• In a blog comment (!), Abraham Foxman appears to endorse an Israeli bill that would ban analogies to the Nazis, although he hopes it would prohibit as narrow a bandwidth of speech as possible. [NYT The Lede]

• Sherman v. Berman in Sherman Oaks gets ugly-erman. [Jewish Journal]

• A lot of public figures and writers (including me) answer the question: What does it mean to be pro-Israel today? [Moment]

• The Crimson Tide’s band announcer is a Jewish guy. Jealous I didn’t write this story. [JTA]

• One of the world’s most organ-donor-averse countries saw a steep rise in organ donations last year. [Haaretz/Forward]

George Clooney will make a feature about the recovery of European art looted by the Nazis. There has already been an excellent documentary about this called The Rape of Europa:

• On a less un-serious note, Iran may practice closing the Strait of Hormuz, an act which, if actually done, would do a huge number on the world oil market. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

• Fresh out of government, former White House adviser Dennis Ross insists that while Obama sees force against Iran as a last resort, he does not rule it out if it means preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. [Ynet]

• A heartwarming story about totally ruining Christmas for little Christian boys and girls by telling them there is no Santa Claus. Glad tidings! [Slate]

• The Anti-Defamation League issues its most dishonest press release ever, referring to Roberto Benigni as an “acting great.” [ADL]

• Go see Alvin Rosenfeld discuss his book, which we liked. [Museum of Jewish Heritage]

Everyone forgets about Dave Grohl’s turtleneck.

• The Egyptian reporter who interviewed Gilad Shalit after his release claims the Red Cross checked him out first. The Red Cross says she’s a liar. [JTA]

• A toxicology report indicates that Amy Winehouse had an extremely high amount of alcohol in her blood when she died. [Metro]

• The first picture from the nude Dead Sea photo shoot has been released (link in the article). [JTA]

• Ed Koch schmoozes. He’s still got it! And he’s back on Team Obama (for now). [New Jersey Jewish News]

• So the Anti-Defamation League wasn’t really trying to prevent conservative groups from attacking President Obama on Israel, except maybe it was. [JustASC]

‘Melo hoops with Hasidim.

The other strikes me as a bigger deal, especially as we enter an election year early next month. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee jointly issued a “National Pledge for Unity on Israel” in order “to encourage other national organizations, elected officials, religious leaders, community groups and individuals to rally around bipartisan support for Israel while preventing the Jewish State from becoming a wedge issue in the upcoming campaign season.” The Republican Jewish Coalition responded to the statement with a strong rejection. “Allowing the American people to see where candidates stand, pro and con on critical issues, is the hallmark of our free and democratic political system,” said head Matthew Brooks. “For this reason, the RJC will not be a signer to this pledge. This effort to stifle debate on U.S. policy toward Israel runs counter to this American tradition.” Yikes!

Given President Obama’s political missteps when it comes to Israel, it seems undeniable that a call to prevent Israel “from becoming a wedge issue” is pro-Democratic in effect, and so likely in intent. The last time somebody prominently played the “Israel should be nonpartisan” card, it was Democrats bickering with Republicans in front of Prime Minister Netanyahu in May.

At the same time, much of the statement reads as “politics stops at the water’s edge”-type boilerplate, and indeed the Jewish establishment has historically been especially adept at instilling a view of Israel that crosses party lines; even Commentary, which takes the RJC’s position (and which, I can’t resist adding, was for most of its life published by the AJC), admires much of the pledge’s sentiment for that precise reason.

Moreover, the AJC and especially the ADL are not the first two organizations you would peg as Democratic or Obama shills. The ADL is a group seen as centrist or even center-right on Israel and likely has funders that reflect that. If this is the sort of thing it is calling for, then it could reflect a genuine backlash at the recent hyper-politicization of the Israel issue at the hands of groups like ECI that surrounded events such as the U.N. General Assembly and the special election in New York.

For pro-Israel Americans of a right-wing, Republican bent, the conundrum is this: You don’t want to so successfully cast President Obama as Israel’s foe and then have him win re-election. Because then the American people will have elected an anti-Israel candidate; in that scenario, the president owes you nothing; worse, he would have been elected despite being who you say he is, and therefore his mandate, if anything, would be to do all the things the right says he secretly wants to do, like divide Jerusalem, support the terrorists, etc.

I sense the pledge is a warning shot: At some point, it says, politicization of Israel could cross the appropriate line. At the same time, the RJC’s easy dismissal of the pledge proves that we haven’t even approached that point yet. If and when it’s AIPAC pushing the “water’s edge” line, that’s when you’ll see GOP backtracking.

UPDATE: After J Street Declares War, ECI Punches Back [Washington Jewish Week]
National Pledge for Unity on Israel [ADL]
RJC Rejects ADL/AJC Pledge: ‘We Will Not Be Silence’ on Israel [RJCHQ]
Earlier: Why Israel Makes For a Lousy Partisan Issue
N.Y.-9 Voters Think Obama ‘Not Pro-Israel’

Yet the very fact that I felt a certain relief at the omission of Jews from the list, as well as a certain disappointment, forces me to acknowledge that things are not that simple when it comes to Jews and Sept. 11. We insist on separating the two terms so strictly, perhaps, because so many enemies of the Jews have insisted on linking them in false and dangerous ways. For instance, there is the notorious lie that no Jews died in the World Trade Center, because the 4,000 Jews—or, depending on how the rumor is phrased, 4,000 Israelis—who worked there were warned to stay home. (The origin of this rumor, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, seems to be a Jerusalem Post article that reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had received inquiries from the relatives of 4,000 Israelis believed to be in New York City on Sept. 11.) After the attacks, this idea gained traction on the far right and far left, with everyone from David Duke to Amiri Baraka, and it remains disturbingly current in the Muslim world. Eventually the U.S. State Department had to issue a rebuttal pointing out that, in fact, somewhere between 200 to 400 of the ground zero victims were Jewish, in keeping with the proportion of Jews in the local population.

On the one hand, this anti-Semitic rumor is meant to deny Jews a part in the national mourning over Sept. 11, to suggest that they had not suffered their share. In this sense, it is like the (false) allegations of German anti-Semites that Jews had not served in the army in World War I. On the other hand, of course, the accusation of Jewish absence is really supposed to be a proof of Jewish presence: If Jews stayed home on Sept. 11, it must be because other Jews knew what was coming and warned them.

Thus, anti-Semitic rumors suggest that the Mossad brought down the twin towers, either because the real hijackers could not have possessed the technical ability to do so, or because Israel was the real beneficiary of the War on Terror. (A strange kind of benefit, one might think, looking at the history of Israel over the last 10 years.) The power of the slander lies not in its plausibility but in the diabolical way it confounds rebuttal. If Jews are accused of staying home on Sept. 11, they can point to the State Department for a defense; but then the anti-Semite’s question becomes, why is the American government so solicitous of Jewish honor? Is it not because, in the words of one fringe anti-Semite quoted in the ADL report, “our government has for decades been used to further the interests of Israel at the expense of the interests of the American people”?

Some lowlife rabble-rouser said that, but in the years since Sept. 11, an increasing number of respectable people have been saying things close enough to it. Thanks to Stephen Walt (of Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (of the University of Chicago), the phrase “Israel Lobby,” often enough translated into “Jewish Lobby,” has become almost as commonplace in American leftist discourse as the phrase “Jewish syndicate” was among the French right during the Dreyfus Affair. Think of how common it was, five or six years ago, to hear opponents of the Iraq War reel off the names of the so-called neoconservatives whose fault it allegedly was—always Jewish names like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith. Remember the bizarre ingenuity that traced the invasion of Iraq to the teachings of a long-dead Jewish mastermind, Leo Strauss.

In this way, the anti-neoconservative rhetoric of the post-Sept. 11 left managed to do for Osama Bin Laden what he could never have achieved on his own. It gave currency and respectability to his belief that events in general, and American policy in particular, can be explained only by reference to Jewish power. This idea is pervasive in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, a book that is necessary to read in the same way that Mein Kampf was once necessary.

Take, for instance, Bin Laden’s statement of Oct. 6, 2002, titled “To the Americans.” “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” he begins, and the first of dozens of enumerated reasons is “You attacked us in Palestine.” In this “you,” the distinction between America, Israel, and the Jews ceases to exist, a point that becomes explicit later on: “[T]he creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.” Later, in the course of explaining why America is “the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind,” Bin Laden explains that “the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.”

The only proper response to this kind of evil fantasy is to ignore it; yet for American Jews, it was hard to ignore. For the insidious power of this discourse was the way it made American Jews self-conscious about something that should, by rights, have been a source of pride: the identity of American and Jewish interests and values in the post-Sept. 11 age (which is not the same thing as the identity of American and Israeli policies). One reaction, perhaps the first reaction, to hearing Bin Laden’s rhetoric—or its echoes in the words of Walt and Mearsheimer, or Helen Thomas—is to deny its poisonous premise that “the Jews” are running America or America is serving “the Jews.” That denial is true, of course. But it leaves those who insist on it looking, and feeling, scared. It places American Jews in the paradoxical position of denying their own patriotism and belittling their own power.

***

A better response emerges in one of the defining books of the post-Sept. 11 period, Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. What Berman shows, in his analysis of the intellectual genealogy of al-Qaida, is that there’s a good reason why the Jews should occupy a central position in the fight between America and what he called Islamism or Muslim totalitarianism—and not because this is a fight about or against Jewish power. Rather, as in Europe in the 1930s, the fate of the Jews is a bellwether for the fate of liberalism—a social order founded on individual rights, secularism, private property, and the rule of law. Since the first, partial emancipation of European Jews in the French Revolution, Jews have thrived in liberal societies and suffered in illiberal ones. This makes perfect sense when you consider that the Jews, as a tiny and historically persecuted minority in the Christian world, could succeed only to the extent that they were allowed to live as free individuals, in a free society.

Historically, then, the fate of the Jews is tied to the fate of liberalism; and after Sept. 11, Berman showed, the greatest threat to liberal values came from Islamic fundamentalists, who spoke about Jews in terms borrowed from European fascists. Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, blamed Islam’s problems on Marx and Freud: “[T]he atheistic, materialistic doctrine in our world was advocated by a Jew, and the permissive doctrine which is sometimes called ‘the sexual revolution’ was advocated by a Jew. Indeed, most evil theories which try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind are advocated by Jews.” This, as Berman points out, is not theological anti-Judaism (though Qutb voiced that variety as well) but the kind of anti-modern anti-Semitism that identifies the Jew with social dissolution and rootless individualism. But these are the very same things that, when considered as values rather than vices, we think of as essentially American: freedom of the individual, free thought, pluralism.

The foreign ministry criticized the initiative, arguing that uniformed officials should steer clear of political questions. It certainly raises several serious questions. Even if one overlooks the problematic nature of involving the army in a thoroughly non-military matter that should be addressed by the proper civic authorities, and even if one is willing to ignore the inherent risks associated with snooping on organizations operating according to the law in Western, friendly countries, one is still likely to come up against the unsolvable conundrum of just what sort of activity qualifies as sufficiently anti-Israeli. “We ourselves don’t know exactly how to define delegitimization,” a foreign ministry source told Haaretz. “This is a very abstract definition. Are flotillas to Gaza delegitimization? Is criticism of settlements delegitimization? It’s not clear how Military Intelligence’s involvement in this will provide added value.”

Under this thinking, it is bad enough that the Knesset is considering a law to defund groups considered insufficiently supportive of Israel and that it is holding hearings (opposed by many groups, including the Anti-Defamation League) into J Street’s pro-Israel bona fides.

To involve one of the world’s greatest armies in such intractable questions, though, is even worse. Some anti-Israeli criticism is legitimate, and some is not: It’s a fine line to draw, and without drawing it clearly the new, military department is left with a wide-open mandate to act against civilian, non-combatant targets—a premise that should be unacceptable in a democracy.

Military Intelligence Monitoring Foreign Left-Wing Organizations [Haaretz]
Related:Knesset Set to Vote on Law To Determine if a Group is Pro-Israel [Haaretz]
J Street Head in Israel to Lobby Knesset Over Group’s Commitment to Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Honest Abe

Unlike the notorious Knesset probes into various left-wing groups accused of delegitimizing the IDF, which seek to uncover their sources of funding, the J Street investigation is about determining whether J Street really is pro-Israel. “If they don’t love and support Israel, then they should not present themselves as pro-Israel,” said one MK. That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Foxman is an American Jew who cares about Israel, and so he recognizes this investigation for what it is: An attempt by the Jewish state to dictate the terms of debate for all Jews and strip the diaspora of any right to have a say—much like the push to give a small coterie of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the power to define who is Jewish and who isn’t. Critics who see the ADL as too right-wing or too beholden to the Israeli government—and I’ve been one of them—may laugh at this notion, but I would bet that Foxman sees, correctly, that while today it is the Knesset investigating J Street, tomorrow it will be the Knesset investigating the ADL. He is acting, at least in part, out of self-interest. Concerned progressive Jews should be pleased nonetheless.

Knesset Hearings on J Street Up the Ante in Debate About ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’ Lobby [JTA]
Related: The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]

The moral argument was nicely made by the Anti-Defamation League, which decided that this week it would indeed live up to its nearly century-old mission, “to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” “We strongly urge you and other Members of Congress to explore this serious issue without creating an atmosphere of blame and suspicion of the American Muslim community,” Abraham Foxman and the ADL’s chief counsel wrote King and other members of the Homeland Security Committee. “Congressional efforts to explore legitimate security concerns should not be overwhelmed by the kind of unfair stereotyping and prejudice that has too-frequently accompanied recent public debates. Singling out the Muslim American community for special scrutiny or suspicion would be discriminatory, offensive, ineffective and counterproductive.” (The Reform movement, the National Jewish Democratic Council, and J Street have also expressed reservations about the hearing.)

Then, the practical argument. “King risks helping to promote precisely the narrative Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers try to promote, namely dividing the world between Muslims and non-Muslims,” said a former top Pentagon counterterrorism expert. A number of folks, including Attorney General Eric Holder, have expressed concern that the panel could deter American Muslims from cooperating with law enforcement—a far more important counterterrorism tool than, y’know, a Congressional panel could ever be.

Anyway, your required reading today is Tablet Magazine columnist Michelle Goldberg’s review of King’s supremely self-aggrandizing novel, Vale of Tears. It is a romp (the review, not, apparently, the novel).

King Defends Domestic Terrorism Hearing [NYT]
ADL Letter to House Committee on Homeland Security [ADL]
Peter King, IRA Supporter and Enthusiastic Counter-Terrorism Advocate [WP]
Jewish Groups Criticize Hearing on Muslims [JTA]
King’s Muslim Probe Needs ‘Semantic’ Adjustment to Avoid Maligning Islam [Bloomberg]
Related: The ‘Hero’ of the War on Terror [The Nation]
Islamophobia or Reality? [Tablet Magazine]

But does it matter if a celebrity gets drunk and utters something offensive? Might it be counterproductive to call attention to every stupid remark? Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman, Atlantic national correspondent and blogger Jeffrey Goldberg, New York magazine cultural critic Emily Nussbaum, and public-relations guru Matthew Hiltzik. [Running time: 16:05.]

Earlier this week, Charlie Sheen said in a radio interview, “I violently hate Chaim Levine”—a reference to the Hebrew name of Chuck Lorre, the director and creator of sitcom Two and a Half Men on which Sheen stars.

Warning bells! The show was canceled and Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League leapt into action. They accused Sheen of “borderline anti-Semitism” and then, presumably exhausted from all that intolerance fighting, took a long nap, content in the knowledge that when they woke there would be an unconvincing apology waiting for them from which they could derive nourishment.

Nothing happening. Sheen, in his usually calm and collected manner, flipped his wig, and sent his lawyers along with an open letter demanding the ADL retract their statement. Now the surprise: Sheen is right. He may be crazy as a hungry honey badger, and should have been fired years ago for his repeated alleged abuses of women, but what he’s not is an anti-Semite.

That’s not to say this kind of name game doesn’t have the potential for prejudice. When someone insists on emphasizing Barack Obama’s middle name, but not Bill Clinton’s, you can assume they have an ugly axe to grind. But Sheen seems to have produced a trump—a ‘vanity card’, one of the trademark small essays that appear at the end of episodes Lorre’s series, on which Lorre wrote,

…why have I spent a lifetime moving away from that group [Jews]? How did Chaim become Chuck? How did Levine become Lorre? When I was a little boy… the rabbis regularly told us that were the chosen people… I went home, observed my family and… thought to myself, “bull$##!

Sheen argues that he called Lorre “Chaim Levine” not because Sheen dislikes Jews, but because Lorre does—and if Lorre had talked about rejecting the name Snuffleupagus, Sheen would have used that to get under his skin, too. Sheen, filled with chutzpah after presenting his case, does go a bit too far in the letter—he dares the ADL to go after Lorre for mocking chosenness—but he probably deserves that apology. He’ll finally be able to mosey off into the sunset with a spotless reputation, never to get in trouble again.

Insulting Chuck Lorre, Not Abuse, Gets Sheen Sidelined [NYT]
Charlie Sheen Demands Apology From Jewish Group[TMZ]
Earlier: Sheen calls Creator of Hit Show Haim

Well, credit where it’s due, I stand corrected, etc. In a statement today, Foxman accused Beck of “bigoted ignorance” and said he should apologize to the Reform movement:

Glenn Beck’s comparison of Reform Judaism to radical Islam demonstrates his bigoted ignorance. Despite his feeble attempt to suggest that he was not equating Reform Judaism with Islamic extremist terrorism, the simple fact that he would mention them in the same breath is highly offensive and outrageous.

The truth is that every religious body has political points of view, whether one agrees with them or not. To compare Reform Judaism, which supports democratic institutions, to Islamic extremism, which supports anti-democratic movements and the repression of basic rights—including, for example, the denial of women’s rights—is beyond the pale.

Glenn Beck has no business discounting the faith of any people, and he should think twice before commenting on something he doesn’t know much about. He owes the Reform movement an apology.

Don’t think I can’t still quibble—Foxman appears, to me, to be more offended by the comparison to Islamism (which Beck himself limited in the course of his making it) than anything else. Still, the concise term “bigoted ignorance” actually manages to capture the quote nicely—the willed know-nothingness tinged with fear of Jews. All in all, a good day’s work for Foxman.

ADL: Glenn Beck’s Comments About Reform Judaism Demonstrate “Bigoted Ignorance” [ADL]
Related: ADL Stands By Glenn Beck in the End [Salon]
Earlier: The Things He Said Yesterday
Fire Abe Foxman?

• “Today belongs to the people of Egypt,” President Obama said. [WSJ]

• The Arab world has been shocked by the successful Egyptian Revolution, which toppled a regime that, in many respects, had existed since 1952. What’s next? [WP]

• Joy in Tahrir Square. [News Desk]

• Why a military-run Egypt isn’t necessarily a bad thing from the perspective of democracy (assuming it’s temporary), and why a “bumpy road” still lies ahead. [Slate]

• As Judith Miller has reported, Israeli officials are worried now—they prefer certainty. [NYT]

• “There is a big chance now and a window has opened after this white revolution, and after the president’s concession,” said Arab League head Amr Moussa. “As an Egyptian citizen, I am proud to serve my country with all the others at this stage, to build a consensus of opinion.” [BBC]

Did I say Arab League head? I meant former Arab League head: He resigned today. Hrmm. [Babylon & Beyond]

• American Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, congratulated the Egyptian people and cautioned against the rise of extremists. Fair. [JTA/Forward]

• Before resigning from office, President Hosni Mubarak reportedly told an Israeli lawmaker that the United States was making a mistake in backing Egyptian democracy—that radical Islamists will come to power as a result. [Haaretz]

• There are reports the military was displeased by Mubarak’s defiant speech last evening; this may have played a role in today’s events. [Laura Rozen]

• The Swiss government froze Mubarak’s assets. [WSJ]

• Of all the regional governments for whom this represents a setback, Saudi Arabia’s may be at the top of the list. [WSJ]

• Some American thinkers totally saw this coming. [PostPartisan]

• Iran’s government praises Egyptian people power, clamps down on internal protests. It’s like they’re trying to be as unlikable as possible. [Babylon & Beyond]

• Politics! Vice President Biden thanked Republicans for halting it at the water’s edge. A Democratic spokesperson lauded the president’s leadership. Presumptive GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty accused the president of—can you guess the word?—“appeasing” the Muslim Brotherhood. Oh, the next 20 months are going to be such a delight. [Ben Smith]

Pretty much:

I recently wrote an essay for Mishpacha magazine in which I talked about my own experiences as a Jewish senior official in the Bush Administration. I also discussed the prevalence of Jewish elected officials in the U.S. Congress, including the new House majority leader, Eric Cantor. In response, one reader offered a cautionary letter in which he warned against getting excited over having Jewish officials prominently featured in public life. The correspondent cited the Meshech Chochma, written by Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, Latvia, who wrote in the early 20th century that Jews should be wary of getting too comfortable in a country, lest the native population be reminded of the Jewish people’s otherness and expel them, or worse.

Simcha’s words are even more haunting in light of Jewish history. In his lifetime, Germany, not the United States, was seen as the safest place for Jews to live. Germany was a cultured and advanced society in which Jews had existed, mostly peacefully, for a thousand years. During his lifetime, few would have believed Germany would be the driving force behind an atrocity like the Holocaust. Thus, one cannot blithely dismiss Simcha’s views as the equivalent of the mousy sentiment, “shah shtil fur de goyim”—don’t make a fuss about your Judaism in front of the non-Jewish population.

Even today, in a welcoming nation such as the United States, this fearful attitude often governs Jewish attitudes toward public life and public service. The notion is that latent anti-Semitism is only a surface scratch away and that Jews should keep their heads down and make as little noise as possible so as not to attract negative attention from non-Jewish fellow citizens. This attitude is often seen with respect to embarrassing behavior by Jews—the Bernie Madoff scandal is a prime example of such negative behavior. But the principle goes beyond scandal and applies to any publicly noticeable activity, even positive actions, such as the public service in which Giffords was engaged.

The adherence to a “shah shtil” approach is somewhat understandable not only in the shadow of the Giffords affair but also when one considers the prevalence of anti-Semitism both in the United States and around the world. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s 2009 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, there were “1,211 incidents of vandalism, harassment, and physical assaults against Jewish individuals, property, and community institutions across the U.S.” Outside the United States, the problem is even worse, as similar studies have found more than 1,700 anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 in England and France alone, two countries that publicly condemn anti-Semitism and have large and relatively comfortable Jewish communities. While 2010 figures are not yet available, the ADL’s website details 75 different anti-Semitic incidents in more than two dozen countries around the world in 2010.

Beyond all of these statistics are real stories of people traumatized by direct contact with anti-Semitism. In my own time in public life, I was never directly confronted with anti-Semitism in a physical sense, but I was certainly aware it was out there. When I worked as policy director for Sen. John Ashcroft in the 1990s, the senator’s chief of staff received a letter from an anti-Semitic group questioning my fitness for the job. The reason? I had publicly—and jokingly—hoped that a highly anticipated, high-end kosher restaurant in Washington—long since closed, alas—would be “good enough for the goyim,” that is, of sufficiently high quality that one would not be embarrassed to invite non-Jewish colleagues to eat there as well. The complainant felt that I had used a slur to refer to gentiles, whom he described, somewhat oddly, as my “opponents.” I explained the nonsensical nature of the complaint, and the chief of staff dismissed it, but I didn’t forget the incident.

Later, when I served in the White House, I was what the Jewish journalist Ron Kampeas called “one of the highly identified Jews” in the administration. As such, I was regularly listed on anti-Semitic sites—along with many of my Jewish colleagues—as one of the administration’s Jews, punctuated by questions such as: “Ask yourself: Is their first loyalty to America or Israel?” Later, when nominated as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, I was the subject of a longer write-up on an anti-Semitic site, which breathlessly reported that my last name Troy had been shortened from “Troyansky.”

In recounting these experiences, I do not intend to portray myself as a victim of anti-Semitism. To the contrary. I believe that it is a credit to the United States that I saw so little evidence of anti-Semitism that only aggressive Googling would uncover it. I also recognize that the White House bubble provides some lever of protection for senior officials—not only is the whole campus closely guarded, but direct phone numbers were unpublished, and discerning the email addresses of White House staffers is not intuitive. At the same time, I was also aware that anti-Semitic ugliness was a reality.

It is this reality that gives Jewish officials cause to be concerned and thoughtful about their public profiles, whether in the United States or elsewhere in the world. Yet while Jews should remain cognizant of the dangers of anti-Semitism, the proper response to the Giffords incident should not be a turn inward. In contrast, it is only by resolving to become active citizens and compassionate neighbors that we can identify and confront what is hateful before it gains political force.

Rather than being discouraged by the tragedy, aspiring Jewish officials should be encouraged by the embrace of Giffords as a national hero. They should also recognize that Jews serving in public life may disturb some, but that their service presents opportunities to show devotion to this country, which is a powerful tool against anti-Semitism. In addition, having more Jews in public life gives Jews a platform for fulfilling their historic role of a “light unto the nations.” The best way to fight against the darkness of all forms of bigotry is with the light of Judaism’s key message, as distilled by the great Rabbi Hillel when asked to summarize the whole Torah while standing on one leg: “What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.”

Giffords was willing to take the risk of serving in Congress while living quite publicly as a Jew. Today all Americans, Jew and non-Jew alike, are united in praying for her full and speedy recovery. But the attack on her reminds us that those willing to take a public stand against bigotry are heroes who deserve the accolades and admiration of our citizens. At a time such as this, Giffords’ example shows the Jewish people that we must eschew the “shah shtil” principle of cowering in the background. We cannot afford to be silent in the face of anti-Semitism or any other ideology of hate.

Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, was a deputy secretary of Health and Human Services and senior White House aide in the George W. Bush Administration.

My high-achieving, second-wave feminist mother, who made a point of tuning into the pageant every year “to remind myself how much I hate it,” had a somewhat different take. I remember asking her when I was 6 or 7 why so many of the finalists seemed to come from the South. I’m not sure I realized this at the time, but, looking back, I think it was my way of wondering why there was never a girl who seemed “like us.”

My mother replied, with a rough edge of bitterness in her voice: “Because that’s where all the blonde Barbie dolls with too many teeth live.”

It was not always thus.

In 1945, the Miss America Pageant constituted a symbolic return to normalcy for the country; a promise that a still-smoldering Europe and a Japan about to face its first devastating nuclear winter could not keep patriotic Americans from leering at a bunch of lissome young beauties parading across a stage in flattering but modest swimwear.

Its winner, however, a leggy 21-year-old brunette named Bess Myerson, was decidedly unorthodox. Myerson represented New York City, a place that many still see as somehow un-American. (There have only been two other New Yorkers named Miss America, including Vanessa Williams, famously the first black woman to win the pageant.) Myerson was a college graduate—unusual for contestants at the time—who had entered the pageant on a lark when she heard of its offer of scholarship money, hoping to win enough to buy a new piano. She was also the first and as yet only Jewish girl to win the crown.

But that could change on Saturday, when Loren Galler Rabinowitz, the reigning Miss Massachusetts, becomes the first Jew to compete for the Miss America title since Myerson. Like Myerson, Galler Rabinowitz entered the pageant for practical reasons. The Harvard graduate and two-time national ice dance champion is about to start medical school, and she hopes to take advantage of the scholarships the program offers for women going into medicine. “A lot of my friends were taking a gap year in order to make money for school—taking jobs at banks and things,” Galler Rabinowitz says. “I wanted to spend a year doing public service, which I’ve always been extremely passionate about. And this year seemed like my last opportunity before jumping on the hamster wheel of med school.”

The pageant circuit remains a pretty Christianized affair, with so many contestant espousing their faith in Jesus (not to mention “opposite marriage”) that you’d think they’re planning a run for, well, the governorship of Alaska. Feminism, an atavistic sense of ritual modesty, the sense that there were more productive ways to spend one’s time (you might think Galler Rabinowitz would belong to the latter category): All may have conspired over the years to keep Jewish girls who were more than pretty from gathering in Atlantic City. Galler Rabinowitz believes part of the problem is simply geographical: “Pageants are biggest in the South, and Jews tend to be concentrated in the Northeast,” she says. “It’s just not part of the cultural purview.”

Bess Myerson, however, isn’t sweating the reasons, and she warns against attaching an unhealthy importance to this latest milestone. “I’m very excited to have another Jewish girl in the running, but there should be another Jewish girl in the running,” the 86-year-old Myerson told me via a representative of the Anti-Defamation League, with which she has been associated since her pageant days. “I’m very proud, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.”

Fair enough. But in 1945, her selection was a big deal, for Jew and Gentile alike. Weeks before the pageant, judges received phone calls from irate pageant watchers warning them not to choose “the Jew.” Hoping to stave off trouble, pageant officials pleaded with Myerson to change her name to the deracinated “Beth Merrick.” After her win, not a single official sponsor, from the notoriously anti-Semitic Ford Motor Company to Catalina Swimwear, requested that she endorse their products; she was barred at the last minute from a scheduled appearance at a restricted country club in the South. The Daughters of the American Revolution, it seemed, did not care to share crab salad with a Daughter of Israel. (Who says she would have eaten it anyway?)

Despite this ugliness, the Jewish community was understandably jubilant over Myerson’s win. One of the less discussed aspects of the Nazi regime, in both incipience and aftermath, is its lasting imprint on many Jews’ sense of physical self-image. (Someone calling you ugly seems rather trivial when that same person is also trying to kill you.) But even relatively trivial wounds can leave lasting scars: Primo Levi hypothesized that much of his crippling shyness toward the opposite sex was caused by the Aryanization laws and ubiquitous Nazi propaganda depicting the Jew as physically and sexually repugnant. His admission is instructive; it would take a self-confidence bordering on the pathological to avoid internalizing at least some of that crap.

A beautiful Jewish girl being named Miss America—“our ideal,” as Bert Parks would remind viewers—went a long way in helping to repair some of this damage. It’s an overstatement to compare the results of a beauty pageant with the U.N. resolution recommending the creation of Jewish state in Palestine, but Myerson’s historic win was nevertheless an important step toward the reinstatement of the status of “fully human” to the devastated Jewish people. Even if much of the world was not quite ready to see it that way.

Bess Myerson could have (and perhaps should have) ushered in a worshipful golden age of Jewish femininity. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. As Jewish men began to shape American pop culture of the postwar years, they often asserted their independence from the painful (or embarrassing) history through less-than-flattering portrayals of their mothers and sisters and cousins, robbing Jewish women of their femininity and sexual power in the public imagination for generations. In the work of Woody Allen, early Philip Roth (although I believe that Portnoy’s Complaint is intended as a satire of these attitudes, not an endorsement), Paul Mazursky, Herman Wouk, and the like, male “Jewish” traits—intellectual sophistication, sensitivity, even neurosis—were portrayed as endearing and even sexually combustible to the right (Gentile) woman; Jewish women (as I scarcely have to tell you) were portrayed as loud, pushy, materialistic, emasculating, crass, and seemingly devoid of any complicated inner life. If they were at all attractive, it was in spite of their Jewishness, not because of it, or the attractiveness had come at great (often surgical) expense.

It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to uncover the seething self-hatred that is the flip side of the JAP stereotype; the furious suspicion that no matter how beautifully you dress, how vigilantly you starve yourself, how meticulously you carve up your body and your face, that you’re never going to be quite good or pretty or lovable enough. That on some level, that schlemiel you married is always going to be holding out for Mia Farrow (or, today, Leslie Mann). Even Ari Ben Canaan, the anti-Portnoy, winds up with the shiksa at the end.

I never wanted to be Miss America, even when I was 7. But I wanted to be pretty. I wanted to be loved.

It’s a feeling Galler Rabinowitz knows well. “I wish I could say it was something I’d never thought about,” she says, sighing. “I come from the world of competitive skating, which is even more aesthetically focused than pageants, and I didn’t fit the aesthetic there either. It took me some time to realize that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s about feeling comfortable and proud of who you are.”

It takes some time for all of us. Maybe it’s silly, but for the first time in years, I think I’ll be tuning into the Miss America Pageant this weekend, cheering on Miss Massachusetts in a frankly chauvinistic (and let’s face it, somewhat embarrassing) gesture of ethnic solidarity. I don’t care if she wins. I just care that she’s there. Bess Myerson is right; it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a big deal. It won’t be for my generation’s daughters. But it still is for me.

• Richard Holbrooke, one of the United States’s most important diplomats, died at 69. [NYT]

• ADL condemns Kissinger’s remarks, says he’s alright anyway cause of Israel. [ADL]

• Reporting on the complex situation in Lebanon, Roger Cohen calls for U.S. engagement with Hezbollah. [NYT]

• Israel-Arab cooperation in the wake of the fire. [NYT]

• Israel had to cancel a ceremony to honor 10 Palestinian firefighters after three were not permitted to enter the country. Recall that they were all allowed in to, y’know, fight the fire. [Haaretz]

• A judge ruled that local Muslims can move forward with plans to build a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Nope, the ADL isn’t all bad. [Associated Baptist Press]

• Former Blossom star and Tablet Magazine contributor Mayim Bialik will play a recurring role on CBS’s Big Bang Theory. [Jewcy]

• Turkey is pretty much turkey, but here are some very Jewish Thanksgiving-appropriate side dishes. [JTA]

• How ping-pong came to stand for the American Dream in its suburban iteration. And a reminder to send in your ping-pong haikus! [Slate]

• Airlines based in the European Union will be exempt from regulations requiring identification clearance codes for entering Israeli airspace. [NYT]

If you need another reason to support the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, this really funny video should do the trick.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has accepted an apology from Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News Channel, for his use of the expression “Nazi attitudes” in an interview to describe officials at National Public Radio.

In a letter to Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, Mr. Ailes wrote that he was sorry for using the term “Nazi” in an interview with The Daily Beast. “I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word,” he wrote, “but I was angry at the time because of NPR’s willingness to censor Juan Williams for not being liberal enough.”

(Actually, not to nit-pick, but Ailes did more than “use the expression ‘Nazi attitudes’”—he actually said of NPR, “They are, of course, Nazis.”)

My parents used to tell me that when you apologize but add a “but,” you are basically negating the apology. Oh well: “I welcome Roger Ailes’s apology, which is as sincere as it is heartfelt,” Foxman said. (As it happens, I too believe that Ailes’s apology was exactly as sincere as it was heartfelt.)

All this may turn out moot: The soon-to-be Republican House Majority is planning to defund NPR. Which means you should enjoy the awesome Twitter #NPRGoesNazi hashtag—Goerring Edition; Morning Becomes “Night”; This American Life, No Longer With The Jew Ira Glass—while you can.

Earlier: Fox News Head Called NPR ‘Nazis’

• Beck, meanwhile, attacked the Anti-Defamation League, inaccurately saying that its “Soros-started” “smear campaign” accused him of being an anti-Semite. Poor Abe can’t catch a break. [Media Matters]

• Will America’s delicate relations with Pakistan prevent a full investigation into the 2008 Mumbai bombing that targeted a Chabad house? [WP]

• The Israeli cabinet unanimously approved the aliya of nearly 8,000 Ethiopian Jews who had been living in dire conditions. [JPost]

• A woman who fights to end the ritual slaughter of chickens on Yom Kippur had her Brooklyn house vandalized with red paint. [Gothamist]

• San Francisco may vote on an initiative to ban circumcision. It is shocking to find that the activist behind the proposal is named Lloyd Schofield. [Jewcy]

SNL does Patti.

Is Randy Scheunemann—a top foreign policy adviser to Sarah Palin whose firm also has Soros’ Open Society Institute as a client—a hypocrite? How about all the Jewish contributors to Fox News? The problem is that there is no Archimedean point from which an otherwise neutral observer could stand and declare, “Glenn Beck is being anti-Semitic”; there has been no universally trusted validator who can be cited to someone who denies this. So, while a part of me wants to call up Bill Kristol, and Eric Cantor, and every other prominent Jewish person of the right, and ask them where they stand, I know they will simply say, “Beck wasn’t being anti-Semitic,” and that I will have no rebuttal beyond my own opinions. I have no one to cite as definitive “proof” that Glenn Beck was being anti-Semitic. I cannot put them on the spot, because I have no spot to put them on. (I did request a comment from News Corp. yesterday regarding Simon Greer’s charge that Beck had engaged in “Holocaust revisionism.” I haven’t heard back.*)

The person that I can cite should be Abraham Foxman. The man has run the Anti-Defamation League for nearly a quarter of a century; he is as connected as they come; and on top of that, he is himself a Holocaust survivor. But the most he would say when I reached him yesterday was that certain comments of Beck’s concerning the Holocaust were “horrific” and betrayed a total lack of understanding of the Shoah. What about Beck’s use of tried-and-true anti-Semitic tropes to conjure an evil billionaire Jewish financier working in the shadows to take over the world? “People involved in global finance have been called all kinds of things,” Foxman told me. “I don’t think that’s anti-Semitism.” He reneged even further today to Salon’s Justin Elliott: “I also believe that there are certain things he doesn’t understand, which have led him to make insensitive remarks,” was the strongest statement Foxman could muster. This is not surprising: It was not a month ago that Foxman’s organization honored Rupert Murdoch, Beck’s boss, with its International Leadership Award.

Elliott correctly identifies the problem: the “tension between the ADL’s dual identities as a civil rights organization and a pro-Israel advocacy organization.” Still, imagine a scenario wherein, yesterday, Foxman had said, “I am against George Soros’ opposition to Israel’s government, and I recognize that Glenn Beck has been a friend to Israel. But Beck completely crossed the line, and made statements about Soros that can only be construed as anti-Semitic. He should apologize.” If Foxman does that, I then get to call Kristol, and Cantor, and whoever else, and I do get to put them on the spot, because Foxman is that spot: Do you disagree with Abe Foxman on the anti-Semitism of Glenn Beck?

There are pro-Israel organizations aplenty. The ADL needs to decide if its mission is still “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” as it pledged in 1913. If it does, then it needs to actually, you know, do it. If it doesn’t, then the American Jewish community needs to find someone else.

* A bizarre attribute of the debate is that even those who have called the anti-Semite an anti-Semite have focused on the Holocaust remarks, when—it seems to me, at least—the lowest-hanging fruit, by far, is Beck’s eager citation of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad—who famously said, “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong”—as an authority on Soros’ perfidy. Ironically, the Jewish community’s famed emphasis on the Holocaust as the sine qua non of anti-Semitism has actually undermined its ability to deal with anti-Semitism that is not directly related to the Holocaust.

ADL Stands By Glenn Beck in the End [Salon]
Top Palin Aide Is on Soros’s Payroll [Salon]
Earlier: Foxman Calls Beck’s Comments ‘Horrific’
Beck Accused of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’
In Beck Documentary, Soros is ‘Puppet Master’

• Hezbollah pledged not to permit members to be arrested over the U.N. tribunal investigating Rafik Hariri’s assassination. [NYT]

• The Army of Islam group is seeking to kidnap Israelis in the Sinai Peninsula. [Arutz Sheva]

• The Times picks up the Glenn Beck story, demonstrating perhaps the power Abraham Foxman has to make an issue bigger. [NYT]

• The European Union proposed December 5 for the first meeting over Iran’s nuclear weapons program in more than a year. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Great, moving, sad piece about boxing promoter Bob Arum and his son, who recently died while hiking in the Northwest. Also describes Muhammad Ali coming for Shabbat dinner. [NYT]

I reached Foxman this morning by phone. “I think one can disagree with George Soros, one can like him or dislike him, one can be opposed to him,” he told me. “But to judge him on his role during the Holocaust is not only offensive, but horrific, over-the-top, and out-of-line. Not even Holocaust survivors have the audacity to judge other Jews during the Holocaust. For a political commentator and entertainer to go as far as to say, quote, Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the camps, is so over-the-top, so inexcusable.”

Drawing on personal experience, Foxman added, “I believe George Soros when he says there is nothing to apologize for. When I was six, I spat on Jews, because I was taught to spit on Jews. You want to go back to history, the Pope was in Hitler Youth.”

He continued: “The other thing I find unacceptable is it’s chutzpah for him to set standards for what makes a good Jew. We don’t set standards for what makes a good Christian or a good Mormon. It’s arrogant.”

As for Beck’s other charges against Soros, Foxman expressed less concern. “People involved in global finance have been called all kinds of things,” he said. “I don’t think that’s anti-Semitism.”

Earlier: Beck Accues of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’
In Beck Documentary, Soros Is ‘Puppet Master’

I come not to quibble with Yglesias’s view of Christian Zionists—my view is similar, although I do think columnist Lee Smith’s more nuanced take is worth considering as well. But I want to point out that if “Post-Jewish Zionists” are the ones opposing this mosque, Jewish Zionists are the ones supporting it: The Anti-Defamation League, through its Interfaith Coalition on Mosques (established, conspicuously, after its wrongheaded stance on the lower Manhattan Islamic center), filed an amicus brief urging the court to drop the Murfreesboro suit, which the ADL called “an artificial roadblock to delay the start of this approved project and to deny the mosque’s sponsors their religious freedom.”

Just a friendly reminder, first, that Zionists whose prime motivation is anti-Muslim sentiment are the exception, not the rule; and, second, that the Anti-Defamation League is at its best when it is combating defamation.

Post-Jewish Zionism [Yglesias]
ICOM Acts Against Lawsuit Intended to Stop Tennessee Mosque [ADL]
Related: Friends in Deed [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: My Hagee Problem—and Ours

The Anti-Defamation League has also recently prominently adopted bullying as a cause.

Anti-Bullying Guidelines Add Protection for Jewish Students [JTA/Forward]
Earlier: ADL Suggests Anti-Bullying Measures

In the two-and-a-half years since J Street launched, under the banner of “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” two competing narratives have emerged about the group. One is that by channeling the energy of the anti-war, anti-Bush Jewish left into the cause of Middle East peace, using grassroots organizing tactics borrowed from the playbook developed by MoveOn.org and put to good use by the Obama campaign, Ben-Ami and company have given voice to the inchoate frustration of many American Jews with the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their frustration with hawkish pro-Israel organizations, namely AIPAC, which was so famously expressed earlier this year in an essay by Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation. The opposing view is that J Street is a front for Democratic political operatives aligned with Obama, and potentially to his left on foreign policy, who hope to exploit the naive sympathies of liberal Jews for the political purpose of undermining the existing Washington consensus on Israel, thereby weakening AIPAC and other Jewish groups whose power depends in part on the perception that they speak on behalf of American Jewry.

Both versions are, to a greater or lesser degree, true. Last month, using an unredacted tax return that appeared on a public website, the Washington Times reported that J Street receives funding from the billionaire investor and social activist George Soros, a longtime critic of Israel, Zionism, and the American Jewish establishment. Though insiders had already assumed as much, the controversial revelation showed that Soros and his family gave J Street $245,000 in fiscal year 2008 as the first installment of a three-year, $750,000 commitment. Critics pounced on Ben-Ami, accusing him of repeatedly lying in interviews about Soros’ involvement, and intentionally obfuscating on the group’s website, which in a section titled “Myths and Facts about J Street” denies claims that Soros was a founder or “primary funder” of the group. “J Street’s Executive Director has stated many times that he would in fact be very pleased to have funding from Mr. Soros and the offer remains open to him to be a funder should he wish to support the effort,” the website said. In an update posted after the scandal erupted, the organization reiterated that Soros did not found J Street—though his senior Washington adviser, Morton Halperin, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration and a longtime critic of Israeli policy, was deeply involved in J Street’s inception and continues to serve as one of three members of the lobby’s executive committee.

Yet it remains the case that Ben-Ami has managed, in a remarkably short time, to build something unprecedented in the decades-long history of leftwing American Jewish activism: an organization with the capacity to raise millions of dollars to win political support for ideas about Israel and the peace process that are frequently at odds with the positions articulated by organs of the Jewish establishment. Whatever one thinks of J Street’s policies—which, among other things, include support for East Jerusalem becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state and firm opposition to new construction in the settlements until negotiations are complete—the group has succeeded in provoking a tremendous amount of debate about the political and emotional relationships of American Jews to Israel. “They have built up this thing, which is just this side of miraculous,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

Ben-Ami and the other progenitors of J Street stepped into the political vacuum left by the perennial inability of established leftwing groups—Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Ameinu, and a long list of long-defunct predecessors—to transcend policy disagreements, clashing egos, tiny budgets, and, according to many veteran activists, a general unwillingness to pick public fights with other Jewish groups. “I tried over the years to get the left to coalesce, and you’d be better off herding cats,” said Charney Bromberg, the former director of Meretz USA, the American branch of the leftwing movement also represented by an Israeli political party of the same name. “We were being totally outgunned by the right, and we consoled ourselves with the idea that we were in the right.” Now, Bromberg went on, “J Street has totally eclipsed the other organizations combined.”

The result is that Ben-Ami is now the de facto leader of the American Jewish left, and his counterparts at other organizations working on peace-related issues feel compelled to support him. “J Street has to succeed, and it has to grow,” said one member of the “peace camp” in Washington. “Now that it exists, we can’t afford to let it fail, because that would be seen as the failure of the left.”

***

J Street’s supporters are quick to point out that despite its meteoric rise, which was helped along by a generous 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine, its budget is still just a fraction of the $60 million AIPAC attracted in the fiscal year 2008, the most recent for which documents are available—about $5 million this year across all operations, according to Ben-Ami, including a $500,000 grant from Jeff Skoll, a former eBay executive, who has partnered with Soros on recent initiatives in the Middle East. It’s harder for J Street to claim the role of scrappy David to AIPAC’s financial Goliath in light of Soros’ financial commitment, anchored by Halperin’s active role in the group. “He’s not in the office every day, poring over stuff,” Ben-Ami told me last week, in the last of a series of conversations this summer and fall, of his relationship with Halperin. “Basically we email, definitely every day.”

Indeed, according to Ben-Ami, the germ of the J Street idea sprouted in discussions with Halperin during the 2004 presidential election, when both men worked on Howard Dean’s campaign. “From day one I’d been talking to him,” Ben-Ami said. “He was almost the first person I talked to about this.” The vision that emerged from those conversations, and in other conversations with the marketing strategist David Fenton, the former Rolling Stone PR man and social activist for whose firm Ben-Ami worked after the campaign, bore obvious hallmarks of lessons learned from Dean’s run. The most important was the decision to abandon the humble fundraising attitudes of the left. “It’s a self-defeating world outlook that says, ‘We’re some poor minority backwater that will never raise money,’ ” Ben-Ami told me earlier this year. “We said, $10, $20, $30 million. You’ve got to have ambition.”

Ben-Ami set out asking for $1 million from initial donors—at around the same time that Benjamin Netanyahu was trolling the ranks of wealthy American Jews for contributions to his 2007 election campaign for the Likud leadership. Netanyahu’s target list, published last week by the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, included pillars of established Jewish groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents: Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Ronald Lauder, Ira Rennert, James Tisch, Leslie Wexner, and Mortimer Zuckerman. The hidden contributors revealed on J Street’s tax return show that Ben-Ami tapped instead into a parallel establishment with a great deal of influence both in Democratic politics and Jewish life. J Street received $25,000 from S. Daniel Abraham, the billionaire founder of Slim-Fast who is a longtime Clinton supporter and advocate for Middle East peace; $75,000 from Alan Sagner, a real-estate developer and former head of New York’s Port Authority whose daughter, Deborah, herself a progressive political activist, is on J Street’s board; and $25,000 from Robert Arnow, a major contributor to New York’s Federation who also helped found the Jewish Week. “I’ve been a radical all my life, somewhat, and I was imbued with the idea of another organization challenging the policies,” Arnow, now 86, explained in a phone interview. “I still have faith—I’ll give them a year or two and then we’ll see.”

J Street’s tax filing also included a $25,000 donation from Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosophy professor with long involvement in the political side of the peace movement, and $10,000 from Alan Solomont, a former Democratic National Committee finance chair who was a board member of the Israel Policy Forum during the Clinton years and is now the U.S. ambassador to Spain. There was also a $5,000 contribution from Hollywood heavyweights Phil Rosenthal, the producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, and his wife, Monica. And there was Elaine Attias, a feisty 86-year-old Democratic activist from Beverly Hills whose parents, Edward and Anna Mitchell, were such active and early donors to Israel that they became, according to the Los Angeles Times, the first Americans to have a square named in their honor in Jerusalem. “I’ve been involved with the Israeli situation for a long time,” Attias explained to me. “J Street was an opportunity to voice our concerns and express our support for the kind of Israel we want it to be.”

Continue reading: Breira, Clinton, and the J in J Street. Or view as a single page.

Some, such as Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz (who yesterday polemicized against the oath) and the protestors who thronged Tel Aviv’s streets this past weekend will still say any oath at all is too much. And others, including Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith, will argue the oath is unremarkable, and restricting it to non-Jews follows the established, broadly observed principle of jus sanguinis. Actually, the group that most prominently advocated the compromise that Bibi has now adopted is the Anti-Defamation League, whose director, Abraham Foxman, met with Netanyahu yesterday in Israel.

But enough of the substance—what about the politics? When Netanyahu first backed the hardline version of the oath, I (and many others) guessed it was an effort to buy credibility with the right in order to extend the settlement freeze. It’s nearly two weeks later, though, and Netanyahu was able to do no more than futilely offer an extension in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewish character. So: Is Bibi’s newfound willingness to make the oath more moderate a sign that bargaining with it is not worthwhile, because the extension is, officially, a lost cause?

Netanyahu Orders Change in Loyalty Oath To Include Jews [JPost]
Related: Under Oath
Earlier: What Did You Do in the Loyalty Oath War?
Bibi Floats Oath Quid for Freeze Quo

• Nextbook Press author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein raves over Nicole Krauss’s new novel Great House. [NYT Book Review]

• Another Nextbook Press author (and Tablet Magazine contributor) Ilan Stavans thinks you should go see Nora’s Will, a new film centering around a Mexican Jewish Seder. [Forward]

• Another Tablet Magazine contributor, Michelle Goldberg, upbraids the Anti-Defamation League for unfairly painting legitimate critics of Israel with the anti-Israel brush. [The Daily Beast]

• Famed and pioneering Columbia Law School Professor Louis Henkin died at 92. [CLS]

• Great pitcher Rube Marquard was not a Jew. But he was buried in a Jewish cemetery with his Jewish wife. [Kaplan’s Korner] Which is my way of reminding you to watch the Philadelphia Phillies’ Roy Halladay take on the San Francisco Giants’ Tim Lincecum tomorrow night in the National League Championship Series.

Sheila Broflovski, the most ostentatiously Jewish character on South Park, has a confession to make: She’s from New Jersey.

“David is, I think, the most important man in America right now,” Beck said in July, introducing one of Barton’s many appearances on his show. In addition to being a frequent TV guest of Beck’s, Barton is also one of three professors at Beck’s online school, Beck University. He was a member of the expert panel that created Texas’ controversial new history standards, which played down Thomas Jefferson and played up John Calvin. In September, he spoke at a rally for Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, where he was billed as a “constitutional scholar.” Later this month, he and Newt Gingrich will headline a meeting for Nevada pastors at a Las Vegas resort, meant to mobilize them ahead of the upcoming elections.

“Barton’s role in the Tea Party movement is much like it’s been in the Republican Party for the last decade,” says Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group that has watched Barton for years. “He is acting as an intellectual resource for them. He gives them the words in their increasingly extremist vocabulary. On the right he has become this great icon of American historical scholarship, when he’s anything but.”

In fact, Barton doesn’t have any historical training all. His sole academic degree is a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University—though given the right’s rampant populism, his fans are unlikely to care about his lack of credentials. Barton’s past association with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers might be more damaging, if anyone paid attention. Still, he’s gotten much more sophisticated about race over the last two decades. These days, he’s more likely to be hurling accusations of racism than fending them off.

Barton built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. He claims, falsely, that 52 of the 55 founding fathers were “orthodox, evangelical Christians,” and that they always intended for Christianity to shape American government. Public secularism, in his view, constitutes an unconstitutional tyranny that is systematically robbing the country of its religious heritage.

This is in many ways an old story. People who write about the religious right—myself included—have often marveled at the intricacy and resilience of the movement’s carefully wrought alternative history. The Anti-Defamation League was criticizing Barton as far back as 1994, writing in one report: “This ostensible scholarship functions in fact as an assault on scholarship: in the manner of other recent phony revisionisms, the history it supports is little more than a compendium of anecdotes divorced from their original context, linked harum-scarum and laced with factual errors and distorted innuendo.”

Yet Barton just keeps getting more powerful and more mainstream. His public career began in the late 1980s when, he has written, God ordered him to the library to investigate the ostensible correlation between the end of state-mandated school prayer and declines in SAT scores. “I didn’t know why,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1988 America: To Pray Or Not To Pray?, “but I somehow knew that these two pieces of information would be very important.”

The next year he published The Myth of Separation, a farrago of quotes torn from context and outright misinformation. It claimed, wrongly, that Thomas Jefferson described the wall of separation between church and state as “one directional,” keeping the state out of the church while maintaining “Christian principles in government.” It also falsely attributed a quote to James Madison, that the government’s future was “staked upon the Ten Commandments.” He later issued an extended correction for these and other mistakes, though that hasn’t stopped them from being repeated endlessly online.

Barton found an eager audience for his Christian nationalist history on the right-wing fringe. In 1991, as the ADL has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a group founded by Pete Peters, a pastor in the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity holds that Anglo-Saxons are the true children of Israel, while Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Black people, according to Christian Identity theology, are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. Barton was advertised as “a new and special speaker” who would ask, “Was it the plan of our forefathers that America be the melting pot home of various religions and philosophies?” (One can assume that the answer was no.) On November 24 of that year, Barton spoke at another Christianity Identity gathering, this one in Oregon. According to the ADL, his self-published books were advertised in “The Watchman,” a Christian Identity publication.

Soon, though, Barton’s star started rising on the mainstream right, and he denounced Christian Identity, claiming that he hadn’t known he was addressing racist groups when he appeared at the movement’s meetings. That sounds implausible—it’s hard to imagine how one might speak at two white supremacist summits in five months by accident. Still, the association didn’t seem to hurt him. By the middle of the 1990s, every major religious right organization marketed Barton’s self-published books. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, praised Barton’s “wonderful” and “most useful” work, and, in 1997, Barton was elected vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. The Bush campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004.

In recent years, Barton has pioneered a new kind of historical revisionism, one that absolves conservative Republicans of any complicity in American racism, which he lays entirely at the feet of Democrats. He points out, correctly, that before 1964, many of the country’s most virulently racist politicians were Democrats. He neglects to mention that they fled to the GOP en masse after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, in one astonishing document, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s break with the Democrats to his “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation. In an equally audacious reinterpretation of history, he paints the founding era as a golden age of racial comity, denying that racism was ever an essential part of America’s DNA.

Such rhetorical maneuvers have been particularly useful to Beck, obsessed as he is with secret histories and a prelapsarian version of the American past. Over the summer, Beck hosted a series of shows he called “Founders’ Fridays,” revisionist forays into American history guided by Barton. Under the guise of teaching black history, Founders’ Fridays argued against the idea that black people had been oppressed by the Revolutionary generation. On July 5, for example, Barton presented a newspaper from the late 18th century that featured the obituary of a black man who had fought in the Revolution. The obituaries, Barton pointed out, were “not broken out black and white. … It’s telling you who’s died, didn’t matter whether were you black or white or anything, you’re a citizen.”

Denying the racial sins of the Founding Fathers makes it easier to deify them—and, in turn, to promote faith in America’s Christian destiny. “In learning about the founders and seeing the heroes that were involved, it only strengthens my view that this was a divine document, the Declaration of Independence,” said Beck at the end of one show. “For the most part, these guys were amazing. And they struggled in their time to do the right thing. You say that they’re not Christians. They were Christians. And they fought for people who weren’t. The same thing with [saying] they were all white. Well, they fought for people who weren’t.”

Barton has given American history an immaculate conception, one that turns slaveholders into civil-rights heroes. He’s helped recreate a myth of a golden age of unimpeachable American righteousness. “[T]he national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we became one,” said Barton during one of his appearances on Beck. “And we have tried for 20 years to make it e unum pluribus, out of one we’re going to be all these groups.” In some ways Barton hasn’t changed much at all. He’s still making the case against diversity, and coating it in divinity.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

Three hundred of us had been flown in for the founding conference of a new Moscow-based watchdog organization, World Without Nazism. For the event’s kick-off, conference participants gathered in a sun-dappled Vichnoyi Slavy Park, home to the city’s Monument of Eternal Glory at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier. We were each handed a red carnation, arranged in parade formation, and led 100 yards toward a massive obelisk memorial. My moment of supreme disorientation occurred just a few steps into the procession, when from behind the bushes came a jolting martial thunder: Previously unseen Brezhnev-era trucks topped with what looked like air-raid sirens had begun blasting the opening chords of “People, Awake!” a 1941 hit from the back catalog of the Red Army Choir. After we reached the obelisk, the very loud Soviet anthem gave way to another, and then another.

“We’ll come back with victory!” promised the all-male choir. “The Red Army is the strongest!”

Under this siege of Soviet orchestral swells, I struggled to remember my purpose in Kiev. Was I here for a conference on combating anti-Semitism? Or had I been cast in a shitty remake of Battle at Kursk?

A similar schizophrenia defined the rest of the inaugural conference of World Without Nazism (WWN), a new initiative from the World Congress of Russian Jewry and its president, the Kremlin-connected mini-oligarch Boris Shpigel. On the opening morning of proceedings, the event distinguished itself by becoming what might be the only conference to receive official letters of support from both Hillary Clinton and the autonomous government of South Ossetia. At the podium, speakers spoke of trivialization and denial, though it was not always clear whether they were referring to the Holocaust, or the decisive sacrifice of millions of Red Army soldiers. At the Hotel Prezidente, where the conference was taking place, whores prowled the muzak-cursed lobby as aggressively as they would have 15 years ago.

The most potent symbol of this schizophrenia is also its primary source. While the new organization aspires to global influence and credibility—a kind of Moscow-based Anti-Defamation League that would partner with the European Union and the United Nations—its founding president and public face is a man whose fortunes depend in part on framing Jewish interests to fit the view from the Kremlin.

Boris Shpigel is a bald, round man who looks older than his 57 years and is given to slumping in his seat. He emerged early in the Boris Yeltsin era. Like others who prospered during the 1990s, he anticipated the coming curve and founded the pharmaceuticals firm Biotek shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By the time Vladimir Putin assumed power, Shpigel had grown his firm from a small research outfit south of Moscow to a major producer dominant in more than 70 markets across the Eurasian expanse. In 2002, he helped found and lead the Party of Russia’s Rebirth, a centrist social-democratic party that enjoyed the blessing of Mikhail Gorbachev (and, thought some, the Kremlin, which had been known to fund center-left parties designed to siphon off support from the Communists). By the time Shpigel was elected president of the World Congress of Russian Jewry in 2007, he was a major player at the nexus of business, diplomacy, and culture among Russia, Israel, and the Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora. Today, as a Duma member, Shpigel sits on committees that handle everything from public institutions to the funding of science, culture, education, and health care.

Concerns over coziness with the Kremlin have dogged WWN’s parent organization, the World Congress of Russian Jewry. When it was founded in 2002 as an outgrowth of the Lubavitch-led Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, some worried the WCRJ was too intertwined with the Russian government to be an effective advocate. Since assuming the WCRJ presidency, Shpigel has only helped validate these concerns. During Russia’s conflict with Georgia over South Ossetia in the summer 2008, Shpigel issued an overheated statement on WCRJ letterhead calling for a tribunal to investigate what he termed acts of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” committed by the Georgian military. Though the casual use of such language is anathema to responsible Jewish leadership, Shpigel did not hesitate to echo the Kremlin’s bombast. It was left to Shpigel’s deputy at the Congress, Israeli Knesset Member Ze’ev Elkin, to dial back the statement. The role of the WCRJ, an exasperated Elkin told Haaretz, is to worry about the well-being of Jews worldwide, not get involved in “geo-political conflicts.”

Yet viewed from Moscow, the growth of far-right activity in the former Eastern bloc is hard to disentangle from geo-politics. This is especially true when this activity bubbles up behind NATO lines, embodied by groups espousing anti-Russian and anti-Semitic rhetoric. WWN’s early fire has been directed toward the Baltics, where attacks on Soviet war monuments are increasingly accompanied by efforts to celebrate the Nazis (as well as their local collaborators) and edit the history of the Holocaust. In July, WWN’s first official statement targeted a decision by Riga’s Administrative Court to sanction a public demonstration honoring the Nazi occupation government. WWN was quick and correct to publicize and condemn the decision. But its letter contained a whiff of Kremlin anti-Western boilerplate, blaming EU leniency for the rise of far-right nationalism in the region.

That the European Union has indeed failed to rigorously enforce laws on extremism and denial does not change the fact that the WWN’s condemnations, if they are to be taken seriously, must be matched by efforts to shame authorities in Russia itself, which is home to a growing culture of far-right street violence targeting Jews, activists, and, especially, migrant workers from Central Asia. Notably, WWN was silent in late August when 100 skinheads attacked a concert in the central Russian city of Miass, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of a 14-year-old girl. (The organization did, however, find time in August to issue a statement in opposition to Manhattan’s Park51 development, aka the “Ground Zero Mosque.”)

One speaker in Kiev publicly addressed these issues and urged the new organization to recognize the historical crimes of communism, even as it challenges official efforts in Eastern Europe to equate and conflate those crimes with those of the Nazis. That speaker was Dovid Katz, a former professor at the University of Vilnius (and Tablet contributor) and the curator of HolocaustInTheBaltics.com. “While we reject the theories of ‘equivalence’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes,” said Katz, “we must be careful never to join those who would deny or mitigate or trivialize the enormous crimes committed by Stalinism and Soviet domination of many lands and peoples against their will.”

“It is also very important that our movement has a democratic Western atmosphere,” he continued. “It must never be seen to be in any way subservient to today’s Russian area politics. We should be meeting in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, not just Kiev, Moscow, and Minsk.”

Regardless of where it holds future meetings, and however compromised by Kremlin ties it may be, WWN hardly lacks for urgent work. As the multinational cast of speakers in Kiev made clear, there is a rising “brown tide” in Eastern Europe and throughout the continent. Well-organized neo-fascist political movements are on the march in Hungary and Italy. In the Baltics, monuments to the Holocaust are being removed and the Nazi occupations publicly glorified. Far-right thugs and activists prowl the streets, march on capitals, speak in universities, and organize online, often in flagrant violation of the law.

If World Without Nazism is to join the fight against these developments, it must overcome suspicions that it is little more than just a PR operation for the Russian foreign ministry. Here’s hoping that it does.

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

(Said Casspi: “It’s probably just some idiot who wants some publicity. But I know the people in Sacramento, and they have been wonderful to me.” He is certainly right about the idiot part: The culprit painted a backward swastika, which is technically a sauwastika. Not even a proper Jew-hater, in other words.)

Anyway, got any info? If it helps lead to the arrest of the perp, the ADL will give you $1,000. Plus you just know you will also get to have your picture taken with Casspi—who, believe me ladies, is handsome as hell.

ADL Offering Reward in Casspi Billboard Vandalism [JTA]
Kings Israeli Forward Says Billboard Swastika ‘Hurtful’ [JTA]
Sacramento Kings Mural Defaced With Swastika [Deadspin]
Earlier: It’s Not Easy Being Casspi

• Chicago Mayor Richard Daley surprisingly announced he won’t run for re-election. White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, long rumored to be on his way out after the midterms, has said he would like the job someday. You do the math. [The Caucus]

• Credit where it’s due: The Anti-Defamation League initiated and is sponsoring the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques to provide support to Muslim communities facing local opposition to proposed mosques. [ADL]

• As 5771 dawns, Israel’s population grew to more than 7.6 million—nearly 5.8 million of which are Jews. [JTA]

• Where are the Great Rabbis of old? [Slate]

• Our very own Liel Leibovitz and Todd Gitlin—co-writers of the forthcoming The Chosen Peoples—argue that Israelis and Palestinians should seek to understand each other’s religious and historical investments in the land they share. [LAT]

An Obama shana tova.

The problem for the ADL is that there simply isn’t much anti-Semitism of consequence in the United States these days. While anti-Semitism continues to thrive elsewhere in the world and to molder on the fringes of American society, Jews have by now been fully assimilated into the American ruling class and into the mainstream of American life. A mundane event like the recent wedding of Protestant Chelsea Clinton and Jewish Marc Mezvinsky drove this point home. What was notable was not the question “will she convert?” but how little importance anyone attached to the answer; the former first daughter’s choice between Judaism and Christianity seemed as inconsequential as the choice between Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism would have a few decades ago.

At the same time, many of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious conspiracy breeding within Western society, pledging allegiance to an alien power, conspiring with allies at the highest levels of government to overturn the existing order. Because the propagators of these conspiracy theories are not anti-Semitic but militantly pro-Israel, and because their targets are not Jews but Muslims, the ADL and other Jewish groups have had little to say about them. But since the election of President Barack Obama, this Islamophobic discourse has rapidly intensified.

While the political operatives behind the anti-mosque campaign speak the language of nativism and American exceptionalism, their ideology is itself something of a European import. Most of the tropes of the American “anti-jihadists,” as they call themselves, are taken from European models: a “creeping” imposition of sharia, Muslim allegiance to the ummah rather than to the nation-state, the coming demographic crisis as Muslims outbreed their Judeo-Christian counterparts. In recent years the call-to-arms about the impending Islamicization of Europe has become a well-worn genre, ranging from more sophisticated treatments like Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe to cruder polemics like Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia.

It would be a mistake to seek too precise a correspondence between the new Islamophobia and the old anti-Semitism, which differ in some key respects. Jews have never threatened to become a numerical majority, or even a sizable minority, in any European country, so anxiety about Jewish power naturally gravitated toward the myth of the shadowy elite manipulating the majority from behind the scenes. By contrast, anti-Muslim anxiety has focused on the supposed demographic threat posed by Muslims, in which the dusky hordes overwhelm the West by sheer weight of numbers. (“The sons of Allah breed like rats,” as the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put it.) It may be that in many ways this Islamophobia shares more of the tropes of traditional anti-Catholicism than classic anti-Semitism.

But if the tropes do not always line up, there is some notable continuity in the players involved. One of the most striking stories of recent years has been the realignment of segments of the European far right behind a form of militant support for Israel. Much of the traditional neofascist right remains both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic, but savvier far-right leaders have realized that by dropping the anti-Semitic elements of their platforms and doubling down on Islamophobia, they can tap into a new base of support from pro-Israel hawks across the Atlantic. Both the British National Party and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium have gone this route, although it remains questionable whether the move away from anti-Semitism is more than skin-deep. (The Vlaams Belang’s predecessor party, for instance, was disbanded after a controversy concerning Holocaust-denying statements made by one of its top officials.) Equally striking has been the rise of Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician whose Islamophobia, virulent enough to draw the condemnation of even the ADL, has made him a darling of “anti-jihadists” in the United States.

Although there was a predictable upsurge in anti-Muslim sentiments in the United States following the Sept. 11 attacks, much of the most virulent Islamophobic discourse remained marginal on this side of the Atlantic in the early years of the war on terror. There are several possible reasons for this, but one of the most important is simply that George W. Bush, as president, was committed to a rhetoric about Islam as a “religion of peace” divided into a moderate majority and an extremist minority. The justification for the Iraq war came to depend heavily on this distinction, and right-wing hawks, with some grumbling, generally fell into line. The election of Obama, however, freed the hawks from any obligation to temper their rhetoric and simultaneously provided ample material for conspiracy theories about Muslims and fellow travelers in the White House. The result has been an intensification both in the amount of Islamophobia and in its political prominence, as ideas that were once marginal have moved to the center of political debate.

***

The two years since Obama’s election have seen a sudden flood of books describing an alleged Muslim conspiracy against the United States. Examples include Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns Or Bombs, Spencer and Pamela Geller’s new The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America, Paul Sperry’s Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington, and Sperry and P. David Gaubatz’s Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.

The works share a set of common themes. Radical Muslims who engage in violence are only the tip of the iceberg, goes the argument; the more insidious threat comes from the far larger group of religious Muslims (most, perhaps all) who aim to subjugate the United States under sharia law through ostensibly peaceful and legal means. In this they are aided and abetted by the leftist elites controlling the government, media, and academy—above all, the ambiguously Muslim Obama himself—and a cast of villains that includes some mix of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jeremiah Wright, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Obama adviser Dalia Mogahed, ACORN, and George Soros. Some of the authors of these works have ties to the European far right themselves; Geller and Spencer, for instance, have alienated former political allies by championing Geert Wilders and the Vlaams Belang.

Generally, opponents of the ADL’s stance applauded the move and proponents tsk-tsked it—the ADL described itself as “saddened, stunned and somewhat speechless.” Andrew Silow-Carroll provides a different take: That, instead of cutting ties with the organization, Zakaria should have used the leverage he had with it (due to his award) in order to try to persuade it, from within, to change its mind.

Meanwhile, contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg notes that we actually have far bigger fish to fry than an Islamic center near Ground Zero; there are Islamic prayer sessions in the Pentagon. How dare Muslim soldiers and officers pray in such a similarly hallowed place while going about their daily business of protecting the rest of our asses from further attacks?

CNN Host Zakaria Returns ADL Award Over Mosque [JTA/Jewish Chronicle]
Zakaria and the ADL: Mosque Madness! [Just ASC]
Muslims Infiltrate Pentagon! Judeo-Christian Civilization Collapses! [Jeffrey Goldberg]
Related: Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition [NYT]

• Yehuda Krinsky, the leader of Chabad-Lubavitch movement and Newsweek’s most influential American rabbi, accuses Mayor Bloomberg of selling out his people … for adopting the Yankees over their native Red Sox. I am making none of this up. [NYT Magazine]

• Is President Obama convinced that current sanctions are working? Or does he think further engagement is crucial? Various reporters whom the president personally briefed cannot agree. [Laura Rozen]

• Condé Nast’s decision to move to lower Manhattan illustrates its despicable insensitivity to 9/11. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• “The original Fanta was a Nazi product.” I knew there was a reason I despised that atrocious jingle. [Slate]

• In a suit brought by the Chabad movement, a U.S. federal judge ruled that Russia is illegally in possession of thousands of Jewish documents seized during the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War as well as by the Nazis and then in turn captured by the Soviets. [Moscow Times]

Andy Warhol, one of the Gentiles most commonly mistaken for a Jew, was born on this day in 1928. Here he is eating a cheeseburger.

This is all great. My additional point being, of course, in the wake of the Cordoba House kerfuffle, that I hope the ADL remembers what its mandate is: In its words, to “counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.” There are still plenty of important issues—like that of bullying and cyberbullying—on which it deserves to remain an influential voice. (Whether Abraham Foxman should retain the privilege of harnessing that voice is a different question.)

ADL Offers Recommendations for Upcoming Federal Bullying Prevention Summit [ADL]
Related: Bully.com
Earlier: Foxman Keeps Digging

Actually, it’s not okay. Foxman is not telling the truth. The statement, released last Friday, reads:

But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.

That is opposition, crystal-clear. There is no other way to read it.

Foxman goes on to plead that the statement was more “nuanced” than many of his critics alleged. That is true: Foxman’s opposition was predicated not on religious freedom or civil rights—in fact it acknowledged that Cordoba House’s developers have those rights—but rather on the ostensible sensitivity of survivors. To the extent that this nuance was elided (which it was not in Tablet Magazine), he has a point.

But there is nothing in the ADL’s mission statement about representing 9/11 survivors or pointing out sensitivities. It is a narrowly defined organization dedicated to promoting “civil rights” and “democratic ideals.” (By contrast, the unaffiliated Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), who said much the same thing as the ADL today, is allowed whatever opinion he wants.) This is probably why the American Jewish Committee declared that the Cordoba House “has a right to be built,” did not take a position on the survivors’ sensitivities, and expressed hope that the center would prove “a facility truly open to the entire community—and to a wide spectrum of ideas based on peace and coexistence.” This is probably why J Street was able to collect over 10,000 signatures in under 24 hours supporting the project.

All of that said, if you do want to play the concern-for-the-survivors game, then check out Jeff Goldberg’s post from this morning. Surely we can agree that our number-one goal ought to be to prevent further catastrophes and further sensitive survivors?

UPDATE: I did not see Foxman’s own defense until after writing this post. Suffice to say it is an extended version of the original statement, which did, indeed, as I have noted several times before, acknowledge the center’s rights. “However, we also must take into consideration the feelings of the families who lost loved ones at Ground Zero,” he writes. To which the natural response is: Why? Why is that any of the ADL’s business? And if, as a private citizen, Foxman felt he had also take the feelings of the families into consideration, why could he not have simply had the ADL say nothing at all?

Foxman Decries Outcry Against ADL [JPost]
If He Could, Bin Laden Would Bomb The Cordoba Initiative [The Atlantic]

Kidding! Actually, the basis for Beinart’s new book, tentatively titled The Crisis of Liberal Zionism, is the controversial essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” that he published in the New York Review of Books in May. Times Books is planning a late 2011 release.

I talked to Beinart when his essay first dropped, but, intrigued by the proposed title change, I decided to call him up again.

Why the change in title? Your article focused mostly on the crisis of liberal Zionism in America. Do you expect to spend more time on the Israeli side in your book?
I think there is a crisis both in Israel and in the United States, and you can’t understand one without the other. I think a lot of the book will be about the American Jewish community. But the moral challenge only arises because liberal Zionism is in crisis in Israel. What I want to try to do is suggest how you could try to build a Zionism that will be somewhat different in Israel and in the United States, a struggle in both societies to reconcile liberal democracy and Zionism. More of the book will be about the American side, but you can’t understand the American side unless you believe liberal Zionism is in trouble.

Which challenges to liberal Zionism do you hope to expand upon? Your essay focused mainly on the American Jewish establishment and the Israeli government’s settlement policies.
In the article, I wrote a bit also about Palestinian citizens of Israel. I think that’s an underappreciated but really important part of this, vis-à-vis [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman and his agenda. There’s also this question of the haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] and their own often highly illiberal political agenda. I’m interested in the points of intersection between the settler project and the haredi hostility to liberal democracy. I think Israel is a complicated place, but for me the framework will be to try to argue that there has been such a thing as liberal Zionism, there are liberal democratic currents in Zionist thought and Israeli institutions, but they are under siege, and we can’t defend them unless we first recognize that they’re imperiled.

Do you plan to do reporting—interviews and such—for the book?
I have already started to do a bunch of interviews. I was in Israel a few weeks ago, and had some conversations there, too.

Do you plan to interview people at some of the American Jewish institutions, like AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League, that you criticize?
I would like to do that. I’ll have to see how keen they are to do that! But I do want to try to delve deeper into the history and evolution of American organized Jewish life. Before I wrote my piece, I had friends at some of the organizations that I criticized, and I think I still do—I hope I still do. My hope is that, yeah, I can have some conversations to continue to deepen my understanding.

[Marc again] For further reading, may I suggest two Tablet Magazine pieces:

• Yoav Fromer’s essay, today, arguing that Israeli democracy is actually bound to have an illiberal effect on Israeli policies.

• Dan Luban’s rejoinder to Beinart’s essay, in which he wondered whether liberal American Jews’ adherence to Zionism and identification with Israel is even something worth fighting for.

Deals: Week of 8/2 [Publishers Weekly]
Related: The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment [NYRB]
Earlier: Beinart Speaks To Tablet

Meanwhile, contributing editor Seth Lipsky’s New York Sun editorializes in favor of the ADL’s decision and credits prominent opponent Sarah Palin with having seichel (one of us, one of us?).

In its statement (which, as Bradley Burston notes, “sounds like unfiltered honesty”), the ADL justifies its stance with reference purely to the survivors’ interests. But whatever Abraham Foxman and the rest of the ADL’s decision-makers may believe as private citizens, the ADL’s mission is not to advocate for survivors’ rights; it is to advocate (as its mission statement says) for “democratic ideals” and “civil rights.” Given that the people behind the Cordoba House are, by the ADL’s own admission, private, law-abiding citizens going through the proper channels to try to achieve a private, Constitutionally protected goal, it is indisputable that those sworn to uphold “democratic ideals” and “civil rights” are obliged to take their side.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” Foxman apparently said. Okay then: If the dictates of Foxman’s conscience compel him not to align the ADL on the side of Cordoba House, then one could muster respect for that. But then the solution would be to have the ADL say nothing at all—not to harness it to go precisely against its self-declared, century-old values. To continue to promote itself and accept donations on the basis of those values would border on dishonest.

Anti-Defamation League Rebuked for Opposition to Planned Mosque at N.Y.’s Ground Zero [Haaretz]
Earlier: ADL Comes Out Against Ground Zero Center

It adds:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.

Founded in 1913, the ADL, in its words, “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all.” Except when it does the precise opposite.

Statement on Islamic Community Center Near Ground Zero [ADL]
Earlier: Ground Zero for a Fight

• Not all swastikas are anti-Semitic, says the Anti-Defamation League. No, really! [NY Jewish Week via JTA]

• Rabbi Andy Bachman, an FOTM, has a simple solution to Emily Henochowicz’s hospital bill: The Israeli government should pay it. [Water Over Rocks]

• A Latvian-born Jewish woman was nabbed in Dallas trying to smuggle night-vision goggles to Moscow. Surely this has been optioned already. [NY Daily News]

• We win things. [JPS]

• Ancestral voices prophesying war! Or, rather, a calm, knowledgeable voice predicting a Mideast war in the next year or two. [Falafel Mafia]

The part-Jewish band Yo La Tengo’s “Stockholm Syndrome” has been in my head for at least 24 hours.

The march is properly understood in the context of “Holocaust obfuscation,” which Dovid Katz reported on for Tablet Magazine. An Eastern European (and maybe particularly Baltic?) phenomenon, Holocaust obfuscation does not deny the Holocaust, but states that the crimes of occupying Nazis and the crimes of occupying Soviets were more or less equivalent. This march perhaps takes Holocaust obfuscation one step further (and several too far!) by cheering the relief of Soviet occupation that Nazi invasion brought.

“To celebrate the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Riga on July 1,” said the director of Israel’s Simon Wiesenthal Center, “is to celebrate the mass murder of all those victimized by the Nazis in Latvia—primarily Jews, but also Communists, Gypsies and the mentally ill.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is slated to visit Latvia over the weekend to honor the roughly 66,000 Latvian Jews whom the Nazis murdered.

Latvian March To Mark Nazi Invasion Condemned [JTA]
Related: The Crime of Surviving [Tablet Magazine]

Thomas’s rant was occasioned by an encounter with Rabbi David Nesenoff, who waved down Thomas outside the White House briefing room before last month’s Jewish Heritage reception for what he expected to be a polite, smiling quip about Israel for his camera. “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” Thomas told Nesenoff, with a flippant laugh. “Any better comments?” Nesenoff replied, still jovial. “Remember these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not Germany, it’s not Poland,” Thomas continued. “So what should they do?” Nesenoff asked. “They can go home!” Where, exactly, was that? “Poland. Germany,” Thomas explained. “And America, and everywhere else.”

Footage of the rant was posted late last Thursday on YouTube, where it attracted more than a million views, and unleashed a tempest in Washington, with former Clinton counsel Lanny Davis and former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer publicly criticizing her remarks as hateful and anti-Semitic. Thomas posted a brief apology on her Web site Friday, conveying regrets and expressing her “heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.” This morning, Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz reported that she had told him she was “very sorry” for her remarks. “I think I crossed the line,” Kurtz quoted Thomas as telling him. “I made a mistake.” In a public statement today, the White House Correspondents association called Thomas’s comments “indefensible.”

It remains unclear whether Thomas thinks that her mistake was in suggesting that Jews should vacate Israel, or in saying so to a videographer. Her views on the Middle East conflict, indeed, are no secret: just last week, she tore into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs after Israeli commandos killed nine people in the raid on Turkish ships bound for Gaza, calling the episode “a deliberate massacre, an international crime.” Last year, after Obama stopped by the press room with cupcakes to celebrate Thomas’s 89th birthday—the same day as his 48th—she told a reporter for Haaretz that she thought “the average Israeli is very fine, very fair, and straightforward, but I think their treatment of Palestinians in Jerusalem, where they continue to take their land, is wrong.” And, she added, “American Zionists certainly expect us to back up anything Israel does.”

Thomas’s tough questioning of the Bush administration over the Iraq war won her a new generation of fans, including many American Jews, and her legendary bluntness was recently captured in a 2008 HBO documentary, Thank You, Mr. President, that celebrated her journalistic credo, “If we don’t ask the tough questions, then they won’t get asked.” But Rabbi Nesenoff is hardly an important American public official, and her uninflected rant against Israel’s Jewish inhabitants seemed not a question, but rather a statement of deeply held beliefs that puts her in the company of racists like former Virginia Governor George Allen, of the infamous macaca joke, or radio shock jock Don Imus, who referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s.” After MSNBC suspended Imus, then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama said he’d have gone further: “I would also say there’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.”

Lanny Davis, the former White House counsel during the Clinton years who now blogs for the Huffington Post, turned the lens on Thomas’s colleagues, some of whom initially shrugged off Thomas’s comments. “Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot,” Davis wrote in a widely disseminated statement. While he insisted that Thomas “has a right to criticize Israel and that is not the same as being an anti-Semite,” Davis pointed out that Thomas’s comments went beyond criticism to statements that echoed  old anti-Semitic tropes about Jews being aliens in the land of Israel and which would clearly be unacceptable if uttered about any other ethnic group. “If she had asked all Blacks to go back to Africa, what would White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials,” Davis wondered, “much less a privileged honorary seat?”

The initial public response from other White House correspondents was to suggest that Thomas is simply a harmless old coot. “Do you have an older relative who says crazy things?” MSNBC host Chuck Todd asked on Twitter. The association’s president, Bloomberg’s Edwin Chen, told Politico yesterday that he thought “policing the views of opinion columnists can start us all down a path that history suggests is best avoided.” Yet, while there is no shortage of opinion columnists and radio commentators who have been fired for airing racist views, history records no other example of someone airing similar views while retaining a front-row seat at White House press conferences.

Taking Thomas’s comments as evidence of senility also seems unfair, given her long history of outspoken support for the Palestinian national cause, and attacks on Israel. As the daughter of Lebanese Christian immigrants, she has never been shy about broadcasting her sympathies for the Arab world, which she once described to a Lebanese-American monthly as “the cradle of all religions.” Thomas does have some supporters among elements of the American Jewish community. After Obama gave a prime-time press conference about the economy, the commentator M.J. Rosenberg thanked Thomas for prodding the president to publicly acknowledge Israel’s nuclear capabilities. “I salute Helen Thomas,” Rosenberg wrote.

Chen’s predecessor as President of the White House Correspondent’s Association, ABC News’ Ann Compton, had said that any punishment of Thomas would be up to Hearst, not the Association—which presumably implied that Thomas would continue to occupy her traditional front-row seat at the White House , with all the uncomfortable symbolism that her presence would have entailed. Hearst, in turn, suggested that it was satisfied by Thomas’s ambiguous apology—if that’s what it was. “We deeply regret Helen Thomas’ remarks, which in no way reflect the views of Hearst Newspapers or its employees,” a company spokeswoman said in an email. “Helen has expressed her own profound regret over the incident.” By Monday morning, the toughest public consequences had come from a Bethesda high school, which rescinded its invitation for Thomas to appear as a commencement speaker. She was also dropped by her agent, Diane Nine, and the co-author of her most recent book, Craig Crawford, said he won’t work with her again.

Surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League—which remained silent on the issue until late Sunday—did not call for Thomas to be fired. “We believe Thomas needs to make a more forceful and sincere apology for the pain her remarks have caused,” the group’s director, Abraham Foxman, said in a statement. Thomas absented herself from this morning’s press briefing, where White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called Thomas’ remarks “offensive and reprehensible”—and added that he didn’t believe they reflected the views of “most of the people in here, and certainly not of the Administration.”

In a meeting on Monday morning, the White House Correspondents Association board condemned Thomas’s remarks as “indefensible” despite earlier statements from its president, Chen, and some of its more prominent members, who initially said Thomas alone was responsible for what came out of her mouth. While noting that the Association does not police the speech of its members, it also said that Thomas’ offensive remarks did raise the question of “whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front row seat in the WH briefing room.” Thomas announced her retirement moments later in a statement issued by Hearst.

As for Nesenoff, the rabbi whose question precipitated Thomas’s public implosion, the correspondent’s behavior still seems unforgivable. “Can someone be rehabilitated, can someone do teshuva? Yes, but not overnight,” Nesenoff told Tablet. “It’s not just saying I’m sorry. One has to return what was stolen.” He stopped and explained that his teenage son Adam had accompanied him to Washington, and been present for the video interview. “He’s been in every state except five,” Nesenoff said, “but he’d never heard such anti-Semitism until he got to the White House lawn.”

• A Hezbollah camp in Syria is a transit point for missiles that are trucked into Lebanon. This is not promising for the prospect of a peaceful summer. [Times of London]

• An Israeli journalist points out that the Israeli military’s hyperactive, loud, and at times asinine response to the Gaza-bound “Freedom Flotilla” is probably not as wise as just quietly diverting the completely non-threatening boats or letting them through the blockade. [Ynet]

• Progressive political group Democracy for America said it will continue to back Marcy Winograd, who is challenging staunchly pro-Israel Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the primary, despite Winograd’s support for a one-state solution and her demand that Harman and others “pledge allegiance to this country.” [Ben Smith]

• JDub Records CEO Aaron Bisman reports from yesterday’s White gala. [Jewcy]

• Brandeis University will try to manage its financial difficulties without selling off parts of its art collection, as it had planned. [NYT]

• Am I the only one who thoroughly enjoys it every time some public figure who says something stupid or worse has to prostrate himself in front of the ADL and insist he is not a Nazi? Anyway, it’s Newt Gingrich’s turn. [ADL]

From our Irish friends, have a happy Memorial Day. Please think of those who protect us and then do not return home.

In his essay, Beinart cites the ADL as one of the prime American Jewish groups that, in its all-but-unquestioning support for Israel, has enabled Israel’s least liberal elements and forced many liberal American Jews—particularly younger ones—to abandon their Zionism. But, echoing critics like David Frum, Foxman argues that Beinart fails to understand Israel’s actions and policies in the proper context: Namely, decades of Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism. Most Israelis and American Jews, according to Foxman,

understand that continuing to sit in the West Bank is not good for the country. So at Camp David in 2000 they tried a solution of ending the conflict, which included withdrawing from 90 percent of the territories and eliminating the majority of settlements. They got a big no and suicide bombs.

In 2005, they withdrew unilaterally from Gaza with the intent to do likewise in the West Bank because they saw no partner for peace. They got Hamas and rockets against their civilians. In 2008, with a different Palestinian interlocutor, they went back to a full and better offer for a Palestinian state and got nothing again. So after all that, is it surprising that the public in the last election said, nothing works, let’s hold on until there’s real change on the other side?

What Beinart diagnoses as chronic Israeli illiberalism is actually, Foxman adds, “a justified cynicism about the willingness of the other side to end the conflict and a confusion about what real options Israel has regarding its dilemma of how to withdraw and still have security.”

In his response, Beinart, while acknowledging that the Palestinians are “not blameless,” argues that Palestinian actions cannot fully explain the most revanchist elements of Israel’s society and indeed government. Hinting at something he said in his interview with The Scroll, he concludes, “the ADL too often ignores the interconnectedness of Jewish and non-Jewish dignity. After all, the same sort of settler fanatics who burn Palestinian olive groves also assassinated an Israeli prime minister.”

Peter Beinart vs. The ADL [NYRB]
Earlier: Beinart Speaks to Tablet
Related: The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment [NYRB]

Our response to Beinart and others who share his view of a profound and growing schism between liberal American Jews and establishment advocacy organizations is not based on political differences. Rather, our concern is that he and others have allowed their own political allegiances to color their interpretation of the views of the broader American Jewish public. In so doing, they give a distorted impression of American Jewish opinion and overlook important developments in the relationship of American Jews to Israel.

No doubt many liberal American Jews, like their Israeli counterparts, recoil at certain policies of the present Israeli government. Among members of the American Jewish public as a whole, however, liberalism is not associated with alienation from Israel. Studies of American Jewish opinion, conducted under various auspices and using different methods, report no relationship between general political views and emotional attachment to Israel. For example, in the study cited by Beinart, Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman concluded that “political identity, for the general population, has little bearing upon feelings of warmth toward or alienation from Israel.” Our own analyses of other survey data support the same conclusion.

Perhaps more surprisingly, these studies provide little evidence that as a group young adults are more liberal with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than members of their parents’ or grandparents’ generations. For example, in a 2007 study of the American Jewish Committee’s annual surveys, Bard College professor Joel Perlmann found that respondents under age 40 were less likely than older respondents to support establishment of a Palestinian state and the dismantling of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. A study we conducted of Boston Jewry under the auspices of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies similarly found that respondents under 40 were less willing to support dismantling settlements.

The evidence is also unkind to the common-sense view that American Jews are more willing than Jewish Israelis to make difficult compromises for peace—a notion that is at least implicit in Beinart’s call to American Jews to save liberal Zionism in Israel. According to a survey conducted in March by Hebrew University’s Truman Institute, 68 percent of Jewish Israelis support establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and 56 percent support dismantling most settlements in the territories as part of a peace settlement. According to a survey conducted during the same month by the AJC, just 48 percent of American Jews support establishment of a Palestinian state. The question regarding dismantling settlements is not directly comparable: Israelis were asked whether they support dismantling “most settlements” whereas American Jews were asked whether they support dismantling “all,” “some,” or “none.” Still, the comparison is instructive: Just 8 percent of American respondents indicated support for dismantling “all settlements” and just 56 percent for dismantling “some settlements.”

Cross-national comparisons of survey data are tricky, and the pattern in other surveys may be somewhat discrepant. But the notion that Israeli Jews are less ready to compromise for peace than American Jews rests on a shaky empirical foundation.

Beinart’s assertion of a large and growing generation gap between younger American Jews and their parents and grandparents on the subject of Israel also rests on a shallow reading of the data. As our colleagues Cohen and Kelman have shown, younger respondents do express less attachment to Israel than older respondents. But, as they explain, this is mostly because the younger age cohort includes a larger number of intermarried respondents, who as a group express a lower level of attachment—and not only to Israel but to all things Jewish. To the extent the younger respondents in the Cohen-Kelman study were less emotionally attached to Israel, it was not because they were more liberal.

Moreover, as we pointed out in our published response to the original Cohen-Kelman report, younger Jews have reported lower levels of attachment to Israel in most surveys going back as far as there are data to analyze. Younger Jews were less attached to Israel in the National Jewish Population Surveys of 2000 and 1990. They were less attached in the AJC surveys going back to the mid-1980s. If, in fact, young Jews are always less attached than older Jews, then the differences in age groups are likely related to lifecycle rather than generation. As Jews age, they become more attached to Israel. In other words, the younger Jews who reported a middling level of attachment to Israel in the mid-1980s grew up to become today’s over 60 group, which reports a high level of attachment.

Looking beyond the evidence from general opinion surveys, Beinart’s claim of young adult indifference to Israel becomes even less persuasive. Since 1999, more than 300,000 young adults from North America have applied to Taglit-Birthright Israel, and nearly 200,000 of these applicants have participated in the 10-day educational trips—the vast majority from the ranks of the non-Orthodox. At the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, we have surveyed this population at frequent intervals over the past decade. Their political views on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are unaffected by the program, and most do not engage in any form of Israel advocacy when they return. But they do feel a strong connection to Israel. In a recent study of participants five to eight years after their trips, 58 percent reported feeling “very much” connected to Israel. Conversely, just 12 percent reported feeling “a little” or “not at all” connected. The program influenced their behavior as well as their sense of connection: 42 percent reported reading Israeli newspapers online, and 40 percent reported having returned for a second visit.

To be sure, those who apply to Taglit do not represent their entire age cohort. Their number, though, is huge. During 2010, Taglit will send about 32,000 American Jewish young adults to Israel (and turn away thousands more). Another 8,000 will participate in long-term study and volunteer programs under the auspices of the Jewish Agency’s MASA program. These young adults have sisters, brothers, parents, and friends; their impact on an entire generation’s ties to Israel has yet to be fully measured, but is by no means slight.

As a result of these initiatives, for the first time, in some studies a larger share of young adults report having been to Israel than older adults. For these young adults, Israel is a central part of their identities in a way that was simply untrue for the vast majority of their parents’ generation. They have more direct ties to Israel including Israelis they met during their trips. They are more likely to return to study, volunteer, or work. And they are more likely to connect to Israel in the United States, through film, music, food, and via the web. Israel advocacy—of either the AIPAC or J Street variety—is just a part of the broader repertoire of connections that young adults increasingly maintain with Israel.

Although Beinart may not be a reliable guide to American Jewish opinion in the past or present, he may yet prove to be a bellwether. When he writes that under the Netanyahu government lines are being crossed and Zionism increasingly seems at odds with liberalism, he expresses the sentiments of an influential segment of the American Jewish intelligentsia. The tension between American Jewish liberalism and the policies of the current Israeli government is real, and the prospect of substantial alienation in the future cannot be dismissed. It should be remembered, however, that American Jews have had plenty of experience with U.S. administrations they did not support politically. For the foreseeable future, diverse personal connections, alongside a basic belief in the need for a Jewish state, will help the next generation of American Jews remain committed to Israel even in the face of distressing political developments.

Theodore Sasson is senior research scientist at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University and an associate professor of international studies at Middlebury College. Leonard Saxe is professor of Jewish Community Research and Social Policy at Brandeis University and director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and Steinhardt Social Research Institute.

Well, damned if someone hasn’t stolen the cross.

Specifically, someone stole the cross’s covering on Saturday; when a National Park Service staff member went to replace the covering on Sunday, he found that the 8-foot-tall cross, which was made of 4-inch-thick cement-filled pipe and had been bolted into the ground, no longer sat atop its usual hill in southern California’s Mojave National Preserve. Removing it, the Los Angeles Times reports, “would have taken a major effort involving planning and probably more than one person.” Conspiracy! (If you want to turn in your partner[s] in, there’s a $25,000 reward.)

I asked the ADL—which opposed the ruling two weeks ago—for a comment. “The theft of this religious symbol is unacceptable and deeply troubling,” the organization said. “We may have disagreed about whether it was lawful to have a 7-foot cross on public property, but this dispute was appropriately being handled by our nation’s court system. This theft may be further evidence that civility in our public and political discourse has eroded.”

Pun—given that said theft was of a cross sitting in a mound of dirt—presumably unintended.

Mojave Desert Cross, Focus of Long Legal Battle, Is Stolen [LAT L.A. Now]
Earlier:c Court’s Cross Decisions Draws Critiism

• Before departing New York, President Ahmadinejad pledged that new sanctions wouldn’t halt Iran’s nuclear development—though they will, he added, kill any chance at reconciliation with the United States. [WSJ]

• Both Egypt and Jordan argued that a nuclear-free Mideast, which a 1995 U.N. resolution calls for, would make dealing with Iran easier. The only (unofficially) nuclear state in the Mideast is, of course, Israel. [JPost]

• President Obama had lunch at the White House with Elie Wiesel yesterday, in what is being seens as the most blatant symbol yet of the administration’s “charm offensive” toward American Jews and Israelis. [NYT]

• More charm: An Obama national security official assured the Anti-Defamation League that the administration does not overly “link” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to others in the region. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Israel reportedly tried and failed to convince Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to make aliyah and serve as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. [JTA/Forward]

The facts are these: The Veterans of Foreign Wars erected the cross as part of a World War I memorial in California’s federally-controlled Mojave National Preserve. In order to let the cross remain while also not violating the First Amendment’s ban on government endorsement of religion, the Interior Department traded the acre the cross stood on for five privately-owned acres nearby. The court ruled, 5-4 ruling, that the Department of Interior acted constitutionally—and cleverly!—in resolving its dilemma in this fashion.

Problem? Maybe. In a dissent, retiring liberal Justice John Paul Stevens made the case that the “affirmative act” of the land-transfer itself constituted a religion endorsement.

And the Anti-Defamation League also expressed concern. While observing that “the unique facts and the splintered, technical nature of the decision” makes it “not a case destined to have much impact on religious freedom,” Director Abraham Foxman pointed to a small part of the controlling decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, which appears to argue that the cross contains extra-religious meaning, which in turn may insulate the federal government from First Amendment issues. “This claim”—that the cross is not (or not only) a religious symbol—”should be equally as offensive to Christians and non-Christians,” the ADL said.

Supreme Court Sides With Interior on Mojave Desert Cross [Greenwire/NYT]
Supreme Court Decision on Religious Monument ‘Disappointing’ [ADL]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell will head to the region after all, this Sunday. His trip last Tuesday had been cancelled as the United States awaited a satisfactory Israeli reply to its concerns. [LAT]

• The Mideast Quartet—made up of the U.S., the E.U., the U.N., and Russia—condemned settlements and, for the first time, endorsed a two-year timetable for a Palestinian state. [WSJ]

• The Israeli Air Force bombed six Gaza targets to retaliate for a rocket yesterday that killed a Thai worker in Israel. [WSJ]

• The Anti-Defamation League publicly criticized Gen. David Petraeus—a hugely popular figure—for linking (to whatever extent he did) the Palestinian conflict and the safety of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Haaretz]

• A new poll finds that the majority of Israelis actually think President Obama has been fair with Israel in the past week. [Haaretz/Forward]

In his article, Foxman establishes that the announcement “couldn’t have been worse.” And he says—in apparent revision of what he told Haaretz earlier this week—that he fully understands the administration’s anger.

By the end, we are back in Dog Bites Man territory. Foxman concludes: “Ultimately, Palestinian unwillingness to compromise for peace and to stop the hate are the real obstacles to peace.”

After Biden’s Israel Contretemps, Stepping Back [Huffington Post]

Israel’s interior minister says the announcement’s timing was unfortunate and not intended to offend. Even if that last part is true, it made the Palestinians look stupid for agreeing to the talks (it also made them look like the victims of Israeli bullying); it made it seem that Israel was passive-aggressively expressing unseriousness about the talks; and it made the Americans appear, simply, foolish.

Even so, Biden’s condemnation was notable. One expert put it well to Haaretz: “If Netanyahu is at all serious about talks with the Palestinian Authority, this will be just the beginning of his coalition woes. Meanwhile, the Israeli bilateral relationship with the United States has just become much more difficult. It is hard to remember a time when a senior U.S. official used the word ‘condemn’ to describe the actions of any ally.”

The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and Americans for Peace Now of course sided with Biden. J Street, with typical savvy—J Street’s savvy being the one thing its admirers and detractors seem able to agree about—let Biden do the talking: “J Street joins Vice President Biden in condemning … As Vice President Biden said … We echo Vice President Biden’s call.” The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group seems to be betting that when it actively evangelizes for its positions, it does more alienating than persuading. Instead, it is positioning itself to be there, waiting, when (it believes) the facts on the ground usher Americans, and particularly American Jews, into its camp.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman told Haaretz that the announcement’s timing was poor but that Biden lacked tact: “The condemnation should have been issued by the State Department in Washington. … Biden undermined the central purpose of his trip to Israel—strengthening the friendship and cooperation between Israel and the U.S.” Meanwhile, no mention of the announcement appears on AIPAC’s Website. The silence is conspicuous, but is it wise? Joe Biden is known as a talker, and American Jews can surely hear him, even across a couple continents.

How Did U.S. Groups React to Biden’s Condemnation of Israel? [Haaretz]

Earlier: Biden Bashes Settlement Announcement