Emanuel, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Rahm Emanuel: On Nov. 4, 2008, a mainstream Greek paper infamously heralded the election of Barack Obama as “the end of Jewish domination.” The elation, however, was short-lived: A few months later, President-Elect Obama would tap Rahm Emanuel, congressman from Illinois, as his first chief of staff. Few choices could have been better designed to incense global anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. After all, unlike even the staunchest of Jewish or pro-Israel politicians, Emanuel is the only one who can credibly say that “Israel” is his middle name.

Emanuel’s pride in his religion and national identity is well-documented. His parents used to take the entire clan to Israel for the summers, and Emanuel served as a civilian volunteer at an Israeli military base during the 1991 Gulf War. In 2005, as part of a political fundraiser poking fun at his future chief of staff, Obama noted that “Rahm is very serious about [his faith]. He keeps the Sabbath. He goes to synagogue. He doesn’t just talk about the Ten Commandments, he lives them. With some modifications. The one ‘thou shalt not kill’—unless he’s a target. ‘Thou shalt not covet’—unless absolutely necessary.” (Obama then added that “every year, Jews celebrate Passover recalling the day that the angel of death passed over their homes in ancient Egypt; today, Republicans celebrate when Rahm passes over their district.”)

But perhaps the most quintessential Emanuel story is told by Asher Lopatin, the modern Orthodox rabbi of Congregation Anshei Sholom B’nei Israel—where Emanuel and his wife are members—who recently delivered the first invocation at the Chicago City Council after Emanuel was elected mayor there. Lopatin recounts how one Yom Kippur, Emanuel, in attendance for the entire day of services, was accosted by an acquaintance during davening. His reaction? “Rahm in his inimitable fashion said, ‘shut [the] *something* up, I have a lot of repenting to do.’”

Bolten, 2006 (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

Joshua Bolten: Less popularly known for his Jewishness is Joshua Bolten, President George W. Bush’s second chief of staff and Emanuel’s immediate predecessor. And with a middle name like “Brewster,” this isn’t exactly surprising. But Bolten’s Jewish commitments are no less substantial and have been evidenced throughout his long political and post-political career.

As recounted in Laura Bush’s authorized biography, when Bolten first began serving as Bush’s policy director in 1999 in Texas, the future first lady noticed that he would consistently pass on certain dishes during meals at the Bush family ranch or governor’s mansion. As it turned out, Bolten would not eat shellfish or consume meat outside kosher homes or restaurants. From that point forward, Laura made sure to have a vegetarian alternative on hand; at campaign barbecues, there would be pork on the grill for staffers and vegetables for Bolten.

Bolten became one of the Bushes’ sources on Judaism. The subject particularly interested the first lady, who would quiz him about aspects of the Jewish holidays or the meanings of rituals. In her biography, Bolten recalls how “whenever I was over for a meal, they would say grace. They would ask me to say grace in Hebrew and ask for the translation.” Once, during a stay at Camp David, Laura asked Bolten to recite the Shehechiyanu blessing to mark the occasion.

At the White House, where Bolten, like Lew, first served as OMB director before becoming chief of staff, he placed a mezuzah on his office door, brought dreidels and gelt to staff meetings during Hanukkah, and, in 2006, participated in a White House Megillah reading for Purim.

Since the close of the Bush presidency, Bolten has served as the vice chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In this capacity, he spoke this past May at the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Museum, where he presided over the joint lighting of six symbolic candles by congressmen and Holocaust survivors. All in all, not bad for a guy who started off funding the production of his teenage band’s LPs by playing covers at bar mitzvahs.

***

It’s hard not to wonder what the funniest Jewish anecdote from Lew’s tenure in the White House will be. If you’ve got a prediction, leave it in the comments. Winner gets a free copy of … you guessed it: Jews and Power.

• Cutting-edge microarchaeology is being put to use in Ashkelon. [NYT]

• The Israelis, they love Churchill, can’t get enough of ‘im! [Haaretz]

• A rabbi won a battle to get a D.C. special election rescheduled in conformity with the Jewish holidays. [Jewish Journal]

• The Israeli Medical Association vs. a Haredi conference on infertility. The battleground: the conference has no woman speakers. [JTA]

• A woman is suing her congregation for allowing a Jamaican woman to be buried in the interfaith section of its cemetery. [The Root]

Steven Spielberg’s films, ranked. Might be my pick:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Continue reading: Obama’s kishkes factor

It was entirely different for Ben-Gurion. The state he led from its birth until 1963, with a fateful gap in 1954 and 1955, had to be created from the ground up, and he had to do much of the creating. The British left abruptly without any organized handover, evacuating their camps and abandoning their offices after taking away all removable equipment. To find clerks and office furniture was nowhere near as hard as finding weapons for an army, air force, and navy—and double-quick because Arab armies were already advancing. Stringent British and U.S. embargoes in the name of peace (with the already equipped Arab armies, including the British-officered Arab Legion left unmentioned) were meant to ensure the expected outcome. But even that near-insurmountable challenge was overcome under Ben-Gurion’s leadership by a variegated cast of unlikely characters that briefly included Josef Stalin (to hurt the British), the irrepressible Hank Greenspun of Las Vegas, the frighteningly smart secret agent Ehud Avriel, a British gentile RAF pilot who could fly any transport any distance, and others worthy of full-scale biographies.

Yet the greatest obstacle to the creation of the Jewish state were the Jews, or rather the Zionist leaders themselves. For all their talents, many were so conditioned by deeply rooted mental habits of dependence that they simply did not understand the absolute imperative of possessing state power. Some, including the religious, could not bring themselves to accept its inevitable military aspect. Guns were for Cossacks, not Jews—an attitude, or mere pose, that long lingered and indeed lingers still in benighted recesses, such as the editorial office of the New York Review of Books.

As late as the Zionist Congress of 1946, held in Basel in the immediate aftermath of the most terrible demonstration of the ultimate survival risk of statelessness, Ben-Gurion met strong resistance when he pressed for a maximum effort to secure an independent state in Palestine. He was the leading Labor party politician, head of the World Zionist Organization, and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which actually built settlements and funded most Jewish institutions, including the Haganah militia. But in Basel, where everything had to be done democratically, the immensely prestigious Chaim Weizmann, who valued his easy access to the halls of the mighty in Britain as elsewhere, preferred continued British control, even as the British continued to block Jewish immigration into Palestine (nobody was impeding the many Arab migrants). As for the very strong Marxist contingent, newly reinforced by the reflected glory of the victorious Red Army, with its powerful kibbutz movement, and the coolest youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, ennobled by leading the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, it wanted an indefinite U.N. mandate over the whole of Palestine to pursue the binationalism that some still long for. Then there were the non-socialist Zionists, many of whom much preferred caution to action. Outside the Congress, Menachem Begin’s Revisionists were very eager for a state, but only over the whole of Palestine, a non-starter.

Shimon Peres’ new Nextbook Press biography of Ben-Gurion earns its price in its very first pages by describing what happened next in Basel. Though there are much fuller accounts, Peres was actually there as head of the Labor party’s youth wing and as Ben-Gurion’s aide, and he saw it all at closest range. For Ben-Gurion, there was but one way of reconciling his utter certainty that the Jews needed a state with the widespread opposition he was encountering at the Congress.

Peres recounts that Ben-Gurion’s formidable wife Paula suddenly rushed down into the basement where the Labor caucus was meeting to tell a startled delegate that her husband had gone mad (“meshugge gevoren”). Instead of settling for a weasel-worded resolution, Ben-Gurion announced he was packing his bags and leaving Basel to start forming a new Zionist organization that would pursue independent statehood unhesitatingly. Faced with that, his many opponents among the Basel delegates dropped their objections and started working to make it happen.

***

For a true leader in a great crisis, the whole world is but a very narrow bridge, and the only important thing is not to be afraid, to reject ignominious retreat and useless face-saving compromises alike. When Ben-Gurion came to the narrow bridge at Basel, it was only his supremely courageous resolve to abandon the Congress and start all over again that won the day.

Ronald Reagan came to his narrow bridge at the very outset of his presidency. European leaders, his own secretary of State, academia, and the quality press were all telling him that in the nuclear age there was no alternative to coexistence with the USSR, hence it was imperative to resume talks leading to a summit meeting with Brezhnev. Having campaigned against détente, Reagan was being told to resume it—and quickly. Ignoring the establishment, Reagan flatly refused, embarking instead on a tenacious campaign to delegitimize the Soviet Union. His “evil empire” speech that must now be judged prophetic was universally ridiculed at the time.

• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

Unsurprisingly, this spirited call to genocide has had Talmudic minds working overtime for millennia. Maimonides, for example, argued in his Guide for the Perplexed that wiping out Amalek doesn’t necessarily mean wiping out the Amalekites; what Jews should target is Amalek-like behavior, the sort of godless vulgarity that is better confronted through compassion and education than by means of violence. Taking a more legalistic approach, the 19th-century scholar Rabbi Hayim Palaggi suggested that even if we took the Torah at its word, it would be very difficult to identify just who should be hauled off to the gallows; with the ancient nations of the world mixed up since at least the time of the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib, we haven’t a chance of correctly identifying precisely whom might qualify as modern-day Amalek.

Still, some won’t stop trying. In 2006, Jack Riemer, an influential Conservative rabbi and a sometime adviser to President Bill Clinton, compared Islamic fundamentalists to Amalek, and Israeli rightists are quick to see hints of the biblical nation in today’s Palestinians. For an extinct race of antiquity, Amalek is alive and well in our imagination.

What we need, then, are new guidelines to handling this most haunting of nations. The genocide question should be easy enough to resolve: In the spirit of Maimonides, let us, too, declare that sinfulness is not biological but behavioral, that sin is best eradicated by means of persuasion and reason, and that violence is rarely the answer. This leaves us with the thornier issue of spotting the Amalekites in our midst. Who might they be? Here’s an attempt at a definition.

The pro-Palestinian protesters who last week interrupted a performance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall are Amalekites. No matter how righteous their rage or how valid their cause, interrupting Webern’s “Passacaglia” with political slogans is a barbaric act. As a long-time, passionate supporter of freedom and justice for Palestine—the only solution, I firmly believe, for a peaceful and sustainable future for both Palestinians and Israelis—I was deeply dismayed to see these hooligans choose to advertise this worthy cause by drowning out music, the one form of human undertaking capable of transcending the innate vileness of the species. The British concertgoers who, judging from video snippets of the incident, yelled at the protesters to leave the hall weren’t siding with the Israelis over the Palestinians; they were choosing culture and civility over brutality and baseness. Amen to that; progress was never achieved, nor would it ever be, by those willing to tear at the delicate fabric of our joint existence for the sake of political causes, no matter how deserving.

Amalekites, too, are the nine religious Israel Defense Forces cadets who this week stepped out of an auditorium in order not to hear women singing. The performance was part of a mandatory lecture in Bahad 1, the IDF’s officer academy; even though more than 50 percent of current cadets are religious Jews, the nine were the only ones to object to the performance. “Listening to women singing,” they explained to their commander, “is against the halacha.” The commander, Lt. Col. Uzi Klieger, was unmoved. “You’re insensitive and disrespectful to these singers,” he said, according to an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv, “I can’t allow you to become officers. He who is insensitive won’t know how to tell a child carrying medicine apart from a terrorist in Lebanon, and will end up shooting the child.”

Klieger is absolutely right. The Israeli cadets are guilty of the same myopia as the pro-Palestinian protesters in London, namely the inability to understand that dignity and decency must always trump ideological convictions, and that no matter our persuasions, we must all pledge allegiance first and foremost to those things—like music, like conversation—that make us human, that make life worth living.

Refusing to do so was Amalek’s crime. The olden nation, we know from this week’s parasha, was guilty of not fearing God. This, Maimonides helpfully explained, means not necessarily that the Amalekites failed to accept all of God’s intricate strictures—which would mean, in essence, converting to Judaism—but that they failed to obey the Noahide Code, the seven edicts all nations, regardless of their faith, must follow and that outline the most basic principles of human morality by outlawing theft and murder and commanding the establishment of courts of law. Put simply, Amalek’s singular crime was refusing to behave like decent folks. There’s no greater offense.

Let us, then, obliterate Amalekite behavior, not by issuing half-hearted, tepid calls to civility, but by fiercely clinging, even amidst real and bitter conflict, to our standards, our spirit, our rectitude. Me, I’ll begin by sitting down, dimming the lights, and listening to that marvelous Op. 1 by Webern.

A Gallup poll released last week found that President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 60 percent among Jewish Americans—an 18 point drop from the 78 percent of Jews who voted for him in 2008.

“The question,” suggested the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas “is whether Obama’s Jewish popularity dip since ’08 stems from the same cause of his fall generally—America’s persistent economic problems—or whether it has to do with the president’s policies on Israel.” He continued: “Apparently the interpretation depends on who is answering. Democrats and Gallup say it’s the economy; Republicans say it’s Israel.”

Yet Kampeas’ either-or reasoning may have missed a more fundamental and intriguing point: Jews almost always turn against a sitting president.

If Barack Obama flew to Israel to offer Benjamin Netanyahu a back rub, he would lose Jewish voters. If he raised, lowered, or kept taxes the same, he would lose Jewish voters. If he learned Yiddish or put a menorah on the flag, he would lose Jewish voters.

For more than 30 years, every incumbent president running for re-election, with a single exception, has lost Jewish supporters in his second campaign.

Running against the unelected incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter won 50 percent of the popular vote and 71 percent of the Jewish vote. Four years later, when he was defeated in his re-election campaign by Ronald Reagan, Carter won 41 percent of the popular vote, a decrease of 9 percentage points, and only 45 percent of the Jewish vote, a remarkable drop of 26 percent points.

In 1984, a wildly popular Reagan won re-election with 59 percent of the popular vote, an 8-point increase over his 1980 share. But Reagan’s percentage of the Jewish vote decreased by 8 percentage points from his first election to the second—which meant he underperformed among Jews relative to the general voting population by 16 points in his re-election effort, just as Carter had in his unsuccessful try four years earlier.

George H.W. Bush fared 24 percentage points worse among Jewish voters in his unsuccessful 1992 re-election effort, while Bill Clinton’s take of the Jewish vote dropped by only 2 percentage points from 1992 to 1996. But because Bush’s performance among the general population also decreased from his first election to his second while Clinton’s improved, both men underperformed by 8 percentage points among Jewish voters relative to the general electorate.

All that said, the majority of Jewish voters are loyal. Even in a very bad year, a Democratic presidential candidate can be assured of at least 45 percent of the Jewish vote. Another 14 percent of Jews—like those who voted for third-party candidates like John Anderson in 1980, who got 14 percent of the Jewish vote, or Ross Perot in 1992, who polled 9 percent of Jews—might not vote for a Democrat but still won’t vote for a Republican. There’s 10 percent of American Jews who will reliably vote for a Republican presidential candidate, plus 9 percent who may vote independent but won’t vote for a Democrat, based on this historical data.

That leaves about 22 percent of Jewish voters up for grabs, most of whom at least lean Democratic. In 2008, Obama won 82 percent of these toss-up Jews. This gave him 78 percent of the Jewish electorate compared to the 53 percent of the general electorate.

The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this—that Obama will inevitably lose Jewish voters in 2012—will make a fine talking point for Jewish Republicans. But Democrats of a more optimistic bent might look to recent history for hope. In 2004, George W. Bush bucked the trend and increased his initially scant Jewish vote by 5 percentage points, compared to a popular-vote increase of 3 percentage points. (Republicans would likely argue that Bush’s increase in Jewish support was hardly an accident, but rather the clear product of his stance as Israel’s leading supporter and an unshakable friend of its former prime minister, Ariel Sharon.) Perhaps that will become the new trend; after all, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first re-election through Richard Nixon’s resignation, Jewish support for incumbents increased as predictably as it decreased from Watergate to September 11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s understandable why his actions leave people disgusted. It would be less skeevy if he met his cybersex partners in cybersex forums, instead of enlisting his political admirers into masturbatory exchanges. The brazenness of his exhibitionism is unsettling; it appears at once narcissistic and, as Laura Kipnis has written, masochistic. He’s embarrassed his pregnant wife and his Democratic colleagues. Worst of all, from a strictly partisan point of view, he’s revived the credibility of the odious Andrew Breitbart.

But the core of his transgression was a small and mundane thing—engaging in sexual fantasies on the Internet. The fact that this has led to a salacious national excoriation has disturbing implications not just for Weiner, but for us all.

I say this with one caveat. It seems likely that Weiner tweeted the photo of his erection to a Seattle college student by accident, intending to send it to the porn star who was alphabetically just beneath her in his contacts queue. (By now, it seems beside the point to express dismay at having to write sentences like the previous one.) If it was something more than that—if he intended to send an unbidden picture of his penis to a young woman whose only interest in him was political—that is an inexcusable act of harassment.

Some feminists have argued that, consensual or not, the content of his exchanges reveals a man with a twisted attitude toward women. On the Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers, an ex-girlfriend and onetime close friend of Weiner’s, described being deeply disturbed by what he wrote to Las Vegas blackjack dealer Lisa Weiss. “Radar Online posted the transcript, and it is rife with misogyny and distorted views about women,” she writes. “In referring to oral sex, Wiener tells her, ‘You will gag on me before you c** with me in you’ and ‘[I’m] thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***.’ This is not about sex. It’s about dominating and inflicting physical pain on a woman, a fantasy the hardcore porn industry makes billions of dollars on selling to men.” These comments helped convince Powers, once a Weiner supporter, that he should resign.

Here’s my problem with this. It’s one thing to argue that Weiner should step down for being stupid enough to bring this kind of attention on himself, his family, and his party. It’s another thing to subject someone’s sexual fantasies to a political litmus test. Weiner is hardly outré in the way he eroticizes power. There’s no evidence, in the Powers piece, that Weiner actually treats women badly—indeed, she describes him as a loyal and thoughtful friend. There is something totalitarian about examining people’s erotic lives for ideological deviance.

That’s why human beings—even exhibitionists—need privacy. Until very recently, there was a tacit understanding that politicians, like the rest of us, had secret sides that needed to be accommodated. Few people think that FDR or JFK’s dishonesty about their sex lives somehow poisoned their ability to conduct the nation’s business. In recent years, though, two great forces conspired to do away with the ability of public figures to keep sexual impropriety discreet—feminism and technology.

It is a good thing, of course, that feminism banished the clubby understandings that enabled not just philandering but widespread sexual harassment and even rape. The drama around Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a stark reminder of the dark side of a radically laissez-faire attitude toward powerful people’s sexual appetites. During the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, liberals like myself looked longingly at France’s seemingly blasé sophistication, its urbane disinterest in its leaders’ sexual peccadilloes. Now we’ve learned that that disinterest extended to cases of coercion and assault.

It turns out that Strauss-Kahn’s penchant for pressuring women into sex was a sort of open secret, but few reported on it for fear of transgressing French norms of privacy. In the wake of his arrest in New York for allegedly trying to rape an immigrant maid, many French politicians and intellectuals have offered a dispiriting refresher course on the misogyny underlying the country’s culture of sexual entitlement. Journalist Jean-François Kahn dismissed the whole affair as a “troussage de domestique”—sometimes translated as lifting the skirt of a servant—as if Strauss-Kahn was simply a high-spirited aristocratic scamp. (Kahn later issued regrets for having made the statement.)

The television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, captures the American version of this mentality, which prevailed until feminism challenged it. That’s why the Clarence Thomas hearings were such a watershed—women are, thankfully, no longer expected to endure overtures and sexual taunts from our superiors. This is a prerequisite for equality.

Technology has further eroded people’s ability to have one self in public and another in private. Think of Jon Favreau, the Obama speechwriter forced to apologize for groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton at a drunken party. Given this, it was madness for Weiner to think his online life could remain secret. But this requirement that even moderately public people behave in publicly acceptable ways all the time? That’s madness, too.

Lately, we’ve seen a number of people undone for slips in the half-public world of social media. Last year, the conservative Daily Caller obtained the archives of a private listserv for left-of-center reporters and writers called JournoList, gleefully combing them for damaging tidbits. The Washington Post’s David Weigel lost his job for some of his comments, including one that suggested that Matt Drudge should set himself on fire—a bit of obviously jokey hyperbole that no one would have noticed had Weigel said it at a bar. In February, the ultra-intrepid war reporter Nir Rosen had to resign from his position at NYU’s Center for Law and Security because of an offensive and quickly regretted Twitter crack about journalist Lara Logan’s sexual assault in Egypt.

Now, people say offensive things about their colleagues and competitors all the time in ordinary life, and no one blinks. For both Weigel and Rosen, the sin wasn’t the words themselves, but the carelessness of letting them leak into the public sphere. The same is true of Weiner, even if his misdeeds are more serious. Very few of us could survive having our offhand comments or secret thoughts subjected to the public scrutiny of political enemies.

It could be that the ability to guard one’s public image, despite the Internet’s intrusions and temptations, is a requisite of modern political life. In that case, Weiner will have to go. But his crime wasn’t engaging in legal and not even particularly kinky cybersex. It was getting caught.

Given the virtual panopticon we now live in, Weiner won’t be the last person to be subjected to this kind of merciless exposure and ridicule. That’s why at some point, unless we want to endure a constant cycle of scandal and personal destruction, we should really figure out some way of forgiving people for being grossly human in public.

For those of us who remembered this story, it was not shocking at all when Rep. Anthony Weiner, Democrat from New York and heretofore one of the brightest rising Jewish political stars, yesterday admitted that racy photos seemingly from him, which appeared on his Twitter account, all stemmed from a single instance in which he had, yes, meant to send a direct message to one follower and had instead tweeted the picture to the world. Which meant he has been lying for the past several days in saying vague things about his account having been “hacked.” He added that he had had similar exchanges with roughly six women, mostly before he was married (to Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, who is, notably to some in the Jewish community, a Muslim woman), some after.

Weiner is 46; Simmons is 41. Both lie in the sweet spot that makes them unusually prone to this sort of Social Media Age gaffe: Too young not to be fully engaged in this hyper-fast, hyper-linked world, but too old to fully, intuitively understand its hazards. Those like former President Clinton, whose extramarital dalliances were likely more prolific and certainly more severe than Weiner’s (the congressman actually had no sexual relations with these women, he claims), would never find themselves in this position because they do not tweet, and if they did, would never get remotely as advanced as Weiner (direct messages? uploading photos? meeting strangers? these are complicated Internet maneuvers!). And those of us younger than Weiner, even the ones who might want to send photos of their crotch to women not their wives, would be more careful than to even leave the chance of this sort of exposure. Those of us who grew up turning on a computer and surfing the Internet with the same familiarity with which our parents operated a television (as their parents fumbled with the dial) understand, in a way Weiner and his generation don’t, that the Internet is a place like any other, not some make-believe, less consequential virtual reality—understand this not just intellectually but instinctively. (People in this older group will ask, “Did you get my email?” People in this younger group never do, because of course you got their email.) While politicians have fallen into sexual scandal many times before, this was the first scandal that could only have occurred, or at least play out the way it did, in the past three or five years. That is its significance—that, and the fact that Weiner just postponed his hopes for Gracie Mansion, and probably foreclosed on those for the White House. Er, Russ Feingold for president?

There is one more thing to discuss, though if my mom wanted to stop reading this post now, I wouldn’t mind. A Nevada woman Weiner flirted with on Facebook told him that she understood herself to be good at giving oral sex and added, “i love doing it.” To which the congressman from Queens responded: “Wow a jewish girl who sucks []! this thing is ready to do damage.”

I’ll pause for your laughter. But this is also, believe it or not, yet another manifestation of a generation gap! Weiner is old enough to be of the generation that, brought up on Portnoy’s Complaint and its spawn, generalizes Jewish women as sexually cold, and specifically unwilling to perform blow jobs and inept at them when they can be reluctantly coaxed. But a younger generation has almost the exact opposite conception of Jewish women: They (again generalizing) see Jewish women as more willing than the average woman to give blow jobs and as especially skilled at the task. Contributing editor Rachel Shukert has written the definitive article about this (she discusses it here); the new stereotype became especially pronounced in the public consciousness, she argues, thanks to Monica Lewinsky. When that scandal broke, Weiner was almost 30.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the single journalist most responsible for forcing this scandal into the open—who briefly hijacked Weiner’s press conference yesterday demanding an apology—is the conservative impresario Andrew Breitbart, who, yeah. Can you imagine if they had had Twitter in the shtetls?

Weiner Admits He Sent Lewd Photos; Seeks Not To Resign [NYT]
How A Bill Simmons Tweet Ended Up with Randy Moss Being Traded [Deadspin]
Weiner Used Jewish Stereotype to Facebook Sexting Partner [Radar]
Related: There She Is [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Being Andrew Breitbart

One might think that the vote of one octogenarian and often cranky former New York City mayor may not be a big deal, but Koch has a long and eventful history of involvement with presidential campaigns. He almost perfectly captures the views of a certain type of older—often but not always Jewish—Democrat who is nonetheless skeptical of his party on national security issues. While Koch usually backs his party’s candidate, he also seems to have an uncanny ability to back a Republican—tacitly or explicitly—when the Democrats are going to lose.

In 1980, during his first term as mayor, Koch tortured Jimmy Carter over Carter’s position on Israel. At one point, Carter’s people reached out to Koch and asked him not to say anything about a particular administration action until the president had had a chance to explain himself. Koch obliged and went down to the White House for a meeting with Carter. Unsatisfied with the explanation Carter gave, Koch then continued criticizing the administration, infuriating Carter. In Carter’s White House Diary, he recalled that “Ed Koch made a disgraceful statement in New York, referring to [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance, [National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski, [U.N. Ambassador Donald] McHenry, and [Assistant Secretary of State Harold] Saunders as a Gang of Four out to destroy Israel. Cy called him and had some heated words. Koch is almost acting like a fanatic this last couple of days.”

As Carter stumbled toward his 1980 electoral drubbing, Koch demonstrated a particular skill at getting under the president’s skin. Koch later recalled that Carter pulled him aside at a fundraiser and said, “You have done me more damage than any man in America.” One of Carter’s aides told Koch that what was going on inside Koch’s head was more hotly discussed in Washington than the thinking of the Ayatollah Khomeni.

Koch never actually pulled the lever for Ronald Reagan. “I never voted for him, but I loved him,” Koch wrote. In his book Mayor, Koch recounts an appearance with President Reagan at which Koch said: “I am not here to defend Ronald Reagan. But I’ll tell you, I like him. He’s a man of character.” Koch’s approach to Reagan differed from that of Democratic Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, who had denounced Reagan on the same day that Koch praised him. Koch recalls that the difference was not lost on Reagan aide James Brady, who told Koch, quite pointedly, “Now, which one of them do you think we’ll try to help more?” Koch even ran for reelection on the Republican ticket in 1981, although he ran as a Democrat as well. He won overwhelmingly.

Koch was not nearly as sympathetic toward the next Republican president, George H.W. Bush, or to his Secretary of State, James Baker. It was Koch who revealed to the world in a newspaper column Baker’s now infamous remark regarding Jews: “F— ’em. They didn’t vote for us.” Bush himself took notice of the column, writing in a letter to Koch that “I never ever heard such ugliness out of Jim Baker.” (Perhaps he hadn’t, but Koch’s source, the late Jack Kemp, apparently had.) This incident harmed Bush among Jews, but more broadly as well. Bush won only 11 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992, a significant drop from the 39 percent Reagan had attained in 1980. Not coincidentally, with Koch on his case, Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton, whom Koch both “supported and admired.”

The next time Koch bucked his party to back the Republican presidential candidate was also the next time that the Republican candidate won the popular vote. In 2004, Koch backed George W. Bush over John Kerry because of Bush’s stances on the War on Terror, on anti-Semitism, and on Israel. “I believe the issue of international terrorism trumps all other issues,” Koch said and added that he did not “believe the Democratic Party has the stomach and commitment to deliver on this issue.” The anti-Semitism issue was also important. Bush had selected Koch to head the U.S. delegation to an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conference on combating anti-Semitism in Berlin in 2004. On the third key issue, Israel, Koch wrote that he was “convinced that President Bush will never trade Israel’s special relationship with the U.S. in exchange for political support, be it domestic or international.” At the same time, he “doubt[ed] that John Kerry and the ‘Deaniacs’ who now embrace him would have the same resolve.” Koch added that “most Jewish leaders will concede that of all U.S. presidents, Bush 43 has been the most supportive and protective of the security of the State of Israel.”

In contrast to his more tacit support for Reagan, Koch explicitly endorsed Bush, as he said repeatedly, “even though I don’t agree with him on a single domestic issue,” and spoke on Bush’s behalf in Jewish enclaves in Florida. Koch’s efforts helped Bush improve his showing in the Jewish vote from 19 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2004. This improvement in the Jewish vote contributed to Bush’s victories in both Florida and Ohio, two states without which Bush would not have been reelected.

While some Democrats dismissed Koch as a turncoat after 2004, he remained in his mind a loyal Democrat. Although he had supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, he endorsed Barack Obama in September of that year. In a prepared statement, Koch said he “concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama. Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs.” And while he had liked certain Republicans in the past, his good feelings did not extend to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who “fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me.” In addition, he noted: “Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.”

But as Jimmy Carter learned in the 1970s, getting Koch’s endorsement and maintaining his support are very different things. The first indications of trouble came in an August 2009 Koch column on Real Clear Politics titled “Falling Out of Love with Barack Obama.” In this item, Koch’s concern was not Israel or a security-related issue, but Obama’s approach to health care. Koch expressed concerns about losing “the continued right to purchase and have available insurance that will permit me, no matter my age and physical condition, to purchase with my own money all the medical care I can afford.” His concerns at the time were not enough to drive him away from Obama, though. He saw “falling out of love” as “hopefully, a reversible process.” Indeed, as recently as April 25, he wrote, “I now believe President Barack Obama will be reelected, and although anything can happen between now and Election Day, I expect to be casting my vote for him.”

Koch’s latest piece, however, makes it seem as if the process of falling out of love may now be close to irreversible, especially after the events of the last week. Obama’s tough speech on Israel was followed immediately by strong criticism of Obama even from Democrats and an overwhelmingly positive bipartisan reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Obama not only lost some face in the back and forth, but he appears to have lost Koch’s backing as well. Given Koch’s long and accurate record of picking presidential winners, this could portend poorly for the president. We are still a long way from the 2012 election, and the Republican field is far from set, but Obama should beware. When Ed Koch goes against his party’s presidential candidate, it is often a very bad sign.

Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, was a senior White House aide in the George W. Bush Administration.

Early voting began in the race for Chicago’s mayor yesterday.

What a strange week it’s been. Last Monday at 5 p.m., despite the rainy snow, a small, hearty crowd of about a hundred people gathered on the corner of Dearborn and Washington Streets, in front of the Board of Elections Commission’s building, to protest the Illinois Court of Appeals’ booting of Rahm Emanuel off the ballot for mayor. With a jot more than four weeks to go until the February 22 election, the decision, which overturned the Board of Elections Commission and the Circuit Court of Chicago ruling that Emanuel was a resident, meant that—his $11 million war chest notwithstanding—there might be a Rahm-less ballot.

The protesters arranged themselves in a semicircle facing Washington St. and held up signs with messages written in colored magic marker: “Let Rahm Run!” “Let The Voters Decide!” “I Want to Vote for Rahm!” “Keep Rahm on the Ballot!” “Chi Town hearts Rahm!”

They began to shout their slogans. The cops kept a clear path between the protesters and the media. Commuters hurried by, some not even looking up. But Pam McKinney, a campaign volunteer, approached me. “I want my voice to be heard,” she said. Apparently, someone else wanted to hear it. From out of the cold, one of Emanuel’s staffers swooped down. “Can I listen in?” she asked. McKinney said: “I worked hard. I hope it’s not going to get political when it gets to the state Supreme Court. It’s not rocket science.” She returned to the crowd of protesters. The staffer warned: Of course you can quote her, but she doesn’t speak for the campaign.

By 5:20 p.m. the protest had broken up. As I walked to the parking garage, I saw a bunch of posters curled up in the trash.

***

On Tuesday, Emanuel’s lawyers made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to hear the Appellate Court’s decision. Early voting, the lawyers pointed out, began in six days.

And for the next few days, speculation about how the Illinois Supreme Court would rule wiped out everything else. Both of the major newspapers ran pro-Emanuel editorials. Newspapers and blogs from all over the world weighed in on the situation, mostly to repeat clichés about Chicago’s politics.

The same day that ballots were printed without Emanuel’s name on them, the Supreme Court granted a stay of the Appeals Court’s decision and promised to rule quickly on the lower court’s decision. The printing press making up the Emanuel-less ballots stopped and began printing ones with his name on them.

While the city waited, theories were floated, some of them conspiracies. Talking heads kept arguing that whatever decision was made, it would be corrupt. Because justices in Illinois are elected, and thus often have deep ties to political officials, the talk was about who owed what to whom and how that would affect the ruling. There was discussion of Supreme Court justice Anne Burke, wife of powerful Alderman Ed Burke, who for years has been deeply involved in the campaign of one of the other candidates, Gery Chico. On Wednesday, Burke, who, it had been speculated, might recuse herself, ridiculed the idea that she should do so.

If Emanuel lost, some pundits speculated, maybe he would stage a write-in campaign or take the matter to federal court. Others thought the Supreme Court ruling would be unsigned, to protect the guilty. An op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune accused the Appellate Court of “obstructing” the democratic process. The other candidates were ecstatic.

Across the nation, Emanuel was joked about. And in Taiwan, Next Media Animation, the video company responsible for bizarre computer animations about other pop culture memes, released one about the residency debate, in which Emanuel appears naked.

On Thursday evening, only two hours before the first official mayoral debate, the Supreme Court decision was made public: 7-0 in favor of Emanuel being on the ballot. But two of the justices, Charles E. Freeman and Burke (the alderman’s wife), though concurring with the majority decision, disagreed with its reasoning. “The result in this case is in no way as clear-cut as the majority makes it out to be,” they wrote. “As this court has noted, the legal term ‘residence’ ” does not “have a fixed and constant meaning.” Further, the concurring justices criticized the tone of the majority as inflammatory. “Spirited debate plays an essential role in legal discourse. But the majority has crossed the line.”

After all the excitement, the mayoral debate, sponsored by the City Club and the Chicago Tribune, was something of a let-down. One sadly predictable attempt to turn the tables came when the other candidates criticized Emanuel for sucking the air out of the campaign with the residency issue, which has, nearly everyone agrees, made him play the uncharacteristic role of victim. But the more substantive attempts to get Emanuel on the issues flopped, like when Gery Chico tried to attack Emanuel’s plan to lower Chicago sales tax, which at 9.75 percent is the highest in the country, by taxing a wider variety of luxury services. Chicagoans will be crushed under a tax “on common services: barber shops, child care, pet clipping,” Chico said.

***

Now the main issue in the race is whether the so-called outsider candidate will score the 50 percent of the vote needed on February 22 to avoid a Democratic run-off. Since the Supreme Court decision, Emanuel has jumped back in, grabbing an endorsement from the gay community and producing several glitzy ads with footage from Bill Clinton’s endorsement. The coming week promises equal doses of homespun Chicago “I’m just a tough-guy going to the L twice a day” posturing and high-wattage fundraisers. A private meet-and-greet at the house of Martin Nesbitt, the treasurer of President Barack Obama’s campaign, and Nesbitt’s wife, Anita Blanchard, Michelle Obama’s obstetrician, is scheduled for later today. Emanuel’s video response to Chico’s allegations about taxes, which uses a soundtrack by the Lovin’ Spoonful, is so smooth it made me feel sorry for Chico.

Nothing bad seems to stick. Not Emanuel skipping mayoral events, as when he committed the sin of leaving Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH forum early on Martin Luther King Day. He later explained he had somewhere else to be.

Also unsticky are the charges, originally reported in the Chicago Tribune in 2006—and much repeated around town—that there might be something rotten about Emanuel’s tenure on the Freddie Mac board in 2000, during an accounting scandal at the firm.

On Sunday, Emanuel’s demanding schedule included a stop at Rapid Transit Cycle Shops in the hip Wicker Park neighborhood, where he made expanding the city’s bike trails sound as urgent as lowering the deficit. “I promise to expand the trails 25 miles a year, that’s 100 miles a term,” he said with gravitas, also outlining a plan to create a series of walking trails in the spirit of New York’s extremely successful High Line park.

And then there was the Wilco fundraiser, held Sunday night at the Park West concert hall off Lincoln Park, where the scene looked like the set of a Nancy Meyers film. While the warm-up band J.C. Brooks and Uptown Sound covered an Otis Redding tune, campaign staffers passed out free snacks in large wicker hampers: pretzels, candy bars, oatmeal bars, nuts, trail mix, and dried fruit snacks. When Emanuel came on stage, he got a standing ovation.

This morning, an appeals court reversed the decisions of the circuit court of Chicago and the Board of Elections commissioners. Rahm Emanuel is not a resident of the city of Chicago and cannot be on the ballot for mayor, the appeals court said. The ruling was 2-1. Judge Thomas Hoffman and Judge Shelvin Louise Marie Hall sided with Burt Odelson, the attorney for the objectors, who argued that state municipal code dictates that mayoral candidates must live in the town where they are seeking election for one year prior to election day. Judge Bertina Lampkin dissented.

Emanuel’s attorneys, who will appeal immediately, have argued that according to state election code, Emanuel was a Chicago resident who qualifies for an exemption because he was serving his country in one of the most literal and direct ways imaginable—as President Obama’s chief of staff.

But Judge Hoffman, one of the appellate judges, wrote: “neither the [election] board nor the party have, however, referred us to any Supreme Court opinion ratifying, adopting or directly addressing this approach.”

The appellate court’s ridiculous decision may be overturned at the state level. But it may not matter.

The dynamic of the race, which until today was focused on Emanuel’s enormous Hollywood war chest and 44-percent lead in the polls, has been permanently altered. If the Illinois Supreme Court rules in his favor, he’s a master of the dark arts who used his money and political pull to get back in the race. In the mean time, he’s been legally certified as a carpetbagger, which gives political cover to all those who—for whatever reasons—have labeled him an outsider.

Flash back a few weeks to a Rahm Emanuel benefit starring Jennifer Hudson at the House of Blues. It’s just before 6 p.m. and the line stretches around the block. The crowd is young, prosperous, and mostly white. Tickets cost $30. It’s freezing.

On the corner, a short, middle-aged white woman who I recognize as one of the objectors from the residency hearings—the hearings held earlier this month in which nearly three dozen community activists, irate Chicagoans, and lawyers tried to eject Emanuel from the mayoral ballot—is holding one edge of a large banner. A young woman in a wool cap holds the other end. The banner reads “Rahm Says F *** the Black Caucus,” which refers to Emanuel’s supposed contempt for progressive Democrats and African-Americans on Chicago’s South and West Sides.

The older woman, who is wearing a headband with a tribal design, is shouting “Rahm Emanuel, he’s a carpetbagger, he’s going to steal your water, he’s a wheeler-dealer.” She is handing out flyers listing allegations about Emanuel’s tenure on the board of Freddie Mac and his involvement in NAFTA. “Rahm is a criminal,” she yells cheerfully. “He’s another Mayor Daley, do you want that?”

People take pictures with their cell phone cameras. The line inches forward.

“Jennifer Hudson didn’t know. Ari got her,” the woman shouts, referring to Rahm Emanuel’s brother, the talent agent Ari Emanuel. “She’s innocent.”

Inside the House of Blues, it’s warm and packed. Everyone is sleek and happy. There are vanilla Alexanders for $8, there are event staff in yellow shirts and earbuds, and advertisements for upcoming events are projected on a screen on stage: “Rebelution, Winter Greens tour.”

The crowd is about 70 percent white and 30 percent African-American. Some of the African-American women have slung their gorgeous fur coats over chairs with “reserved” signs on them.

The words “unity in diversity” are carved into the proscenium arch. Underneath that are images of icons from all the religions. The star and crescent, the Jewish star, the Madonna.

At 7:30, Walt Whitman and the Soul Children Choir of Chicago, a celebrated 23-year-old gospel choir that Hudson requested as her opening act, marches on stage. The choir is comprised of Whitman and about 30 African-American students in orange taffeta vests and white shirts and gray pants. They have performed all over the world, including in Israel, and have recorded a version of “Ose Shalom.”

But tonight their first number is a duet of “I Believe.” After that, they perform one or two gospel numbers. One short kid has an enormous voice.

“Rahm Emanuel is gonna take you up to the next level,” Whitman shouts out at the audience, as he tries to get it to clap. He does a call but gets little response. And then: “We know that Rahm Emanuel has a lineage of Jewish descent,” he says. “We got some Jewish songs. How many Jewish people do we have in the house?”

I don’t see anyone raising a hand.

***

A few days earlier, although the Board of Election Commissioners had ruled unanimously in December that Rahm Emanuel was a resident of Chicago and thus eligible to run for mayor, Odelson, the lawyer for the objectors, was taking his case up the food chain. On the 17th floor of 50 West Washington Street, in the courtroom of Mark Ballard, a judge in the Cook County Circuit Court, Odelson repeated the argument he had made in front of the board of elections—that Emanuel was not a Chicago resident. Now he claimed that Emanuel “rewrote history,” now he repeated the allegations he had raised during the first residency hearing: As chief of staff, Emanuel was making $172,000. And he rented out his house, Odelson said.

The charge that Emanuel isn’t “one of us” comes up in many different places. As does “outsider.” And “arrogant.” And sometimes, behind closed doors and on blogs, other less-appealing epithets.

Even the announcement that Bill Clinton would appear in Chicago to campaign for Emanuel was trailed by protests about the candidate’s outsider status—except that in this case, outsider was said to mean Washington insider. “President Bill Clinton does not live or vote in Chicago,” Carol Mosely Braun, one of the other candidates, told the Daily Caller. “He’s an outsider parachuting in to support another outsider.”

Clinton addressed these charges in his remarks last week at a glamorous event at the Chicago Cultural Center. “We all knew where his heart was,” Clinton said, implying that the former Clinton Administration aide and Obama’s chief of staff was secretly pining for Chicago while in Washington. “But we were glad to have his mind.”

***

Some observers of the political scene here told me that the use of words like “outsider” to characterize Emanuel might reveal Chicago’s racial divide, but it is hardly evidence of anti-Semitism.

“It’s dirty politics,” says Don Rose, a longtime political consultant, who concedes that anti-Semitism might play a “minor” role in the election. He dials back “minor” to “inconsequential” and “fringe.” He concludes: “You’d have to be nuttily sensitive to see what has been said as anti-Semitic.”

Later, Rose emails me to remind me that in 2002, when Emanuel was running for a congressional seat, Ed Moskal, a supporter of Emanuel’s opponent, Nancy Kaszak, made a speech containing anti-Semitic slurs.

“We’ve been watching this election very closely,” says Lonnie Nasatir, the Anti-Defamation League’s Midwest regional director. “Chicago is not New York, where there’s a history of Jewish mayors.” Nonetheless, “I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been more anti-Semitism.”

Asked if he cared that Rahm Emanuel was Jewish, Levi Notik, rabbi of the Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe, a Chabad organization with a branch in Chicago, emailed me: “Rahm is not running for Rabbi, or treasurer, of a local synagogue. People should vote for the most qualified individual for the job. I wish him and all the candidates lots of Mazel!”

***

Still, some Chicagoans have wondered if the language being used to describe Emanuel is more than generic Chicago politicking. In early January, Laura Washington, in her column for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked whether in a city where one third of the voters are African-American, the fact that 28 percent of African-Americans “hold anti-Semitic beliefs”—more than double the national average—would make a difference in the election. But ultimately Washington, who is African-American, backed away from her own question, concluding that “I suspect that in the end, most Jewish voters will see Emanuel as the gravy, not the grime.”

Neil Steinberg, also a political columnist at the Sun-Times, sees anti-Semitism’s role as more powerful. “People who are bigots speak in code,” he said.

Asked whether calling Emanuel an outsider was anti-Semitic, Steinberg said, “That’s code.”

There’s nothing coded about the anti-Semitic slurs in the blogosphere. On a YouTube page showing Emanuel’s North Side Chicago house, one commenter wrote: “There are plenty of pure US citizens that only work for America that you could put in that office.”

Another, “Emanuel was a sorry excuse piece of shit zionist.”

Last week, in The New Republic, David Greenberg, writing about Jared Lee Loughner, referred to a “gnawing worry about anti-Semitism.” The public silence about Emanuel’s Jewishness is itself worrying. If we have entered an era of post racial politics—why the silence?

Although Emanuel did not return phone calls seeking an interview, he is not exactly keeping quiet. During the residency hearing, he joked about his bar mitzvah. At an education forum held last week at the studios of WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, asked if he had ever been bullied, Emanuel told a story about returning from Israel with a dark tan and some kids stealing his bike, beating him up, and shouting “on a racial basis.” Ari saved him. But the appellate court’s decision is another matter.

In her dissent, Judge Lampkin argued that Judges Hoffman and Hall ignored established law and precedent. “An opinion of such wide-ranging import,” Lampkin wrote, should not be based “on the whims of two judges” and “should not be allowed to stand.”

She also wrote, “the candidate never voted in Washington, D.C., never changed his driver’s license to Washington, D.C., never registered his car in Washington, D.C., never purchased property in Washington, D.C., never conducted personal banking in Washington, D.C., and never demonstrated an intent to sell his Chicago home.”

At a press conference held at the Berghof restaurant this afternoon, according to USA Today, Emanuel told reporters, “I have no doubt that we will in the end prevail at this effort. As my father used to say, nothing is ever easy in life.” Especially not in Chicago.

Rachel Shteir, a professor at the Theatre School of DePaul University, is the author of three books, including the forthcoming The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting.

To the legion of Jews that Weiss has enraged, this will sound perverse. It’s certainly self-aggrandizing. But it also gets at the way that Weiss has abandoned a deeply assimilated life for a profound—if idiosyncratic and tortured—engagement with Jewish questions. As the founder of Mondoweiss, a blog that has become a nucleus of anti-Zionist writing, and a co-editor of a new book about Richard Goldstone’s report on Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza, Weiss says that he now thinks about Jewishness all the time. In his fierce critique of tribal identity, he’s found his tribe—one he believes is growing.

“I think I was alienated from a lot of Jewish communal life in my 20s, 30s, 40s,” Weiss says. “One symptom of that is the fact that I’d never been to Israel until 2006. I was 50 before I got to Israel.” Now that he is 55, Israel has become the center of his life. He goes to rabbinical conventions and corresponds with left-wing Israelis. “I love what I’ve undergone in the last few years,” he says. “And I love my engagement with Jewish communal life now.”

Of course, much of that engagement comes in the form of relentless criticism. Weiss’ blog is fulsomely, intensely anti-Israel—it’s a universe in which even Noam Chomsky, hero of anti-imperialists worldwide, is criticized for his residual attachment to the Jewish state. His obsessive focus on Israel has come at the expense of a successful career as a magazine journalist. Harvard-educated, he got his start writing for the New Republic and later contributed features to New York, and the New York Times Magazine and wrote a column for the New York Observer. Initially he launched Mondoweiss as a general-interest blog on the New York Observer website. When he started to focus on Israel, his editor warned him that he was becoming a crank.

He didn’t listen, and in 2007 he left the Observer, taking the blog with him. Today it operates under the umbrella of the nonprofit Nation Institute, which allows Weiss to solicit tax-deductable contributions. But its budget comes entirely from donations, and Weiss has to rely on his wife, the writer and editor Cynthia Kling, to help support him.

It’s a little hard to figure out why Weiss threw so much away for a cause that was so new to him. Naturally, he sees a linear moral logic to his journey. He looks at contemporary Israel and is appalled. Because he came to Middle Eastern issues late in life, he has no fond memories of labor Zionism, or maddening recollections of the times Palestinians spurned opportunities for peace, to complicate his anger. As one long alienated from Jewish life, he hasn’t developed the habit, common to many American Jews, of reflexively giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. For him—as it is for many younger Jews—Israel is defined by Avigdor Lieberman and Operation Cast Lead, by Shas and settlements.

Weiss first became interested in Israel in the run-up to the Iraq war. “I felt there was some element of Jewish organizational life that was behind this war because it was good for Israel,” he says. The notion that the neoconservatives spoke for American Jews horrified him, and it imbued him with a sense of responsibility to speak out as a Jew. As he dove into books about Jewish and Middle Eastern history, he came up against what he saw as the essential conflict between Zionism and American liberalism—which, after all, defines itself precisely by its refusal to privilege any race or religion. Liberal Zionists are used to holding these ideas in uneasy tension. Weiss could see nothing but stark dissonance. “I don’t believe in the necessity of a Jewish state,” he says. “Most Jews disagree with me, and that is sort of the heart of my crisis.”

The idea that American Jews might someday find themselves persecuted and in need of refuge strikes him as paranoia. “Temperamentally, I lack a paranoid gene,” he says. He grew up, he adds, hearing that Jews would always and everywhere be in danger. “And my whole experience has been the opposite.”

That still doesn’t quite explain why he jettisoned so much to devote himself to anti-Zionism. But there’s something in Weiss that reacts intensely to disillusionment. Once he rejects conventional wisdom, he’s willing to swing wildly, even heedlessly, in the other direction. In the 1990s, he was a staunch Bill Clinton defender. But when Clinton disappointed him, he began a long flirtation with all sorts of anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. His New York Observer columns painted an image of a menacing cabal of thugs sitting in the White House and snuffing out their enemies. As he wrote in 1998, “Everywhere Bill Clinton goes, he makes Chinatowns.” He was particularly fixated on Vince Foster’s suicide, which he was convinced was part of something larger and more sinister. He has more of a paranoid gene than he realizes.

He regrets some of this now. “I have problems with loyalty in life, and I felt little loyalty to the Democrats when I sensed the small-town corruption that hung around Clinton,” he wrote in 2009. “I wanted to expose it. It was the wrong impulse because as John Homans, my friend/editor, used to berate me, You’re arming people who disagree with you on policy matters. Did I help elevate W? … And would Gore have kept us out of Iraq? Maybe. That’s why I feel bad about what I did.”

Friends have suggested that the same impulse that sent him after Clinton may drive some of his writing about Israel. Though his voice can be reflective, he seems to enjoy pulling wild ideas from the fever swamps and giving them a respectful airing. He’s particularly interested in Jewish power, manifestations of which he diligently catalogs.

“Over and over, American presidents have said they oppose the colonization program; over and over these instincts have been nullified politically because of the Jewish presence in the power structure,” he wrote in 2009. “The Senate is dominated by Democrats, and 1/5 of them are Jews, even though Jews are just 2 percent of the population. The Washington Post has said that over half the money given to the Democratic Party comes from Jews. Obama’s top two political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. The news lately has been dominated by Obama aides Kenneth Feinberg and Larry Summers. And what does it mean that the Treasury Sec’y gets off the phone with Obama to confer immediately with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman and Jamie Dimon of Morgan (Dimon’s Jewish; Blankfein would seem to be)?” He didn’t say what exactly this did mean, particularly regarding Israel—it was just an invitation to conspiratorial speculation. From there, Weiss went on to list Jewish journalists including Ezra Klein, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Terry Gross, and Nina Totenberg.

Now, it’s fair for Weiss to argue that Jews, owing to their success, are far more secure in the United States than they realize, and that their politics should reflect that, just as it’s more than fair to criticize the pro-Israel establishment for its destructive impact on American foreign policy. What’s outrageous is the imputation of a unified Jewish agenda to all these disparate figures, most of whom have nothing to do with Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern policy, and some of whom are far to the left of virtually all non-Jewish Republicans on Israel issues. Netanyahu has reportedly slurred Emanuel and Axelrod as self-hating Jews; there’s certainly no evidence that they’ve urged softness on settlements.

Not surprisingly, some Jew-haters see Weiss as a native informer, telling the plain truth about the Zionist octopus. “Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice—a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them,” Kevin MacDonald, a leading anti-Semitic theorist, wrote last May. MacDonald has bandied the idea of taxes on Jews and quotas against them in order to “achieve parity between Jews and other ethnic groups.”

Weiss isn’t responsible for his fans, of course. But when he wrote about McDonald’s embrace, there was something notably equivocal in his rejection of a figure who most American journalists and thinkers would find beneath contempt. “I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold,” he wrote. “He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud.” Only then did he call him out for his open racism and disdain for Jewish suffering.

Yet Weiss can’t simply be written off as a victim of self-loathing. His ambivalence toward the Jewish world is too complicated, suffused with attraction as well as lacerating anger. When he first went to Israel, he says, he was surprised by his satisfaction at seeing Jews with guns. He was moved by the silence in West Jerusalem on the Sabbath, and by the struggles of young Israeli leftists like those who’ve clustered around the +972 blog. “I am ethnocentric,” he says. “And as much as I’m involved in Palestinian solidarity, I emotionally look to other Jews.”

“I find his writing about Israel to be infused with a real Jewish concern,” says J.J. Goldberg, former editor of The Forward and a friendly acquaintance of Weiss’. “Some people who are associated with him write about Israeli wrongdoing with what seems like glee. He seems to have regret.”

Lately, Weiss is particularly gratified to see a growing number of Jews moving in his direction. “I think there’s going to be a big anti-Zionist moment in American Jewish life,” says Weiss. “I just think it’s inevitable.”

He may be right. Take Lizzy Ratner, for example. One of Weiss’ co-editors on the Goldstone book, Ratner is a former New York Observer writer who was born into New York’s elite Jewish establishment—her father is millionaire real-estate developer Bruce Ratner. Lizzy was 4 years old the first time she went to Israel; during college she spent a semester there and was at the rally when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Her horror led her to get involved in pro-Palestinian work.

“The moment I crossed a checkpoint, 15 minutes from Jerusalem, the world changed,” she told me. “My worldview shattered. You grow up being told ‘they’ want to push us into the sea and we have to do everything we can to stop this evil enemy that wants to kill us and is going to kill us, and then you meet the terrible evil enemy, and not only are they nice, and decent, but they’re actually oppressed.”

Returning from Israel in the 1990s, Ratner looked for a community of people who shared her concerns with the Middle East, and she couldn’t find it. She’d go to Palestinian solidarity meetings, and only three others would show up. Gradually, she drifted away from the issue altogether, until outrage over Gaza inspired her to get involved again. She found a movement to plug into. “Now I look at Phil and Adam’s website”—Adam Horowitz has been Weiss’ partner at Mondoweiss since 2008—“and I look at Jewish Voice for Peace—something undeniable is welling up,” she says.

Meanwhile, as Weiss has become more enmeshed in the world of left-wing anti-Zionist Jews, he’s become at least a little more sensitive to Jewish concerns. “I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my site over the years,” he says. “I think in my alienation from the Jewish community, I said stuff that I regret on a number of occasions.” He even has second thoughts about some of more strident attacks on neoconservatives. “The neoconservative thing is a very confusing thing to me,” he says. “I think it’s appropriate to talk about Jewish neoconservatives, but there’s an element of red-baiting. I haven’t come down fully on that issue. I know I’ve hurt people.”

And so his alienation from the Jewish community has been transformed into a new sense of mission within it. “There’s a crisis! There is truly a crisis in the two-state solution,” he says. “That de-marginalizes me.” He’s right, whether that fills you with hope or with dread.

Comparing himself to David Ben Gurion and Ariel Sharon, Barak announced that he would be leaving the Labor party along with another minister and three other Knesset members to establish a new center-Zionist “Independence Party,” which would remain part of Netanyahu’s government. The move was planned in secret by Barak and Netanyahu, and it immediately shored up the governing Likud coalition by depriving the left-wing members of the Labor Party, which Barak left behind, of any leverage against the prime minister. The three remaining Labor ministers in the Netanyahu government reacted by immediately quitting it.

While Sharon’s split from the Likud to form Kadima in 2005 was a move made to advance a particular political agenda, many observers saw Barak’s maneuver as a characteristic piece of selfishness whose intended beneficiary was Barak himself. And it will likely further lower the reputation of Israel’s most widely loathed public figure. A few months ago, a panel of journalists and experts was convened by the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir to select the most hated Israeli. Out of 50 contestants—including Netanyahu and other politicians and media personalities—the hands-down winner was Barak.

Such mocking disregard might surprise non-Israelis. Barak enjoys enormous respect in the international community, where he is almost universally considered to be the most responsible and serious member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. And because the widely disliked Avigdor Lieberman is Israel’s foreign minister, Barak also serves as Israel’s de facto diplomat-in-chief; last month, he made his ninth visit to the United States in three years. Barak remains the Obama Administration’s main point of contact in Israel’s government, and, although his relationship with President Bill Clinton has been thorny at times, these days both Clintons (including the now-more important one, Hillary) seem to think highly of him. Nearly all of the relevant administration officials—including Dennis Ross, now Clinton’s special envoy for the region, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—have known and respected Barak for two decades and clear time on their schedules for him whenever he passes through Washington.

And yet within Israel, the verdict of Ha’ir’s unpopularity contest surprised no one. Barak is now enjoying unparalleled status as a public punching bag; indeed, it is doubtful that any other Israeli politician has achieved lower popularity in recent years—quite a feat, given the competition from figures like the brutish Lieberman, the corrupt and incompetent Ehud Olmert, and the blinkered leadership of Shas. The contempt in which Barak is held is even more astonishing when one considers his pedigree: He is one of the three most decorated officers in the history of the IDF and holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and math and a master’s degree in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. He is even, some claim, a very capable amateur pianist. But all of his credentials and talents have never translated to more than a rudimentary ability to connect with people. Barak, an oft-told joke goes, will one day commit suicide by leaping from his IQ to his EQ.

Indeed, dislike for the current defense minister has become so ingrained in the Israeli psyche that his own political handlers have tried to ride the wave rather than fight it: Two years ago, when Barak’s campaign for prime minister ran into a ditch during Knesset elections, his aides fought back with a series of advertisements portraying Barak as “not a sahbak”—the Arabic word meaning friend or “man of the people”—but as “a leader.” The meaning was clear: You might not want to make small talk with Barak at a party, or invite him over to watch soccer on TV, but you might at least trust him to be a responsible grown-up.

The ads did little good. Labor won only 13 Knesset seats (out of 120)—an all-time low for the party. And these days, the most common expression describing Barak is another Arabic term: ahabal, an idiot or fool. In November, Ofer Eini—a member of Histadrut, Barak’s own party—lobbed the now-infamous insult at Barak during a television interview. Eini was responding to a question about the scandal du jour, that Barak’s wife, Nili Barak-Priel, had been caught employing an illegal maid from the Philippines. “Barak has this quality: He never misses a mistake,” claimed Eini. “You’re a member of the government. What the hell do you bring a Philippine worker for? Employ an Israeli one. You should set an example. You need to be an ahabal to do such a thing, really! You know it’s against the law. Did you think that they wouldn’t catch you? Well, they did.” Eini’s language was harsh, but the expression stuck, summing up what large swaths of the Israeli public believe to be an inglorious and costly string of mistakes, both personal and public.

“There’s something slightly autistic about him,” admits a senior official in Israel’s defense administration, who has known Barak for decades. “He hardly listens to criticism, least of all when he’s convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong.” Still, one-on-one, Barak is very convincing and, until very recently, public opinion polls showed an interesting pattern: Most Israelis trusted him as a defense minister, though not as a possible prime minister.

Now almost no one trusts him, in either role.

***

By all accounts, Barak’s problems began a decade ago, during his term as prime minister, which is widely seen by Israelis as an unqualified disaster. After an unprecedented 12-point victory over Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1999, Barak managed to squander nearly all of his public support outside the Labor Party within 20 months as prime minister during which he delivered only one crucial, strategic decision: the unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, which ended 18 years of Israeli occupation. But he then promised to try and achieve regional peace “in 15 months”—and failed miserably. Negotiations with Syria reached a dead end, and the July 2000 Camp David peace summit with the Palestinians famously achieved nothing. Barak went to Camp David supported by only a quarter of Knesset members, and he avoided an immediate ouster only because the summit was held during the Knesset’s summer recess. The peace talks failed not because of Barak, but because Yasser Arafat refused to compromise—a conclusion supported by Bill Clinton, who gave full backing to Barak’s accusations against the PLO chairman. But Arafat can’t have been encouraged by the prospect of compromise with a leader who was clearly a political lame duck. Barak’s string of political failures got even longer two months later, when the second Intifada broke out, plunging the country into nightmarish violence and leading most Israelis to blame the prime minister for being both naïve and unprepared.

Barak was able to make a political comeback—of sorts. After the IDF’s fiasco during the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Amir Peretz, then head of the Labor Party and minister of defense, was widely criticized as unfit for his job. In May 2007, Barak quickly maneuvered him out of both the Labor leadership and the defense ministry, taking his place in Ehud Olmert’s government. Now Barak had a new problem: During his six years out of government, he had been mainly occupied with his flourishing business career. His affluence wasn’t easily accepted by Israeli voters, who generally believe that the leader of what is still supposed to be a workers’ party should not be worth millions of dollars (and be seen flaunting his wealth). To be fair, Barak’s focus on his business career while out of office was no different from Netanyahu’s (and was certainly less outrageous than Olmert’s). But for Barak, an image of ostentatious luxury was quite damaging—and was not helped by his purchase of a $10 million apartment at Tel Aviv’s most luxurious high-rise. Whatever sympathy and forgiveness he received from the Israeli electorate upon his return was soon replaced by contempt.

It didn’t take long for Barak and Olmert to grab for each other’s throats. Serving in the same government, the former friends quickly found each other intolerable. Olmert became embroiled in a series of corruption scandals (he is now standing trial for some of these), and Barak eventually demanded his resignation, forcing the prime minister to retire. But even before this final break, it seemed impossible for Olmert and Barak to agree on anything. In February 2009, Olmert refused to surrender to Barak’s pressure and approve a deal with Hamas in which Israel would release a thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit. When Israel invaded parts of the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Barak’s resistance prevented Olmert from gambling on a full-scale reoccupation of the Strip, which Olmert had hoped would lead to the final defeat of Hamas in Gaza. At this point, there emerged a fierce—and still ongoing—argument between Barak and Olmert, hard to decipher because of restrictions by Israeli military censorship, about the decision-making process before certain Israeli actions abroad, which international media organizations have assumed refers to the successful bombing of a Syrian nuclear plant in September 2007, which Olmert is said to have championed, and Barak, it is implied, opposed.

Yet after Olmert stepped down as prime minister, it began to appear that the only Israeli politician that Barak could get along with was himself. When Tzipi Livni, Olmert’s successor as head of the Kadima party, tried to form a new coalition, Barak did not go out of his way to help her. During the election campaign, he publicly insulted Livni by calling her by “Tzipora”—her full name, but also widely seen as an anachronistic grandmotherly moniker—in a radio interview. He notably withheld even cursory approval for Livni’s performance while trying to raise the same argument Hillary Clinton first used against Barack Obama, asking, in political advertisements, “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” The answer of the Israeli electorate seemed clear: anybody but you.

***

And so, the defense minister’s new image has gradually consolidated: arrogant, aloof, condescending, a habitual intriguer against his fellow ministers and political partners who is constantly accused of corruption, although, unlike many of his colleagues, he has never been indicted for any crime. Even his experience in defense matters—his greatest public asset—has evaporated in the eyes of most voters. His personal friction with Olmert prevented him from playing a bigger role in that government, and his public support has collapsed during Netanyahu’s term.

Yet in spite of his obvious political weakness—or because of it—his personal relationship with Netanyahu is surprisingly good. Both men, each of whom had an unpleasant term as prime minister during the 1990s, seem to have gotten beyond their past confrontations, perhaps brought together by shared antipathy for their fellow politicians and for the press. As Netanyahu’s point man in the United States diplomatic and defense establishments, Barak’s importance is much greater than his party’s role in the coalition might suggest. As a result, Netanyahu has given Barak almost unlimited freedom to deal with military issues and has listened to most of the defense minister’s advice regarding the peace process.

Continue reading: “Mr. Defense,” the quarrel with Gabi Ashkenazi, and Israel’s Mr. Unpopularity. Or view as a single page.

What exactly does sitting pop culture shiva entail? Well, the first part is obvious – sitting. Since most pop culture products are consumed with as little movement as possible this step should be simple for most King’s viewers. Stay comfortable and right where you are. Watch more television or clips of the show on YouTube.

Then comes the food. Now, the neighbors probably won’t bring over assorted goodies since no actual death occurred. You’ll have to take care of this on your own. In order to not disturb the first step, make sure to get the food delivered.

Next comes the renting of the garments. I would advise against this since you are probably wearing your best sweats. Instead, sartorially honor the man by putting on a pair of suspenders to complete the look. Now don’t fret that this accessory will make you appear unattractive to the ladies. Larry wore them for most of his professional career and been married a total of 8 times to 7 different women.

And finally, cover all reflective surfaces. During a traditional shiva, this is meant to discourage vanity and encourage inner reflection, and it’s no different in this instance. After a week spent in sweats, ordering takeout, and wearing suspenders, you probably don’t want to look into the mirror.

Follow these steps and you’ll weather this loss just fine. And when you return to society, you’ll find that the King has actually risen. Yes, he will be hosting specials on CNN at least four times a year.

*The phrase “pop culture shiva” is the brilliant idea of Elizabeth Savage.

Earlier: Larry King’s New Business

Born in 1958 in the southwestern Ukrainian city of Chernovitz, Edelstein currently serves as Israel’s first minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. The path from his non-religious communist upbringing to his current life is at once remarkable and familiar: University years studying foreign languages at the Moscow Institute for Teacher Training, a growing appreciation for his Jewish identity that compounded his desire to escape the Soviet Union, resistance followed by punishment and, finally, freedom.

For his crime of teaching Hebrew to his fellow Refuseniks, Edelstein was convicted and sent to prison in 1984 on false charges of drug dealing. Three years later, he was released on Israel Independence Day and allowed to emigrate to Israel, where he joined a population of around 200,000 Russian-speaking Jews.

Upon his arrival in Israel, Edelstein took a job as vice president of the Zionist Forum, a position he held until 1996. During that time he began his involvement in party politics by advising Benjamin Netanyahu, then in opposition. In 1996, Edelstein co-founded, with Natan Sharansky, the Yisrael ba-Aliya party. That same year, he was named minister of Immigrant Absorption, a position he held off and on until 2003, when a struggling Yisrael ba-Aliya was officially folded into Likud. In the 15th through 17th Knessets, from 1999 to 2009, Edelstein intermittently served as deputy speaker. In March 2009, the new Netanyahu government created his current portfolio.

Edelstein lives with his wife and two children in the southern West Bank settlement of Neve Daniel. With its significant number of Jews from the former Soviet Union, it is the type of community now enjoying a troubled reputation in the United States. Weeks before I spoke with Edelstein, Bill Clinton had publicly singled out settlers from the former Soviet states as a “staggering problem” for the peace process.

Edelstein addressed the question of perceived Russian Jewish extremism during a conversation last week at the Israeli Consulate near the United Nations in New York. Two press attaches and a security guard were also present.

You are the first-ever minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. Some would say the creation of the ministry was 20 years late. What took so long?

Twenty years ago, most Israelis would have said, “Take all your ideas and shove them. Who cares?” The feeling was, “There are Jews, where, in Chicago? They may either come to Israel, or give a million dollars to build a kindergarten in Sderot, OK?” That’s it. Now it’s different. When we ask the hard questions of whether the taxpayers’ money should be invested in Jewish education among the Diaspora, and connecting the Diaspora to Israel through all kinds of programs, the majority of Israelis say yes. It’s no longer seen as either-or—either they come to Israel or the hell with them.

There is a view, most recently expressed by Bill Clinton, that Jews from the former Soviet Union are all extreme in their politics.

When we are talking about a million people, you can’t perceive them as unified. They vote differently, they think differently. There are geographical differences. You can’t talk about these people as a bloc. As for [Bill Clinton’s comment], I don’t buy it. It’s common to think that Russian Jews are more hard-nosed. But I learned living in the Soviet Union that a pessimist is a well-educated optimist. I can’t blame Soviet Jews for saying, “Sign an agreement with Assad? He’s lying!”

Are you saying the experience of having lived under a totalitarian regime—

For a normal person, who’s never lived under a state based on lies, it’s difficult to imagine. I can’t blame Jews coming from the former Soviet Union for being very distrustful toward certain regimes and dictators in the area.

Is this why they show such strong support for Yisrael Beiteinu?

If you check statistically, look at the polls, Soviet Jews in Israel have never voted against the stream. They are always with the stream, sometimes with a slight shift towards the winner. In 1992 they mostly voted for Rabin and the Labor Party. In ’96 they mostly voted for Netanyahu, but so did most Israelis. In ’99, they voted for Ehud Barak and Labor, as most Israelis did. And then Ariel Sharon—the same thing. So it’s a nice legend about all Soviet Jews being very hard-nosed. But even if there’s some truth to it because of the experience I mentioned, it’s not reflected or proven in the voting habits.

How do you see the future of Russian Jewish political influence?

There are four parties in which a Russian-language constituency is represented—Kadima, Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas. This diversity is here to stay. Even if [Yisrael Beiteinu leader and current Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman decides he wants to leave politics, the political influence is here to stay. The head of the Shas faction is a Georgian who speaks Russian. There are lots of majors and colonels who in 10 years will be generals. It’s the nature of the political system in Israel. People are coming up the ranks.

How has Russian Jewish immigration impacted the Russian-Israeli strategic relationship? And what is the role of Moscow’s Jewish elite?

The contribution made to this relationship by the Russian Jewish community in the successor states of the Soviet Union was much more significant during the first years after the fall of the USSR. It used to be built on personal connections. If I needed to arrange a high-level meeting for Netanyahu in Moscow in the early ’90s, when he was in the opposition, then I called someone who called someone, and then that someone called the deputy foreign minister. That’s how things worked.

Now it’s more government-to-government. But there is still a role for the Russian Jewish community in cultivating economic and cultural ties. Community leaders like  Boris Shpigel, and some others who are also elected officials, they definitely contribute. It’s legit to be a prominent politician or businessman who is involved in Russian- or Kazakhstani-Israeli relations, maybe contribute financially to Tel Aviv University, or a Diaspora museum, or some educational program in Israel.

Do you see Russian identity weakening with the second-generation of Russian-speaking Israelis?

Logically it must be. But my friend has a Russian bookstore in Jerusalem, and he always says to me, “It’s amazing how many young people come there. It’s not that they don’t speak Hebrew, but they buy Russian books.” It’s the same thing with TV, there’s the Russian Channel 9. Everyone predicted Channel 9 would be dead in a year, and now it’s been around for six, seven years. So, ties to the old countries are not disappearing.

I think Israel is strong enough as a society to a little bit get rid of the melting-pot model. People are no less Israeli when they speak Russian to each other, or French or English. Most famous is the story of the Gesher Theater. Twenty years ago, we were trying to persuade ministers that it was a good idea for actors to come from Russia and set up a theater. They were like, “We don’t even have a Yiddish theater, and you want a Russian-language theater?” And we found the money, and before long our actors were winning Israeli Oscars. Now the plays are all in Hebrew, but the theater was a creation of Russian-speaking Jews. This is just one example of this process.

What efforts are under way to cultivate Zionist politics and Jewish identity among Russian Jewish immigrants in the United States?

Russian Jews in this country are in a totally different place. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, my meetings with Russian Jews here were a disaster. After a few meetings I stopped meeting with them. For me at the time, they were like the ultimate traitors. I was spitting and spilling blood and they were here in the United States instead of Israel. And in their eyes, I was a total jerk. We couldn’t understand each other—they thought I should be in New York, and I thought they should be in Israel. It was not a dialogue but two monologues. Now Russian Jews are in a totally different place. Sometimes when I talk to Russian Jews here I feel that I am not Zionist enough. Everyone now has relatives in Israel, and they visit, and so on.

Also, the Russian Jews who came here in the ’70s and ’80s went through a process of understanding that not only does it not hurt to be an active part of this community, but it can help. The motivation during the early years was to “become Americans.” This meant not going to Jewish schools or community events. But they realized that Americans are Jewish, Irish, Mexicans, you name it. It didn’t mean they love this country less. So, it was a process of becoming closer to Israel.

The rest is technical and tactical. There are youth programs. Birthright. Youth groups. An emissary who is working with the Russian Jewish community here.

We had a meeting last week during which the prime minister asked myself, the minister of Absorption, and [current Jewish Agency chairman] Natan Sharansky, “How many Jews do you think are still left in the former Soviet Union?” And we all looked at each other, and no one had a good answer. Some would say half a million; some would say 3 million, depending on definitions. But there’s no reliable estimate. As for Israel, we know that around 1 million Russian-speakers have come during the last two decades. We estimate that approximately the same number went all over, the main bulk being here in the United States and Canada. And, unfortunately Germany has what some say is a population close to 200,000.

Do you say “unfortunately” because of a perceived rise in anti-Semitism and far-right politics in Germany?

I am the son of Holocaust survivors, so it’s very difficult for me to understand Jews going to Germany. I say the same thing when I’m interviewed by German Jewish media. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to Jews who emigrate to Germany, or that I don’t want to see them continuing Jewish life, but emotionally it’s difficult for me to understand.

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

And yet new petitions on his behalf have recently begun to circulate, and gain momentum, both in the U.S. Congress and the Israeli Knesset. This is, in large measure, because Pollard’s situation rests on a contradiction: He was guilty of a reprehensible crime, and yet he has been treated abominably. One of the most infamous Jewish criminals in modern times, he is also the victim of the worst act of official American anti-Semitism in our lifetimes. With his round face and shoulder-length hair, Pollard today still looks more like a perpetual grad student than an arch criminal, but he has suffered severely. He has served hard time, mostly in maximum-security prisons, spending years in lockdown 23 hours a day. Websites pleading his case detail his medical ailments, noting that he has “developed diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-glaucoma, and arthritis while in prison.”

From the moment he was sentenced, there were people in the Jewish community—and beyond—who believed Pollard had been unjustly punished and who fought for his release. But they were few and far between, and they often made the wrong case for him. This newest round of argument on Pollard’s behalf is different. For starters, many of his champions have been careful not to lionize him. Rather, they focus on correcting what Judge Stephen Williams, who filed a dissent in one of Pollard’s failed appeals, deemed “a fundamental miscarriage of justice.” Most surprisingly, on September 27, 2010, a former assistant secretary of Defense confirmed many people’s decades-long fears that, at some point, the case had turned personal—and poisonous. Without explaining what prompted him to break his silence, Lawrence Korb, who served in the Pentagon in Reagan’s first term, wrote President Barack Obama: “Based on my first-hand knowledge, I can say with confidence that the severity of Pollard’s sentence is a result of an almost visceral dislike of Israel and the special place it occupies in our foreign policy on the part of my boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.”

Decades into this tragic and pathetic tale, American Jewry’s continuing allergy to defending Pollard says more about our communal fears and the price we are willing to pay for social and political acceptance than it does about Pollard and his crimes.

***

On November 21, 1985, FBI agents arrested Pollard, 31 at the time, just outside Israel’s embassy in Washington. Since June 1984, Pollard had been routinely removing sensitive documents from the Naval Intelligence Support Center on Friday afternoons, passing them to his Israeli handlers for Xeroxing, and blithely returning them on Monday mornings. When first interrogated by the FBI, Pollard called his wife. After he worked the word “cactus” into the conversation, their designated SOS code word, Anne Henderson-Pollard scurried about their house—with a neighbor’s help—sanitizing it. The neighbor subsequently gave the FBI a 70-pound suitcase filled with secret documents, reflecting the volume of Pollard’s activities and sloppiness.

Despite transferring thousands of documents to his Israeli handlers, Pollard failed to gain asylum at the embassy on that day in 1985. Backpedaling furiously, Israel first labeled Pollard a rogue agent, as his handlers worked out of a shadowy organization called Lekem, the Defense Ministry’s Bureau for Scientific Relations. The department, headed by the legendary Mossad man Rafi Eitan, was disbanded shortly after Pollard’s arrest. Israel granted Pollard citizenship in 1995—long after such a move could have done him any good. And it wasn’t until 1998 that Israel finally acknowledged what everyone knew: Pollard had been an authorized agent spying for Israel.

An American Jew’s arrest as an Israeli spy was upsetting enough for American Jews. But Pollard’s defense made the affair excruciating. Minimizing the thousands of dollars he earned, the diamond-and-sapphire ring the Israelis gave him, and his efforts to shop American secrets to South Africa and possibly Pakistan, too, Pollard portrayed himself as a Zionist idealist. Anti-Semites bullied him as a child, he recalled. He claimed that the documents he smuggled out, so crucial to Israeli security, should have been shared freely. And, using a most obnoxious and threatening term, he said a “racial obligation” compelled him, as a Jew, to defend the Jewish state.

Suddenly, amid Ronald Reagan’s resurgence of hard-bodied patriotic machismo, in the age of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy “make my day” taunt, a balding, mustachioed, jowly-faced American Jewish nerd in glasses was betraying the red, white, and blue for the blue and white. Pollard’s crimes epitomized Zionism-run-amok, with the ideological implications of Jewish tribal solidarity pushed to its extreme.

“I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that,” Anne Pollard said defiantly on 60 Minutes shortly before being sentenced, one of many arrogant, self-destructive moves the couple made back then. While stirring up the terrifying “dual loyalty” charge—far more terrifying to Jews than to Irish-Americans and other hyphenated Americans—the Pollards defined every Jew’s ultimate loyalty as being to the Jewish state. Desperately repudiating the charge, the prominent academic Jacob Neusner would declare America to be the true “promised land.”

This American Jewish skittishness regarding Pollard was particularly surprising because by the 1980s American Jews were thriving in America’s suburban meritocracy. Some American Jewish superstars were accented immigrants like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel. But most American Jewish success stories were 100 percent American. Speaking unaccented English, they were supposed to be unscarred psychologically, unapologetically American.

***

American Jews had been here before. Three decades before Pollard made headlines, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s arrest, trial, and conviction as Soviet spies for stealing atomic secrets rendered the American Jews’ nightmare scenario in pinkish hues. But in the 1950s, American Jews were greener, more marginal. Julius Rosenberg represented the intellectual, foreign-born, New York Jew as Communist, at a time when Communism was disproportionately popular among Jews.

With the Rosenbergs—as with the Pollards—the rightness of finding them guilty was often confused with the wrongness of their punishment. The zeal with which they were prosecuted, the way Judge Irving Kaufman presided over their trial, and Ethel Rosenberg’s unjust execution along with her husband, all suggested something deeper in both the American Jewish psyche and the larger American political culture. The American legal establishment particularly enjoyed prosecuting these treasonous Jews, while many American Jews leapt to prove their own loyalty—at the Rosenbergs’ expense.

Just as in the Rosenberg case, the judge presiding over Pollard’s sentencing was swayed to render too harsh a punishment—a decision that kicked up new waves of suspicion and anxiety.

In an effort to keep his wife out of prison, Pollard pleaded guilty to one count of espionage. His wife, Anne, then 26, pleaded guilty to the milder charge of illegally possessing classified documents. In return, the prosecutor asked the judge to punish Pollard with a “substantial number of years in prison.” During the sentencing phase, one voice proved damningly influential. In a secret 46-page-pre-sentencing “damage-assessment memorandum” sent to the judge—and an additional four-page memo that was recently declassified—Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger made a fierce argument. “It is difficult … to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel,” wrote Weinberger, before adding—malevolently and unnecessarily—that Pollard’s “loyalty to Israel transcends his loyalty to the United States.”

Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sentenced Jonathan Pollard to life in prison and his wife to five years. (After Anne Henderson-Pollard served three-and-a-half years, she was paroled. Jonathan Pollard divorced her so she could rebuild her life without him.) The sentence was surprisingly harsh. By comparison, in 1987 Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, who’d been seduced by a Soviet agent, became the first Marine ever convicted of espionage. His crimes compromised agents and the American embassy in Moscow. Yet a military court—under Weinberger’s direct authority—sentenced Lonetree to 30 years in prison, and he eventually served nine years. Richard Miller, an FBI agent who spied for the Soviets in the 1980s, served 13 years. Spies for other allies, like Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Egypt, and the Philippines, served anywhere from two to four years, with maximum sentences of 10 years. Pollard’s extreme sentence—along with the continuing refusal to free him–has raised questions about official American anti-Semitism and whether Pollard is enduring harsher punishment for the crime of being an American Jew spying for Israel.

Given that neither Weinberger nor Robinson ever explained their actions, the Pollard case remained shrouded in this noxious mystery. Years later, Weinberger would skip over the case in his memoirs and, when asked about the omission, would dismiss the Pollard case as a “very minor matter.” But it’s clear that his accusation that Pollard committed “treason”—and harmed the nation—had a devastating impact.

In his recent letter, Lawrence Korb suggested that Weinberger, his former boss, had exaggerated the damage Pollard caused and that an anti-Semitic bias distorted the case. From the start, some speculated that Weinberger, who had Jewish grandparents but was a devout Episcopalian, sacrificed Pollard to exorcise his own ancestral demons. There was something about this pudgy, sloppy, unapologetic Jewish spy for Israel that repulsed Weinberger. Weinberger was also one of the Reagan Administration’s leading Israel skeptics. Caught in a power struggle with the pro-Israel Secretary of State George Shultz, Weinberger usually viewed the Jewish state as more albatross than asset.

More benign observers guessed that the secrets Pollard spilled did more damage to U.S. interests than Pollard or the Israelis suggested. Perhaps, some argued, Russian spies secured key codes thanks to Israeli-based KGB agents. Others assumed Pollard received instructions from a higher-level mole who remains unexposed. After Aldrich Ames’ arrest for spying in 1994, some speculated that Weinberger and others may have blamed Pollard for the damage Ames had actually caused, including the deaths of as many as 10 CIA assets. The author John Loftus and others theorized that Ames, who was a top CIA counter-intelligence official, probably pinned his own crimes on Pollard. In 1995, Moment magazine editor Hershel Shanks would quote Loftus quoting naval intelligence “sources” who admitted that “90 percent of the things we accused [Pollard] of stealing, he didn’t even have access to.”

***

After Pollard’s sentencing, New York Times columnist William Safire warned that Pollard encouraged “anti-Semites who charge that Jews everywhere are at best afflicted with dual loyalty and at worst are agents of a vast fifth column.” Issuing a personal declaration of independence from Israel, Safire proclaimed: “American supporters of Israel cannot support wrongdoing here or there. In matters of religion and culture, many of those supporters are American Jews, but in matters affecting national interest and ultimate loyalty, the stonewalling leaders of Israel will learn to think of us as Jewish Americans.”

But one keen observer of American Jewry, the political scientist Daniel Elazar, noticed that it was American Jews—and not their non-Jewish neighbors—who were actually raising the dual-loyalty specter, “apparently in the hope of preventing the issue from surfacing by raising the charge in order to deny it. Even more frequently, it was raised by Jews in the media, most of whom were highly assimilated but still apparently needed to demonstrate their ‘bona fides’ as Americans.” Elazar concluded: “The level of American Jewish insecurity is astounding.”

American Jews still viewed themselves and their community as on probation in the United States, with their ultimate acceptance conditional on good behavior. This pathology would be stated clearly, if unconsciously, years later, by one of the highest-ranking Jews in American history, who served his country nobly as director of naval intelligence from 1978 to 1982 and yanked Pollard’s security clearance—temporarily—years before the spying began. Rear Admiral Sumner Shapiro sounded like a scared yid when discussing Pollard. Annoyed at fringe American Jewish groups that defended Pollard, Shapiro told the Washington Post in 1998: “We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up … and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me.”

All minorities want to celebrate their tribal successes as reflecting the best of their people without being tarred when one of their own acts poorly. And given the torturous history of anti-Semitism, American Jews feel this intensely. We circulate lists of Jewish Nobel prize winners, delighting in each American Jewish success, using Jewish achievements to validate our rich but complex Jewish baggage. And while we reserve the right to cringe when a Bernard Madoff becomes the modern face of the greedy Jew or a Jonathan Pollard becomes the modern face of the traitorous Jew, we also reserve the right to object when our neighbors make similar leaps from the one bad apple to the whole bunch.

Nearly two years after Pollard’s arrest, with the sentencing returning the case to the headlines, the Israeli academic Shlomo Avineri zeroed in on this American Jewish insecurity—and inconsistency. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, first condemning Pollard as a traitor and his own government as clumsy, Avineri mocked the “nervousness, insecurity, and even cringing” of American Jews. Playing the role of the abrasive Israeli—or biblical prophet—Avineri wrote: “Today, American Jewish leaders by their protestations of over-zealous loyalty to the United States at a moment when no one is really questioning it, are saying that America in the long run is no different from France and Germany. When you have to over-identify, there is no other proof needed that you think that your non-Jewish neighbors are looking askance at your Americanism. You are condemned by your own protestations of loyalty and flag-waving.” At a time when Israel’s actions made it unpopular with many American Jews, Avineri’s aggressively Zionist analysis only exacerbated tensions.

***

The controversy–and speculation–peaked during the Wye River negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in October 1998. Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first round as Israel’s prime minister, lobbied hard for Pollard’s release. President Bill Clinton seemed set to free him as a sweetener to Israel until the CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign. Such power politicking against a spy who had been imprisoned for over a decade reinforced both camps’ speculation. Those who fear anti-Semitism say this irrational move reflects a deep aversion in the WASP-iest bastions of the American government. Those who believe Pollard did more damage than we know insist that the usually mild-mannered Tenet had a good reason to be so rigid.

To Israeli settlers, Pollard’s case symbolizes the anti-Semitism of even benign non-Jewish polities such as the United States and the weak-kneed appeasement policies of successive Israeli governments, which have failed to free Pollard. The most popular pro-Pollard bumper sticker in Israel simply appeals for Pollard to come home “haBaytah,” but a few years ago one poster challenged: “BUSH: FREE YOUR CAPTIVE.” This poster not only targeted a good friend of Israel’s, George W. Bush, but it pictured Pollard with the young Israeli Hamas is holding, Gilad Shalit. The implicit comparisons, between the innocent Shalit and the guilty Pollard, as well as between the democratic United States and the terrorist-state Hamas, were offensive. While the right’s support has sustained Pollard emotionally, it may have made his get-out-of-jail card even harder to get. The Israeli right is unpopular with both the American Jewish community and the American political establishment, making Pollard even more unappealing.

***

However unappealing he may be, the time has come to free Jonathan Pollard—not as some sop to Israelis but as a matter of justice. Holding an individual hostage to the vagaries of the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process is cruel and unusual punishment. The Pollard case has become a question of justice, American-style, unrelated to American-Israeli relations. And justice when applied too zealously becomes unjust. For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil-rights organizations have taught that we take up certain criminals’ cases not because we like the criminals or excuse their crimes but because, at a certain point, it becomes the right thing to do.

Imagine another case in which an accused man served a disproportionately long sentence after being tried in a court where direct pressure was applied by the secretary of Defense for reasons that may well have been mistaken or personally motivated. If there was another such case, one imagines that it would attract lots of attention from the ACLU and other groups concerned with the civil liberties of Americans. So why are they silent? More to the point, why are we silent?

If the Pollard case represents the worst of American anti-Semitism, then, by historic standards, anti-Semitism American style is mild indeed. Still, that American Jews, despite their long record of defending the underdog, still hestitate to champion Pollard’s release now, suggests that we—like Jonathan Pollard—remain victims of the “astounding” insecurity Elazar witnessed two decades ago.

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of six books on American history and Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.

• Former President Clinton marks the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s death with a call for peace. [NYT]

• Israeli killed a Gaza militant planning an attack in the Sinai Peninsula. [LAT]

• In an Arabic-language paper, President Abbas blamed Iran for trying to sabotage peace, and said he may request an imposed American draft plan. [Haaretz]

• Opposition Kadima members and Netanyahu went at it in debate. [JPost]

• Lebanon’s reputation as a beacon of free speech has been threatened by various Internet restrictions. [NYT]

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.

• The Mideast peace process needs some new personnel, U.S. officials believe. Common names include former ambassador Martin Indyk and Bill Clinton. [Laura Rozen]

• The administration and other Western powers are trying to kick-start Iran negotiations based on the earlier fuel swap deal. [WSJ]

• According to a German university’s report, Nazi diplomats were much more complicit in the Holocaust than was believed. [AP/NYT]

• Ameer Makhoul, the Israeli Arab community leader, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to assist an enemy, contact with a foreign agent, and espionage as part of a deal for allegations that he spied for Hezbollah. [Haaretz]

• Settler advocates accused the government of instituting a “silent freeze” on construction. [JPost]

• Top Jewish Democrats denied that J Street had anything to do with their meetings with Richard Goldstone last year. [JTA]

• Several West Bank rabbis presented 20 new Qurans to replace those damaged after yesterday’s mosque arson. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Speaking with Egyptian President Mubarak, President Clinton linked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to motivating terrorism around the world. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Greed, Lawrence Schiffman, Raphael Golb, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. [GreedWatcher]

• On the Jewishness of Dr. Faye Miller, Don Draper’s latest paramour on Mad Men. [XX Factor]

Last night, Jon Stewart was magnanimous in his treatment of Rick Sanchez (who called to apologize).

• Elif Batuman examines what is to become of Franz Kafka’s papers? [NYT Magazine]

• A private Israeli security guard shot a Palestinian dead in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Clashes have since ensued. Gulp. [LAT]

• Russia is nixing the planned sale of sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to Iran in deference to the U.N. sanctions. [JPost]

• J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami calls on Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend the freeze (and J Street is running a whole bunch of print ads backing him up). [JTA]

• American Jews’ outsize political influence runs headlong into disproportionately un-Jewish Iowa’s outsize political influence. [Jewish Week]

• Yesterday, former President Clinton fingered not only settlements but also Russian immigrants in Israel as obstacles to peace. [Foreign Policy]

• Harold Bloom on Isaac Bashevis Singer. [NYRB]

• President Abdullah Gul talks Turkey … and Israel and Iran. [WP]

• Matt Duss compares what Helen Thomas and Martin Peretz said, and contrasts their fates. [Boston Globe]

• A profile of JDub Records artist Clare Burson, whose new album is Holocaust-inspired. [NYT]

• Barry Gewen situates the Park51 controversy in the broader American historical context. [Entanglements]

• Support the (Jewish) troops! While there are plenty of military rabbis, there is a severe shortage of Torahs. [Arutz Sheva/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Israeli know-how + Chinese manufacturing = a lot of money for one Israeli private-equity fund (maybe). [WSJ]

• Fascinating first-person essay from a Jewish U.S. Marine. Reminded me of “Defender of the Faith”. [Commentary]

• A Serious Man lead Michael Stuhlbarg plays Arnold Rothstein in HBO’s new Boardwalk Empire. [Jewish Journal]

• In the midst of his usual grandiose rhetoric, President Ahmadinejad, also in New York (it’s U.N. General Assembly week), predicted that talks over Iran’s nuclear program would soon resume. [LAT]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to put any Palestinian peace deal up to a referendum. [WSJ]

• The assassination of a West Bank Hamas operative has raised questions about the extent of Palestinian Authority cooperation with Israel. [WP]

• In New York, Secretary of State Clinton tried to coax Arab nations to offer more financial support to the P.A. and more general support to the talks (even as her husband gave the talks an optimistic 50 percent chance). [WP]

• Some excellent reporting on how American Jews are actively helping to sponsor Israeli settlements, including those not right near the Green Line—in this case, L.A. Jews and the town of Ariel. [Jewish Journal]

Ponet, a Reform rabbi, has been Yale’s Jewish chaplain for nearly 30 years. (Fun fact! He co-teaches a class, “The Family in the Jewish Tradition,” with none other than Dr. Ruth Westheimer.) Shmuel Rosner finds, in something Ponet once penned about Hanukkah, the basis for a philosophy that seems to condones intermarriage. Wrote Ponet:

Hanukkah implicitly celebrates … the capacity to sustain intimate relations with another without totally ceding your own sense of self, the ability to love without permanently merging, to be enchanted by the exquisite beauty of another without losing sight of your own charms.

And at the Forward’s Sisterhood blog, Allison Kaplan Sommer praises Ponet, who in the case of her own marriage juggled familial backgrounds (New England Reform and Jerusalem Orthodox) nearly as disparate as those of the Clintons and the Mezvinskys.

Mezvinsky’s father was brought up Orthodox, his mother Reform; he was raised Conservative.

Chelsea Clinton Marries Marc Mezvinsky in Rhinebeck, N.Y. [WP]
The Clinton Wedding and the Lesson of Hanukkah [Rosner’s Domain]
In Praise of the Rabbi Who Married Chelsea Clinton [Sisterhood]

• Staten Island’s Democratic congressman fired his communications director for leaking a list of his midterm opponent’s Jewish donors under the title, “Grimm Jewish Money Q2” (“Grimm” is the opponent’s unfortunate last name). [Politico]

• A tour of Ariel Sharon Park, a remarkable, state-of-the-art waste-management facility in Tel Aviv. [Slate]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Benny Morris discusses what is open (and what isn’t) in the Israeli archives. [Chronicle of Higher Ed.]

• Renowned NBA blogger Bethlehem Shoals (née Nathaniel Friedman) plumbs Amar’e Stoudemire’s purportedly Jewish background, and finds murky evidence both ways, and nothing dispositive. [Fanhouse]

• The FBI had been keeping a file on Howard Zinn for six decades. [FBI]

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) brings it.

By the way, given who officiated his wedding, I think it’s safe to say that Weiner will be in Rhinebeck this weekend congratulating the happy couple. We weren’t invited, but we wish them mazel tov anyway.

Chelsea Clinton’s wedding is this weekend, and gossips the world over will be gawking at the famous guests. We at A Yidisher Pop are no different. This week’s installment, then, is dedicated to the Wedding of the Year; what, we wonder, might each of the event’s famous guests bring the young couple as a gift?

אָפּראַ זאָגט אַלע געלאַדענע חתונה געסט: “קוּקט אונטער אייַערע געזעסן… דער לעצטער מאָדעל אויטאָ!!!”

Transliteration: Opra zogt ale geladene khasene gest: “kukt unter ayere gezesn… der letster model oyto!!!”

Meaning: Oprah tells the wedding guests: “Look under your seats… It’s a brand new car!!!”

פּרעזידענט אָבאַמאַ שענקט אַ צוויי וואָכעדיקע חתונה-נסיעה מיט אַ שיפֿל אין דעם מעקסיקאַנער גאָלף.

Transliteration: Prezident Obama shenkt a tsvey vokhedike khasene-nesie mit a shifl in dem meksikaner golf.

Meaning: President Obama gives a two-week honeymoon on a small boat in the Gulf of Mexico.

טעד טערנער גיט אַוועק לאַרי קינגס מעמוּאַר, “ווי באַנייַט מען אַ ווייַב: ליב האָבן אוּן צוּזאָגן קאָסט ניט (קייַן סַך) געלט.”

Transliteration: Ted Terner git avek Lari Kings memuar, “vi banayt men a vayb:  lib hobn un tsuzogn kost nit (kayn sakh) gelt.”

Meaning: Ted Turner brings Larry King’s memoir, “How to renew your wife: Love and promises shouldn’t cost you (too much) money.”

באַרבראַ סטרייַסאַנד לאַד אַלעמען אייַן צוּ איר לעצטן, לעצטן, לעצטן — באמת איר לעצטן — קאָנצערט.

Transliteration: Barbra Straisand lad alemen ayn tsu ir letstn, letstn, letstn — be’emes ir letstn — kontsert.

Meaning: Barbra Streisand invites everybody to her last, last, last — really her last — concert.

Future and Past tense, and good wishes to the couple!

The future tense in Yiddish is built with the verb Veln וועלן + the infinitive. For example, if we were invited to Chelsea’s wedding (it’s not too late!), then:

איך וועל עסן — I will eat
דוּ וועסט טרינקען — You will drink
ער וועט לייענען די כתובה — He will read the Ketubah
מיר וועלן זינגען — We will sing
איר וועט דאַווענען — You will pray
זיי וועלן זיך אַרוּמנעמען – They will hug

The past tense is constructed with one of two auxiliary verbs, conjugated in the present tense: Hobn האָבן , to have, or Zayn זייַן, to  be, + past participle. Verbs that take Zayn are mostly motion verbs (to go, to travel); most of the rest take Hobn. The past participle of verbs often requires the prefix Ge גע. For example:

איך האָב געשיקט אַ ליבעסבריוו – I sent a love letter
דוּ האָסט עס באַקוּמען – You got it
ער האָט עס געפֿוּנען – He found it
זי האָט אים געקוּשט – She kissed him
מיר האָבן געוווּסט – We knew it
איר האָט עס איבערגעלייענט – You read it through
זיי האָבן חתונה געהאַט – They got married

איך בין געפֿאָרן צוּ דער חתונה – I traveled to the wedding
דוּ ביסט געלאָפֿן מיט שמחה – You ran happily
ער איז געבליבן פֿאַרחלומט – He remained dreamy
זי איז געווען גליקלעך – She was very happy
מיר זייַנען געגאַנגען צוּזאַמען – We walked together
איר זייַט געשטאַנען בייַ דער חופה – You were standing by the Chupah
זיי זייַנען אַלע געווען פֿריילעך – They were all very happy

So even though we’re probably not going to get an invite from the Clintons, here’s our bit of advice for the newlyweds:

אַז איר קריגט זיך, קריגט זיך אַזוי אַז איר זאָלט זיך קענען איבערבעטן

Az ir krigt zikh, krigt zikh azoy az ir zolt zikh kenen iberbetn

When you fight, fight in a way that lets you make up.

Mazl tov!

At one point in my recent interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, I ask him why his mentor David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, in choosing among many promising young men of his circle, selected Peres as his aide. Perhaps motivated by modesty, the 87-year-old Peres doesn’t offer a clear explanation. But without doubt, the “old man,” as Ben-Gurion was often called, had spotted the youngster’s oratorical and intellectual brilliance, which has entranced world leaders, though not always the Israeli public.

At home, Peres’ persona was shrouded for decades in a pall of popular distrust. He lacked credibility among many Israelis—which explains, in part, his inability to win general and internal Labor Party elections. Rabin repeatedly beat him, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in contests for the Labor leadership. One result of the bad blood between the two was that Rabin called Peres an “indefatigable underminer” (hatran bilti nil’eh), a description Peres thought unjustified. But the charge stuck and thereafter shadowed his political career. Though the two men apparently worked well together during Rabin’s second premiership, in 1992-1995, when Peres served as foreign minister, Peres proved unable to shake off their troubled history. Rabin’s martyrdom reinforced what he had left behind as his legacy. Peres eventually, only on his second try, won the presidency—not by popular majority but by Knesset vote.

How deeply he believes in his oft-proclaimed vision of a “new Middle East” after a decade of disappointment and terror is anyone’s guess. The hard core of “Mr. Security” surely remains: Hamas rocketeers and Turkish “peace flotillas,” and, possibly, Iranian nuclear madmen need to be forcibly contained and faced down. Beneath his polished, world-weary exterior, he is still the ex-defense minister who believes that for a stable Israel, security concerns must take the highest priority and that any chance of peace is ultimately contingent on Israel’s strength, and he seems to carry considerable clout as adviser and elder statesman with the current brood of politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his repeated failures to win election as prime minister, Peres is now a highly popular president, distanced from the daily toil of politics in the largely ceremonial head-of-state role, with a steady 78 percent public approval rating.

I interview Peres in his office, seated around a coffee table. He wears a suit and tie, about which he complains (“I meet diplomats all day”). His media adviser, Ayelet Frish, and her assistant sit with us throughout the two interviews, which were conducted in the Presidential Mansion in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh quarter in early July and lasted for approximately 80 minutes each. Ayelet occasionally interjects, “That’s off the record,” when she feels her boss has said something excessively revealing. I’m not sure he remembers that I had interviewed him in the past, when I worked at the Jerusalem Post in the 1980s and he was Israel’s foreign minister. I can clearly picture a briefing he gave to journalists accompanying him to Alexandria, where he was to visit Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Peres had sat in an armchair in the center of his hotel room, and the journalists were draped over assorted chairs or seated on the carpet. I remember that he was brilliant. A quarter of a century on, he appears more tired, his voice weaker; perhaps altogether not quite as sharp.

I ask him about the 1948 war, in which some 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of the area that became the Jewish state. (Over the past three decades, I have written extensively about the war, devoting three books to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-1949. Peres, as far as I know, has never publicly commented on my books—though I have sensed, over the years, a certain displeasure on his part with my findings, which many viewed as critical of Israel and Ben-Gurion.)

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter from him praising a highly critical review I had written of a book by an anti-Israeli British historian. (At the start of our first interview earlier this month, Peres commented on my recent book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, saying it highlighted for him the failings of personal memory. But he did not elaborate.) The war ended with Israel having an Arab minority of some 160,000, representing 15-20 percent of its citizenry. Today, Israel’s Arab minority, 1.3 million strong, identify themselves as Palestinians, occasionally riot, and support Israel’s enemies during bouts of hostilities (as when Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008-2009).

Morris: Perhaps ending the 1948 war with this demographic was a mistake?

Peres: No, moral considerations took priority over demographic considerations. Ben-Gurion knew that every war and conflict takes place twice—once on the battlefield and then in the history books. He didn’t want things to be written in the history books that were in dissonance with the foundations of Judaism. He really believed that without a moral priority there is no existence for the Jewish people. To expel he saw as contrary to his moral values.

But in 1948 he sometimes gave orders to expel.

He did not give orders to expel.

I suggest that Ben-Gurion did in fact give such orders, as when, on July 12, 1948, he authorized the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Peres shakes his head. “I remember sitting in the room, when the matter of the expulsion of the Arabs from Haifa began, when Ben-Gurion telephoned [Labor Party strongman, later Haifa mayor] Abba Khoushi and told him to do all he could to get the Arabs to stay [in Haifa]. I heard this myself. I was there.” (It is worth noting that the Arabs of Haifa were not expelled but fled the city at the end of April 1948, due in part to a decision of the local Arab leadership.)

Next: The first decade of the Jewish state

The biggest names, of course, are President Obama and the First Lady. But also count on Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand (presumably with hubby James Brolin—he is such a rock), Kate Capshaw and Steven Speilberg, Harold Ickes, Terry McAuliffe (he is basically Bill Clinton’s manservant at this point), former British Prime Minister John Major (what, no Blair?), Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ted Turner, and Denise Rich (ex-wife of Marc, the prominent Jewish philanthropist whom the bride’s father notoriously pardoned in 2001).

This is one day on which the Hudson Valley won’t be such a Sleepy Hollow!

(Boy, writing in the US Weekly style is tougher than it looks. My respect to them.)

(And, no, still no word on whether she’s converting.)

Obama and Oprah Expected To Be At Clinton Wedding [Hudson Valley News]

• A “humanitarian” ship organized by Muammar Qaddafi’s son will depart Greece for Gaza tomorrow. [JTA]

• Yehuda Amital, a formidable leader in the religious Zionist movement, died at 85. [JPost]

• The University of California is taking criticism for too weakly responding to and condemning anti-Semitism on its campuses. [LAT]

• Ernest Nussbaum, an 82-year-old resident of Bethesda, Maryland, has invented a new instrument: The Prakticello (it’s a lot like a cello). [All Things Considered]

• Peaceniks for Gilad. [Dissent]

Today is the 15th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s final show, at Chicago’s Soldier Field, before lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died. Below: “Sugar Magnolia,” the favorite song of the group’s longtime promoter, Bill Graham (born Wolodia Grajonca to a Russian-Jewish family that narrowly escaped Berlin).

“After six Israeli prime ministers and three U.S. presidents failed at the peace process,” Gold says, “you’d think people would stop and say, ‘Let’s think about this, maybe a reassessment is needed.’ ” Instead, he continues, the default reaction is to pick up the shattered relics of Oslo, an approach that tends to ignore the Second Intifada and what he has noted was a 500-percent increase in rocket attacks from Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. “In think-tank circles it’s said that we all know what the final settlement looks like,” he says. “But this is binding Israel to a legacy of failed negotiations. If you do that, no one would ever negotiate. What if Medvedev met with Obama and said, ‘Let’s pick up where Reagan left off at Reykjavik?’ ”

The sticking point is that Washington sees a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli agreement as a vital U.S. interest to ensure an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the White House has been willing to beat up on Netanyahu over settlements in Jerusalem even as Obama seems to be hemorrhaging Jewish political support—and fund-raising—with a midterm election only four months away.

While Gold no longer works for the Israeli government, in his post as president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs he is widely held in Israeli and U.S. circles alike to be close to Netanyahu and his senior staff. “Since I left government service,” says the 56-year-old former academic, “I have been obsessed with the need for Israel to articulate in the public discourse its security requirements in the West Bank.” Netanyahu asked Gold in 1997 to accompany him to the Map Room in the basement of the White House for an intimate meeting with President Bill Clinton and one other official in which the IDF’s concept of defensible borders was laid out to the United States.

While the Palestinians’ political demands are clear (a contiguous state, a capital in Jerusalem), the Israeli side, as Gold wrote in Tablet Magazine last week, “has been far more vague,” dwelling in abstractions like peace and security without clearly articulating what that entails. The project that Gold is now pushing in Washington is meant to fill that vacuum. “Israelis have taken lots of risks for peace,” says Gold. “They should not be in a diplomatic testing ground again.”

The book Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace is a collection published this year under the auspices of the JCPA with essays about security and diplomacy by leading figures in Israel’s security establishment, like Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, former head of IDF intelligence, and Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan, former IDF deputy chief of staff and a former national security adviser to Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. The volume’s findings represent a broad consensus across the Israeli political spectrum, and the fact that Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon—former IDF chief of staff and currently the vice prime minister—wrote the introduction is evidence that the ideas have won approval at the highest political levels.

The book pushes three common ideas, some likely to add to the friction between Washington and Jerusalem: First, Israel, must not withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines; second, Israel needs defensible borders; third, Israel must rely on itself to defend itself and not on foreign forces as proposed by U.S. national security adviser Gen. James Jones, who has talked openly about replacing the IDF with international forces in the West Bank.

The insistence that Israel must retain the ability to defend its own borders—a basic attribute of national sovereignty—is the least controversial element of Gold’s blueprint. The issue is not merely the inglorious record of U.N. peacekeeping forces—from Sinai to Bosnia and Lebanon—but also the fact that the international community rarely sends its blue helmets into the middle of a real shooting war, which is what the West Bank would become if an IDF withdrawal left Hamas and Fatah at each other’s throats and eager to gain credit for launching terror attacks on Israel.

The concept of defensible borders is closely tied to the drawing of 1949 armistice lines, commonly and incorrectly known as the 1967 borders. As Gold explains in his contribution to the volume, successive U.S. administrations since Lyndon Johnson’s have all recognized the danger in Israel withdrawing to those borders. George Shultz, one of President Ronald Reagan’s secretaries of State, explained that “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders,” and the Clinton Administration reaffirmed the Reagan White House’s concept of defensible borders. However, it was during Clinton’s Camp David negotiations that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak abandoned the idea of defensible borders in the hope of a radical breakthrough with Yasser Arafat. With the outbreak of the Second Intifada and peace nowhere in the offing, the George W. Bush Administration pledged not to hold the Israelis to the Clinton parameters and returned to the traditional U.S. position. “It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” reads an April 14, 2004 letter from Bush to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Gold, who was not officially in the Sharon government, was nonetheless employed in a number of missions and prepared Sharon’s presentation to Bush on the significance of defensible borders during their first meeting, in 2001. Gold sat in the Roosevelt Room as Sharon entered the Oval Office with the index cards Gold had written. “Years later, when Sharon completed negotiations over the Bush letter in 2004,” says Gold, “he instructed his team in Washington to call me in Jerusalem to say we got defensible borders into the letter.”

Even as the Bush letter applied regardless of who sat in the White House (it won wide bipartisan approval in the House and Senate, with both Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel voting in favor), the Obama Administration has not yet clearly signaled if it intends to accept the commitments of its predecessor. Insofar as Israel sees the letter as “the foundation for the United States to accept new construction in the Jewish settlements that encircle Jerusalem,” it is yet another source of contention between Netanyahu and Obama.

Perhaps even more daunting is the prospect of any Israeli government having to explain to the Obama White House that many of the land swaps from Camp David are not plausible in the context of defensible borders. In other words, everyone in Washington who believes that they know what Israel’s vision of a final settlement looks like is in for a surprise. Israel will have to retain security control over the Jordan rift valley, which means not just the river bank but the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. It is important to remember that the West Bank overlooks Israel’s coastal plain and 70 percent of the country’s population. If the Hamas rockets fired from Gaza were launched from the West Bank on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it could bring Israel to its knees, disrupting the country’s economic and social life on a massive scale and shutting down Ben Gurion Airport. Moreover, Islamist militants from all around the region would attempt to transit through Jordan into the West Bank to launch attacks against the Zionist entity, destabilizing the Hashemite Kingdom.

“The concepts in this book are very close to last Knesset speech of Rabin, given thirty days before he was assassinated,” says Gold. The rhetorical point is clear enough: For all the nostalgia in the United States for a visionary statesman like Rabin, a warrior and also a man of peace, he also articulated most clearly Israel’s need for defensible borders and said nothing about land swaps. If those ideas have been lost in the last 20 years, the Israelis are also to blame. “A lot of Israel’s biggest mistakes is that Israeli diplomats put forward plans and pushed it back to the military,” says Gold. “For instance, Oslo began with two academics, and later representatives of the Foreign Ministry came in. When it became official, that’s when the army came in, at the end. I strongly believe we have to reverse the sequence—to lay out Israel’s security needs and then come out with diplomatic process to protect them.”

There is no going back to Oslo, no matter what the Obama Administration believes or hopes. Perhaps the only thing saving Netanyahu from having to fight with a U.S. president and thereby unnerve the Israeli electorate is the incompetence of the White House. Had Obama not pushed Netanyahu so hard on settlements, twice, he wouldn’t have pushed Mahmoud Abbas into a corner where it was impossible for the Palestinian president to be less intransigent than the United States, thus freezing the diplomatic process.

The paradox of the U.S. president’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause and lack of sympathy for Israeli territorial and security claims is that he has managed to fulfill the dreams of hard-liners on both sides and turn back the clock 20 years to before the ill-fated Oslo process even began. For the first time in two decades, the Palestinians and Israelis are not in direct negotiations. A final Palestinian-Israeli agreement couldn’t be further away, which means that Netanyahu can smile for the cameras and shake the president’s hand and breathe easily, now that he doesn’t have to explain that a peace deal, if it happens, won’t look like what everyone in Washington thinks it will.

Wexler, who arrived late, stood by himself through the hourlong presentation, leaning against a wall near the back of the room with his soft black leather Dell briefcase between his feet. At 49, he was at least a decade younger than most of the other men in attendance, though he sports similarly silvered hair, and he kept his hand pensively over his chin for much of the talk. Dayan expressed his opposition to the current U.S. effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations using 1967 borders as the basis for a future Palestinian state. During the question-and-answer session, Wexler raised his hand and asked, pointedly, “General Dayan, how could it be in any respect a smart strategy to treat in this fashion your most important ally?” Dayan looked surprised. “Rabbi Wexler,” he began, before someone at the front corrected him. “I’m not challenging the White House or the so-important friendship with the United States,” Dayan said. “I’m challenging how important borders are.”

Wexler may have been unfamiliar to the general, but others in the room knew exactly who he was. In his six months as president of Abraham’s Center for Middle East Peace, Wexler has adopted an unofficial role as ambassador to the organized American Jewish community. As a congressman, he managed to retain support from both J Street, the dovish two-year-old Israel lobby, and the more conservative AIPAC, which commended him earlier this year as “one of the stalwart leaders of the American-Israel alliance in Congress.” After last week’s luncheon, hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Wexler stayed behind for a quiet tête-à-tête with the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first premiership a decade ago, and who addressed the lunch gathering along with Dayan.

In March 2007, Wexler endorsed Barack Obama, breaking not just with other Jewish Democrats in South Florida but with his own long history as an early and fervent supporter of the Clintons, starting in 1992. Today, he is frequently mentioned as a potential ambassador to Israel—a position currently filled by James Cunningham, a career diplomat who went to Tel Aviv in the waning days of the George W. Bush Administration. “It’s a position he could have at the snap of his fingers,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who served under President Bill Clinton as a special envoy for Holocaust-era claims and is a special State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton on Holocaust issues. “He could do a world of good for the administration, because at the end of the day [the Israelis] have to have trust in the American administration, and there is no one better placed than Bob to make that argument.”

The visit to New York followed a high-profile dinner Wexler and Abraham hosted at Washington’s Newseum for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to Washington in early June. The guest list included the billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman and Lee Rosenberg, an Obama supporter who is currently the president of AIPAC, along with political heavyweights like Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, and Stephen Hadley, who held the job under George W. Bush, and his former deputy, Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle Eastern affairs under Bush. The center Wexler runs is “a meeting spot where people from all segments of the community can come together and hear reasonable points of view,” said J Street President Jeremy Ben Ami, who was also at the event.

Publicly, Wexler is probably best known for his 2006 appearance on Comedy Central’s satire show The Colbert Report, on which Stephen Colbert coaxed him into repeating the sentence: “I enjoy cocaine because it’s fun to do.” Wexler spent a dozen years representing Boca Raton, one of the most Jewish and most reliably Democratic districts in the House of Representatives. As a member of the influential Foreign Affairs committee, he was particularly active in establishing a congressional caucus on U.S.-Turkish relations and went out of his way to travel to places like Saudi Arabia and Syria, where, according to an account in Wexler’s autobiography, Fire-Breathing Liberal, President Bashar al-Assad gave him messages to carry to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Serving in government is an extraordinary honor, whether it’s in Congress or in any other capacity, but there are other ways to participate in a meaningful way as well,” Wexler said in an interview in late June. We were in his Washington office, on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the colonnaded Navy Memorial plaza along Pennsylvania Ave., where he keeps the bronze plaque from the entrance to his old House office leaning against the windowsill. Framed photographs of him posing with various leaders—Netanyahu, Sharon, Obama, King Abdullah—compete for space with framed newspaper clippings from his Florida political career.

Wexler, who was in shirtsleeves, favors blue ties that match his eyes and tends to rap his fingertips on tabletops when he is particularly emphatic about a point he’s making. He refused to say whether he had been offered the ambassadorship, formally or informally. (The White House declined to comment for this story.) But Wexler has publicly, and repeatedly, said his decision to leave Congress was motivated in part by financial concerns—he has three teenage children—and acquaintances speculate that his hesitance about returning to government service, even as an ambassador, stems from the same pressures. (Members of Congress are paid $174,000 annually; Wexler declined to disclose his current salary, which is not reflected in the Center’s most recent financial filings.) Over the years, Wexler explained, “Danny would joke with me and ask when I was going to leave Congress and get a real job.” The jibe turned into a real prospect after Obama’s election invigorated Abraham about the prospects for reaching a peace agreement—an irony, he added, since Abraham, a longtime supporter of the Clintons, had initially been sharply critical of his decision to back Obama. Now he shuttles around on extra-diplomatic excursions—Israel and the West Bank, Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan—aboard Abraham’s private jet.

Abraham, an 85-year-old World War II veteran, founded the Center for Middle East Peace in 1989, with Wayne Owens, a Democratic congressman from Utah who had served on the foreign affairs and intelligence committees, at its helm. Together, the pair met with Yasser Arafat in 1989, in Tunisia, then an extraordinary step, and went on to cultivate relationships with leaders across the Middle East. “They would come see us and the national security adviser and occasionally the president to brief us on meetings they’d had with various Israeli and Arab leaders and give us ideas,” said Robert Malley, who served on the staff of the National Security Council and as a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton Administration. He recalled that Abraham had called the White House from Israel with both Ehud Barak and Arafat on the line after the failure of negotiations at Camp David. Of Abraham’s center, Malley said, “It’s not going to change history, but in his position you can’t hope to do more than that—he has access and he can bring people together.”

Owens died unexpectedly in December 2002 after having a heart attack on the beach in Tel Aviv during a trip with Abraham, who subsequently wound down the center’s $14 million operation. Owens was deeply beloved in official Washington, but as a Mormon, he never had Wexler’s entree into the official world of American Jewry. Wexler, a Queens native who grew up in South Florida, where his father owned a deli, made his first trip to Israel on his honeymoon, after his wife, Laurie, said she didn’t like the idea of marrying someone who hadn’t been to the Jewish state. He was elected to Congress in 1996 after six years in the Florida State Senate and was drafted onto the Foreign Affairs committee by Lee Hamilton, a veteran Democratic congressman from Indiana who subsequently served on the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. “He was a natural,” says Hamilton, who is currently president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “He’s always been very close to the Jewish community and a very strong advocate for the Democratic Party, and I think he’s played a hugely important role in bridging the gaps that sometimes arise between the two.”

Now Wexler’s task is not just to maintain open channels among the Americans, Israelis, and Arabs—it’s to continue applying additional glue to the relationship between the Obama Administration and the American Jewish community. “My understanding with Danny was that I had only one red line, or only one rule, and that is that we would work in coordination and consistent with the Obama Administration,” Wexler said. “I believe the course that President Obama is pursuing is compelling in terms of what is in the best interests of the state of Israel.” He echoed recent administration talking points about the closeness of the U.S.-Israeli military and intelligence relationships and added another example to counter claims of anything like a rift between Washington and Jerusalem: phone calls made by George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, to voting countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this spring encouraging them to accept Israel as a member.

None of that, though, speaks to the fundamental anxiety increasingly pervasive in some Jewish quarters about where the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is heading. Last week, Wexler met with Ehud Barak during the Israeli defense minister’s visit to Washington; he has extended an invitation to host a gathering for Netanyahu when the prime minister is scheduled to be in town next week. But, like everyone, Wexler is looking ahead to the expiration of the settlement-construction freeze in September, and like everyone, he can’t predict whether or not the current proximity talks will lead to a resumption of direct, Camp David-style negotiations. “The plan is to create the dynamic in which the Israelis and the Palestinians can engage in direct negotiations. That’s the plan. It’s tedious, it’s painful, and for every two steps forward there’s one step back, but that’s the plan,” Wexler told me. He deflected the question of whether he anticipated a grand proposal from the Obama Administration, in the event that the proximity talks fail to progress. “I don’t think it makes any sense to foreshadow what might happen four months from now, or five months from now, should there not be direct negotiations,” he said. “Because I am confident and hopeful there will be.”

That optimism is a hallmark of the style Abraham and Owens established two decades ago, during the hopeful era of the Oslo accords. “They had more fire and determination than anyone else on the block,” Malley said. “And Wexler shares this attitude of, ‘We have a vision, it makes sense.’ ” Obama’s election revived Abraham’s resolve to fight for the establishment of a two-state deal, Wexler said. “I think he felt that coming off the eight years of the Bush Administration, because of the Intifada and because of the two wars, the opportunity for negotiating a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and an end to conflict was so remote, that the next two or three years were the best last opportunity for a two-state solution.”

Wexler said that Abbas, at the Newseum dinner, warned about the increasingly vocal campaign among Palestinians against continuing to pursue the two-state model. “People need to understand that while the two-state solution may seem difficult to attain—it’s riddled with uncertainty, it’s riddled with risks and painful compromises—but the alternative is not paradise. It’s not some golden status quo,” Wexler went on. “The alternative is the one-state solution, and the one-state solution will amount to a state that is no longer Jewish. And I for one am not for that.”

The main story is that Clinton, for all his friendliness with the Obama administration, is going against its strongly preferred candidate, Bennet. But The Scroll is interested because this race features two candidates who are both Jewish, albeit in subtly different ways.

Romanoff identifies as Jewish on his Facebook page. By contrast, Bennet—the brother of James Bennet, who is the current Atlantic editor and former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief—has a Christian father and says he was “raised with two different heritages.” His mother’s side, however, possesses that ultimate token of contemporary Jewish authenticity: His grandparents survived the Warsaw Ghetto.

A spokesperson for the National Jewish Democratic Council told me this morning that her group does not endorse candidates before general elections. “We’re always excited to see Jewish Democrats running for office, but we don’t take a position in any primary,” she said.

Relatedly, in today’s New York Times Matt Bai published an interesting essay on the post-Obama decline of ethnic appeals in politics. “Ethnic politics haven’t vanished, by any means,” Bai reports.

But for others in the new generation of immigrants’ children, the political calculus can be different. Minority candidates who now contemplate winning statewide or in mostly white districts are more apt to emphasize their cultural commonality than they are to recount origins that might seem alien or divisive.

So while Mr. Obama wrote a book about his racial identity before entering politics, he spoke expansively about it only once during his campaign. And even then, his speech in Philadelphia, in response to incendiary remarks made by his pastor, was more an exploration of racial attitudes than it was a personal revelation.

As president, were he to make light of African-American stereotypes or discourse on the black experience, it would probably be so jarring as to inspire a week’s worth of cable-TV clamor and dissection. (The one time he ventured even close to this territory, criticizing the police for arresting the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., it overtook his health care agenda for days.)

This shift away from discussing race and ethnicity is not only strategic but also generational, the natural outgrowth of what younger Americans know as political correctness.

Clinton-Obama: The Back Story [Politico]
Ethnic Distinctions, No Longer So Distinctive [NYT]

Two of those emails contain the subject line, “Re: Two G-rated Jewish jokes.” But the content of the emails has been lost, making this the most compelling White House lacuna since the 18-and-a-half minutes.

So, readers, we put it to you! What do you think the two G-rated Jewish jokes were? Remember to keep it clean: They need to be okay for listeners under the age of 13.

While the Institute produces sober analyses on a host of regional concerns from Turkey to the Persian Gulf, it is best known as the home away from home of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is no surprise that the hottest topic of conversation at this family gathering is the seeming apostasy of everyone’s favorite uncle, Aaron David Miller. A former high-ranking State Department official who helped inaugurate the peace process in 1988 as an aide to Secretary of State James Baker and continued to knock Israeli and Arab heads together under President Bill Clinton, Miller just announced in a cover story in the new Foreign Policy that he no longer believes in the peace process. Recalling the hopefulness of the early 1990s and the Oslo process, Miller writes: “America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I’d become a believer. I’m not anymore.”

Most people in the room don’t know what to make of Miller’s apparent about-face on the single issue that has united the major institutional players in the American Jewish community’s foreign policy establishment from the Washington Institute to American Israel Public Affairs Committee for the past two decades. Combined with the recent vitriolic public attacks on Obama adviser Dennis Ross from outside and within the Administration for his supposed “dual loyalties” and insufficient dedication to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which Ross oversaw under President Bill Clinton, Miller’s article suggests that a watershed moment has been reached in the history of the peace process, which once served to show how American Jews could serve their country while also helping to bring peace to Israel. It has become a dead letter—or, at worst, a wedge to pry Jews out of decision-making positions in the U.S. government and suggest that the interests of the United States and Israel are necessarily opposed to each other.

Some suggest that Miller’s article is a mere bit of showmanship, meant to get the former policymaker some attention at a time when everyone—perhaps even those in the Obama Administration—knows the peace process is stalled. “You get a lot of respect if you make one big flip-flop in your life resulting from an epiphany,” says Washington Institute scholar Martin Kramer. He cites Francis Fukuyama, who declared “the end of history” in 1989 only to turn against his neoconservative colleagues when the Iraq war didn’t work out so well, and Benny Morris’s public disenchantment with the Israeli left. “Do it twice,” says Kramer, “and you’re dismissed as a flake.”

Miller sees his views as consistent with his public statements over the past few years. “What I’ve seen over time is that prospects for peace are getting bleaker and bleaker,” he told me over the phone last week. Miller believes that he is the same man he has always been—it’s the Middle East that has gotten meaner. “My perspective changed because reality changed,” Miller says. “This region has become much nastier, more complex. The political leaders are hostages, not masters, of their fate, and the issues are much more complicated.” Problems like the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees—the core of the conflict since 1948—seem no closer to being solved then they did when Miller began his peace processing under President George H.W. Bush. In other words, the region hasn’t changed for the worse; Miller’s just frustrated that it hasn’t changed for the better yet. But as Miller himself admits, he has not entirely turned his back on the peace process. “I didn’t reject the religion of yes to embrace the religion of no,” he says.

The religion of yes, which is as good a name as any for the faith that Miller claims to have abandoned, has little in common with a naïve belief in unicorns and fairies or in the righteousness of Yasser Arafat. Rather, it was a coherent strategy formulated more than 40 years ago by American statesmen like Henry Kissinger and other cold, calculating policy professionals. Jewish-funded institutions like AIPAC and the Washington Institute shaped the peace process’s moral core and in doing so gave American foreign policy one of its articles of faith: Someday, Israelis and Palestinians will have a negotiated settlement allowing both peoples to live side by side in peace, prosperity, and security.

The Washington Institute, one of the pillars of the peace process, was founded in 1985 by Martin Indyk, then AIPAC’s deputy director of research who went on to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Clinton Administration. Indyk is often an acerbic critic of Israel and hardly a member of American Jewry’s right-wing militant fringe.

“They obviously come from a pro-Israel framework,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told me on the phone, describing the Washington Institute. “But they’ve brought in real quality people, not just Israelis, but also Arabs as well as European scholars, to do important work. They’ve made the stew here richer at an important time.”

Perhaps the Institute’s best-known alumnus is Dennis Ross, who has worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and currently serves in the Obama White House. Someone in the Administration, under the cover of anonymity, leaked to a reporter the observation that Ross “seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.” The accusation of Ross’s “dual loyalty” was quickly picked up by Israel Lobby co-author Stephen Walt, who used the opportunity to attack the Institute. “Isn’t it obvious,” Walt asked, “that U.S. policy towards the Middle East is likely to be skewed when former employees of WINEP or AIPAC have important policy-making roles, and when their own prior conduct has made it clear that they have a strong attachment to one particular country in the region?”

Walt’s article, as well as the charges made by Ross’s anonymous colleague, stunned Washington policymaking circles. After all, Ross is a lifelong peace processor whose willingness to ignore Arafat’s most egregious provocations earned him heaps of criticism in hawkish circles. Yet here was Ross portrayed as being yet another Jew whose loyalty to Israel trumped his obligations as a public official and U.S. citizen. Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute, wrote a rebuttal to Walt’s article. “If terrorism is the use of violence against innocents for political purposes, this is the analogue in the policy debate,” he told me last week by phone. “To use the worst sort of attacks on people’s loyalty, legitimacy, ethics, and values to try to undermine them doesn’t belong in a sober policy debate.”

Yet for all the intellectual fireworks about dual loyalties and the peace process, the American electorate seems to have firmly made up its mind about Israel policy. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week shows that while 48 percent of Americans approve of President Obama’s foreign policy in general (with 42 percent disapproving), only 35 percent approve (with 44 percent disapproving) of the way the Administration is handling the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. Some 42 percent believe that the president is not a strong supporter of Israel. Half of American Jews polled say that Obama is a strong supporter of Israel, but only 23 percent of Protestants and 35 percent of Roman Catholics agree. The issue is not that American Jews fear that Obama has no deep reservoir of feelings for Israel but that American Christians believe Obama is out of step with the rest of the country on the matter of the Jewish state.

“To Stephen Walt, pro-Israel is a bad thing, but to the American people it is a good thing,” says Steven Rosen, director of the Middle East Forum‘s Washington Program. “If he thinks our national interests are not being followed, and that Dennis Ross and WINEP are instruments of a foreign power, then by that measure, the majority of the American people are instruments of a foreign power.”

Walt claims that his argument for favoring Israel less and pushing Jerusalem harder on making peace is based on a realist evaluation of U.S. interests. However, a sharper version of realism suggests that a real Middle East peace would actually weaken the U.S. position in the region. After all, it was U.S. arms shipments in the middle of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war that proved to the Arabs they could not hope to defeat an Israel backed to the hilt by the Americans. If the Arabs wanted concessions from Israel, they’d have to come through Washington. With that nifty bit of policymaking the United States went from being a Great Power to a regional power broker, capable of leveraging both sides against each other for our own national gain. A just and comprehensive peace between the Arabs and Israelis, allowing the two sides to deal with each other directly, would diminish our role dramatically.

The problem with the peace process, of course, is it makes no place for such cynicism. Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace is perhaps the most earnest book ever written about the Middle East, more plangent than all but a handful of King David’s psalms. Aaron David Miller is considered a skeptic because he says without a trace of irony that the Middle East is a nastier place than when he began two decades ago. Even a mild cynic might recall that 1989, the year that the peace process began in Madrid, was the end of two regional wars that killed millions of people: the Iran-Iraq war and the Lebanese civil war. Today’s Middle East is hardly the Garden of Eden, but the people living there are no worse off than they were two decades ago.

The peace process is perhaps the least cynical enterprise ever launched by the most optimistic country in world history, and the caretakers of that process are American Jews, a group for whom the peace process has indeed become the centerpiece of a kind of secular theology. Interestingly, Arab rejectionist movements such as Hamas see the peace process through a similar lens, though the language they use is quite different. In their telling, the peace process is a plot hatched by the Americans at the behest of their Zionist paymasters with the acquiescence of Arab quislings and Palestinian collaborators who would betray sacred Muslim lands.

Stephen Walt is an ideologue of a different sort than the rejectionists of Hamas, for they at least have to live with the consequences of their choices. Walt’s problem is that his realism and reality are totally incommensurate. He believes that the Israel lobby in the United States is blocking an attainable peace in the Middle East, when the rejectionists have made it quite clear that they don’t want any version of the peace that they have been offered, and would prefer an apocalyptic confrontation with the Zionists and the West. When Hamas says that the Middle East Peace Lobby and the peace process itself is a pro-Israeli front, there is an important sense in which they are right. Walt’s imagination can’t encompass the reality that no one cares more about the peace process than the American Jewish lobby, which is why he has to accuse Dennis Ross of being an enemy of the peace process and a traitor to his country.

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

This kind of rhetoric, most commentators believe, helped to lose the 1992 election for the Republicans. And a good thing, too; for, whatever your party allegiance, there can be no mistaking the dangerously anti-democratic tendency of Buchanan’s metaphor. Politics is a matter of debate and compromise, but wars involve destruction and conquest, and “religious war” is the most savage kind of all. When politics ceases to be about “who gets what” and becomes an existential ordeal, a means of defining “who we are,” liberal democracy is in danger. And historically, the group that suffers first and most from the attack on liberal democracy has been the Jews. When a nation wants to proclaim “who we are,” it needs to be able to point to who it is not, and the Jews have always been the Christian West’s closest, most available Other.

Frederick Brown, the eminent historian and biographer of Flaubert and Zola, must have had Buchanan’s speech in mind when he titled his new book For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus. Despite the best efforts of Buchanan and his ideological heirs, America, thankfully, has never known the convulsions of a real, open, uncompromising culture war. If you want to know what that looks like, Brown seems to say, just look at France in the last decades of the 19th century—the era that culminated in the Dreyfus Affair.

Alfred Dreyfus, of course, was the Jewish army captain who was convicted in 1894 of selling French military secrets to Germany. But the years-long Dreyfus Affair, which Brown summarizes in the last section of his book, was more than just a miscarriage of justice—the miserably common story of an innocent man sent to prison. What made it a historical phenomenon, and a dire forecast of what would happen in Europe in the 20th century, was the way it revealed the deep hostility of millions of Frenchmen toward enlightened ideals of secularism, tolerance, and legal equality.

The really alarming thing about the Dreyfus case, Brown shows, is that the more apparent it became that Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted—and then, when the verdict was challenged, elaborately framed—the more insistently the French right wanted him punished. That is because admitting Dreyfus’s innocence would have meant acknowledging that top-ranking officers in the French Army—the bastion of the nation’s honor, and the preserve of conservative, Catholic, and monarchist forces—were guilty of spectacular injustices, including the forging of documents, the coercion of juries, and even complicity with the actual traitor who committed the crime for which Dreyfus was blamed. And to criticize the Army, its leaders said, was to endanger the nation: “What do you want this army to become on the day of danger, which may be closer than you think?” one general railed. “What do you want the poor soldiers to do, who will be led into battle by leaders discredited in their eyes?”

In this way, Dreyfus’s guilt ceased to be a question of fact and became a litmus test for ideology. Those who believed in it, the anti-Dreyfusards, considered themselves the “real” Frenchmen, while those who challenged it, the Dreyfusards, were painted as cosmopolitans, traitors, and pawns of a Jewish conspiracy. For it was Dreyfus’s Jewishness, all along, that was his real crime, or at least the piece of evidence that made his criminality believable. At his court-martial, the prosecutor stuck to insinuations about Dreyfus’s “supple, even obsequious character” and his suspicious knowledge of foreign languages (he was a native of German-speaking Alsace). The Catholic and right-wing press was not so subtle: “Our society has already been punished, but its suffering is not at an end,” wrote a priest in one extremist paper. “Our treasures, our banks, our papers, our railroads and our army are caught in the spiderweb of Judaism.” Edouard Drumont, the dean of French anti-Semites and editor of the rabidly Jew-hating newspaper La Libre Parole, was elected to Parliament in 1898, at the height of the Affair, under the slogan “Mort aux Juifs.”

Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the evidence Brown uses to reveal the state of mind of ordinary Frenchmen. One of the most despicable figures in the Affair was Colonel Henry, the intelligence staff officer who forged evidence to support the Army’s weak case against Dreyfus. When his forgeries were exposed, Henry committed suicide in his jail cell; but as Brown writes, this didn’t stop him from becoming a hero to the anti-Dreyfusards, “a would-be savior out of whose mortal wound flowed blood for a ritual of tribal self-affirmation.” La Libre Parole solicited donations for Henry’s widow, and readers sent messages along with their contributions. Brown quotes from these in a footnote: “From a cook who would rejoice in roasting Yids in her oven”; “Two francs to buy a round of drinks for the troopers who will shoot Dreyfus … and all the kikes.” From this to the world of Hitler’s willing executioners does not seem like a big step.

To understand how matters could have reached such a point in France, the birthplace of the Rights of Man, Brown begins his book some three decades before the Dreyfus Affair, with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. The defeat of France in that war, followed by the radical uprising of the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression, left deep wounds in the French body politic. The Third Republic, which took shape in the early 1870s, was the heir to defeat and rebellion, and just as with Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War I, it never succeeded in convincing its die-hard foes of its legitimacy. Monarchists might well have succeeded in making a France a kingdom, if they hadn’t had two rival princes to deal with. Catholics were bitterly opposed to the secularizing policies of the Republic, in particular its attempt to bar clergy from being teachers. And the Army was eager for revanche, a war of revenge against the Germans, in order to reclaim the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

These anti-Republican forces, Brown shows, were at the heart of the anti-Dreyfus movement. But well before Dreyfus, they had already challenged French society on many occasions. Some were symbolic, as when the church of Sacré-Coeur was built in Paris, in 1875, as a sign of the nation’s repentance for its sins against God and the Church. (Anticlerical forces rejoiced when the Eiffel Tower went up 14 years later, as a kind of modernist rebuttal to Sacré-Coeur.) Others were deadly earnest: in 1889, as Brown shows in a detailed chapter, a general named Georges Boulanger came within a hair’s-breadth of overthrowing the Republic and establishing a military dictatorship.

Many of the Third Republic’s wounds were self-inflicted, however. Constant political crises, intense partisanship, and systematic corruption helped to discredit the very idea of parliamentary government. Especially damaging were two major financial scandals—the collapse of the Union Générale in 1882, and that of the Panama Canal Company in 1889. (Brown devotes a chapter to each.) Imagine the Bernie Madoff affair fused with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, and you get some sense of how devastating these frauds were to France’s economy and morale.

The Panama scandal, in particular, helped to fuel right-wing anti-Semitism, when it was revealed that two German-Jewish financiers, Jacques de Reinach and Cornelius Herz, had helped engineer the fraud and bribed a number of politicians. It was in the wake of Panama that Drumont launched La Libre Parole, capitalizing on popular hatred of Reinach and Herz to promote the doctrine of modern, racial anti-Semitism. “These people have differently configured brains; their evolution has not been ours; and everything about them is exceptional and bizarre,” Drumont wrote about the Jews. “The Crash, the sensational event, the financial killing … are their natural event.”

After reading Brown’s history of this extended “culture war,” the Dreyfus Affair no longer looks like such an anomaly. Instead, it seems inevitable, a crystallization of all the tensions that had made “the soul of France” a battleground for years. Perhaps it is more surprising that, in the end, the Dreyfusards won and justice prevailed. Thanks to advocates like Emile Zola, the fact of Alfred Dreyfus’s innocence was established, and after five years in prison on a remote island, he received a pardon. The Third Republic was vindicated and would survive until the German invasion of 1940—it is still, in fact, the longest-lasting French regime since the Revolution of 1789. But the dark forces the Affair revealed, and that Frederick Brown masterfully evokes, did not disappear. They only went underground—to reemerge, with fatal consequences, in the Vichy years.

Chelsea Clinton Is Engaged [NYT]

Once, it was almost enough for Jimmy Carter to provide a neutral, secret place for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to meet, at the presidential retreat at Camp David. Today, the Obama administration finds itself playing the strongman, wrestling both sides, grudgingly, into just sitting at the same table. The meeting, which is being held while all three main players are in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly—where, last year, Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres declined to meet—comes at a time when, perhaps, the United States is more interested in reaching peace than are “the parties,” as the two sides are referred to in diplomatic circles. Here, a brief evolution of America’s role in the drive toward peace.

Camp David, September 1978: Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat

The summit that eventually took place in the wooded retreat at Camp David was originally set to happen in Geneva, under the auspices of a peacemaking conference established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That meeting, burdened with Cold War politics, never happened, and it wasn’t until after Sadat—with Israeli assurances—took the unexpected, dramatic step of going to Jerusalem later that year that Carter began his push for U.S.-backed talks.

At Carter’s invitation, Begin and Sadat traveled to Maryland for 12 days of secret negotiations—the first 10 days of which consisted of Carter shuttling among cabins, until Sadat and Begin agreed to meet face-to-face. The result was a U.S.-witnessed agreement that established a lasting peace in the Sinai, and an initial framework for negotiating peace in Gaza and the West Bank.

Oslo Accords, September 1993: Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

The photograph is iconic: Rabin, in his suit, and Arafat, in his keffiyeh and military uniform, shaking hands at the White House, ensconced in Clinton’s wide embrace, immediately after signing their historic peace agreement. But the United States did relatively little to bring about the Oslo deal, which was largely due to the efforts of Terje Rod-Larsen, a Norwegian sociologist who had done work in the Palestinian territories and Israel’s Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin, which was elected in 1992.

Months of meetings between the Israelis and the PLO, held secretly in Norway outside the framework of U.S.- and Soviet-sanctioned negotiations launched at a 1991 conference in Madrid, culminated in an agreement between the two sides to recognize each other as negotiating partners and to reach a permanent peace deal within five years, inked in Oslo in August 1993. Clinton, ever the showman, invited both sides to Washington the following month for a formal signing ceremony that would produce, at the very least, an indelible image of possibility.

Wye River, October 1998: Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

Netanyahu is no stranger to negotiations with the Palestinians. The last time he was prime minister, he was meeting with Arafat at the Aspen Institute’s Wye River complex, in Maryland, under the supervision of the Clinton Administration. Netanyahu, much as today, found himself then bound by promises made by others that created political pressures for him in Jerusalem, specifically with regard to withdrawals from settlements—but Clinton used the fifth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, an agreement hallowed by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of an Israeli objector, to force both sides back to the negotiating table.

Clinton, who called on King Hussein of Jordan to help grease the negotiations after Carter-style shuttling between the camps failed to produce results, eked out an agreement after a marathon 21-hour negotiating session, commemorated with a solemn indoor signing ceremony. The agreement laid out a timeline for land transfers from the Israelis to the Palestinians, based on security assurances, and set a target date of May 1999 for a final-status agreement.

Camp David Summit, July 2000: Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

After the Wye River timeline fell apart, the Palestinians and the Israelis—led now by Ehud Barak—set out a new timeline at Sharm el-Sheik, in 1999, which called for a final deal by February 2000. That date passed before Clinton, at Barak’s urging, convened a new summit in July of that year at Camp David—this time, with the world watching. Barak, it is widely acknowledged, broke every precedent and appeared to offer the Palestinians sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a Palestinian state on the West Bank. But Arafat said no—a decision that has been analyzed for a decade, but one that was at least in part driven by, ironically, the concern that America’s willingness to usher along an Israeli-led peace effort compromised its role as an honest broker between the two sides.

Aqaba, June 2003: Ariel Sharon, George Bush, Mahmoud Abbas

The summit at Aqaba was not an American event—the formal host was Jordan’s King Abdullah, who inherited his father’s role as a facilitator, but it was the moment when George Bush, fresh off the Iraq invasion, stood between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas and declared himself the local sheriff in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. “I used the expression ‘ride herd,’” Bush told reporters after the meeting, on the Red Sea. “I don’t know if anybody understood it in the meeting today.”

Rather than playing couples’ therapist, and letting the Israelis and the Palestinians dictate the pace of negotiations, Bush said he would appoint an American team to monitor progress on the “Road Map” plan he originally proposed in 2002, and insisted he would hold both sides accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities under existing agreements. No firm commitments were reached on resuming formal peace talks, but Abbas promised an end to the terrorism of the Second Intifada, and Sharon promised progress toward a Palestinian state.

Rose Garden, November 2007: Ehud Olmert, George Bush, Mahmoud Abbas

Seven years after the failure of Clinton’s Camp David effort, Bush convened a Middle East conference of 44 nations at Annapolis, where Olmert and Abbas agreed to resume peace talks with the goal of reaching a lasting agreement by the end of Bush’s presidency, in January 2009. In a press conference that recalled the 1993 Oslo signing ceremony, Bush stood between the Israeli and Palestinian leader and pledged the “active engagement” of the United States in the peace process.

Yet Bush said at the time that he had no plans to go back to the Middle East himself to “unstick negotiations”—and he never called a round-the-clock, Camp David-style retreat before he left office, with no final deal signed.

Photos: Camp David, 1978 by Karl Schumacher/AFP/Getty Images; Oslo, 1993 by J. David Ake/AFP/Getty Images; Wye River, October 1998 by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images; Camp David, July 200 by Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images; Aqaba, June 2003 by Hussein Malla/AFP/Getty Images; Rose Garden, November 2007 by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

Blumenthal—a lightning-rod figure whose Republican enemies still call him by the nickname Sid Vicious—was never bound to be an easy sell to the drama-averse Obama crowd, but these days he comes with a new potential liability: his son, Max, a 31-year-old journalist who has carved out a role for himself as a kind of YouTube Michael Moore, infiltrating conservative conventions to capture confrontations with the likes of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. But recently, he turned his attention to a new target.

“The whole time I was writing about the right, I was following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict closely,” Max Blumenthal said in an interview with Tablet this week. “But I wanted to establish a modicum of credibility before I pulled the trigger.”

In early June, the day before Obama’s landmark address to the Muslim world from a Cairo stage, Blumenthal went into central Jerusalem armed with a shotgun mike and a cameraman to interview college-aged—and very likely drunk—Americans, who, with remarkably little prompting, spewed racist vitriol about the president while asserting a strikingly meatheaded brand of Jewish pride. The video went viral, garnering more than 400,000 views before YouTube pulled it down, citing unspecified terms-of-use violations.

Blumenthal comes across as an insider’s outsider; he veers from earnest, serious condemnations of the Israeli left or Sacha Baron Cohen’s portrayal of Kazakhs to cracks about Shabak interrogations, and frets about being passed over in “hot or not” discussions among interns at The Nation. He describes himself as a “non-Zionist” liberal, though he describes the identification of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism as a “cynical ploy by the Israel lobby.”

He said he was less surprised by what the subjects said than by the reaction after the video posted, on June 5. Commentators from across the political spectrum went nuts; those on the left objected to letting hate speech against the president go unchecked, but the most vocal criticism, which Blumenthal claims included death threats, came from those who felt it was wrong to portray Jews in such a negative light, either for fear of fomenting anti-Semitism or because of the implicit moral equivalence with everyone from garden-variety America-haters to actual anti-Israel terrorists.

Blumenthal said he didn’t think that concern was sufficient to merit quashing the video, which he said he’d hoped would prompt “soul-searching” in the American Jewish community and become a teaching tool for people engaging with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It may not reflect the reality, but they reflect a reality,” Blumenthal said, dismissing the concern that the video might be “bad for the Jews.” “So why not show it?”

This impulse, he said, came from his father’s advice on being a journalist. “He urges me to be cautious in my methodology and how I express myself, and to be clinical in my writing—to not be strident, to let the facts speak for themselves,” Blumenthal said. But when asked whether the brouhaha over the video had anything to do with the White House blocking his father’s appointment, the younger Blumenthal rose in filial defense, rejecting the idea that his work had anything to do with his father’s career. (He declined to say what his father thinks of his work; Sidney Blumenthal did not respond to email requests for comment.)

Growing up, Blumenthal said, Zionism was never discussed; engaging with Jewishness meant cheering when Kevin Youkilis, a Jewish player, made it to the Boston Red Sox. He made his first trip to Israel in 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks but after the launch of the Second Intifada, and said seeing the circumstances of the Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories prompted him to question Israel’s role in the conflict. After President Bush launched the War on Terror, Blumenthal said, he was upset to hear rabbis at High Holiday services drawing parallels between Israel’s fight against Palestinian militants and America’s war on al-Qaida terrorists.

“I wanted to describe myself as a liberal Zionist, but there was no way—the liberal values I’d been raised on were not compatible with Zionism,” he said.

He returned to Israel for the first time this spring after turning in the manuscript for his book, Republican Gomorrah, which will be published in September. Once there, he began collecting his own footage, which led to the recent videos.

Editors at the Huffington Post refused to post the original video on the grounds that it was insufficiently newsworthy, and the site earlier this week posted and then quickly removed its sequel, which captured apparently sober Israelis in Tel Aviv saying similarly impolitic things about Obama and Palestinians. The videos wound up on the left-wing blog Mondoweiss, whose founder, Philip Weiss, focuses on the Israel-Palestine conflict from a self-described non-Zionist perspective. “The videos are enormously important,” Weiss told Tablet. “The suppression of the videos strikes me as lamentable and predictable and ostrich-like.”