a while, his leftism coexisted peacefully with his Judaism—he launched Jews Concerned for Central Americans during this time, he says—but then, in 1985, found himself disillusioned after Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega went to Moscow immediately after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted down President Reagan’s request for funding to the opposition Contras. “I said, ‘How can this man go to Moscow the day after we saved his neck in the U.S. Congress?’ ” Korn said. (It is a story he tells often, according to people who have known him for decades.) “So, I said, if he will betray his own people, I am finished with this, I am going to learn Hebrew and go to Israel.”

Within a few years, Korn had married an Israeli woman and fathered four children. (The pair eventually divorced; Korn, who describes himself as Modern Orthodox, has since remarried.) He established the Philadelphia chapter of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, but he then became a journalist himself, first as editor of three Jewish papers in South Florida and then, in 1994, as executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. Four years later, he left to join the conservative Zionist Organization of America. “I often wonder to myself if I had come of age now rather than when I did if I would have gone off the derech,” Korn said, using the Hebrew word for “path.” “The Reform movement has now embraced Zionism, but it was not like that in the 1980s.”

At the retreat, Korn steered the conversation away from Israel toward an array of anti-Obama Tea Party staples: energy policy, health care, even Michelle Obama’s effort to reduce consumption of high-fructose corn syrup. He invited Tea Party activists Teri Adams and Adrienne Ross speak. Later, in a phone conversation, he repeated his frequent assertion that his admiration for Palin stems in part from what he sees as her ecumenical outlook, which he believes is demonstrated by the fact that her husband, Todd, is part Native American. “We want to break through some of the baseless charges made against her, separately and against the Tea Party movement, that they are racist, narrow, and bigoted, or that they come from some kind of cultural place that is hostile to Jews, blacks, and other minorities,” Korn told me.

Korn has been criticized, most recently in Salon, for being a party of one, engaged in a quixotic effort to try and lure his fellow Jews away from their well-established liberalism. But he is operating in a religious Jewish world that is more open to “values” conservatism than it once was—a universe apart from the secular Jewish world. “The earlier generation of secular Republican Jews were à la carte Republicans, making common cause with evangelical Christians on issues like foreign policy,” said Ami Eden, the editor of the JTA, who got his start working for Korn at the Exponent. “These Orthodox Jews are buying the whole conservative program, from health care on down—it’s a unified front against what they see as a secular-socialist worldview.”

And Korn isn’t shy about making use of his political journey. It’s just the kind of redemption narrative that characterizes successful conservative rhetoric today. He delighted in telling those gathered for dinner on Friday night, over brisket and chicken, that he was once a fan and follower of the late community organizer Saul Alinsky, a favorite punching-bag of the right-wing blogosphere. Mark Young, a physical-rehabilitation specialist from Baltimore, interjected, “You’ve done teshuva!” (Teshuva is Hebrew for repentance.) The group laughed. Korn gave a brief, sad smile and replied quietly, “I guess you could say that.” Then he picked up where he had left off.

The “cartel” in question is the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, which tightly governs the placement of rabbis with member synagogues across the country—a delicate matchmaking process whose result is often a major determinant of whether a congregation will thrive. The professor, Barak Richman, is a lay leader at his synagogue in Durham, N.C., and has spent the last eight months developing his claim that what started as a way to make sure that far-flung synagogues got their fair pick of rabbis graduating from the seminaries—and to prevent internecine poaching of successful clergy between competing synagogues—may today run afoul of the same federal antitrust statutes that brought down Rockefeller’s oil empire.

In Richman’s view, the Rabbinical Assembly and its analogues in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements use their oversight of the hiring process to threaten the autonomy and, at a fundamental level, the independent spirit of individual synagogues. (Richman excludes the rabbinic association of Modern Orthodoxy, known as the Rabbinical Council of America, from his analysis.) “Each placement system imposes severe restrictions on the labor market for pulpit rabbis without creating any identifiable pro-competitive benefit,” Richman wrote in his paper. “These rabbinic organizations are acting to advance their own commercial interests to the detriment of the welfare of consumers, namely the congregations and congregants who hire and ultimately benefit from a rabbi’s services.”

The argument lays bare a facet of Jewish life that remains obscured to the vast majority of American Jews today, who think of their congregations as independent religious communities and who are far less likely than their grandparents to know—or care—about the umbrella movements. But the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations do what secular professional associations do: maintain standards, facilitate hiring, and organize pensions. Under the current system, rabbis and cantors seeking jobs declare their candidacy through their movements’ placement offices, rather than operating as free agents. On the other side of the equation, synagogues agree to accept panels of candidates screened by the central placement authorities, rather than posting their jobs on public job boards or recruiting privately. Rabbis and cantors follow the rules in order to protect their access to future jobs at their movements’ synagogues; congregations, most of which go through the hiring process only infrequently, follow the rules because it’s easier and to preserve their good standing within their movements. Bucking the system requires an appeals process that can, in some cases, cost congregations, and rabbis, matches that both sides hope to make.

The idea that American synagogues are, at such a fundamental level, subject to a centralized leadership is a foreign one to most of their members—there is, after all, no Chief Rabbi in this country and no sense that a Jew in Pittsburgh is somehow answerable to an authority in New York, let alone in Jerusalem. The question of what the appropriate relationship between synagogue and movement should be is emerging at a moment when the Conservative movement, in particular, is painfully aware of the need to re-engage its constituents; indeed, its annual conference, last month, was devoted to the issue of rebranding. It underscores the degree to which mainstream synagogues feel the movements have hampered their efforts to attract younger Jews at a time when independent minyans and other groups are succeeding with a less institutional approach to Jewish practice. And it dovetails with a general decline in support for unions—which the rabbinic associations, in some sense, are—among a younger generation accustomed to union-busting. But Richman’s claim, first set out in a Forward op-ed last September, is that the movements’ constraints on rabbinic hiring aren’t just run-of-the-mill Jewish parochial concerns—it’s that they’re actually illegal.

***

Grumbling over the rules imposed by the rabbis’ and cantors’ professional associations is, by itself, nothing new. The issue was explored at length a decade ago by the journalist Stephen Fried in his book The New Rabbi, in which seniority rules restricting hiring by large synagogues became a major plot point, once the Conservative Philadelphia congregation at the heart of the story decided it wanted to promote its young assistant rabbi rather than hire a more experienced stranger from somewhere else to replace its retiring senior rabbi. (The Rabbinical Assembly eventually bent its rules to accommodate the synagogue, Har Zion, one of the largest and most powerful in the country.) And the idea that the movements might use their control over the hiring process to influence theological decisions by its member rabbis surfaced in 2005, when Ayelet Cohen, a Conservative rabbi, complained to the New York Times that she was being punished by the Rabbinical Assembly placement committee because she had officiated same-sex weddings. (The movement responded that Cohen was only being called out for violating the terms of a waiver allowing her to work at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a largely gay and lesbian Manhattan synagogue that is unaffiliated with any major movement; the Conservative movement voted the following year to allow its members to marry gay couples.)

The current system emerged in the 1960s to impose order on what was largely an ad hoc process, according to Marc Lee Raphael, professor of Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary and author of a new history, The Synagogue in America. “In the old days, and this was true at the Orthodox seminary and the Conservative seminary and the Reform seminary, the chancellor of the seminary just told new rabbis what pulpits they were going to,” said Raphael, who also serves as rabbi of a Reform pulpit in Maryland. “The next step was the old boys’ network, where the president of the synagogue would call a guy and say, ‘We’re twice as large and pay twice as much and why don’t you come over.’ So, the placement process replaced two terrible ways of hiring rabbis.”

But the core of Richman’s argument, which has not been tested in any court, is that the rabbis’ professional associations organized their system in a way that violates the terms of the Sherman Act, which was passed in 1890 to combat the power of the railroad and oil monopolies, and later helped break up the Bell System. Rather than operating as a neutral clearinghouse, the hiring process run by the rabbinic associations is structured to limit both member rabbis and affiliated synagogues from using other avenues for making hires. And it turns out there is precedent for using the Sherman Act against secular professional associations for just this kind of behavior: In 1995, the Justice Department successfully sued the American Bar Association, the body governing the legal profession, on the grounds that it was using its cartel power to unfairly manipulate law schools into guaranteeing higher salaries for law faculties.

Richman’s crusade against the Rabbinical Assembly emerged from his personal frustration with a system that prevented his Conservative synagogue, Beth El, from interviewing Reconstructionist candidates to replace its retiring senior rabbi, who had been ordained in the Reconstructionist movement and obtained a waiver to preside over the congregation when it was still a Jewish backwater, decades before the universities in the area’s Research Triangle emerged as a hot destination for young academics, many of them Jewish. His initial salvo in the Forward elicited a statement from the Rabbinical Assembly asserting that its system “encourages talented individuals to enter and remain in the profession” and thereby “benefits not only rabbis and their families, but the Jewish community as a whole.” (Representatives of the Rabbinical Assembly did not respond immediately to phone and email messages left seeking comment; Richman declined to speak to Tablet Magazine on the record, citing potential legal action against the Rabbinical Assembly.)

But Richman is far from alone. Congregation Beth Elohim, a popular Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, ran into difficulty earlier this year over its efforts to hire a star cantorial student on the verge of graduation named Joshua Breitzer. Under the ranking system used by the American Conference of Cantors—Reform cantors’ equivalent of the Rabbinical Assembly—Beth Elohim was required to hire a cantor with more than three years of experience. In order to hire Breitzer, the synagogue had to appeal for a special waiver, which it eventually won. But the process took so long that they nearly lost their candidate to another congregation that could offer a job without waiting for secondary approvals. “In the end, we got who we wanted,” Beth Elohim’s rabbi, Andy Bachman, says now, “but it was an unnecessary wringer that we needed to go through.”

Part of the problem is that having a national office act in any substantive capacity is antithetical to the idea of local control. “I’m happy with how everything worked out, but down low, on a personal level, nothing was going to stop me from getting the best cantor, or the best rabbi, I could for our congregation, whether it was someone who was Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist,” Bachman said. “We don’t need the national movement to tell us what Jews in Brooklyn need—we know what Jews in Brooklyn need.”

It’s an irony Richman notes in his paper: The approach taken by the movement may in fact be strangling the very community it purports to support. “It amounts to an effort to deprive local congregations of the very autonomy and self-determination that has fueled the blossoming of diverse Jewish experiences for two thousand years,” Richman writes. “Were the rabbinical organizations to adopt less restrictive rules that were consistent with the Sherman Act—rules that empower individual communities and defer to the preferences of both congregants and rabbis—it would kindle the passions and empower the dynamism that Jewish communities have shown over time.”

Well, that was January 2010. Now, we hear, Aguiar’s back in Bal Harbour, where last night he was scheduled to unveil plans for a new visitor center at the Western Wall to be devoted to the Lubavitcher rebbe. Tentatively titled 770 Western Parkway—a nod to the Chabad movement’s Brooklyn headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway—the facility is supposed to offer “substantive food for thought” to people visiting Judaism’s holiest site, according to a quote from Aguiar on the Lubavitch Website. “People walk away from the Kotel and are not sure how to translate the spiritual high they feel into something concrete,” Aguiar said. “It would allow me to finally gift to others what I have been so fortunate myself to have—a life enriched by the inspiration and impact of the Rebbe.”

Construction of New Visitor Center to Begin [Lubavitch.com]
Related: Prodigal Son [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Former Tropper Sponsor Forced Into Psych Ward

The first Maxwell House Haggadah was published in 1932 and was free with purchase of a can of Maxwell House. It wasn’t the first instance of marketeering finding a place at the Seder table—the State Bank of New York had done earlier haggadah giveaways—but it turned out to be the most successful by far. More than 50 million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah have been distributed over the years, a kind of covenant between the coffee maker and those seeking to preserve “a Jewish national institution,” as the 1939 edition described the holiday ritual. It was famously used in the first-ever White House Seder last year, and it remains significant enough that its adoption this year of an updated English translation warranted coverage by the New York Times.

But here’s the odd thing about the Maxwell House Haggadah: Despite being a thoroughly American artifact, it doesn’t read as a particularly American Jewish text. Its early incarnations have the overtones of a David Attenborough script: “Almost everyone is familiar with the Biblical story of Passover,” began the 1939 introduction. “Yet the Jewish people love to recall this tale year after year.” The English doggedly follows the Hebrew, leaching any poetry from the Seder passage linking matzoh to the sought-for relief from exile in a way that renders it literally rather than conceptually Zionist. “At present we celebrate it here, but next year we hope to celebrate it in the land of Israel,” it says. “This year we are servants here, but next year we hope to be free men in the land of Israel.” So much for the goldene medina.

The English of the Maxwell House Haggadah stands in sharp contrast to the other major mass-market American haggadah of the 20th century: the booklet distributed to more than 350,000 Jews serving in the United States military during World War II. (Proper title: Haggadah of Passover for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States.) Consider this alternate rendering of the same Hebrew lines describing the Jews’ desire for redemption: “May Israel wandering yet this year reach Israel’s land this coming year, and Zion’s mount and shrine ascend. May those who freedom lacked this year their shackles break this coming year; may freedom on the world descend.” The authors, David and Tamar de Sola Pool, were unhesitant about drawing an explicit link between the safe haven of mid-century America and the hoped-for Promised Land of the Seder. “This book brought to them a heightened dedication to the ideal of liberty doubly theirs as Americans and as Jews,” the de Sola Pools wrote in 1947, in a preface to a postwar edition.

It may have been significant that both the de Sola Pools had a newcomers’ appreciation for the United States. David de Sola Pool was a Briton ordained as a rabbi in Berlin, while his wife Tamar was born in Jerusalem and arrived in New Jersey as a teenager. David de Sola Pool came to the United States in 1906 to take the pulpit at Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, better known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the first Jewish congregation established in the colonies. At the height of World War I, he was known as a fervent Zionist, and he publicly argued that the colonization of Palestine was “the only way to restore Hebrew ideals,” according to a report in the Times—in opposition to those who insisted, according to the same item, that “the keeping alive of Hebraic ideals at home was of far greater importance than the Zionist movement.”

The rise of Hitler shifted de Sola Pool’s focus. Speaking at Fort Dix, N.J., just before Passover in 1941, he told a thousand Jewish soldiers that fighting Hitler was their chief responsibility as Jews. “The rape of Europe by armed violence has made it clear that the world war now being waged will determine whether human liberty is to live or die,” de Sola Pool declared. “Our American army is being expanded to strengthen the defenders of liberty, and the highest concept which you can hold of your function is that of being trained to preserve liberty against the forces of tyranny.”

De Sola Pool wasn’t the only rabbi asserting a link between the Passover story and the special burden on American Jews to save the entire free world. “Through twenty centuries of history the Jew refused to surrender his faith in the ultimate triumph of liberty,” Joseph Lookstein, the rabbi at New York’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, told his congregants on the Upper East Side in 1941. “And today, the greatest victim of the barbarism that seems to have engulfed the world, the Jew still stands unbowed, convinced that no temporary retreat by the forces of democracy can check the march of civilization toward its ultimate destiny of equality, liberty and brotherhood.”

When the United States entered the war in December 1941, de Sola Pool was chairman of the religious activities committee of the Jewish Welfare Board, which had been established during World War I to support Jewish chaplains and which commissioned the new wartime haggadah. In 1943 the USO distributed the first printing—65,000 copies—which carried a stern reminder about “generation after generation of Jews who have stood up to cruel taskmasters.” In the de Sola Pools’ English translation, Israel is referred to not as the terroir of the Maxwell House Haggadah but as a body standing in for all humanity, “Israel wandering” toward a promised ascent to a Zion of the spirit. It evokes a striking moment in the Jewish story: a frozen instant when “Israel,” not yet a physical entity, was at serious risk of being destroyed as a notional one in Europe.

Today, that makes reading the wartime haggadah, still available from Bloch Publishing, something of a relief. The literalist language of the Maxwell House Haggadah sets up an almost guilty dynamic. By the time “Next year may we be in Jerusalem!” rolls around—page 47, if you’re wondering—it’s almost impossible, for people reading outside Israel, to avoid thinking about vacation time and air miles. (Coach fares for this year’s holiday, from John F. Kennedy International Airport, are running about $1,200.) But for people who prefer to be in Bethesda, and for Jews in the Diaspora who harbor conflicting feelings about the State of Israel—whether over its domestic politics of conversion or the looming prospect of another war in Gaza—the de Sola Pool haggadah offers a short-circuit around contemporary history. It ends, not with Chad Gadya, but with a trio of songs: Hatikvah, the Star-Spangled Banner, and My Country ‘Tis of Thee, under its alternate title, America.

On April 15, 1962, Hannah Arendt sent a brief personal note to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, thanking him for some flowers he had sent. It had been a rough winter for the political philosopher: Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, was suffering from a brain aneurysm, and Arendt had developed a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics she was given to treat a cold. Then, in March, a truck had plowed into a taxi she was taking through Central Park, resulting in a concussion, hemorrhages in both eyes, broken teeth, and fractured ribs. Nevertheless, in her note three weeks later to Shawn—who had assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem a year before, and was still awaiting her copy—Arendt sounded almost chirpy. “I am much better,” she wrote, in her blue-ballpoint cursive, spidery and cramped on cream-colored stationery, “and on the point of going back to work.”

Five months later, she was done. On Sept. 19, a sheaf of onion-skin pages arrived at The New Yorker’s office at 25 West 43rd Street, with the title, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report.” The manuscript was sent over to the typing pool, where it was copied onto heavy yellow bond, double-spaced, and then returned to Shawn for editing.

Meanwhile, a carbon copy was delivered to Arendt’s publisher, Viking Press. A lightly edited version of her manuscript was published as a book in May 1963 under the same title she’d picked for the New Yorker articles that were published in February and March but with the dramatically enhanced subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” The book, with revisions, has remained in print since. But it never reflected Shawn’s changes to Arendt’s draft, which was serialized in five issues of the magazine. So while The New Yorker remains almost reflexively associated with “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the text that most people have in mind when they talk about Arendt’s report is not, in fact, the one that appeared in the magazine.

The Shawn typescript, cluttered with pencil marks, is now held with the rest of The New Yorker archive at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. His major cuts and alterations to Arendt’s original are striking in their consistency: Almost all of them involve Arendt’s asides about the contemporary Jewish community and its handling of the trial. Many of the most controversial passages made it into the magazine intact, including her assertion that “if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between five and six million people.” But the final magazine text is in some ways less provocative, more streamlined, and—unsurprisingly, given the precision of The New Yorker’s legendary copy editor Eleanor Gould—more polished than what’s in the book.

In one sense, Shawn was simply exercising his preference for straightforward structure and well-modulated language: The sections cut from the magazine, especially near the beginning, are generally asides that distract the reader from the central focus of the Eichmann narrative. In some places, he reined Arendt in, softening her claim that Hitler was, in 1935, “admired everywhere as a great national statesman” with a judiciously placed “almost” before “everywhere.” But the cuts also reflect Shawn’s aversion to what Irving Howe, in his criticism of Arendt in Commentary, self-deprecatingly described as the “grubby” polemic of the little intellectual journals. (Ben Yagoda, in his New Yorker chronicle, About Town, noted that Arendt went to Shawn for the assignment on the advice of her friend Mary McCarthy only after Norman Podhoretz told her Commentary couldn’t afford to send her to Jerusalem; given that Podhoretz responded to Arendt’s finished piece with a scathing review subtitled “A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” one can only imagine that the final product would have been quite different had Arendt been writing for him.)

Arendt doesn’t appear to have fussed over the cuts. “She did not like to look at things, or go back to things,” explained Jerome Kohn, Arendt’s former research assistant and now her literary executor. “What she gave to Shawn she left in his hands, and what she sent to the publisher, she left in theirs.” She did, however, send in corrections, and requested multiple sets of galleys during editing. “It would make things easier for me,” she wrote to Shawn on Sept. 30, 1962. After the first installment of the series was published, the following February, she wrote to chastise Shawn for an error she had found in the text concerning the date of Yad Vashem’s establishment. “This is an error,” Arendt wrote, noting she had spoken to the fact-checker, William Honan, who went on to be a culture editor at the New York Times. “This is not very important but it confirms my conviction that no dates or facts provided by your checking department should be inserted unless they are checked and approved by me.”

The date of Yad Vashem’s founding turned out to be the least of it, of course. According to Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Shawn cabled Arendt on March 8 to advise her of the response to her piece: “People in town seem to be discussing little else.” A few days later, on March 13, she replied that she had begun receiving angry letters. “Now the Jews know that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the German’ and the Germans agree that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the Jew,’ it is me,” Arendt wrote, in a letter held at the Library of Congress. “This, to be sure, is an exaggeration and your checking department would not let me get away with it.”

The Iranian Jews spent two decades as the Cubans of Los Angeles: a tight-knit community living in exile, in many cases fabulously wealthy or entrepreneurial or both, plopped down not in some far, unseen corner of the city but right at its commercial and cultural heart, resisting any move toward assimilation while they waited for the tide to turn back home. Jimmy Delshad, the former mayor of Beverly Hills and an unofficial spokesman of the Persian Jewish community, refers to it as “the suitcase mentality”—as in, ready to go at any time. But that fantasy of return is long gone. Now, within a few miles of Nessah, there is a Chabad Persian Youth center, an Orthodox synagogue and school called Ohr HaEmet, and the Iranian Jewish Senior Center, all featuring prominent multi-lingual signage. “Their kids have grown up here,” Delshad says. “They know the kids would never go back to Iran.”

Nessah today occupies a 60,000-square-foot neoclassical temple a few blocks east of Rodeo Drive, where Yedidia Shofet’s son and successor, David Shofet, conducts services in Hebrew and Farsi, from a bimah in the middle of a high-ceilinged thousand-seat main sanctuary. Aging men in charcoal gray suits with white shirts fill the east side of the room, while their wives sit to the west. That is the part of Nessah that its members describe as “traditional Persian.”

No one knows what to call the services in the event hall on the other end of the block-long campus, where on Saturdays a charismatic young Lubavitch rabbi from Miami Beach named Menachem Weiss leads prayers in English from a standard Modern Orthodox text. Here, the worshippers are Jews who identify as Persian but are also unequivocally American. His congregants are the children and grandchildren of Shofet’s original flock, people who grew up in the United States, who live their daily lives in English, and who don’t want to or simply can’t follow services in Farsi. Even in the ladies’ room, where mothers whisper to their toddlers, the lingua franca is English.

Now adults, they are the first generation of Persian Jews to come of age outside their country since the time of the Babylonian exile. More Persian Jews live in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world—an estimated 45,000, roughly twice the number remaining in Iran. They have homes in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, and Encino; they have Ivy League degrees and work as doctors, lawyers, producers, and bankers. The names of the community’s most successful members, the brothers Parviz and Younes Nazarian, adorn the city’s major synagogues and centers at USC and UCLA; Younes’ youngest son, Sam, is a nightlife impresario who has been profiled in The New Yorker and who made the Los Angeles Times power list in 2006 at 31. There is even a Persian “Bernie Madoff”: Ezri Namvar, a real-estate investor who owned everything from a Marriott downtown to a resort in Lake Tahoe and was indicted last fall on charges he stole $23 million from investors in his collapsed fund.

Marked by their complicated surnames and close family ties, the Persian Jews are—willingly or not—responsible for determining how much of the old language and customs will survive after their transplantation to Southern California. Many of Nessah’s members, including its board officers, have what they jokingly refer to as “dual citizenship”: membership at Nessah as well as at one of the large, mainstream synagogues nearby, like the Conservative Sinai Temple or Reform Stephen S. Wise Temple, where their children attend day or Hebrew school and have their bar or bat mitzvahs.

The community’s arrival exerts a profound influence on the Jewish culture and politics of Los Angeles, even as the Persian Jews themselves reshape their traditions to fit the American mold. “Persian, Jewish, American,” says Zvi Dershowitz, a rabbi who was instrumental in welcoming Persian Jews to his synagogue, Sinai Temple, one of the largest Conservative congregations in West Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the revolution. “It’s the three-legged stool.”

***

It’s hard, these days, to remember that there was a time when Iran was cool, a place where Elizabeth Taylor went to recover from her split from Richard Burton and before embarking on her political life with Virginia Sen. John Warner. In an American context, the Persians remained foreign and exotic even after they began arriving in large numbers. Their American pop-culture debut was in the 1995 movie Clueless, the writer and director of which, Amy Heckerling, spent months sitting in on classes at Beverly Hills High School. “That’s the Persian mafia,” went one line in Heckerling’s screenplay. “You can’t hang with them unless you own a BMW.” To people in Beverly Hills, the joke was funny because it was true, and because it lampooned both Persians’ extravagant materialism and their American counterparts’ disdainful fascination. The joke still plays: A lavish feature in W magazine accompanied by a Larry Sultan photo essay depicted a bejeweled L.A. Persian old guard in faux-Versailles mansions—the Shah Reza Pahlavi crowd—giving way to a generation of rich, nubile proto-Kardashians posing in their clothes in the rooftop hotel pool.

When the Persians began immigrating from Iran in the late 1970s, they encountered an established American Jewish community that was prepared to assist penniless Soviet defectors but utterly confused by the sudden arrival of self-sufficient and self-directed Jews who were relatively wealthy—wealthy enough to inspire genuine jealousy, the kind of jealousy that led parents to say nasty things in front of their kids and their kids to distill that into playground rejection. In Tehran, the wealthiest Jews had lived in the same neighborhood as the Pahlavis, down the road from the Shah’s new international ski resort; arriving in Beverly Hills at the height of the hostage crisis, they were treated like they had cooties. Sam Nazarian has recounted being called a “camel jockey”; his older sister, Sharon Baradaran, says one of her earliest memories in California is of being rejected in her seventh-grade folk-dancing class because she was from Iran. “Kids would say they wouldn’t hold hands with me,” said Baradaran, who now oversees strategic investments as president of the $30 million family foundation created by her parents, from an office in Century City where the parking lot is filled with Rolls-Royces and Maybachs. “Kids can be really mean at that age.”

It was a time of anti-Iranian violence and boycotts directed at Iranian businesses, and Jews—many of whom had been as unobservant and monarchist as their Muslim neighbors—found that being seen publicly in established synagogues helped them establish anti-Islamist bona fides, like wearing oversized chai necklaces or Americanizing their first names. “We were treated like terrorists,” says Ron Mehrdad, a 1980 graduate of Iowa State’s engineering program, who stopped using his Farsi name, Mehran, after sending out more than a thousand job applications and not getting a single positive response. Going to American synagogues was a way to signal they were Jews first and unwilling to be associated with the Islamic Republic.

Continue reading: strangers fitting in, fundraising, and “No, we are not Jewish.” Or view as a single page.

It’s perfectly understandable that Lee—raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist and, later, a Jehovah’s Witness—doesn’t talk about it much. She and Karatz were in the midst of their divorce when she and Cuomo met, in 2005, and Karatz subsequently married Lilly Tartikoff, the widow of former NBC president Brandon Tartikoff. And while Lee’s unfortunate Kwanzaa cake is the one people love to hate, she also has an angel-food Hanukkah cake that brought forth a torrent of ire from food bloggers.

Thankfully, New York’s Benjamin Wells is on the case. In his profile—which you really ought to read, from beginning to end—he casts the conversion as part of Lee’s dramatic jump up the class ladder, from oldest sister maximizing her family’s food-stamp allowance to Real Housewife of Bel Air, driving around in a Mercedes SL600 and hanging out with Arianna Huffington while launching her TV show and a line of companion books from her garage. “She has changed names and religions and coasts,” Wells writes. “She has scaled steep socioeconomic heights and done so by eking wealth from her woes.”

The Ravenous and Resourceful Sandra Lee [NY Mag]

From the start, the rabbi, who appears everywhere in a large-brimmed black hat, his white beard flowing, insisted on his innocence. He was, after all, no Madoff; what he did, according to government affidavits, was take checks from congregants and other rabbis, no questions asked, and then return the funds from his own charitable accounts, minus 10 percent. The rabbi’s cut helped finance the vast network of schools and social services that keep the Syrian community together—a mitzvah, of sorts.

But the outcome of the case was all but determined from the start. Even with the best representation—and Kassin’s lawyer, Gerald Shargel, is widely regarded as one of the best criminal-defense men in New York—fighting the government’s case, built with help from Solomon Dwek, the man who turned on his cohorts, would have been an uphill battle, and taken its toll on a man Kassin’s age.

So, now what? Kassin agreed to forfeit $367,500 seized by federal authorities after his arrest. Prosecutors have said that, as part of Kassin’s plea, they will not seek a prison term, though the supervising judge could impose a sentence of up to five years. Kassin also faces up to an additional $250,000 in fines. But, as far as the criminal justice system is concerned, that will be that. “Few financial crimes offend our sensibilities like those that hide illegal activities behind the curtain of charity,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said in a statement.

Rabbi Pleads Guilt in Connection with Brooklyn Money-Laundering [NY Post]
Related: Crisis of Faith [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Insider Led Agents to Rabbis, Pols
Dwek, Center of N.J. Fraud Case, Pleads Guilty to Bank Fraud

Also, the winner in the best documentary short subject category, Strangers No More, is about a school in Tel Aviv that takes in students from war-torn countries. This morning, the entrance was decorated with a sign reading, “We have the Oscar, congratulations!” But a 14-year-old student told Yediot Aharonoth, “For my friends the best prize will be to stay in Israel and not be deported back to Africa.” Cue heartbreak.

Winners and Nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards [Oscars.org]
Jewish Talent Shines at 2011 Academy Awards [JTA]
Billy Crystal Jokes Around at the Oscars [USA Today]
Kirk Douglas’ Laughs [LAT]
School Rejoices in Oscar Win [Ynet]

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Double Bill
Oscar Eyes Tel Aviv Documentary
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