• Political dissension and varying scandals have led to a worrying decrease in the IDF’s prestige. [WP]

• A profile of San Francisco-raised Sally Oren, the wife of the Israeli ambassador. [Washington Diplomat]

• Some important inside-Jewish-charity baseball news, as the Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency decide to beat their swords into plowshares. [The Fundermentalist]

• Actress Rachel Weisz and director Darren Aronofsky are headed for Splitsville. This somehow feels important. [Jezebel]

• Michael Goldfarb (not the former McCain adviser), whose book Emancipation is excellent, is speaking at the Manhattan JCC this week and next. [Manhattan JCC]

In case you still haven’t seen this middle school trick play …

• This is literally an article about five Jewish women from the Five Towns and how they like to play mah-jongg. [NYT]

• The ethics of transgender dating in the Orthodox community. [NYT Magazine]

• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that investigating the planned mosque at Ground Zero would be un-American. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• That guy is totally wearing a Yom Kippur on his head! [Jezebel]

• Congratulations to Susan Cernerk and Robert Giampietro. Rob helped design our site! [NYT]

Some perverbs for the evening.

Goldfarb, former London bureau chief for National Public Radio and now an independent journalist living in London, speaks to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about signifcant moments and personalities of that period, from philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who left his Talmud studies in the Dessau ghetto to become what some referred to as “Germany’s Plato,” to the Rothschild dynasty and its antithesis, Karl Marx.

So is the location—the Russia House in downtown Washington, D.C.—a joke, too? Is the party even happening? “We booked Russia House, and then realized there was so much we could do with that,” Spitalnick said. The party, in other words, is a go. Join J Street, friends of J Street, and Michael Goldfarb (maybe) in two Tuesdays for free booze. great times, and good conversation. We’ll even hazard the guess that the topic of Israel might come up.

J Street Chanukah Happy Hour at Russia House [Facebook]

Previously: The Pulse-Taker

In the funniest scene from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, several Ukrainians attempt to understand what exactly is wrong with an American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer who refuses to eat any meat. Almost a decade later, Foer has finally explained himself, in Eating Animals (Little, Brown, November), a nonfiction cri de coeur against factory farming. By temperament a sentimental maximalist, and now with an actual cause to champion, Foer pulls out every stop: science, humor, horror, pathos, celebrities. Natalie Portman proclaimed last week that Foer has single-handedly transformed her into a vegan. If Foer’s dog, sweet Holocaust-surviving grandmother, and infant children have anything to say about it—and, oh, they absolutely do—you’ll think twice before devouring the flesh of another mammal, kosher or not.

Unlike Foer, but like Tablet contributing editor Eryn Loeb, Mollie Katzen discovered vegetarianism through kashrut: “I loved meat when my mom cooked it,” she once told Hadassah Magazine, “but when I wasn’t at home, my way of keeping kosher was not eating meat, and that led me to look for other vegetarian options.” She helped found the Moosewood Collective, in Ithaca, New York, and went on to author some of the most popular vegetarian cookbooks ever published. Yet, like Foer before fatherhood, Katzen’s hardly a dietary absolutist, and Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen (Harper Studio, October)—aimed at beginners—includes recipes for Pan-Seared Garlic Prawns and Linguine with Clam Sauce along with Grandma Betty’s Brisket and a range of vegetarian fare. Foer would prefer the latest volume from the Moosewood Collective itself, Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health: More than 200 New Recipes for Delicious and Nutrient-Rich Dishes (Simon & Schuster, November), a thoroughly Pollan-ified (whole grains, no “white foods”) update to the Collective’s shtick.

* * *

The nagging question of how Jews can maintain some form of kashrut without refusing to eat at restaurants and at non-Jews’ houses—which Katzen solved by going veggie—resulted, in large part, from the developments chronicled by Michael Goldfarb in Emancipation: How Liberating the Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance (Simon & Schuster, November). A radio and print journalist, Goldfarb relies on academic historians, weaving their findings into an upbeat tale of how freedom from persecution and insularity led Europe’s Jews onward to remarkable cultural feats. Goldfarb simplifies matters rather formidably—“One day we’re being completely segregated,” he says, describing the book in an audio report, “next thing you know, Napoleon comes through town, tears down the ghetto gates, and we can do whatever we like, sort of”—but many readers will enjoy his anti-lachrymose view of Jewish history.

Just as Goldfarb credits Napoleon with the emancipation of Europe’s Jews, Tablet columnist Seth Lipsky regards the U.S. Constitution as having produced and safeguarded in perpetuity the freedom of Americans, Jews included. Having once praised The Founders’ Constitution, a collection of primary sources from the time of the document’s composition, as the “American Talmud,” Lipsky has now produced what might then be called an American Tosafot, in which he riffs on the original document and its sources and contexts. He calls the result The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide (Basic, November), though a more accurate name would be The Conservative’s Constitution, seeing as how Lipsky’s book is “free of the tendentious liberal ‘interpretations’ so typical of other guides,” in the words of the Conservative Book Service.

* * *

Recent work by historians of the Mediterranean and Middle East suggest that contrary to Goldfarb’s central generalization, even the Jewish communities that we might imagine as most powerfully isolated from their surroundings were, in fact, engaged in complex and important relationships with the non-Jewish communities around them. Attending to what he calls “integration” in antiquity, for example, Seth Schwartz proposes in Were the Jews A Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton, November) that “Jews were more deeply implicated in Roman and Mediterranean bonds of reciprocity and honor than is commonly assumed.” In Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy (Cambridge, November), Joshua Holo focuses on the through the the 13th centuries BCE, and on the often Greek-speaking Jews of the Byzantine empire, examining how this community’s dual economic spheres, one internal and another external, dramatize the Jews’ “acculturation and ambivalence.” It isn’t startling news, meanwhile, that Jews and non-Jews interacted in deeply resonant ways during the Spanish Golden Age, but the paperback publication of The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale, November), offers up 200 lush color images of artifacts, all testifying visually to the vigor of those relationships.

* * *

You may never have heard of Emmanuel Radnitzky, but if you’ve ever visited a half decent collection of 20th-century art, you’ve certainly seen some of his work. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, to a pair of Jewish immigrants from Russia, and raised partly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he took on the name Man Ray before producing his Dadaist and Surrealist paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as a set of haunting short films (such as 1926’s Emak Bakia). He lived in Paris for decades, where he photographed James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein; his creations in a range of media were exhibited alongside the works of Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró. An exhibit opening at New York’s Jewish Museum on November 15 explores the artist’s “willful construction of veiled identity”; the catalog, Alias Man Ray: The Art of Invention (Yale, November)—with biographical and critical essays by curators and art historians, plus hundreds of examples of Man Ray’s work—is much cheaper than a trip to Manhattan.

As it happens, the Standard has also been calling around to members of Congress who had signed up to participate in the conference asking about their participation—a factor that inevitably raised J Street’s discomfort level. According to Politico, Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware backed out after receiving a call from the magazine, and his withdrawal was soon followed by other high-profile exits, including New York senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Theater J artistic director Ari Roth, who was scheduled to moderate the poetry panel, tells Tablet he decided not to argue against the cancellation when J Street called yesterday, while he was watching football. “It’s J Street’s conference, and they have to pick their battles,” said Roth, who was roundly criticized earlier this year for his decision to stage Caryl Churchill’s controversial protest play Seven Jewish Children.

J Street Conference Sessions [J Street]