This question is raised in very concrete terms by the appearance of What We Talk About When Talk About Anne Frank, the new volume of short stories by Nathan Englander, at the same time as the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, which features Englander’s translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic text. The story collection declares its quandaries in its title, an allusion to the famous Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Englander’s story of that name copies Carver’s basic situation—two couples in conversation, getting gradually more intoxicated and more dangerously honest. By putting Anne Frank in the title, Englander marks his story as Jewish, but in a particular way: The juxtaposition of Carver and the Holocaust is both a declaration of his own fictional territory and a blatantly bad joke.

The big question about Englander’s work, since his sensational debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges appeared in 1999, is whether his stories transcend their jokey premises to achieve some higher meaning, or simply offer a kind of Jewish minstrelsy. Englander himself is aware of this danger, as he made clear in the story “The Tumblers,” in his first book. This story imagines the fate of the holy fools of Chelm, the town celebrated in Jewish folklore, during the Holocaust. Englander has them escaping deportation to a concentration camp by boarding a train full of circus performers, then posing as a tumbling act in order to survive. The story climaxes with the Chelmites, dressed in pitiful costumes, putting on an incompetent show in front of an audience of Nazis.

The story strives to be a parable, but, as with much of Englander’s work, the more closely you read it, the less coherent the parable seems to be. After all, the crime of the Nazis was not primarily to humiliate Jews; nor can the Jews during the Holocaust be thought of as performers. And if the idea is to show what happens when folktale innocence meets human evil, that was already done supremely well by Isaac Bashevis Singer; inevitably, one reads Englander’s tale as a pale imitation of Singer.

What is distinctive about the Englander story is its sentimentality, which is another way of saying its failure to trust the subject and the reader, its insistence on underscoring the tragedy of the situation with cues and nudges. One such nudge comes when a young Jewish girl is shot by a German soldier: “The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear.” Another comes when the Holocaust is described as “unmatched feats of magic performed with the trains. They go away full … and come back empty, as if never before used.” (This kind of mock-naiveté has more in common with Roberto Benigni than with Singer.)

Where “The Tumblers” makes sense, however, is as an interrogation of Englander’s own treatment of the Holocaust and of Jews. Is writing about these things the way he does equivalent to forcing the innocent Jews of Chelm to dress up and play tricks for a hostile world? For there is indeed something potentially exploitive about the high-concept premises of Englander’s stories about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. In “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” a moneyed WASP suddenly decides that he has a Jewish soul, and begins to live Jewishly, to the outrage of his disbelieving wife. In “Reb Kringle,” a Hasid with a big belly and beard makes his living as a department-store Santa. In the title story, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” a Hasid is told by his rebbe to go to a prostitute when his wife won’t sleep with him.

The wager of each of these stories is that the comic premise will build and topple over into liberating outrage—as Roth does in early stories like “The Defender of the Faith” or “Eli, the Fanatic”—or else deepen into a Malamud-style magical realism. But the truth is that Englander’s talent is not perfectly suited to either of these purposes, and his stories often seem to end where they begin, with the punchline of their premise. That is when the threat of minstrelsy appears—the possibility that readers will laugh at these stories only as familiar Jewish shtick.

Englander is at his best in a more familiar and old-fashioned kind of realism, in which he simply explores the common humanity behind the surface unfamiliarity of Hasidic or Orthodox life. Englander, who was raised Orthodox on Long Island, is well-situated to do this, just as Sherwood Anderson did it for the inhabitants of his invented Winesburg, Ohio; and a story like Englander’s “The Wig”—in which a Hasidic matron’s disappointed sexual feelings are sensitively imagined—puts the reader in mind of Anderson’s compassionate realism.

Thirteen years later, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the same impulses are still at war in Englander’s fiction. Once again, he is prone to high-concept stories that trade on the obvious incongruity of Jews—especially old or Orthodox Jews—doing profane things. In the title story, two couples—one pair of assimilated American Jews, one pair of baalei tshuvah from Israel—smoke a lot of pot and get the munchies, and the sight of black hats getting high is a large part of the story’s point. In “Camp Sundown,” a group of Holocaust survivors, convinced that another elderly man is really a concentration camp guard in disguise, murder him in a bout of senile revenge.

Worst of all is “Peep Show,” a story about a former Orthodox Jew who goes into a Times Square peep show and, instead of a stripper, is greeted by his therapist, his mother, and his childhood rabbi. The book’s high-powered blurbs describe Englander as “edgy” and “audacious,” but this fantasia on Jewish guilt is like something Woody Allen would have rejected for being too broad around the year Englander was born. (There are even shrink jokes: “I think it would be best if you paid for my peep. Thus far in your therapy, we’ve constructed a relationship based partly on financial remuneration.”)

Both the shtick and the psychology here are so contrived that it brings home one of the dilemmas Englander faces as a writer: simple belatedness. To rebel against a puritanical Jewish household in the year 2012 is inevitably to repeat the gestures of those who did the same thing in 1932 and 1952 and 1972, and it would take a writer of genius to give that rebellion a genuinely new fictional form.

Even then, the rebellion itself would not speak to today’s young Jews in the way that Roth’s did a half-century ago. If postmodernism, in the 1960s and 1970s, gleefully exposed the nullity of traditional authority and the corrupt partiality of every account of the past, then the post-postmodernism of the writers who emerged in the 1990s is an attempt to rescue the concept of authority and to regain contact with an authentic past. The literary standard-bearer for this generation was, of course, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s achievement was truly dialectical: Instead of simply rejecting postmodern fictional techniques and returning to an outworn mode of realism (à la Jonathan Franzen), Wallace pushed through the artificiality and self-consciousness of postmodernism to create a new, self-critical sincerity. His achievement, one might say, was to make sentimentality legitimate again.

Continue reading: The chains of tradition

• 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.

You don’t need to know much about history to recognize that Brzezinski here is trading in a classic anti-Semitic trope. Why didn’t his Salon interviewer call him out on it? Why hasn’t anyone else? Where are the American elites—the intellectuals, writers, policymakers, and political activists—when it comes to vigilance against anti-Semitism?

The editors of magazines and newspapers have a responsibility as gatekeepers of polite society. It turns out the gatekeepers haven’t been vigilant. We live in a culture where the social taboo against anti-black racism is so fierce that violating the taboo means certain expulsion from polite company. But the very reverse process is taking place when it comes to anti-Semitism: The taboo is being rapidly eroded, and those who ought to confront it are enabling it.

***

Israel Firsters, dual loyalists, Likudniks, ziocons, neocon warmongers—in the wake of the Holocaust, such anti-Semitic rhetoric would have been unimaginable. Yet it became commonplace little more than half a century later at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. Midlevel George W. Bush Administration officials with Jewish-sounding last-names—Wolfowitz, Abrams, Feith, and the rest of their neocon cabal—were accused of dual loyalty, sending American boys to die for the sake of the country that had their true devotion: Israel. According to this theory, administration principals like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and the president—policymakers with actual decision-making power—were merely instruments in the control of vast Zionist networks that were also manipulating the media and financial industries.

This theory reached full bloom in 2007, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of America’s most esteemed publishing houses, handed the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt a $750,000 advance for their book The Israel Lobby. As my colleague Adam Kirsch pointed out last week, the book’s impact was massive because it made it possible to say almost anything about Jewish money, and Jewish power, and the Jewish state. Walt and Mearsheimer’s thesis was praised as bracing, and to question their motives or their ideas was to traffic in McCarthyism. And so the book’s argument earned respect.

Today that discourse has made its way into a Washington-based think tank with close ties to the Obama Administration. Last month, the Center for American Progress found itself in the middle of controversy when some contributors to the organization’s Think Progress blog were accused of writing posts and Tweets that were out-and-out anti-Semitic. One blogger, Zaid Jilani, used the term “Israel firsters” to describe pro-Israel Obama donors. “Waiting 4 hack pro-Dem blogger to use this 2 sho Obama is still beloved by Israel-firsters and getting lots of their $$.”

American Jewish groups were incensed. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Washington Post that, “The language is corrosive and unacceptable.” Jilani left the organization and apologized for using the term, but his colleagues remain, only slightly chastened.

CAP’s chief of staff Ken Gude explained in response to the criticism that, “We have a zero-tolerance policy for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, or any form of discrimination.” However, it would seem that Think Progress’ bloggers were well-suited to the general temperament of the organization. The problem isn’t just CAP-sponsored ephemera like blogs and tweets, but its more significant offerings relating to the Middle East, like its massive research project on Islamophobia. On Page 94 of that study, for instance, the authors take issue with the Middle East Media Research Institute, founded by Israelis. “MEMRI is respected in some circles for its work to combat hate language and anti-Semitism, but it is also criticized for its selective translations. The institute contends that it highlights moderate Muslim voices on its Reform blog. Yet MEMRI’s selective translations of Arab media fan the flames of Islamophobia.”

How do the Jews who run this translation organization promote Islamophobia, according to CAP? By translating the opinions of those who want to persecute and kill Jews. Try fitting this twisted reasoning into Gude’s zero-tolerance policy against any form of discrimination: Women’s rights groups stir up male hatred by collecting statistics of violence against women; the NAACP fans the flames of racism because it advocates on behalf of equal rights for African-Americans.

***

The root of this problem is not a twentysomething blogger writing something stupid on the Internet. Rather, it is that anti-Semitic rhetoric and logic are being protected and justified by those who are supposed to be gatekeepers. These people, often in the service of their larger political aims, are willing to apologize for or ignore what is obviously Jew-baiting and Jew-hatred.

Continue reading: This isn’t an intramural debate

Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald asked Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: “former Israeli prison guard.”) The obvious implication is that Goldberg’s true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term “Israel Firster” to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: “Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S.” That’s quite mild compared to some of the others.

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize.

Throughout my career, I’ve been associated with the Jewish left—I was to the left of the New Republic staff when I worked there, moved on to Talking Points Memo, hosted my blog at Firedoglake for years, and so on. I’ve criticized the American Jewish right’s myopic, destructive, tribal conception of what it means to love Israel. But it doesn’t deserve to have its Americanness and patriotism questioned. By all means, get into it with people who interpret every disagreement Washington has with Tel Aviv as hostility to the Jewish state. But if you can’t do it without sounding like Pat Buchanan, who has nothing but antipathy and contempt for Jews, then you’ve lost the debate.

This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

***

A bit of background for the uninitiated: Last month, Josh Block, a former AIPAC spokesman, pushed a series of talking points that targeted several liberal writers at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with ties to the Obama Administration. (Full disclosure: My personal blog was very briefly hosted by CAP in 2008; some of Block’s targets are my friends.) The effect was to suggest that CAP was hostile to Israel because it is to Block’s left. A plain reading of the think tank’s work refutes the accusation.

But buried in Block’s overbroad invective was a kernel of truth. Some at CAP, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, and beyond deployed the “Israel First” smear, calling the Americanness of their political opponents into question. Predictably, right-wing Jewish writers took their shots at CAP, Media Matters, and the rest—never wanting to miss an opportunity to indict the left. And the Washington Post revived the contretemps last month in an article that effectively asked if CAP was anti-Israel.

The response to this controversy, and related ones, was ugly. Many toyed with the idea that denigrating someone’s American identity wasn’t so bad after all. Left-wing polemicist Philip Weiss wrote that he considered the term “Israel firster [to be] a perfectly legitimate term in a wide-open American discourse.” Time columnist Joe Klein noted that he’s used the term himself before, weighing in on “Americans who are pushing for war with Iran”—as the question of attacking Iran lurks in the background of this entire debate—and who “place Israel’s national defense priorities above our own.”

Even more disappointingly, the term got a nod of approval from the head of a lobbying organization that represents the Jewish left. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace organization that I’ve written favorably about, told the Washington Post he was cool with the throwing “Israel Firster” around. “If the charge is that you’re putting the interests of another country before the interests of the United States in the way you would advocate that,” he said, “it’s a legitimate question.” So, Ben-Ami’s response to years of getting baselessly attacked for not caring about Israel is to turn around and say his attackers don’t care about America? (Ben-Ami later clarified that, “The conspiracy theory that American Jews have dual loyalty is just that, a conspiracy theory and must be refuted in the strongest possible way.”)

If what Rosenberg and the others on the left want is a debate—by which I understand them to mean a debate about the wisdom of a war with Iran, and about the proper role of the U.S.-Israel relationship—great. The left, I think, will win that debate on the merits, because it recognizes that if Israel is to survive as a Jewish democracy living in peace beside a free Palestine, an assertive United States has to pressure a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran.

But that debate will be shut down and sidetracked by using a term that Charles Lindbergh or Pat Buchanan would be comfortable using. I can’t co-sign that. The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization. It shouldn’t matter that the American Jewish right proliferates the term “anti-Israel.” The easiest way to lose a winnable argument is to get baited into using their tactics. I don’t fetishize false civility; bullies ought to get it twice as bad as they give. People disagree, so they should argue. Shouting is healthier than shutting up.

Call me a squish or a sellout or a concern troll. Whatever. But if you can’t be forceful without recalling some of the ugliest tropes in American Jewish history, you’re doing it wrong.

• Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, has apologized for a column he wrote that suggested one option for Netanyahu would be to “Take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel.” The Secret Service is investigating the incident. [Forward]

• Jeffrey Goldberg responds to Glenn Greenwald. [The Atlantic]

• The Global Arts Group initiative is selling “Israel Beyond a Dream,” a new work by artist David Datuna, and will donate 25 percent of the sale to the Jewish Agency for Israel. [WSJ]

• Meet David Deerson, Jewish day-school alum and current vice president of his university’s College Libertarians group, who is voting for Ron Paul. [New Voices]

• Now, this is how to announce a new M.A. program in Jewish Cultural Arts. [From Under the Fig Tree]

The biggest piece of news—the thing that, anyway, I hadn’t known before—is that less than 10 years ago the Times considered Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg for Jerusalem bureau chief, partly in the context of the tenure, a few years before, of Deborah Sontag, who was seen as especially sympathetic to the Palestinians. There is also much on current chief Ethan Bronner, who has been assailed by the left—for allegedly giving favorable coverage to other people in his speaker’s bureau—and by the right—for the fact that his son served in the Israel Defense Forces. Actually, the left saw his son’s service as problematic, too: Rorscach-like, you could perceive it biasing him toward pro-Israel militarism or incentivizing him to write things that make armed conflict less likely.

The New York Times is a daily magazine of Jewish life and culture that is obsessed with not appearing Jewish—in, I can’t resist adding, an indelibly German-Jewish way, reflective of its historically German-Jewish owners. The article opens with the story of David Shipler, who was selected in the 1970s specifically to be the first Jerusalem bureau chief who was Jewish—an odd twist on preferential hiring made odder by the fact that Shipler is not Jewish. But the Times is weird about Jews in many ways. Consider its famous celebration, in recent years, of Brownstone and hipster Brooklyn, of Williamsburg and Fort Greene and Park Slope—populated by plenty of Jews, but secular ones—at the expense of, say, Russian Jewish Brighton Beach, or Syrian Jewish Gravesend, or Hasidic south Williamsburg and Borough Park: neighborhoods that actually can seem like Marrakesh compared to the neighborhoods in which the typical Times reader resides. The paper’s (Jewish) travel writer just admitted that Israel was the only country he “had absolutely zero interest in ever visiting,” and when he got around to writing it up, it focused almost entirely on Jerusalem’s Old City. So, it’s more a Jewish problem than an Israel problem.

(The article does not address the Times editorial page, which theoretically more directly reflects ownership’s sensibilities and which was recently criticized by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office. Personally, I think Bibi is wrong to refuse to be published by the Times, which remains the most important podium in the American Jewish world, even if he is right that President Abbas’ op-ed last year should not have been published as it was.)

There is one bizarre section in which Lewis points out that terrorism can exploit neutral journalism by using murderous spectacle to draw attention to its cause, and that there is not much that can be done about this. He follows with a more scrupulous discussion of a related dynamic:

Another common theme of American Jewish supporters of Israel who criticize the Times is that the paper, and indeed most Western media, generally do not cover fully the range of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel invective that is depressingly common in parts of the Arab media and clergy.

The critics are frustrated by this and have a point. Newspapers generally have a difficult time in dealing with any repeated phenomena, like hateful speech. An individual article may cover the subject once, to lay out the general phenomenon. But it is generally impractical to write an article about each subsequent instance. Editors are then inclined to say that the initial article already covered the subject.

As a result, such outrageous comments recede into something akin to background noise. They may be deplorable but are not always deplored.

Lewis then suggests that Israel is held to a double standard; but that this is right, because it’s a democracy; but that actually it’s wrong, because it’s still unfair. He is a bit mushy on solutions—although maybe we will find out some of his suggestions when, as is reported at the conclusion, a longer version of this article is published in February. Because you really can’t talk about this stuff enough.

The ‘Times’ and the Jews [CJR]
Related: Conflict in Israel? [CJR]
Netanyahu to ‘New York Times’: Take a Hike [JPost]
Lost in Jerusalem [NYT]
Earlier: In Op-Ed, Abbas Distorts History

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Related: ‘Eight Days of Hanukkah’ [Tablet Magazine]

• It’s looking like the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party will win Egypt’s first post-Mubarak democratic election, reports Tablet contributor Eric Trager from Cairo. [The New Republic]

• Israeli airline El Al has instituted an ambassadors program, which has (attractive) flight attendants meeting with the public during their time in the U.S. between flights. [JTA]

• Jeffrey Goldberg argues that along with liberty, the Arab Spring has brought about an increase in anti-Semitism in countries like Libya, Syria, and Egypt. [Bloomberg]

• Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, turned 108 on Nov. 25. Happy Birthday! [JTA]

• Natalie Portman finally gets her own stamp. [Jewcy]

But historians looking into further insights from the once and not future Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution of Libya should dig into the archives of Louis Schlamowitz, an 81-year-old Brooklyn florist, who engaged in an extensive, back-and-forth written correspondence with the dictator from his 1969 ascension to 1988—the year of the Libya-sponsored Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed nearly 300. A cursory glance at Qaddafi’s brilliant exegeses reveals such insights as, “America practices terrorism against the Palestinian people through providing Israel with the planes and weapons for attacking the Palestinian camps,” and, “If America carried out an act of aggression against us, we will become a second Vietnam.”

Then again, the person whose book I want to read might be Schlamowitz. “I felt bad about how he was slaughtered,” he told the New York Post about last month’s events. “They really gave him the one-two-three. But that’s politics.”

Qaddafi Canon a Primer for Translating Tyrants [Bloomberg View]
Jewish Florist Exchanged Letters, Photos with Qaddafi [NY Post]

Summing it up, Goldberg writes, “And most notably, she endorsed the idea that pressure from President Obama on Prime Minister Netanyahu is a service to Israel, saying that it is pressure from the American Administration that caused Netanyahu to endorse a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis.’When Obama pushed Bibi, Bibi made some steps forward,’ she said.”

Tzipi Livni Praises Obama for Pressuring Netanyahu, Suggests U.S. Should Keep Up the Heat [Goldblog]

• On Wednesday, the Arab League is expected to endorse a plan to bring Palestinian statehood to the U.N. Security Council in September, which would amount to a dare for the United States to veto it (a dare which the U.S. will almost certainly accept). [Haaretz]

• Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged Oslo mass-murderer, apparently had gotten plastic surgery to make himself look more Aryan. Dude, you were born Nordic, be happy with it! [Ynet]

• Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg catches a Republican congressman and prominent evangelical Zionist standing next to David HaIvri, a former leader of the incredibly ultra-right-wing Israeli Kach Party. [Goldblog]

• Speaking of whom, Hussein Ibish offers a General Theory of Goldberg. [Ibishblog]

• Given that Aluf Benn is becoming the new editor of Haaretz, it would be nice to get a succinct summation of his political views. Good thing he published a Times op-ed Saturday! Basically: Israel is in a strong position, but it is contingent on U.S. backing, which Bibi needs to work harder for. [NYT]

Randy Moss announced his retirement today. I was never a fan of any of this teams, but he revolutionized the wide receiver position. Set aside several minutes and watch this:

In the opposing corner, in khaki slacks, we have contributing editor Jeff Goldberg, who noted (via the Forward) that the video is an almost word-for-word copy of a video made by a settlers’ organization, and concluded, “The Israeli Foreign Ministry Is Now Part of the Settlement Movement.”

Fights scored with round winner getting 10 points, loser getting nine; additional points docked for knock-downs. Gentlemen, you know the rules: Twelve rounds, obey my instructions at all times, no hits below the belt, and keep it to 140 characters. Ding-ding!

Round 1 @DannyAyalon: “Can you please give me the reference to the future of the West Bank that you allege is made during the video?”
@Goldberg3000: “Sorry, I’m not sure I understand your question.”
Analysis: Parrying, dodging, not much movement or anything. A bland 10-9 round for Ayalon.

Round 2 @DannyAyalon: “what in the video made you state ‘The West Bank belongs to Israel now AND FOREVER’ and then launch into expletives?”
@Goldberg3000: “Just one expletive, actually. Maybe the claim that the Jews already made a painful concession by giving up Transjordan?”
Analysis: Nice deflection by Goldberg on Ayalon’s claim of coarseness, and then a nice shot to the body—accusing Ayalon of changing the terms of debate by giving Israel more credit for concessions than it merits. 10-9 Goldberg.

Round 3 @DannyAyalon: “That is the sole basis for your unequivocal stance that we will hold on to the territories forever???”
@Goldberg3000: “Your entire project is designed to legitimize Israel’s hold over the territories forever.”
Analysis: Furious combination from Ayalon, which Goldberg mostly absorbs, but can only offer one body-shot in return. Many judges will see this differently, but it’s gotta go 10-9 Ayalon.

Round 4 @DannyAyalon: “It only talks about history w/o reference to future. It mentions negotiations, if we want to hold on 4ever, why mention this?”
@Goldberg3000: “Sure does. But my worry is about Jewish decision-making. Keeping the WB will bring about the end of Israel as we know it.”
Analysis: Slight advantage Goldberg. 10-9 Goldberg.

Round 5 @DannyAyalon: “Please back up your statements. Prove to me where that is stated in the video or elsewhere or retract.” And: “I ask you again. Where in the video is this stated, even implicitly?”
@Goldberg3000: “Come on, man, own your feelings! You want to hold onto the settlements, you don’t like the idea of a Palestinian state. Etc.” And “The video is a pro-settlement video. One reason we know this: It’s the same video put out by settlers! tinyurl.com/3w6da32.” And: “You’re right. Your video was designed to convince Israelis to abandon settlements and leave the West Bank.”
Analysis: A flurry from Goldberg! Momentum shifting his way. Ayalon will need to go on the offensive if he wants to regain control. 10-9 Goldberg.

Round 6 @DannyAyalon: “‘You don’t like the idea of a Pal State.’ Look at my 1st interview given in office bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=….”
@Goldberg3000: “Mere words. What have you done to bring about creation of Palestinian state? Expanding settlements doesn’t count.” And: “Let me rephrase my question: Have you done more to end the West Bank occupation, or solidify it?”
Analysis: Goldberg has opened a cut over Ayalon’s right eye—that the actions on the ground speak louder than words in interviews. Expect Goldberg to keep working that cut for the rest of the fight. 10-9 Goldberg. Goldberg up 58-56, halfway through, with momentum his way.

Round 7 @DannyAyalon: “Please provide me with one quote, just one, to back up your assertion.” And: “Firstly please address the fact that you have not been able to back up earlier statements. You just move on to another issue.”
@Goldberg3000: “1. You argue settlements are legal, citing Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg (1908-1990). 1000s of scholars say otherwise.” And: “2. When we met in your office last year, you told me Palestinians only interested in destruction of Israel.” “3. In your office, you spoke feelingly of Jews’ inalienable right to rule Judea and Samaria.”
Analysis: First knockdown of the night! Ref starts count, Ayalon gets up around six or seven, and ref signals fight can go on. Still, 10-8 round for Goldberg. Ayalon is going to need a KO at this point.

Round 8 @DannyAyalon: “OK, but that is not what you said. Please back up your original assertions, not detract to other issues.” And: “Still not addressing the issue 12 Tweets later. Do you admit you made a mistake?”
@JeffreyGoldberg: “Gevalt. I cede the point: You’re opposed to settlements and would like to leave the West Bank as soon as possible.”
Analysis: The little-used sarcastic left hook (a favorite of Sugar Ray Robinson)! 10-9 Goldberg.

That’s where we are at for now. Goldberg way up on the cards, Ayalon bleeding, and only four rounds more to go. Let’s hope this barn-burner continues!

The Battlefield Over Palestinian Statehood Moves to YouTube [Haaretz]
The Israeli Foreign Ministry Is Now Part of the Settlement Movement [Goldblog]
Related: Punchy [Tablet Magazine]

Which is why interested applicants should email a résumé, cover letter, and three clips to internship@tabletmag.com by next Monday. Looking forward to hearing from everyone!

• Glenn Beck is moving his “Restoring Courage” rally next month in Jerusalem from the Temple Mount to an as-yet-determined location; having it at the Temple Mount is seen as making him an assassination target and also as gratuitously provocative and tasteless, although he only cited the former reason. [Huff Post]

• When an earthquake hit New Zealand earlier this year, it killed 181 people, three of them Israeli. One of them, according to a new report, was in Mossad. [Haaretz]

• Jeff Goldberg says Michele Bachmann loves Israel not wisely but too well. [Bloomberg Views]

• Michael Walzer visits Hebron. [Dissent]

• Jason Diamond apologizes for having inadvertently worked for the international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. [Jewcy]

Oh yes, there is a new Beastie Boys video. (And, oh yes, Spike Jonze directed it.)

All of the above? Yeah, that was January. Just January.

Since then, in the Territories, Hamas and the P.A. cracked down fiercely on popular protests in favor of unity. Then, suddenly, they agreed to unity, even though it was always doubtful it would actually work. But they stayed together long enough to mount the most threatening Nakba Day protests in years if not decades, and to threaten even worse come September—if they seek unilateral statehood.

Substantively, the most consequential thing President Obama did vis-à-vis Israel was veto a Security Council resolution condemning settlements. In a speech in May, Obama pledged similar opposition to the statehood gambit, condemned Hamas and the P.A.’s deal with it, sharply criticized Iran, and committed the U.S. to totally standing up for Israel’s security and right to exist. And he mentioned what the previous two presidents had assumed: That a two-state solution depended on land-swaps based on the ’67 borders. So, naturally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, creating a huge diplomatic mess that has yet to be fully untangled, and which could have implications on the 2012 U.S. presidential contest.

The Fogel massacre. The Hamas rocket attacks. The Jerusalem bus stop explosion. Israeli responses claimed lives, including of innocents.

On the Iranian front, first we were given ample reason to believe that its purported nuclear program was substantially delayed. But then we learned that Stuxnet, while helpful, was no panacea. And then we learned that Iran has made significant progress on weaponization technology.

Egypt continues to move tentatively toward democracy.

In Lebanon, the sealed U.N. indictment for the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister (and father of the also-former prime minister, who had to resign when Hezbollah pulled its support) was only last week partially unsealed; expect things to continue to get hotter there.

It was weird that the Syrian regime was brutally cracking down on internal dissent, and barely anyone was saying anything. And that was half-a-half-a-year ago.

Former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who once harbored dreams of being the first Jewish Speaker of the House, instead decided to run for mayor of Chicago; was briefly declared ineligible, then not; then won.

We were there as Rabbi Gershom Sizoumu ran for and lost a seat in Uganda’s parliament. We observed the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Ellen Weiss, an NPR honcho and wife of the enormously influential Rabbi David Saperstein, was forced to resign. Rep. Peter King held hearings on the American Muslim community, attracting the opposition of the American Jewish community. The Reform movement picked a new head.

Jimmy Carter was sued by people who bought and hated his book. Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder sued Washington City Paper, and even got the Simon Wiesenthal Center to endorse his ludicrous accusation of anti-Semitism—maybe his buddy Tom Cruise helped? Jon Demjanjuk was convicted of helping carry out the Holocaust, and then set free.

Quote of the Half-Year (paraphrased): “Oops!” — Richard Goldstone.

Western countries invaded Libya, possibly out of Holocaust guilt. A crazy guy tried to blow up a Santa Monica Chabad house. Benjamin Netanyahu and Justin Bieber were plausibly mentioned in the same sentence. A glass ceiling was shattered when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was picked to be the first woman to run either the Democratic or Republican National Committee. The Prince of Wales had the least Jewish wedding ever. Controversy swirled about playwright Tony Kushner. Jill Abramson was named the first woman editor of the New York Times. Dolph Schayes rooted for the Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA championship, and lo, it came to pass.

Eva Braun in blackface. Eva Braun speaking to the Tenafly JCC.

On the home front, Nextbook Press author Hillel Halkin was honored, and Rush Limbaugh said we were a “radical left-wing” outfit. We rolled out a welcome mat for Goldblog. And the American Society of Magazine Editors confirmed that it enjoys The Scroll.

We said several goodbyes, most of them sad: Elizabeth Taylor; Chris Hondros (whose photograph adorns the top of this post); Juliano Mer-Khamis; and Debbie Friedman, whose death I managed to turn into a controversy, though I swear I mourn for her as well. I don’t, however, mourn for one of the most important U.S. neo-Nazis, who was killed by his own son. There were many other sad goodbyes. Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph Lieberman announced he would retire after four terms. John Galliano’s career ended, or at least lulled, on less favorable terms. So did Rep. Anthony Weiner’s. Oh, and a final goodbye: Enjoy your virgins, Osama. Hamas will enjoy them with you. (Fortunately or not, Noam Chomsky’s religion does not conceive of an afterlife.)

Where do we stand now? Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for rape, which is looking more questionable by the day; Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer was barred from replacing him as head of the International Monetary Fund. The most Jewish state got gay marriage thanks in part to a handful of Jewish Republicans. Israeli-American law student Ilan Grapel is still being detained by Egyptian authorities under dubious espionage accusations. Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest domestic rival may well be retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan. The Gaza flotilla remains docked.

How should you deal with all this? We suggest going the f**k to shul.

• Prompted by Goldblog, Friend-of-The-Scroll Rabbi Andy Bachman pens the best response yet to the Awl essay. [Water Over Rocks]

• Speaking at Israel’s Presidential Conference, Dennis Ross—the adviser seen as the strongest pro-Israel voice within the White House—called on Israel to return to negotiations in order to forestall delegitimization. [Haaretz]

• Gal Beckerman talks to Natan Sharansky about the recently deceased Yelena Bonner. [Forward]

• Name Jewish celebrity baby children! [Kveller]

• Ron Kaplan profiles slugger Shawn Green. [NJ Jewish News]

Rebecca Goldstein, author of Nextbook Press’s Betraying Spinoza, advises that if philosophers were stocks in a market, you’d want to dump Descartes and go long on Spinoza. Somehow, that reminds me of this:

William Kolbrener, an Orthodox Jewish Milton scholar (not a huge special-interest group) from Jerusalem, though originally, like Goldblog, from Long Island, has written a beautiful book called Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love.

William Kolbrener: I was one of those Jews ‘fleeing for their lives’: I avoided Jewish organizations at Columbia and dismissed the aggressive posturing of proselytizers outside the 116th Street subway station. But, following a professor downtown one Saturday morning – I heard he had a secret life, a contemporary ‘Marrano’ – I ended up in a synagogue, discovering, beyond the fundamentalist performances of certainty I had seen on the street, a Jewish tradition based on debate and conversation.

Read the rest.

• In the morning, we thought that almost the entire GOP presidential field would be attending Glenn Beck’s rally in Jerusalem. Now, we know that almost none of them are. Don’t worry, though, Joe Lieberman probably is! [HuffPo]

• Of the Awl essay I linked to yesterday, Jeff Goldberg writes, convincingly, that the author “seems to have exchanged one simplistic narrative for another.” [Goldblog]

• Israel HaYom, Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli tabloid, now has an English-language version. [Israel HaYom]

• “Regional developments” including Palestinian reconciliation and the crisis next-door in Syria have prompted the Turkish group IHH, which led last year’s flotilla, to consider dropping out of this year’s. The flotilla itself is still scheduled for the end of this month. [JPost]

• Natalie had a baby. It’s a boy! [JTA]

A helpful, brief video biography of Washington. You may learn a few interesting facts about him.

The second thing he did was tell the audience about “Eight Days of Hanukkah,” the song he recorded two years ago for Tablet Magazine. It’s a good story, one that begins in 1999, when Hatch—an avid songwriter—treated contributing editor (and future blogger) Jeffrey Goldberg to a private performance of his Christmas songs. Hatch recounted that Goldberg had asked him for a Hanukkah song, and said the whole thing had been forgotten as a joke until a decade later, when he was invited up to New York to record the song, which was set to music by Madeline Stone. The only problem was that Hatch seemed to have forgotten both Goldberg’s name and the name of the “blog” that made the whole dream into reality. But, never mind: Here we are! And so, one more time, is the video:

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Related: Eight Days of Hanukkah [Tablet Magazine]
Ambassador Michael Oren Explains That These Are Perilous Times [Right Turn]

• Speaking beside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Obama said the two agreed that the Palestinians should not seek statehood at the United Nations. [Ynet]

• Israel Shamir, the Jewish-born anti-Semite extensively profiled in Tablet Magazine, has played an even more active role in WikiLeaks than has been believed. [Jewish Chronicle]

• A mosque in a West Bank village near Ramallah was torched; indications are that the arsonists were militant Jewish settlers. [WP]

• The International Atomic Energy Agency’s finding of elements of an Iranian nuclear weapons program obviously discredits its parent body, the U.N., President Ahmadinejad pointed out. What with there being no Iranian nuclear weapons program and all. [AP/WP]

• Contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg points out that Iran clearly has a nuclear weapons program. [Bloomberg View]

• Spurred in part by strong Jewish opposition, an anti-circumcision movement leader dropped her campaign to place an initiative to ban the practice on the Santa Monica, California, ballot. [JTA]

• English Jewish author Harry Bernstein, who precociously penned his acclaimed memoir at the age of 96, died at 101. [NYT]

• The Syrian-American blogger known as “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was arrested. [AP/WP]

• President Obama is so anti-Israel that some are now worried he will lose Arab-American support. Wait, what? [Salon]

• Note to whoever paid $200 for 14 pairs of Bernard Madoff’s boxers: That money could be better spent feeding starving African children. Or feeding me at Le Bernardin. [JTA]

• You know who else drank decaf coffee? Hitler. [berfrois]

JTA editor-in-chief Ami Eden has a grand theory of the X-Men, involving Magneto and Meir Kahane. Watch his video feuilleton:

• Some Israeli officials see Egypt’s opening of the Rafah Crossing as a boon: It will ease international pressure on Israel’s blockade of Gaza (with the flotilla sailing next month), and the weapons are getting in anyway. [NYT]

• Word is Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have been talking secretly. [Telegraph/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Amy Winehouse has gone back to rehab. I wish there were an adequate song lyric that I could utilize to cleverly summarize this. [Page Six]

• President Obama visited the memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto today. [AP/Haaretz]

• Iran’s atomic envoy insisted sanctions have had no effect on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. So then they won’t mind the yet tougher ones that were proposed in the U.S. Senate? [AP/WP]

• U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon—Italian troops— sustained injuries in a bomb attack, the first since 2008. [AP/WP]

• Amazing story about IDF paramedics, and their treatment of, among others, injured Palestinians. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Robert Satloff wrote the most cogent objection to President Obama’s mentioning the ’67 borders. [Washington Institute]

• Howard Jacbson’s Jewiest interview yet! (Which is saying something!) [KCRW]

•For your weekend viewing, a Charlie Rose roundtable on Mideast peace, starring (among others) contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg. [Charlie Rose]

• Not all Democrats have sold Obama out on Israel. [The Plum Line]

Happy Memorial Day.

Adas has a history of this sort of thing:

In the 1970s, when Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s ambassador, he attended Adas for the High Holidays with Nixon speechwriter William Safire. The rabbi gave a blistering Yom Kippur sermon advising his congregation “not to let our country be divided and polarized by those who use the technique of alliteration”—an allusion to the Safire-penned speech for Vice President Spiro Agnew criticizing “the nattering nabobs of negativism.” Safire, who had stopped traveling with Agnew to return to DC for the holiday, squirmed. He wrote later that this wasn’t the sin he had come to atone for.

Jewish Lobby Rejoices as Senate Confirms Shapiro as Top Diplomat to Tel Aviv [All Headline News]
Dan Shapiro and Michael Oren: Mixing Diplomacy With Davening [Washingtonian]

• Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg reminds us that the Palestinians, not the Israelis, are the ones who get to wait out the clock. [Bloomberg View]

• Some Democrats are questioning even President Obama’s Mideast stance. This does not, however, including the Jewish head of the Democratic National Committee, and mainly includes anonymous people. [WP]

• Thomas Friedman has the solution to the impasse, in his Friedman-y way. [NYT]

• An official in Pakistan’s military intelligence expressly condoned the targeting of the Chabad house in the 2008 Mumbai massacre. [ProPublica]

• Dana Milbank watches Bibi with his daughter’s Israeli au pair. (It actually sorta works.) [WP]

• Ambassador Michael Oren argues that the U.S.-Israeli special relationship remains crucial to American interests. Several folks, including contributing editor Jeff Goldberg and controversial professor Stephen Walt, respond. [Foreign Policy]

• An inside look at how the IDF creates its ethical rules. [JPost]

• Will the U.S. Senate get its first Jewish Tea Partier? Yes, if Adam Hasner, of Florida, has his way. [JTA]

• A new issue of the Jewish Review of Books dropped, with much attention given to the Arab spring, including a lead essay by Natan Sharansky. [JRB]

• Stay classy, pro-gun lobby. [HuffPo]

If it’s spring, it’s time for Chabad’s Mitzvah Tanks!

During a rally, a Soviet leader tells the crowd that in fifty years every citizen of the Soviet Union will own an airplane. Some brave or suicidal soul in the crowd asks, “Why should we want an airplane?”

“You fool!” responds the official, “What if you are in Kiev, and you hear there is bread in Moscow?”

Completely unrelated, Prime Minister Netanyahu apparently wants to build an artificial island off the coast of Gaza to house a sea and airport and maybe a smoke monster. Being attacked by environmentalists, the Israeli ministry of environment protect, and the Palestinian Authority, it might be, as contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted, “the stupidest idea ever.”

Is that a challenge, Mr. Goldberg? While the island is very stupid, I, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, can think of six idiotic things before breakfast. For instance: Build the world’s biggest Jenga tower in Gaza to attract tourism. Scroll readers, I’m betting you can come up with some pretty brilliant stupidity of your own. Leave them in the comments!

The January Times article—an obvious leak-job—could plausibly be seen (as I noted at the time) to have served certain contingent purposes (making departing Mossad chief Meir Dagan look good, making the Obama administration seem smart, making Israel look valuable to the U.S.) as opposed to simply telling the total truth. Plus, some worry that the Stuxnet mystique is at this point more useful to Iran than to the West! Perhaps, this theory goes, the Islamic Republic has gotten the worm under control and has fooled the West into believing that it was dealt a major setback and therefore that further sanctions and threats of military action are no longer urgent and necessary? (This line of thinking is expanded upon in an excellent Leonard Lopate Show podcast.)

The VF piece, authored by Michael Joseph Gross, is an entertaining tick-tock that contains much that has already been reported and some that hasn’t. It further conveys just how “revolutionary” Stuxnet is: “The first known virus that, released into the wild, can seek out a specific target, sabotage it, and hide both its existence and its effects until after the damage is done.” Michael Tanji explored much of what made Stuxnet unprecedented last October in Tablet Magazine. Also then, Yossi Melman guessed—it increasingly seems correctly—at the involvement of both Israel and the German conglomerate Siemens; Melman also presciently hypothesized that Stuxnet primarily targeted not Iran’s declared nuclear energy reactor at Bushehr, as many originally thought, but rather the murkier enrichment facility at Natanz. After the jump, some choice highlights from VF.

• Stuxnet contains a number of fail-safes to try to ensure that it not get totally out of hand—an indication, many say, that it is the handiwork of a comparatively responsible state actor. Among the safeguards: On June 24, 2012, Stuxnet will self-destruct.

• There have been at least three versions of Stuxnet, each more daring than the one before. “The authors, [one expert] thinks, weighed the risk of discovery against the risk of a mission failure and chose the former.”

• Among hackers, it is a big deal to be able to find and exploit a so-called “zero day,” which is a flaw in a system that the system’s own creator is unaware of; it is a particularly big deal when a zero day is discovered in a prominent system, like Microsoft Windows. Stuxnet’s creators discovered and exploited four Windows zero days.

• Last July, just as the worm was receiving widespread publicity, it was given a new digital signature, enabling it to continue breaking into systems undetected.

• Here, basically, is how Stuxnet works:

Stick a flash drive with the virus into a laptop and it enters the machine surreptitiously, uploading two files: a rootkit dropper (which lets the virus do whatever it wants on the computer—as one hacker explains, “‘Root’ means you’re God”) and an injector for a payload of malicious code that was so heavily encrypted as to be, to Ulasen, inscrutable. The most unsettling thing about the virus was that its components hid themselves as soon as they got into the host. To do this, the virus used a digital signature, an encrypted string of bits that legitimate software programs carry to show that they come in peace. …

When Stuxnet moves into a computer, it attempts to spread to every machine on that computer’s network and to find out whether any are running Siemens software. If the answer is no, Stuxnet becomes a useless, inert feature on the network. If the answer is yes, the worm checks to see whether the machine is connected to a [programmable-logic controller, the tiny computers that regulate machinery all over the world for all sorts of things] or waits until it is. Then it fingerprints the P.L.C. and the physical components connected to the controller, looking for a particular kind of machinery. If Stuxnet finds the piece of machinery it is looking for, it checks to see if that component is operating under certain conditions. If it is, Stuxnet injects its own rogue code into the controller, to change the way the machinery works. And even as it sabotages its target system, it fools the machine’s digital safety system into reading as if everything were normal.

• Finally, Frank Rieger: Whatta character!

A few weeks later, in Berlin, the morning after a fresh snowfall, Rieger stomped into the Chaos Computer Club (C.C.C.) hacker space, a giant rec room on Marienstrasse full of fake surveillance cameras, beat-up leather sofas, and lots of softly whirring fans cooling lots of computer processors. Rieger’s dark-blue-gray jumpsuit was caked with ice from his morning commute, which he makes on a large tricycle regardless of the weather. Beefy and taciturn, Rieger serves as spokesman for the C.C.C., the second-largest human-rights technology group in the world (after the Electronic Frontier Foundation). The group calls itself “a galactic community of life forms, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information.”

A Declaration of Cyber-War [VF]
Related: Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay [NYT]
Uncloaked [Tablet Magazine]
Coded [Tablet Magazine]
Modern Warfare, Too [Tablet Magazine]
Underreported: Who Was Behind the Stuxnet Worm? [The Leonard Lopate Show]
Earlier: How Stuxnet Came To Be

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

• After Thousands of anti-government protestors filled Egypt’s streets last night, Egyptian authorities banned any large gathering today. Four have been killed. [WaPo]

• Gabrielle Giffords’ doctors have upgraded her condition from serious to good. [The Caucus]

• Hussein Ibish and Tablet contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg look on the bright side of the peace process and suggest some steps forward. [NYT]

• A Holocaust denier accidently sent an e-mail meant for a listserv of like minds to the listserv of his son’s Upper East Side elementary school. [NYT]

As ever, public statements about Iran are more about advancing the speaker’s immediate interests than accurately describing reality. Dagan wished to cast his just-concluded eight-year term in-charge of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency as a success—and what better way to do that than to note that things are looking up regarding Israel’s top foreign priority? Clinton, traveling through the Gulf, sought to temper optimism on Iran to make sure the Arab states—who, as we know from WikiLeaks, are as worried about an Iranian bomb as anyone else, but might look for any excuse to appear to be going easy on the Islamic Republic—don’t take their foot off the gas pedal in terms of sanctions, the enforcement of which is part of the reason why Iran’s program has been delayed. Then, a few days later, Clinton wished to brand the Obama administration’s Iran policy as a success—and what better way to do that than to brag that the most important piece of that policy, sanctions, is working? Cut to Netanyahu, whose very job description is to worry about Iran when no one else is: He called for yet harsher sanctions and emphasized that the military option remains on the table.

So what is actually the case? The money has got to be on the notion that the program has genuinely been delayed. There have been ample reports that the refining-challenged Islamic Republic has been having trouble acquiring sufficient amounts of gasoline due to sanctions (less the U.N. sanctions than the series of bilateral sanctions, exacted by the U.S., the EU, and others), and if the sanctions are having that effect, it is logical to presume they are having other adverse effects, too. And even before we knew about Stuxnet, there were pretty large hints that sabotage was succeeding; and now with all we know about Stuxnet, it seems pretty clear even to the naked eye that subterfuge is accomplishing at least as much as sanctions.

In the end, I have to agree with Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg (whose August Atlantic article was significantly at odds with what he says now*) when he argues, “the combination of sanctions and subterfuge has definitively set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least one and perhaps as many as four years.” (Among other things, Goldberg reports that Dagan “is too invested in the survival of Israel and the Jewish people to politicize intelligence,” and is therefore worth listening to when he gives his 2015 estimate.)

I also agree with Goldberg when it comes time to dole out credit: Stuxnet (“the virus,” one Israeli source calls it) gets a pat on the back, sure; but so does the American president. “He did the difficult work of pulling together serious multilateral sanctions against Iran,” notes Goldberg, “he has convinced the Israelis—at least he has partially convinced some Israelis—that he has placed the prestige of his presidency behind this effort … and he has supported, in ways that I only know the most general way, some very hard-edged counterproliferation programs, programs whose existence proves, among other things, that he is capable of real and decisive toughness.”

A Major Victory for President Obama on Iran [Jeffrey Goldberg]
Netanyahu Presses for Tougher Iran Sanctions [WSJ]
Related: Modern Warfare, Too [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Iran: Stuxnet Isn’t Harming Nuclear Program

* I think the article accurately reflected the Israeli fears and a slice of Iranian reality six months ago, fears and reality that have since been altered in part because of his article, which scared people and countries into getting serious about Iran and prompted the Americans to provide reassurance to the Israelis. Also, Stuxnet apparently happened since Goldberg did his reporting, and Stuxnet was a game-changer.

All of South America except for Colombia and Peru have either recognized or plans to recognize a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders. Abbas was in Brasilia last month for a groundbreaking ceremony—complete with flying doves!—for what will be the Palestinian embassy. Meanwhile, the P.A. is drafting a Security Council resolution that would condemn settlements, which the United States has pledged to veto.

The resolution—which will not call for Palestinian statehood or even sanctions against Israel—is a microcosm of the larger trends: Lacking much in the way of teeth and unlikely to produce any concrete changes in the near future, it nonetheless threatens to prove the groundwork for an eventual climate wherein Palestinian statehood comes to seem inexorable. The point is less the eventual climate than the threat, to Israel and the U.S., that it is in their interests to get onboard.

The fact is—and no offense to Ecuador, which I hear is lovely—these South American nations’ recognition of a nonexistent state don’t, practically, amount to anything. (Although it is interesting that Argentina, with its nearly 200,000 Jews and generally philo-Semitic populace, is among these nations.) And the resolution isn’t even really designed to be passed—the U.S. has pledged to veto it. Besides, even if it were passed, it would explicitly have no practical effect.

But what the resolution is designed to do is embarrass the Americans. After all, as veteran Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat put it, “It’s a very moderate resolution, by design, because we don’t want the U.N. to veto it. We want the international community to tell Israel that the settlements are against international law.” That is not exactly the truth, of course: Erekat does want the U.N.—specifically the U.S.—to veto it, which it no doubt will. This is because, as he goes on to say, since the resolution’s anti-settlement argument basically reflects the Obama administration’s stated position, were the U.S. to veto it anyway, “then that’s a story” (which also isn’t entirely true, since it wouldn’t exactly be the first time the U.S. blocked an anti-Israel resolution, but you see his point).

On top of all this, top American Jewish opinionmakers Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg (a Tablet Magazine contributing editor), and David Remnick recently made comments that seemed to go further than they ever had before in condemning Israeli settlement-building as both immoral and dumb. None of what they said is groundbreaking if you have been following the region closely, but most people don’t follow the region closely and instead take their cues from people like Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg, and David Remnick, so this is not irrelevant news.

In a sense, Israeli illegitimacy is the new Palestinian state-building: The most resonant argument for fast-tracking an independent Palestine, potentially without Israeli support. This is dangerous: Whereas successful Palestinian state-building is a logical argument for a Palestinian state, Israeli illegitimacy is more of an emotional one. But, of course, that is also why it may be more persuasive. Pointing to a new fire station is one thing. Pointing to a dead protestor is another.

Palestinians To Appeal to U.N. with Anti-Settlement Resolution [LAT]
U.S. Opposes Anti-Settlement Resolution [JTA]
Palestinian FM: Chile, Paraguay To Recognize Palestinian State in Coming Weeks [Haaretz]
Abbas Lays First Stone of Palestinian Embassy in Brazil [JPost]
Earlier: What is Fayyadism?
Too Good To Be True?

The quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables leaked through the Wikileaks organization and published yesterday in several newspapers mostly revealed that our worst fears, grounded in things we already knew, are shared by State Department professionals privy to non-public information (although over half of the leaked cables were not classified). They are the geopolitical equivalent of Kinsley gaffes, slip-ups embarassing precisely because they confirm what people already thought to be true.

The Times’s lead bulletpoint, for instance, describes U.S. concerns that Pakistan has enriched uranium that could be used to make illicit weapons for very bad people. Well, we knew Pakistan was a nuclear state; that the father of the Pakistani bomb, A.Q. Khan, is the world’s worst individual proliferator; that Pakistan maintains alliances with radical Islamic groups (like the one that murdered hundreds in Mumbai). So this new tidbit, of “a dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel,” is scary, but it is not shocking.

Or as Laura Rozen put it, “The classified diplomatic discussions on Iran revealed in the cables are not all that different from what one would expect from following the public comments senior U.S. officials have made on the Iran issue the last several months.” I will address other revelations, including ones touching on the Mideast peace process, Egypt, and Turkey, in a future post. The Iran stuff has been among the most buzzed-about.

We learn that Iran is being armed by North Korea with far more sophisticated missiles than was thought they had. This is alarming, of course. It also might help explain why Russia has been on-board sanctions efforts—those suckers could reach Moscow. I haven’t seen any cables that definitively pinpoint where Iran is in terms of effectively weaponizing nuclear technology, though they do suggest that U.S. diplomats believe Israel is overstating just how close Iran is.

The leaders of Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are if anything even more bullish on attacking Iran’s facilities than Israel—a revelation that certainly provides a frisson of vindication to hawks and Israel especially. But surprising? Tablet Magazine contributing editors Jeffrey Goldberg and David Samuels, as well as basic common sense, have long supposed that Arab states fear the non- and at times anti-Arab regional hegemon’s going nuclear, and would love to see it disrupted in a manner such that they can have plausible deniability (indeed, even plausible condemnability)—such as, say, a limited U.S. attack. King Abdullah said, regarding Iran, that the United States should “cut off the head of the snake.” Dramatic? You bet. Puzzling? Not really. As Tablet Magazine contributor Yossi Melman wrote, “It would have been sufficient to read pundits and journalists who cover the Mideast to see that everyone is in agreement on this issue. Everyone would like to see the United States bomb Iran.”

In early 2009, we learn, Israeli Defense Minister Barak implied to the U.S. that Israel might feel the need to strike before the end of 2010, after which collateral damage could become unacceptable. (One month to go!) This threat may have been designed chiefly to prod the United States to action (certainly this was among its goals); and even if it was based on a clear-eyed assessment of available intelligence, such intelligence came from over 18 months ago, before sanctions and sabotage and Stuxnet and presumably updated intelligence.

We learn that Mossad head Meir Dagan has been a longtime lobbyist for trying to topple Iran’s regime through various Iranian minority groups.

We learn that Supreme Leader Khamanei has terminal leukemia. Of course, that’s from a cable that dates into last year, so who knows.

Finally (for now), we learn that Iran uses the Iranian Red Crescent (their version of the Red Cross) to smuggle weapons and agents into Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Even those with uncharitable views of the Iranian leadership can be excused for being a bit chilled at just how low this is.

A thought: If these revelations don’t surprise you, smug vindication isn’t the best response—steadfast determination to hope for and work toward a good resolution of the Iranian crisis is. And if these revelations do surprise you, stubborn resolve to ignore them isn’t the best response—acknowledgement that there is such a thing as the Iranian crisis is.

Iran Stirs Distress in Mideast [NYT]

Whoops! Lynch wasn’t talking about the McNabb deal. Over the weekend, the United States offered Israel a package of security and aid guarantees in exchange for a 90-day extension of the prior ten-month construction freeze in the West Bank (though not East Jerusalem). Should Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet approve the deal, Israel gets 20 high-tech jets plus further military aid; a promise that the U.S. will veto any unilateral Palestinian statehood at the United Nations; and a pledge not to ask for a further extension.

Why should this freeze be different from the previous freeze—when nothing was accomplished beyond a few perfunctory and preliminary direct talks between the two sides? You can talk yourself into reasons why: The notion that talks this round will focus on borders, not settlements—which (as Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out the other day) is the more pressing issue, and one that will actually also help resolve the settlement issue—is promising. But you can talk yourself into the McNabb extension, too (he is championship-caliber, he just needs pass-catchers and a better offensive line, and locking him down gives the Skins the time to build those things, etc).

At base, the deal is, as the Washington Post astutely reports, “A triumph of hope over experience.” Nobody could possibly think this is a good option. What one could think is that, given U.S. history as Israel’s patron (and its basically unquestionable status) as well as U.S. regional interests (Israel was probably due for a military upgrade for Iran-related reasons anyway), getting the freeze extended was probably the best possible option, even if on its face it seems like (to mix football metaphors) Charlie Brown lining up one more time to kick the ball that Lucy will inevitably yank away. (Not to be totally unfair: The United States has admitted that the year-long timeframe for peace it established a few months ago was probably over-optimistic.)

But don’t only ask me! From the left, Bernard Avishai argues that focusing on borders, while perhaps strategically wise, is a tactical non-starter, because a final discussion about borders is the last thing Israel’s powerful right wants, or will stand for. For the realists, Aaron David Miller notes that talking about borders when Jerusalem is seemingly off-the-table may be worse than worthless. Roger Cohen mentions that the split among the Palestinians, chiefly between Fatah and Hamas, makes discussion of a peace deal absurd. (The Fatah-run Palestinian Authority is among the extension’s largest skeptics.) Christopher Hitchens takes a closer look at exactly whom the deal is being done with—namely, the right-wing crazies in Netanyahu’s own government.

And if (if? ha!) the deal doesn’t work? There will be talk (as Lynch floats) of a radical new approach, or some sort of thing. But in fact, the deal has the effect of locking the United States and Israel into a closer partnership, more strongly binding their interests together; it makes it less likely that the U.S. will fundamentally change its overarching Mideast strategy, which contains as its pillar the fact that Israel is a number-one regional ally.

There will still be issues in the Mideast to deal with even if no peace is reached, just as there will still be 16 games to play each season (well, barring a lockout next year, anyway). We will need an ally, and the Redskins will need a quarterback. The Skins are paying a guy who took one team to five conference championships a whole lot of money, so they may as well start him. There will be disappointments—last night’s utter butt-kicking, by McNabb’s former team, comes to mind. There will also be triumphs; but they will be small. Talk to me when the Redskins are playing in February; and talk to me when all the pieces are in place—a willing Israeli government, a Palestinian partner capable of cutting the deals that would need to be cut, less Israeli fear about Iran—and a real peace deal can be made. Til then, I’m just looking for a few Sundays when the situation will seem a little less bad than it really is.

A 90-Day Bet on Mideast Peace Talks [NYT]
Analysis: U.S. Pinning Its Mideast Hopes on 90-Day Settlement Freeze [WP]

Additionally, with each new installment we’ll also induct our favorite suggestion from a reader, who will receive a Gallivanting Spatula mug—emblazoned with Mark Alan Stamaty’s fantastic logo—as a token of our appreciation.

This week’s winner is Ed, who relayed the following: “My mother (72 years old, Jewish, Brooklyn) and her friends have always referred to the gastroenterologist as the ‘gastro-man.’ I thought this was normal and used it myself until someone asked me if my stomach doctor wore a cape and tights.” To be frank, the more popular locution is “GI guy.” But we’re giving this one to Ed on account of the clever superhero joke.

And now, the new words:

Viennese table (noun): A buffet table of desserts (usually parve.) Unrecognizable to Austrians, or anyone else who has not visited Leonard’s of Great Neck. Here is its use in a sentence: “We were going to do the Viennese table, but our catering manager advised us to skip it and do the chocolate fountain instead.” This is not a sentence we made up. Related phrases include “modified Viennese” and “mini-Viennese”—neither of which should be confused with “shmorg (noun)”, which itself has absolutely nothing to do with “shmorg” (verb), go wash your mouth out with soap.

Peoplehood (noun): Mythical state of bliss sought mainly by Jews who are paid by other Jews to think about Jews. Usage: “The Jewish Peoplehood Subcommittee will meet in Room 404, immediately following the plenary.”

Sit-down dinner (noun): See here. Not to be confused with heavy hors d’oeuvres.

One of the targets was a small shul that specifically serves LGBT Jews. One synagogue’s Website reportedly received dozens of visits from Egypt recently. KAM Isaiah Israel, which famously is located across the street from the Obamas’ house in Hyde Park, was not one of the targets.

I do buy the official explanation of just whom exactly these bombs were supposed to kill (which is to say, airplane passengers, not Chicago synagogue attendees). So I can no longer completely agree with contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s argument (which he also made before the revelation) that the bomb-making terrorists “are fundamentally annihilationist in outlook, meaning that they have as a primary goal the killing of Jews, everywhere.” It seems to me that their primary goal is killing Americans and other Westerners in sensationalistic fashion. At the same time, the addresses on the cargo do make plain their special animus. “There are many people out there who believe that al Qaeda and its fellow travelers are angry over settlements,” Goldberg continued. “They are not. They are angry over the continued existence of Jews.” This was a useful reminder.

Monsters Breeding [Tablet Magazine]
U.S. Official Says 2 Package Bombs Were Intended To Detonate ‘In Flight’ [WP]
Attacking Jews Remains a Radical Islamist Guiding Motivation [Haaretz]
Related: The Message [Tablet Magazine]

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to apartheid, called on a South African opera company not to perform in Israel, comparing the situation there to South Africa before reforms. [Arts Beat]

• Why the NBA’s new rule against arguing with the refs is un-Jewish. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• “Jeffrey Goldberg: animal lover.” [Jewish Journal]

• Meet the Israeli Tea Party! Because the world needed another. [JPost]

• Ron Kaplan notes that Dick Miles, the biggest ping-pong champion in American history, is a member of neither the International nor the National Jewish Hall of Fame. I smell a cause célèbre. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Igor Olshansky: You are a defensive lineman; tackling Ahmad Bradshaw is your job, so there is no need to celebrate so elaborately. Stop being a shanda and start getting your 1-5 team off the home-field schneid.

Andrew Silow-Carroll, who got to know Cohen and her husband, David (who survives her, as do her 100-year-old mother and two children), while editing Washington Jewish Week, has further reminiscence. He notes that the two were to be awarded the Abraham Joshua Heschel Award from Jews United for Justice this month; David used to work at Americans for Peace Now.

And Michael Schaffer, the editor of Washington City Paper, observes of whoever ends up buying Politics & Prose (which may be a group that includes Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg), “the largest chunk of their investment in the store will not come because its inventory is that large or its Connecticut Avenue storefront is that appealing. It’ll involve buying access to the network of loyal customers Cohen and Meade painstakingly developed.”

As a fiercely proud member of that network, I’ll let my earlier words speak for themselves.

Carla Cohen Dies; Co-founder of D.C. Bookstore Politics & Prose [WP]
Carla Cohen, Washington Bookseller [JustASC]
Carla Cohen R.I.P. [City Paper]
Earlier: Reflections on a Book Paradise

• Goldberg to Bibi: Renew the freeze! [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• While in New York City last week, Iranian President Ahmadinejad met with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. [Vos Iz Neias/MyFox Los Angeles]

• Wearing a straw hat on a yontiff: A cautionary tale. [The Gloss]

• Things you should go to in New York City tonight! Vox Tablet guest Gal Beckerman discusses his new book; Tablet Magazine senior editor Sara Ivry interviews a graphic memoirist at the Tenement Museum.

• Krystal Night Limousines. It’s pogrom-errific! [Krystal Night]

Pretty much the final word on New York versus L.A. Jewish authenticity. That, and the fact that it’s 111 degrees there right now.

Now, Castro is backtracking. “In reality,” he explained, “my answer meant exactly the opposite of what both American journalists interpreted regarding the Cuban model. My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system no longer works for the United States or the world.” So he was misquoted? “He does not invent phrases, he transfers them and interprets them,” Castro said of his interlocutor. So, no, he was not misquoted. Okay then.

(By the way, Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith published an attempted corrective of Goldberg’s dispatch, which is worth considering.)

Meanwhile, perhaps the greatest good to come out of Goldberg’s jaunt—in addition to just the story of it—is that Castro’s endorsement of the Jewish people led Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez to echo his self-styled mentor: “We respect and love the Jewish people,” he affirmed upon hearing Castro’s quote. Now maybe Chávez will stop cozying up to Iran and tacitly endorsing anti-Semitism at home, hmm?

Fidel Tries To Wiggle Out of One [Atlantic]
Related: When Jeffrey Met Fidel [Weekly Standard]
Earlier: Hugo Chávez’s Uses for Anti-Semitism

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

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

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

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

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

An Obama shana tova.

New Photo Shows Fidel Castro With Jewish Leaders of Cuba [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Rabbi Avraham Bronstein, of the Hampton Synagogue, has a nuanced take on the new, unavoidable relationship between Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists. [… VaAni B’Sof HaMizrach]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu will be roughing it to some extent when he arrives in Washington, D.C., next week: Foreign Ministry workers are on strike. [JPost]

• Meet the newly announced Six Points Fellows: Nine emerging Jewish artists to watch. [Jewcy]

• Why the Park51 affair is important, no matter whether it ever actually gets built. [Jonathan Chait]

• Advocacy group Women of the Wall collected photographs of women around the world reading from the Torah. [Sisterhood]

Colbert v. Goldberg, on Iran.

How about, do you want to see Martin Amis talk about Philip Roth and how his father, the great (though not as great) novelist Kingsley, was a minor Jew-hater? English philo-Semites are great.

Related: Chosen [The Atlantic]
Albion’s Shame [The Atlantic]

• Goldberg v. Lazio on Meet The Press. [Atlantic]

• “It’s a community center. They’re going to have a gym. They’re going to have point guards. Muslim point guards.”—Al Franken [News Desk]

• Speaking of which, shortly after Amar’e, the NBA’s biggest big man is soon to visit Israel. Will we soon welcome Dwight Howard to the Tribe? Would we even want to? [JTA]

• Considering the Cordoba Initiative controversy, Ron Radosh considers not one but two Tablet Magazine articles, and quotes yours truly to boot. [Pajamas Media]

• This article is technically about opulent Persian weddings in L.A., but various hints make it pretty clear who they mean by “Persians.” [LAT]

It’s bad enough that Hapoel Tel Aviv’s Itay Schechter was yellow-carded for pulling a yarmulke out of his sock and putting it on after scoring against Austria’s FC Red Bull Salzburg. Turns out he wasn’t even aware of the anti-Semitic chants the Austrian crowd had offered. In fairness to the Austrian fans though, it must really suck to lose 3-2, at home, in a Champions League qualifying match to a bunch of Jews.

• The central if somewhat implicit logic of the piece may be that a. Israel will likely bomb Iran; b. it would be better if the United States bombed Iran; therefore c. the United States should bomb Iran. [Ben Smith]

• Matt Duss says an Israeli strike won’t really accomplish all that much (and is therefore unlikely to be undertaken). [Wonk Room]

• Steve Clemons thinks Israel is primarily intent on making the world think it will likely strike Iran rather than actually doing it. [The Washington Note]

• Joe Klein still completely opposes any and all airstrikes against Iran. [Swampland]

• Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett—whom Tablet Magazine columnist Lee Smith has had words with—say Goldberg’s implicit case for a U.S. strike is “flimsy.” [Foreign Policy]

• Fred Kaplan calls the piece “shrewd and balanced.” [Slate]

• J.J. Goldberg thinks the article, which does take care to acknowledge the potential consequences of a strike, still underplays just how catastrophic the aftermath could be. [Forward]

• Among other things, adds Matthew Yglesias, a strike could lead to a fantastic rise in oil prices, which could pummel the global economy. [Yglesias]

• Stephen Walt accuses Goldberg of trying to “mainstream” the notion of an Iran strike so that it will be more widely accepted if it comes, much as was done with the invasion of Iraq. [Foreign Policy]

• Goldberg himself gets the insight of air war expert Chuck Wald. [Atlantic]

• Next week, the Atlantic promises a blue-ribbon debate over the piece and its implications. [Atlantic Wire]

Goldberg writes,

The Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

There are several truckloads of reporting in the piece, and you should read the whole thing. (My favorite nugget: “[President George W.] Bush would sometimes mock those aides and commentators who advocated an attack on Iran, even referring to the conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol as ‘the bomber boys,’ according to two people I spoke with who overheard this.”) Goldberg explains that the consequences of an Israeli strike could be catastrophic for Israel, for the United States, and for the all-important U.S.-Israeli relationship. Netanyahu is aware of this, of course; if he goes ahead and launches the strike anyway, according to Goldberg, it will be because his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu (profiled in Tablet Magazine by Jason Epstein), imbued his son with, in Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s words, “a deep sense of his role in Jewish history.”

At the piece’s close, Goldberg seems to come out against an Israeli attack. (For a comprehensive argument in favor of one, here is contributing editor David Samuels in Slate last year.)

Goldberg also argues that the Iranian regime’s consistent assertions of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are properly taken at face-value—meaning “that rational deterrence theory, or the threat of mutual assured destruction, might not apply.”

“Let me tell you a secret,” Netanyahu apparently jokes. “The American military is bigger than Israel’s.” Yet, though President Barack Obama has called a nuclear Iran “unacceptable” and has said nothing is off the table, most Israeli observers doubt he will actually strike Iran. In a crucial nuance, Goldberg reveals that while the United States and Israel actually do see quite closely on the dangers of a nuclear Iran, Israel seems to much more highly value the possibility of postponing that state of affairs.

More thoughts later as responses, inevitably, roll in.

The Point of No Return [Atlantic]
Related: Personal History [Tablet Magazine]
Why Israel Will Bomb Iran [Slate]

After long consideration, I think that, yes, we should. Goldberg, one of the most prominent journalists on Jewish issues in the country, ultimately deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to knowing who the editor of one of the most prominent Jewish journals is. (Especially when said editor is his fellow right-wing neocon Podhoretz, with whom, I have heard, Goldberg routinely plots ways to establish “a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel” that involves condemning settlements.)

Take it from us: Goldberg may not know toilets. But Jews? Jews he knows.

Thursday Link Dump: Congrats to John Podhoretz! [Salon]

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

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

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

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

• Mel Gibson reportedly told the mother of his child, “I want Jew blood on my hands.” 13th-century Englishmen reported relief that Gibson has found a new target. [Huff Po]

• The 50 Most Influential Female Rabbis in America (only six appeared on Newsweek’s list of the 50 most influential rabbis). My personal congratulations to Avis Miller, whose High Holiday sermons were not to be missed. [Forward]

• A reader writes in to contributing editor Jeff Goldberg: “You and your psychopathic friends at tablet magazine and commentary and aipac are criminally responsible for the actions of the israeli government.” Commentary running things? That strunz? Not in this life. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Old-school sportswriter Vic Ziegel—he covered baseball, boxing, and the ponies for New York’s Post and Daily News—died at 72. [NYT]

• Palestinian nationalism, via the Guinness Book of World Records. [IHT]

The video below promotes a Brazilian megachurch’s planned $200 million, 10,000-seat replica of the Temple—yes, as in Solomon’s Temple—in São Paulo. It is quite creepy.

As far back as 2003, David Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard, was among the first to note the resurgence of anti-Semitism, “the socialism of fools,” in polite conversation, as conspiracy theorists peddled the idea that Jewish-American officials and their colleagues in the media had pressed the United States into making war with Iraq to serve the interests of Israel. From blogs and bulletin boards, Jew-baiting soon entered the mainstream publishing industry, most famously with the publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby. The two authors argue that there exists a group of U.S. officials, journalists, and activists—housed at institutions from The New York Times to AIPAC—who intentionally deceived the American public and subverted “true” U.S. interests on behalf of the Jewish state. As reviewers noted, the bulk of the book’s research was based on secondary sources, most of which came from the web.

If not quite as popular as adult-content sites, the anti-Israel blogosphere is a dirty little thrill that major U.S. media outfits have mainstreamed for the masses, the intellectual equivalent of the topless “Page Three” girls that British tabloids use to boost circulation. Among the dozens of blogs and websites obsessed with Israel and the machinations of the U.S. Israel lobby, Phillip Weiss’ Mondoweiss (a project of The Nation Institute), Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon, and Stephen Walt’s blog on ForeignPolicy.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) sit atop the junk-heap.

“Whenever one of these guys writes about me, I can tell without having looked at their blogs, because my inbox quickly fills with anti-Semitic invective,” says The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor and a frequent target of Weiss, Greenwald, and Walt. “Whenever I see a subject line with something like ‘You fascist Zionazi,’ it’s pretty much assured the link in the email will lead back to a post from one of these guys.”*

Some of these bloggers, like Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, were widely published journalists prior to their careers as Jew-baiters. Walt is a different case: A tenured professor of international relations at Harvard, his reputation extended no further than academic circles until The Israel Lobby put him in the middle of the national debate over U.S. Middle East policy. “I wouldn’t consider it a Middle East blog,” Foreign Policy’s managing editor, Blake Hounshell, says of Walt’s work for the site. “He writes about a lot of other things. It’s a regular foreign-policy blog.”

While it is true that Walt covers a wide range of international subjects in his blog, nothing provokes the same amount of reader feedback as his posts about Israel. Last week, a post on the Russian spy scandal received 14 comments; another post during the same period, enumerating what Walt considers the “five big questions about contemporary world politics,” fared a bit better, garnering 53 responses. In the eyes of Walt’s readership, however, those five major issues are dwarfed by the significance of his post concerning the Emergency Committee for Israel, a new pro-Israel organization founded by William Kristol, which was commented on 378 times.

These numbers suggest that the purpose of Walt’s blog is to act as a magnet for the animus of a readership hostile not only to Israel but also to American figures friendly to Israel, especially American Jews. Whether that bothers the owners of The Washington Post or thrills the advertising staff is another question. Jeffrey Goldberg believes that big media companies have morally blinded themselves to the ramifications of using anti-Semitism to attract readers. “I suppose that to the managers of Foreign Policy, traffic is traffic,” Goldberg says. “But in the course of building that traffic they’re surfacing some fairly dreadful invective about Jews. I don’t think they’d be comfortable surfacing the same kind of invective about African-Americans or other groups. But there seems to be a high tolerance for hosting a Jew-baiting blog.”

One explanation for the open sewer of hate that runs through the most prestigious foreign-policy websites is that their editors have become desensitized to opinions they read every day—and that are widely echoed throughout the Arab world and in Europe. In the view of such people, anti-Semitism is simply another common inconvenience of the medium. “As with other sites on the Internet, we certainly don’t feel as though we’ve found a good solution yet to dealing with offensive speech—or, though undoubtedly less importantly, for the annoying spammers who are for some reason insistent on selling our readers ‘Tiffany’ watches, jeans and shoes,” says Susan Glasser, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy.

While it is difficult and in some cases perhaps undesirable to keep reader-comment sections completely free of insults, racist slurs, paranoid rantings, and threats of violence, it is also the case that some authors and certain subjects, regardless of the author or argument, are more likely than others to stir up the cesspool. Robert Mackey’s The Lede blog at The New York Times serves up a steady diet of Israel-related stories that give hardcore anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic commenters a home at the paper but is energetic in removing the most egregious posts.

Commenters who are shut out at The Lede can find a welcoming home on Lobeblog, hosted by Jim Lobe, a journalist with the IPS News Agency who believes that the roots of the U.S. invasion of Iraq lay not in the White House or the Defense Department, or in U.S. dependence on Arab oil, but in a small neoconservative outfit called the Project for a New American Century, which was supposedly run by American Jews looking to direct U.S. policy on behalf of the Israeli government.

“It hasn’t been secret,” writes Carroll, a commenter on a Lobelog post, that “for a long time that we have a small cabal of US zionist operating in and manipulating the US for their vision of Israel and a group of US Neocons and other assorted special interest who never met a war they didn’t like. … What do we have to do to put an end to them? … Suicide the cabal?” On another post at the same site, a commenter named Rowan Berkeley writes: “It seems to me that it is no exaggeration to say roundly that the USA in its entirety is under Jewish control of one variety or another.” He then makes an entirely accurate observation: “Ten years ago, it would have been a safe assumption that only ‘neo-Nazis’ would say such a thing.”

What is notable about such comments is not that they are original or unusual, but that there are hundreds and thousands of them, each sicker and crazier than the next, appended like a mile-long oil slick to nearly any mainstream news story or opinion piece that mentions Israel. In addition to creating the impression of a wave of popular hatred directed against the Jewish state—an impression belied by polls that show nearly two-thirds of Americans support Israel—the commenters attempt to swamp the news with paranoid anti-Semitic rantings that are entirely detached from even the BBC’s version of reality. On Glenn Greenwald’s Salon blog, there were close to 1,000 comments when the news of the Gaza flotilla incident broke. One commenter took the episode as proof that “The jewish state intends to clean itself of all non-jews. Anything that might slow the starving of the hated ones will be dealt with in the most harsh of terms. This slow-motion genocide/ethnic-cleansing is a horror to witness.” One prominent contributor to Greenwald’s blog, a commenter calling himself Shingo, also appears in the comments section at Stephen Walt’s place, where he manfully exposes Zionist lies: “There is no archeologically and historically evidence that a Jewish state did exist,” he wrote in response to a Walt post.

That comment, along with several dozen others, disappeared from FP.com yesterday, removed by site administrators after I emailed Foreign Policy’s Glasser for comment. “Walt often provokes heated debate with his blog posts, and we are attentive to making sure that offensive comments are taken down,” she later explained in an email.” Many of Shingo’s similar comments remain live, however. Another typical comment, by a reader named Cal, also disappeared after I contacted Foreign Policy. “[E]njoy your hubris reveling while you can,” he warns, “cause you know whose going to be blamed for all the damage and fallout if there is a US military involvement with Iran or if we spend more blood and treasure on Israel’s war … the ‘Jews are.” The authority that Cal cites for his creepy, conspiratorial worldview is none other than the blog’s author: “[A]s before, Walt is right, has been right. Israel stung the frog, now it’s gonna drown.”

Walt’s readers live through his posts and feed off of the legitimacy bestowed on him by mainstream American cultural institutions—Harvard, which employs him; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which published his book, and FP.com and The Washington Post Company, which host his blog. Walt and his anti-Israel blogging colleagues have become the respectable face of Jew-baiting. They’re the cesspool’s avatars.

There was a time when American publications could easily ward off the fringe population of semi-literate paranoids and shut-ins who seek admission to mainstream American intellectual life by writing crazy letters. Editors of magazines like The New Yorker didn’t particularly care what their readers had to say (the magazine had no letters section for many years), so long as they kept renewing their subscriptions, and a magazine’s prestige seemed proportionate to the lack of interest it evinced in audience feedback. Being kept in the margins, or shoved there, is the other side of the homespun success story, and no one ever has written better about thwarted American aspiration than Nathanael West. His novel Miss Lonelyhearts is about a newspaper advice columnist driven to despair over the anguished longings of his miserable readers; West’s Day of the Locust is about fringe Hollywood characters who never make the big time, a book that ends in a riot and Los Angeles in flames. What we’re seeing now on the blogs is the obscene marriage of West’s two greatest, and apparently visionary, works: Miss Lonelyhearts’s readers have repossessed the media and redeemed their self-pity and resentment with lead roles in American intellectual life—which they are intent on burning to the ground. Yet even West never dreamed that the proprietors would provide the matches.

“Walt is a throwback to the 1930s,” says Goldberg. “In the ’30s the isolationists rode the Jews as a hobby horse. They tried very hard to marginalize American citizens of the Jewish faith by questioning their loyalty. These guys don’t even understand what ancient terror they’re tapping into. What’s original, what makes this period alarming, is that The Washington Post Company would give a Jew-baiter a platform.”

*A prior version of this article incorrectly suggested that Goldberg was also referring to Andrew Sullivan in the above quote. He was not.

• What exactly are the U.N. soldiers in southern Lebanon supposed to do? No one is actually sure, and Hezbollah is exploiting the confusion. [LAT]

• Israel’s “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system is ready and will be deployed starting in Sderot this fall. [NYT]

• An update on the play that imagines a meeting between Elie Wiesel and Bernard Madoff, which opens upstate later this week. [NYT]

• A womens’ group periodically drives Palestinian children from the West Bank to an Israeli town on the Mediterranean coast in order to give them a day at the beach. [WP]

• Head-Jew-in-charge (and contributing editor) Jeffrey Goldberg nominates editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse to be his replacement following her essay on the Rotem Bill. [Atlantic]