Opinions! Everyone seems to have one. Can you believe, for example, that some people actually prefer vanilla to chocolate? And other people actually liked Avatar? And then there’s that whole whatever-you-want-to-call-it between Israel and the United States right now. People have opinions on that too! Here are some notable ones:
• Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith thinks (as he wrote on The Scroll) that President Obama’s lashing out at the Israelis only makes him look weak. [Slate]
• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg sees in the Israeli government’s incoherence—first announcing the settlements, then apologizing for doing so—evidence that Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost control of his weak coalition. Previously, Goldberg reported that Obama is trying to shake that coalition up further so that moderate Tzipi Livni can become prime minister. And we should listen to him: he is, after all, quite close to his fellow Tablet Magazine contributing editor Barack Obama. [Atlantic]
• Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy praises the Obama administration’s “tough love” for Israel. [Haaretz]
• Prominent Palestinian official and intellectual Mustafa Barghouti sees America as a “hostage” to “the last colonial system in modern history.” [LAT]
• Aluf Benn predicts that both Obama’s and Netanyahu’s reputations will take hits by the end of all this. [Haaretz]
• Fred Kaplan sees Obama’s harsh stance as ultimately more supportive of Israel than the most ardent pro-Israel cheerleading could ever be. [Slate]
• Oh, and Netanyahu’s brother-in-law thinks Obama is an anti-Semite. A Kenya-born one, no doubt. [Laura Rozen]
Excuse the excitement and bragging, but we just got a text from our editors attending the Digital American Society of Magazine Editors awards ceremony, and: our Vox Tablet podcast serieshas won the National Magazine Award for Best Podcast! This is our first ASME win. A special congratulations to Senior Editor Sara Ivry and Audio Executive Producer Julie Subrin.
And feel free to give a listen to those podcasts we submitted to the nominating committee. In case you haven’t heard, they’re award-winning!
• “Remembrance Day”: Gregory Warner reports from Rwanda on commemorating the country’s 1994 genocide, with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day as a template.
• “The Queens of Bollywood”: Eric Molinsky discusses the early days of India’s Bollywood movie factories, when most of the leading ladies—from Rose Ezra to Ruby Myers—were Baghdadi Jews.
• “Blessed Bluegrass”: Jon Kalish profiles Orthodox bluegrass musician Jerry Wicentowski, whose observance prevents him from weekend gigs, but not from virtuosic guitar work.
A new memoir by a Bergen-Belsen survivor reports that her fellow prisoner distracted young children at the German concentration camp by regaling them with fairy tales. Berthe Meijer’s Life After Anne Frank casts Frank’s actions as of a piece with her remarkable (and remarkably precocious) story-telling abilities.
But now Hannah Pick-Goslar, a childhood friend of Frank’s who also survived Bergen-Belsen, has come forward to dispute the memoir’s account. “In that condition, you almost died,” she told a reporter. “You had no strength to tell stories.”
I guess I’d like to know whether this is true or not. But please let’s not lose sight of the Diary, which really does justify its considerable hype. I’m constantly amazed by how many people have never actually read it. If you’re one of them, then have I got a book recommendation for you!
Below: Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel plays his song, “Holland, 1945.”
According to White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Biden did not, as some had alleged, tell Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israeli settlements endangered U.S. troops. But what about the venerable General David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. military’s Central Command (which is responsible for Central Asia and most of the Middle East)? He reportedly requested that the Palestinian territories be added to CENTCOM’s purview, on the grounds that events there were intimately linked to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We don’t need to guess what exactly Petraeus thinks, because he was quite candid yesterday before a Senate committee. He disclosed that adding the territories to CENTCOM has been discussed, but never formally requested. And he argued:
The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the [area of responsibility]. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbullah and Hamas.
In other words: everything is connected, but Petraeus does not perceive the Palestinian conflict as having an overwhelming effect on other conflicts.
Military journalist and historian Max Boot confirms that Petraeus never made this request. Speaking to a military source, Boot reports that Petraeus really does believe what he told the committee, and that he does not think the settlement question creates the U.S. military’s biggest challenges over there. “In other words,” Boot concludes, “the current crisis in Israeli-U.S. relations cannot be laid at the American military’s door.”
Today in Tablet Magazine, Sheik Abdul Hadi Palazzi, the head of a prominent Italian Muslim organization, shows that the Quran establishes Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land—that, yes, “Allah is a Zionist.” You’re darn right there is a Barbados Jewish community: Alexander Gelfand reports. Eddy Portnoy remembers 1920s Yiddish poet Shmuel Nadler, who turned Communist, was publicly denounced by his brother, and was eventually captured and killed in Vichy. On the subject of Vichy, The Scroll would recommend The Sorrow and the Pity, but it’s currently not in the mood to see a four-hour documentary about Nazis.
The NCAA Tournament begins today. And Tablet Magazine’s official team* is playing in the final game of the day. At 9:45 P.M., the sixth-seeded Tennessee Volunteers will face the 11th-seeded San Diego State Aztecs in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Vols are our official team because they are coached by Bruce Pearl, the highest-profile Jewish college basketball coach working today. Pearl, soon to complete his fifth season in Knoxville (though hopefully not too soon!), also coached the U.S. team at the 2009 Maccabiah Games in Israel. Despite a spate of injuries, Tennessee finished the season ranked 15th in the country, and third in the Southeastern Conference.
Tennessee was put in the toughest region: if they win all their games and the favorites win theirs, they’ll next play three-seed Georgetown, two-seed Ohio State (which many consider a championship contender), and tournament favorite Kansas. March Madness, people, March Madness! Go Vols!
* A motion for Tablet Magazine’s official team to be “whoever’s playing Duke” was, sad to say, struck down at a staff meeting. But for the record: Mike Krzyzewski (“Coach K”) is not a Jew.
• While describing the East Jerusalem construction announcement as “not helpful,” President Obama denied that U.S.-Israel relations are in crisis. [JPost]
• Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren makes a similar description and the same denial in this op-ed. But he also stands by Israeli building in East Jerusalem. [NYT]
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas now says he won’t engage in proximity talks without a settlement freeze in East Jerusalem. [LAT]
• A Thai farm worker in Israel was killed by a Gaza rocket, the first such death since the January 2009 Gaza conflict. [LAT]
• 49 percent of Americans believe Israel must stop building settlements; 22 percent think they should be alllowed to continue. [Laura Rozen]
• The situation has U.S. officials mulling the prospect of their proposing the specific contours of direct peace negotiations, likely after several months of proximity talks. [NYT]
• The U.S. military transported hundreds of “bunker-buster” bombs, which can burrow underground and destroy (for example) secret Iranian nuclear-weapon facilities, to its Indian Ocean airbase. [Haaretz]
• The Israeli leadership is taking steps to resolve its tensions with America. [NYT]
• Jordanian King Abdullah II accused Israel of trying to cleanse Jerusalem of Arabs. [Haaretz]
• Mazel tov to Avner Netanyahu, the 15-year-old son of Israel’s prime minister: after winning the Jerusalem competition last month, he won the Israel-wide Bible Quiz. He will compete in the world championships, in Jerusalem, in several weeks. [Arutz Sheva]
• The New York Times’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnists, Thomas L. Friedman and Maureen Dowd, both wrote about Israel today (and generally took the administration’s side). [NYT/NYT]
• Do you actually want to live in one of those planned East Jerusalem homes? Here’s how. [Slate]
Jam band Phish, two of whose four members are Jewish, announced its summer tour yesterday. They’ll be hitting many cities; here they are covering the Talking Heads’s “Cities”.
With Democratic Gov. David A. Paterson still clinging to power despite a pretty damning scandal involving his alleged intervention in an aide’s assault case, Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch likely won’t get the chance to cure the two-year-long drought in New York—the republic’s most Jewish state!—of not having a Jewish chief executive.
But on the Republican side, there’s now a chance. Some Republicans who are dissatisfied with the current prohibitive favorite for their nomination—that would be Rep. Rick Lazio, best remembered as Hillary Clinton’s original Senate opponent in 2000—have inquired as to whether Lazio’s fellow Long Islander Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, is interested in running for the GOP nod.
Levy is—how shall I put this?—a Democrat. But this is the same state whose main city has elected a lifelong Democrat who turned Republican, and then turned independent, as mayor. Three times. Besides, for us, Levy will be of neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, but rather of the Tribe. (Okay, so his mother’s Italian. We’re trying here.)
Last week’s construction announcement in Israel has rippled through a political system halfway across the world. While most Republicans and many Democrats have criticized the administration, some have backed it and turned their criticism toward Israel. Anyway, the Obama administration has its uses for that criticism, too: it may just help buttress its credibility in the Mideast as a genuinely honest broker. Below, several ways the controversy over Israel has played out in America:
• The most prominent elected U.S. official to criticize the Obama administration was Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Virginia). He is the House Minority Whip, a GOP rising star, and the son of an Israeli. [JPost]
• In private, many pro-Israel Jewish politicians have expressed sympathy with Obama and frustration with Israel; at the same time, many have been reluctant to espouse these views all that publicly. [Laura Rozen]
• AIPAC asked its supporters to spread the word that the Obama administration went too far in its criticism of “our partner Israel.” The group’s annual conference begins Sunday in Washington, D.C. [Ben Smith]
• Sarah Palin, who has studied this issue long and hard from her perch on the Council of Foreign Relations, called for a “reset” of U.S.-Israel relations. [Ben Smith] [MORE]
