• Circumcisions helps prevent the spread of HIV and are now, thanks to an Israeli company, as easily done and minimally painful as ever. [NYT]

• Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg adds a bit more room to the new one he tore for John J. Mearsheimer a few years ago. [Atlantic Goldblog]

• An OECD study pegs Israel the second most-educated country in the world (congratulations Canada, I guess). [Haaretz]

• Submit your embarrassing bat mitzvah photos to Gawker. Bar mitzvah photos are presumably banned to give the ladies a chance to win. [Gawker]

• The lost and new Jews of … Crown Heights! [NYT]

If you read Hebrew, you’ll recognize that this is Haaretz discussing Liel Leibovitz’s Scroll post yesterday.

A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn’t advocating Obama’s assassination by Mossad agents. “Of course not,” he said.

But do you think Israel should consider it an option? “No.”

But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? “No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you’re quoting me?”

Yes. “Oh, boy.”

This man can barely speak for himself, let alone anyone else. And now Adler, who to judge from that interview never expected a spotlight outside of his small paper, is being hounded online—and presumably offline too—by angry hordes. I suppose it’s appropriate, in a dotting the “i” way, for the Secret Service to be involved, but the folks who really need to have their motives investigated are the readers, including all of those righteous tweeters sharing their livid reactions to the tossed-off comment of a patently simple man. These people, one presumes, want to be spoken for by more responsible, thoughtful journalists, and yet not enough of them have been interested in actually paying for this expertise. Barely a year goes by without news of yet another Jewish newspaper folding—the most recent of which, in Portland, actually died as the community itself grew. How loudly can I scream this from a rooftop? Journalism is hard and expensive, and communities that don’t pony up adequate resources for this privilege have only themselves to blame when they find unskilled men and women making un-thought-through comments ostensibly in their name.

But Gawker is a different story. Cook—who knows his way around trenchant, often excellent reporting and criticism—had the chance, on a site dedicated to covering the media, to make an important point about the desiccation of communal journalism. Adler is clearly no great thinker and no skilled journalist. Once Cook realized this, he might have dug for a teensy bit more backing before presenting Adler as any sort of communal voice, and indeed, in the tradition of worthwhile media criticism, might have made many of the points I made in the previous paragraph. Instead, Cook wrote a post that may not have been meant as a dog whistle for anti-Semites, but which certainly had that effect. (“Why the American tax payer has to pay billions each year to maintain peace for Israel comes down to one thing,” asserted an average commenter: “Israel’s lobby in the USA and the willingness of many American Jews to put another country’s interests over the one they were born in.”) If some random Muslim writer from a local giveaway in Dearborn called for jihad against the United States, would Cook have highlighted it in this same manner? I’d hope not. That’s the kind of tactic for which far-right lunatics like Pamela Geller are regularly, legitimately denounced. So, why is it acceptable to treat the Jewish community in this shoddy way? To tacitly present Adler as representative of anyone—particularly the day after Barack Obama effortlessly raked in a half a million dollars at a Jewish fundraiser—is so facile that it’s hard not to view it as purposefully malicious.

I have to imagine that isn’t the case. This is, at least in part, because Cook is married to Allison Benedikt, who last year caused a firestorm with an essay about her disillusionment with Israel. Whatever your feelings about that piece—and, by the way, most of the published reactions to it were either moronic or reprehensible—there is no debating that Benedikt was honestly grappling with an important personal and communal conflict. In doing so, she subjected herself to the harsh limelight of an increasingly vicious conversation about the relationship between American Jews and Israel, but because she is a real journalist, she did so with actual knowledge, insight, and measured awareness of the consequences of her argument. With her as one of the best examples, I’d argue that any media writer, and particularly one with the privilege of sharing Benedikt’s breakfast-table, should be able to discern what a genuine journalist is, and what one isn’t—and, given the differences, make the requisite responsible decisions about his or her coverage of this landscape.

Profanity aside, the book is hilarious and all in good fun, because even as the parent’s frustration mounts, his or her love for the child is never actually in doubt. Still: “Imagine if this were written about Jews”? Sounds like a dare …

(Profanity after the jump.)

It’s Yom Kippur, and you’re far away,
The last thing I want’s to be cruel.
I’m your mother, son, you know I adore you,
But please go the fuck to shul.

You’d only go for a few hours,
Shorter than a full day of school.
You’ll probably run into people you know
If you go the fuck to shul.

We don’t observe the birth of Christ, son,
This isn’t some lame fucking Yule.
It’s the Day of Atonement, a big deal:
Go the fuck to shul.

Go ahead, eat something beforehand.
Gay gezunt, no reason to drool.
I’m not asking you to believe in it,
Only to go to fucking shul.

It’s a depressing observance, I know.
Could make you want to hit the barstool.
It’s the day that you say you’ve been shitty,
Which is why it’s in fucking shul.

Sure, guilt me, make me feel I’m unfair,
That I treat you like a fucking mule,
That I’m an awful, ungracious mother,
Who cares, if you’re in shul?

Cast me as some kind of tyrant,
Your very own lord of misrule.
Jesus, is it really so fucking horrible
For you to go the fuck to shul?

And yes I’m a big stereotype,
Or worse, just a big Jewish tool.
It doesn’t matter what you think of me, though.
Go. The fuck. To shul.

You used to treasure your religion.
I’d get you in Hebrew School carpool,
And all you’d discuss was how you couldn’t wait
To go the fuck back to shul.

But now it’s just some kind of burden,
Time-spending’s equivalent of gruel,
Fucking stop all your bitching! It’s not so bad,
As you’d know if you went to shul.

I admit Yom Kippur can be trying,
You do tend to run out of fuel.
One year I actually fucking fainted
In the middle of shul.

It came early this year, so it’s warm
I could just go swim in the pool.
Would it truly be the end of the world if I
Don’t go the fuck to shul?

Screw this. I’m done lying to myself,
No more shall I feel like a fool.
I’ve got things to do anyway,
I’m not fucking going to shul.

‘Go the F**k to Sleep’ Not Funny [CNN]
Related: The Big Jewcy: Adam Mansbach [Jewcy]

But I’m writing this post mainly because I already barked up this tree, earlier this month, when discussing the late Jewish singer-songwriter Debbie Friedman. Is this the same kind of thing, or not? You tell me.

Why Won’t Anyone Tell You That Marty Peretz Is Gay? [Gawker]
Related: Martin Peretz Is Not Sorry About Anything [NYT Magazine]
Peretz in Exile [NY Mag]
Earlier: Debbie Friedman in Full
Peretz Agonistes
Harvard Cancels Peretz Speech

And there’s more! Gawker’s nuptial scorekeeper, one Phyllis Nefler (which could be a Jewish name, although I hear it’s a pseudonym), determined that the Glazer-Skloot union was actually not the weekend’s Jewiest. That honor, rather, belongs to the happy coupling of Julie Goldman and David Weinfeld. The bride’s father sits on the board of the American Jewish Committee’s Boston chapter; the bridegroom wrote his thesis on American Jewish humor and “identifies” with Larry David (wow). Only one rabbi at their wedding, though.

Erin Glazer and Joseph Skloot [NYT]
Scoring Sunday’s Nuptials: Welcome to Wedding Season [Gawker]

• The Monsey, N.Y., Beit Din investigating Rabbi Leib Tropper filed a civil suit to get him removed from one yeshiva’s bank accounts. [FailedMessiah]

• A Republican research document, apparently geared toward winning over Ohio’s (not insubstantial) Jewish community, is titled, “Buck-Oy State” and in one place reads, “Ohio Dems Are All Verklempt Thanks to Obama’s Meshugeh Health Care Experiment.” [Ben Smith]

• Paul Krugman notes that Israel’s central bank has, with great success, intervened in its currency in the way America fears China will intervene with its own. [The Conscience of a Liberal]

• Researchers want access to sealed records that, they say, prove that the Catholic Church aided Adolf Eichmann’s escape to Argentina. [JPost]

• Gawker takes down Dan Senor, the Jewish former Bush speechwriter who is considering a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat in New York. [Gawker]

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]

We conducted our own inquiry, with similar results. Former Heeb staffers told us they’d heard rumors of its demise but couldn’t confirm them. We asked the magazine’s music editor, Arye Dworken, what was going on, he maintained in an email that the gossip was just lashon hara that likely came from angry freelancers or ex-interns. “We as a magazine can’t be best friends with everyone and those non-best friends love coming out of the woodwork with ‘scandalous’ details (i.e., yawn, who cares, so what, etc.) when the rumor mill goes back into production,” he wrote. But when asked about the specific allegation that the print magazine, rather than the Heeb brand as a whole, was on its last, he dodged the question and referred it to editor in chief Josh Neuman. Neuman (who earlier told a Jewish Telegraphic Agency blog that Heeb was alive and well) responded in a short email, “Long story short: denying that we’ve decided to cease print.”

The Heeb Magazine Deathwatch Starts Now [Gawker]
Heeb Not Closing, According to Publisher [JTA]

“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]