• So, reconciliation appears to be back on track, for now. [JPost]

• That great Times Magazine cover for the Gilad Shalit article? It required 60 hours of drawing. [NYT The 6th Floor]

• Henry Kissinger will not serve as secretary of State in a Herman Cain administration. Which, actually, might be the first good reason to vote for Cain. [Politico]

• Stuart the Turtle sees something he doesn’t like about Occupy Wall Street. [Forward]

• Nextbook Press deputy editor Wayne Hoffman returns to shul. [Huff Post]

Palestinian protesters attempted to take the bus into Jerusalem without permits, in a nod to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s.

• Where is the Arab Spring’s Havel? [NYT Week in Review]

• Mazeltov Borukhova, the Queens woman whose murder conviction was covered by Janet Malcolm, lost her appeal, in which she was represented by Alan Dershowitz. [NY Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Eli Valley’s spooky latest is perfect for today. [Forward]

• Bernard Madoff may have been a bad guy, but he actually had nothing to do with the financial crisis, and focusing on him only prevents an honest, effective reckoning with what did. [David Klion]

• Rep. Gary Ackerman, Democrat from Queens, apparently told Ilan Grapel when he first was released from Egyptian prison that the Mets had won the World Series. Cruel. [Hartford Courant]

I have not liked this band for approximately a decade, but the song is called “Halloween,” so.

• Sorry for all the Rick Perry stuff today, but this article’s important: Despite extensive ties to Israel, the Texas governor has had real trouble—at least in part because of his strong, public religiosity—cultivating Jewish support stateside. [Politico]

• New reports suggest Jonathan Pollard approached Australia about spying for it before he began his work for Israel. If true, it sorta calls his motives into question (and those weren’t great to begin with). [Ynet]

• The campaign launches a new blog. [Jewish Americans for Obama]

• Iran went on the offensive today at the International Atomic Energy Agency, accusing Israel of assassinating many of its top nuclear scientists. [AP/WP]

• This story about a thief trying to fence a Hasid’s hat is actually a Jackie Mason routine, and nobody can convince me otherwise. [NY Post]

The Emmys provided just the latest instance of the horrible abuse of “Hallelujah.” Let’s go back to the original.

• The father of Leiby Kletzky sued Levi Aron, who has confessed to murdering the eight-year-old Hasidic boy, for $100 million. [Daily News/Failed Messiah]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted the U.N.’s flotilla report to be postponed six months. Instead, it’s due to drop Friday. [Haaretz]

• Eli Valley has a tremendous, personal comic about growing up with a single mother’s cooking (or lack thereof). [Saveur]

• Mel Brooks frets about the preponderance of non-Jewish comedians. “We’ll go back to prizefighting.” [The Daily Beast]

• Israel wants to be a prime location for Hollywood shoots, and it is enacting the tax incentives to get it done. [AP/Haaretz]

• U.N. nuclear inspectors got nowhere in talks with Syria over the facility, allegedly an illicit reactor, that Israel destroyed in 2007. [AP/WP]

• Adam Kredo has the most comprehensive breakdown of J Street’s new poll on American Jews’ attitudes toward Obama. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Archaeologists are making major strides in unearthing the ancient city of Shekhem in what is now the West Bank. [WP]

• Myra Kraft’s funeral was held. [Providence Journal]

• Speaking to the group, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren compared Christians United for Israel to Righteous Gentiles. [Arutz Sheva]

• A new, peer-reviewed, scholarly article finds that the media disproportionately focus coverage on Israel. [Contentions]

• Eli Valley’s latest has a helluva punch line. [Forward]

• How a pilfered painting by the Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani led to the capture of a Serbian war crimes suspect. [ArtInfo]

• Bartenura wine can be seen in Drake’s latest video. Um, gross! [Heeb]

• The former longtime American Jewish Committee representative in Washington, D.C., impeccably named Hyman Bookbinder, died at 95. [JTA]

An homage to black-Jewish couplings and offspring (and, more implicitly, a celebration of Los Angeles).

• What really gets asked during the Four Questions. [The New Yorker]

• Ten Jewish car writers on the ten automotive plagues. [VF]

• Eli Valley on what the Four Sons ask today. [Forward]

Paschal Lampoon [Tablet Magazine]

• Hamas put down another pro-unity protest. [AP/Haaretz]

• Ron Kaplan obviously has a fuller list of Jews competing in the NCAA men’s tournament. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• This parody article about Natalie Portman wins on the basis of the name Abe Bitmeshugah alone. [NY Jewish Week]

• Julian Schnabel talks Israel-Palestine and Miral, his new film. [Deadline]

• In New York City? Go see Eli Valley at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope tonight! [Young Manhattanite]

Seriously, though, happy St. Patrick’s Day.

• The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has already found upwards of 15,000 volumes in Chaim Grade’s old apartment. [Arts Beat]

• Forward cartoonist Eli Valley discusses his life and work. [The Comics Journal]

• Christopher Hitchens further elaborates on the topic of praying (and not praying) for him. [VF]

• Reza Aslan and Bernard Avishai call on President Obama to do all in his power to prevent Israel from taking military action against Iran. [IHT]

• Buzz Bissinger asks: Who are the two Jewish pitchers who won the Cy Young Award? Peruse his whole feed to find the answer. [@buzzbissinger]

• As House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) readies a book tour, a colleague predicts, “He’ll be the first Jewish Republican something.” Please don’t hesitate to suggest various somethings in the comments. [Politico]

• Hamas scion turned Christian turned Israeli spy turned California resident Mosab Hassan Yousef was granted asylum in America. [JPost]

• This American Life calls it quits after running out of vestiges of upper-middle-class American life to chronicle. Note the source, please. [The Onion]

• Eli Valley’s Stuart the Turtle flies to Israel. Chaos and anti-Semitism ensue. [Forward]

• Lower East Side Torah store Zelig Blumenthal appears to have closed. See some amazing pictures of this relic of another world. [The Lo-Down]

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) makes an awesome play at Nationals Park during the annual Congressional Baseball Game, landing him on SportsCenter.

the Jewish world today is rife with “evil speech” … Jewish media are filled with accusations and “scoops”; they compete gleefully to find the vilest examples of crimes to report, to do the most attention-grabbing job of reporting them, and to be the first to do so. The very week of the recent catastrophe in Haiti, a national Jewish newspaper published a comic strip featuring grotesque depictions of religious Jews and aimed at disparaging Jewish outreach to other Jews. And another Jewish newspaper ran an editorial placing the alleged ugly sins of an individual at the feet of Jewish rabbinic leaders, simply because the presumed sinner, before he was exposed, had arranged for several respected rabbis to deliver lectures and had encouraged people to make donations to their institutions.

The comic strip, drawn by (friend-of-The-Scroll) Eli Valley, appeared in the Forward. The editorial appeared in The Jewish Star, and it concerned “accusations and ‘scoops’” about Rabbi Leib Tropper that Tablet Magazine broke. (UPDATE: Rabbi Shafran emailed in to note, correctly, that in his article, he also said that some of this stuff comes from within the Orthodox community, too.)

Yesterday, Shafran clarified his earlier post. “I did not ‘blame’ the earthquake on anything, much less a particular piece of writing or art,” he said. “I simply cited the Jewish mandate to soul-search in the wake of disaster, and quoted a Godol of our generation who suggested that speech fueled by ill will is a particularly rampant evil in our day. I cited the cartoon and editorial as recent examples, nothing more.”

It probably is an oversimplification to describe Shafran as having argued that “evil speech” caused the quake (as Gawker did). Still, the rabbi did call upon Jews “to perceive Divine messages in humankind’s trials”—he was asserting that the “evil speech” and the quake were at least somewhat related. But it is hard to believe the Richter scale is sensitive enough to register those sorts of early warning signs.

The Earth Trembles [Cross-Currents]
A Personal Note to Cross-Currents Readers [Cross-Currents]

Related: The Odd Couple [Forward]
A Smart Career Move [The Jewish Star]
Sex, Lies, and Audiotape [Tablet Magazine]

“If you look at my comics outside the context of what they’re making fun of they might seem even more outrageous, but if you’re familiar with the Jewish community and what I’m making fun of, it’s actually not that great a leap,” Valley told Tablet. He declined to comment on why the Forward killed the comic; Forward editor-in-chief Jane Eisner said she had no time to speak because of the paper’s impending deadline. So, for now, the answer to why a Jewish newspaper refused to run a comic in which Israelis are depicted as non-brain-eating primates must remain a mystery.

Dawn of the Chimpanzee! (Relax Folks, They’re Just a Metaphor) [Gawker]