To find the place, we had to turn on a few side streets, go down a discreet staircase next to an apartment complex, and press a button beside an unmarked black door. Three short rings later, we were greeted and quickly ushered inside by a round Russian man with a shiny bald head.

“It’s exclusive,” Dasha whispered to me as we traipsed down the stairs. “They don’t want to bother with just anybody.”

Dasha, Anastasia, and Nastia, native Russians in their twenties, made the orders: pomegranate hookah, tea with milk, tea with lemon, chocolate-covered almonds, and fruit beer. Dasha, an icy blonde, and I sat next to each other at the low table while the other two women sat across from us smoking gold-tapered cigarettes.

We began with talk about the stinginess of Dasha’s recent ex. “A Russian woman should only have to pay for her candy and stockings,” Anastasia, draped in fur, informed me. As the newcomer, having just moved here from New York on a fellowship, I had Russian romance lessons to learn. We continued with necessary nastiness about his new girlfriend. “In this day and age, if a Russian woman isn’t beautiful by 30, she’s just stupid,” Nastia, very tall with black hair, said, making the case that plastic surgery solves everything. Dasha had new prospects: an Italian diplomat and a Finnish entrepreneur. “We look for foreigners,” Dasha explained.

Soon the conversation turned to me. I mentioned a few disastrous dates I’d been on since arriving and then made the typical four-single-women-at-a-lounge conclusion: “Men are impossible.” Anastasia and Nastia murmured their agreement, blowing smoke rings.

“Except Jewish men,” Dasha interrupted. The three of us looked at her. She crossed and uncrossed her legs and signaled to the waitress for another drink. “The best men are Jewish.”

I turned to Dasha. “You’re Jewish?” I asked. She smiled, fiddling with the diamond cross around her neck. “Of course I am Jew,” she said. “Jewish men are stylish and important men. And they are the most generous. You must date Jewish men.” Anastasia and Nastia nodded seriously, as though Dasha were imparting the secret to successful dating.

I leaned back and took a deep drag off the pomegranate hookah. I was in St. Petersburg—a city that 100 years ago had forbidden Jews’ residency. The only exceptions had been Jews who openly converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, or Jewish merchants with connections. In rare cases, Jews who had served in the czar’s army for 25 years were permitted to live in the city.

When Daniel Chwolson, a great early 20th-century intellectual in St. Petersburg, was once asked why he had converted to Russian Orthodoxy from Judaism, he answered: “Out of conviction.”

“Out of what conviction?” he was asked. His answer: “Out of the conviction that it is better to be a professor in St. Petersburg then a melamed [Hebrew schoolteacher] in Shklop.”

Now, in a trendy lounge, a young Jewish Russian woman was flaunting her Jewishness and her trysts with Jewish men like it was a fabulous accessory, akin to her black fur coat.

***

When thousands of Russian immigrants began flooding Israel in the 1990s, the joke was that for the first time in history, people were trying to alter their official papers to say that they were Jewish. Since my move to St. Petersburg this fall, I’ve been taken aback by a similar trend: Everyone I meet is excited to have their metaphorical Jewish papers. Jewishness has a new social currency—especially when it comes to dating.

Before my move, my sole association with Russian Jewry, like so many American Ashkenazi Jews, was that of my lineage. Unless I was discussing the refusenik movement of the 1970s or taking the occasional subway ride to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Russian Jewry was the family photographs on my living-room walls.

In one, my great-grandfather, a Hasidic rabbi from a shtetl outside of Minsk, Belarus, looks out sternly from an oil portrait above our piano. In another, my grandfather and great-aunt, from the same shtetl, gaze with somber eyes in faded black and white. On a table in our foyer is another black-and-white photograph of another great-aunt, a classic babushka.

Russian society was deeply anti-Semitic when those photographs were taken. Pogroms were government issued. There was little to eat. I am reminded of a Yiddish shtetl song my mother, a Yiddish translator by profession, once taught me: Zuntik bulbes, montik bulbes, 
Dinstik uhn mitvoch bulbes, 
Donershtik uhn fraytik bulbes. 
Ober shabbes in a noveneh a bulbeh kuggele 
Zuntik vayter bulbes. (Translation: Sunday potatoes, Monday potatoes, Wednesday potatoes, Thursday and Friday potatoes. But on the Sabbath for a change a potato pudding.) Between this and the lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof’s “Anatevka”—overworked, underpaid—my stereotype of Russian Jewry was complete.

As I prepared to move, I thought about how my Belarusian grandfather had come to New York City 80 years ago in order to learn English and make a life for himself and his family. And as I began to study rudimentary Russian, I couldn’t shake the lingering and lovely thought that this was my grandfather’s childhood alphabet. Learning simple greetings and the words for “black tea” connected me to him and his lost world, both of which I longed to understand.

The next time I met Dasha, over wine in a fashionable, factory-style café above an art gallery called the Loft, I pried her about the comments she made at the club. She waved to various artists drinking at different tables and then turned back to me. “It’s simple. If you don’t like a man, I tell you it’s because he is not Jew,” she said in her accented English.

Continue reading: The rabbi’s daughter dances

So, what’s the point of a toothless resolution? “The Arab-Western strategy at the U.N. makes a great deal of sense if Assad’s days are truly numbered, and the decisive pressure to remove him will come from the inside,” argues Marc Lynch in an excellent analysis. (He writes as one who opposes any military action, even a no-fly zone, on the merits.) “An international consensus crystallized in a Security Council resolution would limit the regime’s options and send a clear signal to Syrians that their future does not lie with the status quo,” he adds. “The political transition plan may not unfold as outlined on paper, but the constant references to toleration and inclusion can reassure frightened elites and minorities that they have a place in post-Assad Syria.” And to Assad, it would be a threat of what might come next.

Why wouldn’t Russia relent? Especially given the thousands of Syrian soldiers who have already defected and much chatter from the West (some of it no doubt ginned up precisely to make the regime’s end seem inevitable, but still) that Assad is on his way out? The answer is, Russia probably will. Credit also Secretary Clinton’s strong speech Tuesday and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s admonition that the Security Council form a consensus. Even credit the Turkish president, who said it’s over for onetime ally Assad. Their words will make it so.

And really, credit Israel. They wanted this before just about everyone. When the unrest first started in Syria last spring, everyone assumed Israel would prefer the stability of Assad—that phrase about “the devil we know” was tossed around a lot, including by me. Ambassador Michael Oren answered that way of thinking by June: “Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region,” Oren wrote. “The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.” No doubt Israel has been moved in large part by the near-certainty that an Assad-less Syria would greatly hurt Iran and its ability to project power throughout the region that threatens Israel, chiefly by funding and shipping arms to Hezbollah and Hamas (indeed, Hamas has already ditched Damascus and may be splitting with Tehran). For Israel, pragmatism may have been the better part of virtue. But they were still virtuous before the rest of the world (minus Russia and a few other holdouts) came around: a statement, in its way—you can know someone by his enemies—about what Israel stands for in the region and the international community.

Diplomats at U.N. Haggle With Russia Toward a Compromise on Syria [NYT]
The Security Council Takes on Syria [FP Mideast Channel]
Endgame in Syria [WP PostPartisan]
Israel Prefers The End of the Assad Regime to Its Continuance [WSJ]
As Syria Wobbles Under Pressure, Iran Feels the Weight of An Alliance [NYT]

• The emergent opposition claims President Assad no longer controls half of Syria. [Haaretz]

• Guess who the Syria issue’s really also about? Iran. [NYT]

• Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of Gaza and Hamas, is visiting Tehran. Hamas and Iran have been on the outs recently due to Hamas’ abandonment of the Assad regime. [JTA]

• As predicted, Prime Minister Netanyhau cleaned up in the Likud primaries. [Ynet]

• The Orthodox Jewish Press responds to threats it has received over an op-ed it recently published by someone who identified as Orthodox and homosexual. [Jewish Press/Failed Messiah]

• A State Department spokesperson criticized an Israeli announcement of new West Bank settlement-building. [Haaretz]

• The Mossad head has recently had secret meetings with top U.S. officials on Iran. It’s not clear if we are supposed to know this (though it’s not exactly shocking, either). [Haaretz]

• The story of Bernie Fine, the former Syracuse assistant basketball coach, takes a turn for the even-more-tawdry. [ESPN]

• Israel sent the Muslim Brotherhood a note of cautious congratulations on its success in Egypt’s parliamentary elections. [Arutz Sheva]

• Jewcy’s Jason Diamond reviews Ben Marcus’s new, super-Jewy novel, The Flame Alphabet. [NPR]

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, whose The Law in These Parts, a documentary about the West Bank legal system, just won the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, made a short “Op-Doc” for the Times.

• Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that it would take Iran about a year to actually develop a nuclear weapon—if it decided to. That decision, he added, is the United States’ red line. [Haaretz]

• Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, having effectively abandoned Damascus, visited King Abdullah II in Amman, in a sign of reconciliation between estranged allies who both have reasons to be friends (but not too good friends) again. [NYT]

• The chatter in Israel is of early elections. The thinking is that Prime Minister Netanyahu will call them while his popularity is high and before the U.S. elections. [LAT]

• Russia is, like, absurdly good to the Assad regime. [NYT]

• An Israeli documentary about the legal system in the West Bank won the prize for best documentary at Sundance. [Haaretz]

OK, OK, we get it!

Meanwhile, David Sanger had a valuable article over the weekend reporting that China has finally decided to understand what Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer told it almost two years ago: that Iran’s raising of the temperature would, for a number of reasons, increase economic instability and tamper with world energy markets—two things China loathes. “For years,” Sanger notes,

China resisted sanctions on Iran, since it buys so much Iranian oil. Now it sees that escalating sanctions are inevitable, so it is busy hedging its bets, looking for alternative sources (with help from the Obama administration) while delaying a crisis. “They are a little late to the game,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said. “We have been telling them this was coming for two years now. But they are only now believing it.”

Fellow veto-wielding Security Council member Russia, by contrast, benefits from a crisis that raises energy prices: After all, it is the world’s largest producer of crude and a net energy exporter by a wide margin. To convince it to go along, Israel may need to get going on the Soviet-born Foreign Minister Lieberman’s meager feed.

Related: Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections [NYT]
Earlier: Iran Foes Try to Coax China
In Homefront-Heavy Speech, Iran Warned

• And from the U.S. perspective, does anything come after sanctions? (More at 10.) [NYT]

• The Arab League appealed to the United Nations to take action on Syria. [WP]

• Talking in Amman, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators grew angry when an Israeli tried to prevent his stance on security arrangements. The sides meet again today. [Haaretz]

• Israel jailed the speaker of the Palestinian parliament and another Hamas legislator for six months without trial. [WP]

• The Russian Jewish Congress protested a memorial to a particular Nazi slaughter that removed the word “Holocaust” and seemed to de-ethnicize the killing. [AP/NYT]

• Iran is quietly facilitating Syria’s continued sail of oil in contravention of an embargo by importing it, selling it on the world market, and remitting the revenue back to the Assad regime. [WSJ]

• Russia’s foreign minister forcefully pledged to block any U.N. Security Council authorization for military intervention in Syria. [NYT]

• The annual Security Council report on the Gaza blockade was released yesterday. It calls the blockade “collective punishment.” [Ynet]

• Israel’s submission, Footnote, qualified for the nine-film Best Foreign Movie Oscar shortlist. The five nominees will be announced next week. [JTA]

• Anne Sinclair, Dominique-Strauss Kahn’s wife, will run the French edition of The Huffington Post. [NYT]

Bátora’s letter, signed by members of a far-right organization that goes by the acronym D.O.S.T., (meaning “enough” in Czech, and whose symbol is a clenched fist hitting a table), claimed that the festival was “organized by groups of homosexuals and lesbians whose demands against the Czech public significantly exceed the framework of mere tolerance.” Citing Ronald Reagan, whose anti-Communism has made him an enduringly popular figure in the Czech Republic, Bátora wrote that Eisen had betrayed the former president’s legacy and threatened to rupture the “good relations between our nations.”

American ambassadors, particularly those in small European countries, aren’t supposed to be in the business of stoking controversy. Not so for President Barack Obama’s appointees. Early last year, a State Department investigation revealed that the former ambassador to Luxembourg, a major Democratic Party fundraiser named Cynthia Stroum, had so demoralized her staff that some career foreign-service officers working under her fled for posts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last month in Belgium, Ambassador Howard Gutman provoked a firestorm in the United States when he intimated that Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe was largely a response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the surface, Eisen and Gutman have much in common: Both are prominent Democratic Party fundraisers, lawyers, and the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors. But their respective controversies could not have been more different: Whereas Gutman’s remarks provided fodder for those who seek to blame Jews for the hatred directed at them, Eisen’s intervention bolstered liberalism in a country that, still seeking its place in the post-Communist era, badly needs it.

The Czech Republic is known for its carefree attitude toward sex and sexuality: It has the highest divorce rate on the continent; it’s a popular destination for British stag parties; nearly half the population identifies as atheist; and it’s a major hub for the production of gay pornography. But these ostensible signifiers of social tolerance belie what is in fact a deeply conservative society.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, for one, took umbrage at the fact that Eisen, along with 12 other Western ambassadors, voiced support for Prague Pride. The same day that Bátora marched on the U.S. Embassy, Klaus, a founder of the country’s biggest right-of-center political party, issued his own statement, declaring: “I can’t imagine any Czech ambassador daring to interfere by a petition with the internal political discussion in any democratic country in the world.” (Klaus had made his own views on the parade well known the previous week by defending an aide who had referred to gays as “deviant fellow citizens.”)

Eisen, 51, whose mother is a Czechoslovak Holocaust survivor, was now thrust into the center of a political controversy that had been roiling the country for months. Bátora had already been fingered as a man with unpalatable views: A group of Czech senators called for his dismissal from the Education Ministry a week before he delivered his missive to Eisen. The senators had raised concerns about Bátora’s involvement with a now-defunct far-right political party that promoted the expulsion of Czech Roma citizens. Bátora had also praised as “brilliant” a 1925 anti-Semitic book called The Adulteration of the Slavs, which approvingly cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and the works of German writers who would later go on to become leading figures in the Nazi Party.

Bátora’s presence in the Education Ministry threatened the country’s fragile center-right coalition government. (The most admired Czech in the world, Vaclav Havel, denounced Bátora from his sickbed.) Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, a distinguished Czech political figure and founder of the center-right TOP ’09 party, reportedly called him an “old fascist.” But it was Ambassador Eisen’s provocation that ultimately led to Bátora’s downfall.

Continue reading: The brouhaha moves to Facebook

• In a false flag operation that made President George W. Bush livid, Mossad agents reportedly posed as U.S. intelligence agents to recruit members of a Pakistani terrorist group into conducting operations, including assassination, in Iran. Huge scoop. [FP]

• Frequent Tablet Magazine contributor James Kirchick links the contemporary use (typically on the left) of terms like “Israel-firster” and “dual loyalism” to the anti-Semitic far-right. [Haaretz]

• Entering roughly the same debate, Eric Alterman defends his own record and accuses critics of think tanks like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters of practicing “Jewish McCarthyism.” [Forward]

• Iran continued to allege that Israel and the United States were responsible for yesterday’s and other assassinations of nuclear scientists (which the U.S. strongly denies) and hinted at reprisals. [NYT]

• Yet weirdly the head of Iran’s nuclear agency showed up at the scientist’s funeral, almost as though the scientist had not been merely a scientist. [Golnaz Esfandiari Twitter]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged that sanctions are indeed harming Iran’s economy and possibly working toward their goal of making the country compliant with international nuclear standards. [Haaretz]

• The head of the Kremlin’s Security Council accused Israel of pushing the U.S. toward war with Iran. [Haaretz]

• The Palestinian Authority set a Jan. 26 deadline for concrete progress or else it will pull out of the series of talks in Amman. It’s … unclear what the stick is here. Or the carrot, for that matter. [JPost]

• PolitiFact says that the Democratic accusation that the leading Republican candidates (excepting Paul) would “zero-out” aid to Israel is ridiculous. [JTA Capital J]

• Which religion, out of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, offers the best average pay for clergy in America? Hint: Don’t over-think this one. [Slate]

• Tila Tequila is going to convert to Judaism. I am ashamed to admit that I have heard of Tila Tequila but proud to boast that I have no idea who she is. [TMZ]

• The Frugal Traveler (aka Matt Gross) visits Jerusalem! Now if only Bourdain would go. [NYT]

• According to American Airlines, Tel Aviv is the Middle East’s best gay city (well, duh). That’s just to distract you from the occupation, though. [ThinkProgress]

• Saad Hariri’s tweet “@” an Israeli Defense spokesperson could make things … awkward for the former Lebanese prime minister. [Abir G Twitter]

I imagine this video, starring Mayor Michael Bloomberg and with a cameo by former Mayor Ed Koch and set to the music of Lady Gaga, lets you feel what it’s like to take a lot of acid.

This man might have been my grandfather; his hands were parched like ears of corn, his nails yellowed most probably by psoriasis. I quarrel with myself: How much to give? $1? $5? A man looks like a walking heart attack, comes halfway around the world, and you give him $5? All I had were 20s. I hardened myself. “Do you have change?” I say. Of course he has change. He puts down his papers, a sheaf of papers he carries in a leather folder, like something from Bernard Malamud’s Magic Barrel. You could swear he smells of fish. Seeing his exertion, I told him to keep the $20 bill.

The motif of the beggar, both the holy and unholy ones, is firmly ensconced in Judaic lore, from the Talmud all the way through Hassidic tales. Begging intensified when we were forced to live in ghettos in Europe in the period following the Middle Ages. This continued in the shtetl. We were all one family then, staggered as we were by the waves of brutality visited on us by the gentile nations. This was the golden age of beggardom, which begat a new kind of beggar—the “schnorrer.” “Schnorrers” refer to those beggars who have an air of entitlement, as if they were exiled monarchs, gifts to civilization, who have the unfortunate position of having no money.

Every Tuesday morning at my synagogue, by the coffee urn just inside of the entrance, sit three elderly Russian men. They literally have their hands out. A dollar here and there, a few coins, a Yiddish turn of phrase, a mixture of gold tooth smiles and plaintive requests. One dollar buys you a torrent of blessings from them: A gut yahr, na zdrovie, they say. Spraznikom.

I love these men, with their blue-eyed, lined faces. Perhaps they are veterans of the Great War, remnants of the Red Army’s drive on Berlin. One of them is old enough for sure, but no one is quite sure why they are there.

And those are just the regulars. There are a host more who make cameo appearances, often from Israel. They make impassioned, sometimes anguished speeches beseeching donations for one important cause or another or for themselves. These men, anachronisms in human form—they would have been at home in the shtetl, with their dirty caftans, patched jackets, and stale cigarettes. Their faces, some of them, convey a world of dust and famine, feet in run-down boots that tread in gutters muddy with dirty snow and ice. These men (and they are almost always men) come in the modern equivalent of droshkies (Polish for horse-and-buggy taxis) beat-up car services and livery cabs.

Not too long ago, one young man from Israel asked me if he could take a few minutes to make a plea for funds during one morning minyan. I told him he could do so, after the aleinu. I knew this was after some of his customers would have already left, but the minyan was running late. It hurt me to say no, but I did.

He fumed. Afterward, I asked him how much money I caused him to lose—he told me $25. I gave it to him. He embraced me in gratitude, but I saw he wasn’t happy. Later someone pointed out to me that he may have “needed” to tell his story. I had robbed him of the opportunity to klop on the bimah and tell his tale. It wasn’t only the money. Without his speech he was painfully invisible.

One man I know appears at intervals and faithfully recites his tale with pathos, inveighing with all manner of fire and brimstone all that has befallen him. “I used to have parnassah, pay bills, have a business, but now …” His story is dear to him, so dear that in his mind it trumps davening. A tug-of-war develops between him and the shliach tzibbur, or leader of prayers, as to whose voice will triumph. “I have to make chasunah”—wedding—“now for three children …” is pitted against “Amen Y’hei Shmei Rabboh,” the climax of the Kaddish prayer. Some rush to shush him while others hear him out, pressing dollar bills and fives dramatically into his hands as he sings his song of sorrow. He can break your heart even if you think he is not telling the truth.

In my Passaic, N.J., synagogue, a benevolent attitude has formed toward worthy and non-worthy vagabonds alike. Everyone is given something and sometimes a little more than something. Not too long ago I struck up a deep conversation with Baruch. A man in his fifties, a seventh-generation Yerushalmi, Baruch took his tea with tons of sugar as we schmoozed. He had the visage of a holy man. He carried an album with him with photos of his parents and his children. Ten of them lived in a three-room apartment in the old city of Jerusalem. He was marrying off his third son, and he was begging and borrowing to do it. The man had such charm, had such Jew-holiness about him, I would have emptied my bank account into his, if I had anything.

Together we worked up a cozy steam. On his mother’s side, they came from the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia, where my ancestors are from. In his way, he was a devoted father and grandfather. He would provide by hook or by crook. I respected that. So what if his family was a lot larger than he could handle? Who hasn’t over-reached? Besides, there were already grandchildren. How could a Jewish child be a mistake? It was all very touching. Besides, he quoted from Talmud at a page a minute, and I matched him quote for quote. We had a jolly old time.

I can’t remember if this is actually so, but I believe he made himself as the Yiddish expression goes, ze’er ba’kvemt—very, or too comfortable. Perhaps he took out a cigarette and made smoke rings or maybe he downed a plate of cookies, I can’t remember exactly. He asked if I knew anyone who would be sympathetic to his plight. I actually did know someone, a wealthy hotelier who once told me that he wanted to “twin” his daughter’s wedding with a poor man’s wedding in Jerusalem. “Is he observant?” the Yerushalmi wanted to know. He was not observant, I told him.  With a horrified look, my Yerushalmi friend said that he could not take the money of someone who was not observant.

You had to admire him in a perverse way.  Here was a beggar and a chooser. At any rate, we both paid lip service to the coming of the Messiah, and I gave him $100. But after I did that, I asked him casually, if his children had any plans for making their way in life, like you know, working.

Without even a trace of irony he waved his hand and said, “Ze lo bishvilanu la’avod,” or “It is not for us to work.” At that point, I realized that we were both crazy—I for giving him money, and he for expecting me and the rest of the world to provide for all the children he sired pell-mell—without the slightest plan. We shared a bond as members of the same tribe, but our worldviews were wholly incommensurate with each other.

Nevertheless, somehow in the people’s yiddishkeit, in the precincts of the shul and the beis medrash—a world where virtue and piety rule the high seas of human thought and behavior, we are, all of us, as if in an opium den, rendered into holy fools.

The activists sought to secure the right of thousands of Russian Jews—at risk of cultural extinction after years of forced assimilation under Communism—to leave the Soviet Union. Moscow should not receive most-favored trade status from the United States, American Jews insisted, unless and until their Soviet brethren were allowed to emigrate. Under immense pressure exerted by this movement, Congress would eventually pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment in 1974, which conditioned trade with the Soviet Union on Russian emigration policy. In the process, the movement transformed the nature of American foreign policy, helping to establish “the principle that human rights supersede national sovereignty, that democracies are morally bound to intervene in the internal affairs of dictatorships,” as the former activist Yossi Klein Halevi, now an Israeli author and journalist, has written.

Most Iranian Americans are likely unfamiliar with this inspiring saga. But they could learn a lot from its example. They, too, face a totalitarian adversary in the form of Iran’s clerical regime, which has trapped millions of their countrymen for over three decades. And just as the Soviet Jewry movement had to overcome the hostility of a U.S. administration obsessed with realpolitik, Iranian-Americans today are frustrated by a White House seemingly unmoved by the plight of dissidents in Iran. Like American Jews, Iranian Americans are a notoriously fractious bunch, divided by numerous ideological and generational fault lines—and torn between an assimilationist imperative and the urge to preserve their unique cultural and linguistic heritage in the United States.

Unlike the organized American Jewish community, Iranian Americans have been ineffective at mobilizing support for their cause of advancing democracy in Iran or even formulating a coherent political message. Disputes over the meaning and significance of historical traumas—from the 1979 revolution to the failures of the reform movement ushered in by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami—have frequently divided the Persian diaspora. Iranian American activism, moreover, has fundamentally failed at reaching a broad, mainstream audience.

Given the similarities between these two communities, the Soviet Jewry model may help Iranian Americans rethink and revitalize their own efforts to ensure that democratization and human rights are central pillars of U.S. policy toward Iran. Of course, there are contextual differences: Jewish activists in the 1970s and ’80s had the benefit of a Soviet dictatorship open to engagement, whereas the regime in Tehran relishes its isolation and defiance. Nevertheless, Iranian Americans can pick up quite a few lessons from the astonishing successes of the Soviet Jewry movement, which ultimately led to the downfall of Communism in Europe.

Balance the Particularistic Against the Universal

Almost as soon as they launched their movement, the Soviet Jewry activists were faced with a difficult branding dilemma. As Gal Beckerman explains in When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, his magisterial history of the movement, these activists were animated by profoundly Jewish impulses. “The movement involved the whole soup of Jewish psychology—Holocaust guilt, fears of assimilation, all of these very particularistic Jewish concerns,” Beckerman told me. “But if it were limited to that, you would have just had a very small group of protesters screaming.” Aware of the risk that their movement might play as a narrowly ethnic one in the wider culture, the activists consciously grounded their message in the language of universal human rights and fundamental American ideals, such as religious freedom and freedom of movement. To broaden their impact, they reached out to civil rights leaders from outside the community and carefully framed their cause as a mainstream one.

Iranian Americans have struggled with this difficult balancing act. Too often, their rallies, advocacy literature, and messaging come across as part of a debate within the community. Last year, for example, I helped organize a rally in Boston to mark the first anniversary of the disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran. Benefiting from the counsel of some veteran, non-Iranian activists, we took steps to appeal to the broader Boston community. We billed the event as an “interfaith solidarity vigil,” secured the endorsements of civic leaders from Boston’s various ethnic communities, including the largest Latino-rights organization in Massachusetts, and began the rally with the U.S. national anthem.

Continue reading: Seeking latter-day Sharanskys

• At an emergency meeting called by Prime Minister Netanyahu, at least one minister supported labeling certain right-wing Israeli Jewish groups as “terrorist organizations” following these events. [JPost]

• Meanwhile, Israeli police play Javert to the Jean Valjeans who have attempted arson at six mosques in the past two months. [Haaretz]

• President Obama asked for his drone back earlier this week. Yesterday, Iran said no. Who saw that coming? [NYT]

• Russia and China are yet again blocking action against Syria at the U.N. Security Council. The current smokescreen is, of course, Why aren’t we discussing the Palestinians? [FP Turtle Bay]

• A worldwide index of religious freedom scored Israel a 0. In fairness, it gave the same score to Afghanistan, China, Turkey, and 49 other countries. [Haaretz]

The rabbi’s sickly-idiot son is in the corner of the room desecrating the holy day by smoking. It is apparent even to our passing Jewish war correspondent that he will be of no use in continuing the family line or propagating the law. The rabbi and the other men in the room spit words of toxic condemnation on him but the traveling war correspondent pleases the rabbi with his erudition—“What did this Jew study?” he is asked; “Bible,” he answers—and his comportment. The pathos of the scene is to be found in the mutual understanding between the rabbi and the soldier-intellectual, one lucidly perceiving the new path his people must take, the other regretting the passing of ancient traditions. At the end of the story the war correspondent returns to his unit of the Red Cavalry to write an article for its newspaper. Like me, he is behind deadline and he must spend the entire night at his typewriter.

Yet Odessa was never just the wellspring of all our troubles. Built by Italians and Greeks, its original ruling class was the cream of mendicant European Aristocracy. (The first several governors were French.) Populated to this day by hundreds of nationalities, it was the Black Sea gateway to Constantinople. It was the regional outpost of European trade and thought, and every idea, innovation, caprice, and whim of Europe was there taken up, second hand, from the holds and decks of the ships docked in the port on their way to being spread, along with the occasional bout of plague, throughout the Russian Empire. Demographically the most Jewish city besides Minsk at the edge of the empire, Odessa was the only place inside the pale of settlement where Jews weren’t prohibited from living in town. In fact they had been actively incentivized to do so, and Odessan Jewry was among the most emancipated and disabused throughout the Russian Empire. Babel’s ancient rabbi was not wrong to be suspicious of his guest.

The “star of our exile” is, along with Alexandria, Thessaloniki, New Orleans, and Naples, one of a constellation of glittering and flamboyantly raucous port towns that fascinate and inspire the continuous composition of enough history books and reminisces to fill whole libraries. Odessans are curators of their own mythic past par excellence. One Soviet-era Odessa professor made his vocation in writing 30-odd books about “Criminal Odessa.” (Naturally , I was warned off by other historians from using these as source material, as half the stories had been made up.)

The latest English addition to this literature and an excellent guide to the city is Charles King’s 2011 chronicle, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. A readable distillation of Odessan folklore and yarns nimbly unspooled by an academic clearly having fun on his sabbatical abroad, it is a treasury of salty anecdotes, such as the unlikely tale of the Sioux circus performer traveling with a Russian troupe in the Crimean port town of Sevastopol. The native American had found himself sacked after a night-long vodka-fueled bender; the circus had departed, and his costume had been stolen so he walked naked through the city. The British Consul took pity on him and lent him the ferry money to Odessa, where, as a member of the Sioux nation, he was entitled to services from the American consul. The American diplomat then took him to see an Orthodox Jewish tailor who made him a new costume. We know all this from diplomatic archives: The consul had requested an official reimbursement of $75 from the State Department to cover the cost of the costume.

King’s book also unearthed for me the amazing fact that Catherine the Great’s 1792 campaign to wrest control of the Crimea and the surrounding territories from the Turks was waged by a ragtag assortment of regular army, irregulars, conscripts, and mercenaries that also included “a company of Jewish lancers” drawn from regional farmers who owned horses. Jews of what would become the Odessa region were in fact the first Jewish soldiers in the Russian Army.

Built on the dusty steppe amid borderland anarchy and casual banditry, Odessa retains the entrepreneurial scheming spirit that has always been its most beloved characteristic. Babel’s most famous and adored literary creation is the swaggering wiseguy Jewish gangster Benya Krik of the Odessa Tales. As the scene of some of the worst pogroms of the Russian Empire, Odessa harbored Jews who had to get tough fast. Marvelously, and sometimes not, much of the character of the city remains unaffected: Picaresque kleptocracy and violent crime have remained steady features of Odessan life for two centuries. The talk of the town this summer was renewed efforts by the local authorities to expropriate businesses and redistribute them to members of the president’s Party of the Regions. From the largest corporate enterprises to my fiancée’s friend’s graphic design shop with its four employees, no one was safe. The tax police come first asking for the receipts, and the goons arrive shortly thereafter.

The current president of the country, Victor Yanukovych (aka the head of the so-called Donetsk mafia) has been tried and convicted and jailed for multiple violent crimes, including assault. After the 2004 uprising known as the “orange revolution,” 2007 marked the Ukrainian public’s one concerted effort at democratic intervention into a political process it feels it has no control over. Viktor Yushchenko’s ineffectual reign, after clawing back the presidency in the wake of mass demonstrations over a rigged election, and the collapse of the government from infighting between him and fellow revolutionary, braided former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, dampened any further enthusiasm for democratic politics amongst the Ukrainian people. Tymoshenko’s politically motivated trial for corruption in signing off on Russian natural gas contracts as prime minister was this summer’s televised grand spectacle. (Sample dialogue from the proceedings: Judge: “You will stand when addressed by this court and refer to me as ‘your honor’ as legislated by the Ukrainian Law codex!” Tymoshenko: “Honor cannot be legislated; it must be earned.”) This month, she was sentenced to seven years in jail.

• The Kol Nidre service tonight at Occupy Wall Street will be across Broadway from Zuccotti Park, in an deliberate effort to expand the Occupation. (If you go, try to find me and say hi.) [Forward]

• Why Occupy Wall Street is taken most seriously in the Middle East. [NYT]

• Washington Capitals forward Jeff Halpern will Koufax tonight; Coach Bruce Boudreau won’t. [WP D.C. Sports Bog]

• Nor will the Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun; the Times’ Richard Sandomir explores further. [NYT]

• It’s kind of adorable how our basic Ashkenazic break-fast foods are seen as exotic in Israel. [Ynet]

• It may be a travesty of democracy, but Russia’s Jews are pretty okay with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s imminent return to the presidency. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Calvin Trillin has a tale to tell from Toronto’s diamond district. [The New Yorker]

• Left-wing Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk set an important precedent, getting a court to allow him to register his official religious status as “without religion.” [Haaretz]

• Nukes or no nukes, Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel insists Iran will not surpass Israel’s qualitative military edge. [The Daily Beast]

• Saul Bellow on being “a Jewish writer in America.” [NYRB]

• Columbia Professor Bruce Robbins is making a movie called Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. [Kickstarter]

• For only the second time ever, centuries-old Bible manuscripts from Damascus were displayed, in Jeruslaem. [AP/WP]

Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? -Isaiah

• Countries ranging from the United States to European nations to Turkey berated Russia and China for vetoing the U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria this week. [AP/WP/AP/WP]

• Field Marshal Tantawi, Egypt’s de facto ruler, announced that the governing military would not field a presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections. [NYT]

• Following a report that he had pushed for clemency for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard only to be rejected by President Obama, Vice President Biden agreed to meet with Jewish-American leaders on the issue. [JTA]

• Nick Kristof apportions a significant amount of the blame for Israel’s current woes to Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT]

• Apple impresario and inventor Steve Jobs died at 56. He was inspired to work in personal computing after reading a 1971 article by Tablet Magazine contributor Ron Rosenbaum. [NYT]

Yesterday, European countries led by Germany, Britain, France, and Portugal—and backed by the United States, which has declared that Assad’s time is up—pushed for a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the regime and threatening sanctions. It was, however, vetoed by China and Russia (“a rare double veto,” according to ace U.N. beat reporter Colum Lynch). Notably, the resolution had already been watered down, and would have been the first Security Council recognition of the Syrian strife. Also notable was U.S. ambassador Susan Rice’s impassioned response: “The United States is outraged that this council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security,” she said. And her Twitter feed lit up with indignation: “This is a sad day. Most especially for the people of #Syria, but also for the UN Security Council”; “The UN Security Council has just utterly failed to address the Asad regime’s brutality. #Syria”; “The people of #Syria, who seek nothing more than their universal human rights, have been slapped in the face”; “Those who opposed the resolution and gave cover to a brutal regime will have to answer to the Syrian people.” For a diplomat, this wasn’t very diplomatic—probably a good thing, given the circumstances.

Neighboring Turkey, a crucial player, has started military maneuvers near the Syrian border, surprising even the Obama administration (pleasantly), and has gone ahead with its own sanctions. Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut, became the first senator to call for the imposition of a no-fly zone to protect civilians. All this in addition, of course, to Monday’s Senate confirmation of the heroic Robert Ford as ambassador to Syria, a sign that the U.S. will not be cowed by attacks and intimidation. So clearly is the direction in which things are moving that even neighboring Lebanon’s new prime minister, necessarily backed by Assad ally Hezbollah, carefully began to distance himself from the regime, saying, “I wish for the Syrian people what Syrians wish for themselves.” He isn’t alone.

Facing Backlash, Syria Revokes Week-Old Ban on Imports of Consumer Goods [NYT]
Russia and China Veto Security Council Resolution Condemning Syria [FP Turtle Bay]
Syria Warns U.S. Ambassador Against Meddling in Internal Affairs [AP/Haaretz]
Lebanon Premier Sees Risk From Damascus [WSJ]
Earlier: The Brave Man Robert Ford

• In “a rare double veto,” Russia and China put the kibosh on the first U.N. Security Council resolution that would have recognized and condemned Syrian atrocities. [FP Turtle Bay]

• Defense Secretary Panetta failed to secure Israeli-American Ilan Grapel’s release from Egypt. [AP/Haaretz]

• The deputy chief of Israel’s mission to the United States, Dan Arbell, was relieved following revelations that he had given the press sensitive information. Feels like this could have legs. [Haaretz]

• Daniel Schectman of Haifa’s Technion became the third Israeli to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [JPost]

• Politician and rabbi Hanan Porat, who helped found and popularize the settler movement at its outset and during its early years, died at 67. [NYT]

• Israel launched airstrikes into Gaza and killed the Islamic Jihad member who bankrolled last week’s attacks; in response, rockets were launched from Gaza. [AP/WP]

• Israel also moved to fortify its southern defenses. [Haaretz]

• Meanwhile, Egypt is reportedly planning to destroy some of the smuggling tunnels to Gaza. [JPost]

• The Jewish Museum chose Claudia Gould, whose background is contemporary art and who grew up in an interfaith household, as its new head. [NYT]

• Omri Casspi will in fact not play for his old club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, during the NBA lockout due to the high taxes he would face as an Israeli. [Haaretz]

• Trouble at the American Jewish Committee, with executive director David Harris forced to repudiate its director on anti-Semitism and extremism’s statement that use of federal law to combat anti-Israel activism on campuses is wrong. [Jewish Journal/JTA]

• Hamas leader Khaled Meshal met yesterday in Cairo with officials from the Palestinian Authority and Egyptian intelligence. Is Gilad Shalit involved? [Haaretz]

• Iran expressed openness to a Russian proposal to restart nuclear negotiations through a series of small concessions on each side. [AP/NYT]

• Syria is using diplomats to harass and intimidate anti-regime protesters in other countries, including the United States, because they are charming that way. [WSJ]

• A bill proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, could withhold U.S. funding from certain Israeli military units if they are found to engage in human rights violations. [Ben Smith]

• Russia is semi-secretly working to restart nuclear talks with Iran. [AP/WP]

• Roughly one-fifth of the House of Representatives is visiting Israel during summer recess, especially notable given the poor relations between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT] Texas

• An advocacy group accused Israel of arresting an Al Jazeera journalist and holding him without charges. [AP/WP]

• Glenn Beck, in Israel in advance of next week’s rally, called the #j14 protesters the “hard left” and repeatedly insisted referred to “Judea and Samaria.” [Ynet]

• Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is sponsoring a bill to halt U.S. funding to three elite IDF units (including the famed Shayetet 13), which he says engage in human rights violations in the Palestinian territories. [Haaretz]

The cancelled loan included works by Paul Poiret for an upcoming exhibit on the French fashion designer.

Laura Gilbert reports:

“The ‘loans won’t be going forward,’ Mr. Holzer said, ‘in response to’ Russia’s embargo on lending art to U.S. museums. ‘As long as the loan embargo is in place, the museum believes it can no longer lend’ to Russian museums. A ‘one sided’ relationship would, he said, be ‘unfair.’”

Breaking: Met Cancels Loans to Kremlin Museum [NY Observer]
Earlier: Art Wars

This is the latest round of a legal battle that has been waged since the 1980s, when elements of the Schneerson library—long thought to have been lost or destroyed by the Nazis—were found in Russia’s State Library. The contentious dispute, which saw Chabad employing various legal means trying to get the collection back to the U.S., has caused serious strain in the art world as more institutions become inadvertently involved in what is essentially a property dispute.

The collection, which had grown to include 12,000 books and 50,000 documents, was curated by the Russian-based Chabad-Lubavitch movement for centuries, and believed to have been confiscated during World War II.

Court Calls Russia’s Fear of Chabad Art Seizure Legitimate [New York Observer]
Dispute Derails Art Loans From Russia [NYT]
How Chabad Triggered a Superpower Art War [Jewish Chronicle]

The demise of the Israeli left is a fact. Together, Meretz and Labor—formerly the twin pillars of the Zionist left—currently hold 11 Knesset seats, four fewer than Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Ignored by most political commentators is the strange and unexpected death of the Israeli right. And like all good thrillers, this one, too, is a murder mystery.

At first glance, pronouncing the Israeli right dead sounds like a bit of sophistry. The current governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is widely regarded as the most stringently conservative in Israel’s history. Since being voted into office in 2009, it has, among other achievements: de facto outlawed the public commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of the events that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948 and to the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Arabs from their homes; passed a bill requiring new immigrants to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, a stroke of legislation that mainly targets Palestinians from the West Bank who wish to marry Israeli Arabs and become Israeli citizens; enacted the anti-boycott bill; and threatened to establish official committees of inquiry targeting human-rights and civil-rights nonprofits. But this busy résumé hides the fact that the political and ideological leviathan that shaped so much of the country’s character for its first five decades has been supplanted by a new and foreign political culture that would have been utterly unrecognizable to Israelis even a decade ago.

One major influence on that culture arrived in Israel from Russia after 1989, along with the million or so immigrants who made aliyah after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While it is never wise to speak of a culture as if it were inalterable and hereditary, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that, to the extent that Russian political culture can be discussed, it is a ghastly oppressive enterprise. This is, after all, a nation that has spent much of the past millennium stumbling from one oppressive autocracy to the next. The majority of Russia’s population lived, until as recently as 1861, as serfs. As Richard Pipes, professor emeritus of history at Harvard and a former Soviet expert, suggested in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, given the Russians’ iron-fisted history, they have traditionally expected their leaders to be groznyi, a word that, applied to Czar Ivan IV, was improperly translated as “terrible” but really means “awesome.” This, Pipes wrote, explains why a 2003 survey found that 22 percent of Russians supported democracy, while as many as 53 percent actively disliked it. Pipes called this phenomenon, still very much in force today, a flight from freedom, and he explained it had much to do with Russia’s perception of itself as a country under permanent siege. The prominent newspaper Izvestiya, he noted, captured this spirit perfectly when it described Russians as “living in trenches,” surrounded by enemies.

It takes a very small leap of imagination to see how perfectly this mentality translates into Hebrew: In Israel, aspiring politicians born in the former Soviet Union found that talk of trenches and enemies made for stellar political currency.

The most renowned example of this new autocratic style is, of course, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current foreign minister. The Moldovan-born politician started his career as Netanyahu’s assistant; within less than two decades, he surfaced as his former boss’s most valuable political partner and, some say, puppet master. Lieberman’s path to power was simple: Whereas most other right-wing politicians spoke sotto voce about ideological opponents, he favored incendiary statements. The Israeli left, he told a radio interviewer in 2007, was responsible for all the nation’s woes. Appearing on television that same year, he compared a prominent civil rights group to concentration camp capos. He snubbed or humiliated foreign dignitaries who would not play by his protocol, refusing, for example, to meet with the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when da Silva chose to skip the customary visit to Theodor Herzl’s grave. While most Israeli pundits saw such acts as petty and harmful to Israel’s standing in the world, most Israeli voters think Lieberman is groznyi: In mock elections held in Israeli high schools in 2009, a majority of students said they would vote for Lieberman.

But Lieberman is far from alone. Nearly every one of the current government’s repressive bills was sponsored by politicians who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The Nakba law, for example, was sponsored by the Moscow-born Alex Miller of Yisrael Beiteinu. The anti-boycott bill was the brainchild of Ze’ev Elkin of Likud, who emigrated from Ukraine. The bill to form official committees of investigation targeting the left, defeated last week in the Knesset, was formed by Faina Kirschenbaum, also from Ukraine. The list goes on.

Even some staunch Likudniks have been appalled by the Russification of the Israeli right. Most vocal among them was Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset and one of the party’s most prominent figures. A day after the anti-boycott bill passed, the chairman took the unlikely step of criticizing the parliament he himself headed. His ire was reserved for his colleagues on the right; they, he argued, are a disgrace to the legacy of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism and the ideological founding father of Israeli conservatism.

“I stand ashamed and mortified before my mentor, Jabotinsky, for not having succeeded in protecting the individual, whom he likened to a monarch, against the parliamentary fists of the majority,” Rivlin wrote. “It might have been hoped that in an era in which Jabotinsky’s followers are scattered across the whole political spectrum, from the coalition to the opposition, things would be different. But in the absence of an ideological backbone, it appears that even the deep commitment to democracy and individual freedoms of those who call themselves his successors is conditional. It is the State of Israel that is compelled to pay the price of political interests that supersede national interests.”

Other Likud stalwarts were equally horrified. Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, for example—the son of Eliyahu Meridor, a former Likud Member of Knesset and close confidant of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—gave repeated interviews in which he called several of the legislative initiatives brought forth by Lieberman and his associates “very dangerous.” Lieberman wasted no time: Meridor, he told the Israeli media, was a “fineschmecker,” a derogatory Yiddish term for an elitist dandy.

And, as American legislators are learning, once politics becomes a zero-sum game, it is very hard for moderate and mindful legislators to thrive. Ze’ev Elkin, the author of the anti-boycott bill, is a great example. When former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abandoned the Likud to form Kadima, he was searching for a token settler to add to his new parliamentary faction as a nod to his former supporters in the settler movement who had largely abandoned him in light of his commitment to withdraw from Gaza; he found Elkin. In Elkin’s native Ukraine, the young politician had been known as a capable and committed Zionist activist. After emigrating to Israel in 1990, he excelled in his academic studies, earning degrees in both mathematics and history. When interviewed by Sharon’s associates, he expressed views that were right-of-center, but he stood out as a pragmatic, fair-minded, and soft-spoken individual, a perfect choice for Kadima’s transideological aspirations. Elected to the Knesset in 2006 as a member of Kadima, Elkin soon realized that the winds were blowing away from Sharon’s centrist platform. In 2008, he quit Kadima and joined the Likud. Within a few years, he learned that the only way to survive in a perpetually rightward-moving political universe was to move even further to the right. This, claim some who have long known Elkin, is what’s really behind the anti-boycott bill he sponsored. Aviad Friedman, the Sharon aide who recruited Elkin to politics, told the Israeli daily Maariv last week that “the anti-boycott bill may be good for Elkin when he faces off his rivals in the Likud, but it is very bad for Israel, and I think that deep inside, Ze’ev Elkin knows this well.”

The ideas of the Russified Israeli right find a clear reflection in current Russian political culture, down to the details of the bills that Russian-born Israeli politicians sponsor in the Knesset. In his 2004 State of the Union address for example, Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, announced his intention to investigate nonprofit human rights organizations “obtaining funding from influential foreign or domestic foundations.” Accepting international funding is standard operating procedure for many nongovernmental organizations the world over, but Putin’s speech insinuated that those who criticized the government and profited from foreign funds were disloyal to Russia and somehow dangerous. Within a few years, Putin and his henchmen have succeeded in creating an environment in which it is nearly impossible for NGOs to operate successfully, thereby severely crippling the possibility of a robust political opposition. Faina Kirschenbaum’s proposal to investigate left-wing NGOs, and her allegations that the foreign funds some of those NGOs receive—lawfully and transparently—are a sign of nefariousness, are a page out of the Putin playbook.

The blame for the death of the Israeli right, however, lies not only with Russia but with the United States as well. Orchestrated mainly by Netanyahu, a parade of American political consultants began marching into Israel’s electoral battlefields in the 1990s, changing what was previously a cantankerous but civic-minded political culture into a toxic terrain of secrets and lies familiar to anyone who has grown up on American campaign ads. Take a look, for example, at this extended ad for Labor from 1988. Even in the midst of mad inflation and shortly after the breakout of the first Palestinian intifada, the party’s leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, used their on-screen time to calmly address potential voters, offering up the key points of their political plans, sitting at a desk.

By 1996, political ads looked a lot scarier—the ominous voice-overs, the allegations that political opponents are not just wrong but dangerous: They’re staples of a particular style of campaigning introduced to Israel by the American Arthur Finkelstein, the spin-master Netanyahu had hired. Finkelstein had made his political fortune in the United States by applying simplistic tags to the mostly liberal candidates he’d helped unseat. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, in his catchy formulation, was “too liberal for too long,” and the 1992 Democratic candidate for Senate in New York, Robert Abrams, was “hopelessly liberal.” Both men lost despite overwhelming odds in their favor—Cuomo to George Pataki, Abrams to Alfonse D’Amato. Liberals lost, too: Finkelstein had helped turn the very term “liberal” into a bad word.

In 1996, Finkelstein was recruited by Netanyahu to run a rather hopeless campaign. Rabin, the popular leader of Labor, was assassinated a year prior to the election by a right-wing fanatic whose act was preceded by months of vehement demonstrations featuring signs portraying the elderly prime minister wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform. Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition, was severely criticized after Rabin’s death for fanning the flames of hatred and failing to denounce the violent language and imagery favored by his supporters. To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s opponent was Shimon Peres, Rabin’s closest political ally and co-recipient with him of the Nobel Peace Prize. Early polls predicted an easy victory for Peres. This was when Netanyahu called in Finkelstein.

The American adviser applied the same tactics that worked so well stateside, but he turned up the heat considerably. He orchestrated ads showing the aftermath of suicide bombings. He devised numerous spots showing Peres with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accusing Peres of blindly succumbing to Arafat’s schemes. Most memorable was his leading slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” It was false; as prime minister, Netanyahu signed on to the very same peace accords that Peres and Rabin were committed to, and none of them advocated the de-unification of Israel’s capital. The slogan was scary, and it worked wonders: Netanyahu won by slightly less than 1 percent.

Finkelstein’s engagement was the first time an American consultant was so deeply involved in an Israeli campaign, but it wasn’t the last—nowadays, many Israeli politicians, left and right, hire Washington’s brightest minds to orchestrate their quests for power. In less than a decade, Israeli political culture, once staid in a C-SPAN sort of way, has become a horror film, with ads and jingles featuring fear, loathing, and blood.

It is, of course, naïve to expect any political culture to remain unchanged and free of outside influence. But when a transformation as massive as the one that has swept the Israeli right in the last five or 10 years occurs, it is time to stop and recalibrate. Old-time Israeli right-wingers like Dan Meridor and Reuven Rivlin are far more likely to see eye-to-eye these days with Meretz’s Nitzan Horowitz, say, than they are with Elkin and other members of Likud.

A few weeks ago, when the anti-boycott bill passed into law, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled out a volume. It was my wedding present from my father, a book bound in thick, rich leather, on its cover a copper emblem featuring the map of Israel crossed by an outstretched hand grasping a rifle and the words rak kach, meaning “only this way.” It was the emblem of the Irgun, the paramilitary organization that fought to expel the mandatory British regime from pre-state Palestine. The book’s author was the Irgun’s last commander in chief, Menachem Begin. It was inscribed to my great-grandfather, Chaim Leibovitz.

“Let justice be the cornerstone of Israel,” Begin wrote in Hebrew, “established with labor, with tears, with suffering, with battle, with blood.”

If only the same spirit still guided the Israeli right.

People think it doesn’t get cold in Southern Europe, but it does. Maybe not a snow-packed Eastern winter, but cold enough that you need to build a fire.

I was in Italy when it was cold, around Christmas time in 1989, when it was so cold that I saw people fighting for wood. My mother and I were in Nettuno, a small coastal town a six-hour bus ride south of Rome where large center squares bristle with shoppers. The buildings are yellow and white, long faded to perfection, and not one rooftop is flat.

The people fighting were Russian émigrés. Russians are like that; they see point A and point B and the line between them becomes an inflexible meridian. The locals learned to ignore them because the Russians would soon be gone. Coastal towns in Italy were meant as a transit point, not a destination. Once in a while an elderly man would lean to his wife and say, “animali persi” or “lost animals”—the Russians, who fought for wood.

Russian people are a gift. God gave them to the world to confuse everybody, like a bird with gills, or post-modernism. They’ve seen their share of life and think they know everything. But then sometimes the wind gives people a different gift. It howls, the temperature drops, and for a moment the sky covers with something and a large branch nearly falls on you, but it doesn’t. Some violent force pushed you out of the way. But then you need to drag the branch. I saw this when I was in Italy. But I was a kid then. I can only tell it the way I remember it. If you tell yourself the same story long enough it becomes sad and broody, but if you tell the story to someone else, it refines itself, unveiled—like a good joke.

Here is a Russian joke: Every time the Soviet Union wanted to make friends with the West it would let out some Jews. In 1989, right before the fall of the Union, the Soviets really wanted some friends, so they let out half a million Jews from all walks of life. As long as they could legally prove their Jewish blood and get their forms and party cards submitted on time, they could leave.

Even non-Jews had scrambled for a way to prove that they were Jewish. The rate of adult circumcisions went up dramatically—people really wanted to leave. People wanted to leave not because it was cold, not even because they had grown hungry, but because there was no hope left. That’s why my mother and I left—at night and on a train—in search of hope. My father stayed behind.

Most of those who left went the same way, and our route was dubbed the “passage of guilt.” First we took a train out of the country, looking out the window as the forests changed shapes, becoming more manicured, less imposing, while snacking on boiled eggs and Kielbasa. My mother told me stories of forest creatures, and as the scene of the forests changed, so did the creatures of my mother’s imagination evolve and bend. The train stopped in Vienna, and we got on a bus that went into the mountains. Our destination was a big inn, where we were huddled in a basement. It was a nice basement, divided into rooms. We ate bouillon soup and took short walks to a shack that sold yogurt. Most of us spent a month or so at the inn waiting for our emigration number to be called. When it was called, we got back on the bus and on a nicer train to Rome. In Rome we were told to wait but to make something of our time. We were given a small stipend to help with this waiting. But Rome was expensive and cluttered, so we went to other towns already full of Russian émigrés. That’s when we ended up in Nettuno. There we waited again—long enough to become afraid and to talk of what we had left behind. I didn’t think about these things, but I know my mother did. I wondered what she was thinking and I think that’s was when it got cold in Southern Italy.

We rented space in the kitchen and living area of a one-bedroom apartment. The bedroom of the apartment was occupied by another Russian family who had been waiting longer then we had. We blocked off our area—furnished with a bed and dresser—with curtains. There was no insulation, and it got cold at night. It may have been cold during the day too, but we weren’t around; my mother was either trying to make money doing odd jobs or filling out more forms in yet another language, and I was playing in the streets, soaking up a foreign language, and embracing the thrill of adolescent hooliganism.

At night my mother tried a number of things to warm us. She had scored us extra blankets from the Red Cross, found large rocks by the beach, boiled them, and placed them at the corners of the bed-cover, finally covering us with the blankets. For all that we lacked, there were also some pleasant surprises, like a fireplace just beyond our curtained area of the apartment. My mother would find small branches and burn them. It helped, but only a little. I would find tossed books and magazines, but they burned out quickly. There she was, a highly educated woman, trying to find some way to make use of that fireplace, snapping twigs and ripping papers. I watched her through the crease of the curtain, fixated by her movements as she fed the fire and stared into it.

Once a week in Nettuno we went to a large meeting area to hear a well-dressed Italian Jew call out the numbers of those who were finally headed to Tel Aviv or New York. If your number was called, you’d be on a plane in about a week. Sometimes, you would be delayed at the airport, kept seated for a few more hours because there were papers to check and more papers to fill out; but you’d liked this—at last, this was the vacation part. It was the metamorphosis of emigrant to immigrant, free of worry or nostalgia, the one moment when we carried nothing.

The passage of guilt was filled with stories like this: cold, homeless nights, of sewing pockets in your underwear to hide valuables, and the friends and loved ones left behind. But I did not know all this back then. I was a boy. I saw it, but did not understand, because my eyes had not yet given shape to the contours of nostalgia or sadness. I would not understand until much later, until another language had become my land—but I do remember the day that I began to sense it.

One cold night my mother and I were huddled close together, coming back from the meeting place in the park. Our number had not been called. It was a crisp, milky sort of night, and the sidewalks were nearly abandoned. I had been thinking about the fun I had had earlier that night; the shouting and pushing with other kids in the park had made me feel a part of something. I felt religious camaraderie with my people: I had wanted to fall to the ground and crawl through the tangle of feet, to punch somebody and have him embrace me, to stand on someone’s shoulders and yell with all my might like a jackal pup.

My mother was walking quietly and kept tugging at the hood of my jacket, pulling me closer. I kept trying to squirm away. As if to say: Mom, you don’t need to hold on to me. Don’t you know what I have seen already? Don’t you know that I spend my days in a world much greater then I am? That I have learned how to judge an intersection, how to work a squeegee on a windshield in under seven seconds, how to know when another Russian kid is bigger and stronger than me, how to distinguish Odessa Jews from Moscow Jews, because you don’t pick fights with Odessa Jews? I have learned how to reach into someone’s coat pocket without them noticing the intrusion or even sensing my presence. I have learned how to talk to the bartenders at the small local bars, convincing them to let me in, allowing me to play video games there for hours—a mascot. I have learned how to scavenger the dumps at night and how to evaluate the worthiness of trash, and I have learned, where, when, and to whom I should sell my finds. I have learned where you hold our money, and that you do not keep track of it. How to make friends at a soccer field without fully speaking the language, how to walk the street without being bothered, how to pocket fruit and candy from a street stand, how to dry wet socks on the go—mom, don’t you know that I have learned all of that?

The wind picked up to a thick wheeze when we were still about 20 blocks from our place. And then the sky went dark. A broken howling rose up around us and the voice of the wind became saturated with one long reverberation—something cracked above us. Suddenly, instead of pulling me, my mother pushed me forward, throwing me down on the ground. In front of us lay a small tree.

Hours later, I lay in bed very warm, drifting in and out of sleep. When I would open my eyes, I watched my mother sitting on the stool, slowly pushing and turning the tree in the fireplace. We could not chop the tree as we had no ax. She sat there all night, warm and satisfied, slowly turning that tree.

But this isn’t what I most remember, not wood fibers turning to ash before my eyes, not my mother on the stool with large shadows working over her face, nor the plane ride to New York two months later, the taste of fried chicken at the motel near Kennedy airport, or the 20-seater that flew us to our final location, in Florida. What I remember is what happened after the tree fell.

My mother stood there and looked at the small tree, and I think in that moment the tree became a branch, and then just became a hunk of wood—because she grabbed onto it and began dragging it. I was behind and tried to take up the back of the tree, but I got tired and had to stop. I watched her drag the tree forward; she reminded me of a mule with her head down. I stopped and began to cry. I could not help it. It was as if everything had hit me at once—the cord between leaving and going forward had snapped—and I felt so sad for her, and I felt sad for everything we had left behind. I no longer wanted to embrace or punch anybody, or even yell. I finally knew what cold was; it is the soft white that punctures you.

My mother stopped and we sat on the tree. We just sat there. People walked by and whispered. “Senzatetto,” “perso,” “zingari,” homeless, lost, gypsies—but we ignored them. We were in our own little world, and our stories did not coincide with those around us. She hugged me and told me that it was all going to be fine, and that there was nothing to worry or feel sad about, because this is an adventure—like that of the Le Petit Prince. And people walked by and disappeared—the world around us falling silent. They moved forward to their homes and their families, their possessions and their plans, their romances and disappointments. They moved along the meridian of their land, moved by the gravity of their forces. And we moved on as well, all while losing those things, surrendering the seeds of our life; our people, our home, our family—our wheat fields.

We finally got up from our tree and started on our way. My mother sang to me as we went along, as we carried the tree together, and I got tired and she dragged the tree herself. She sang old Russian songs of Luferov and Visodsky, she sang old gypsy songs with chimes in her voice, and she sang old Jewish songs and emigrant songs. I can no longer remember the words; they are the seeds scattered behind in translation.

Nikita Nelin was born in Moscow in 1980 and emigrated with his mother in 1989. He earned an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and currently lives in New Orleans, where he is working on a novel.

• Yet Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan insisted that Israel must not only express regret but actually apologize for last year’s flotilla raid. That will make Israel and Turkey’s negotiations toward formal diplomatic rapprochement more difficult. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• At least 12 died in anti-regime protests in Syria today, bolstered by U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford’s surprise visit yesterday to the dissident stronghold of Hama. [WSJ]

• Your weekend reading is this amazing profile of Joe Levin, the foremost private investigator specializing in the Hasidic world, courtesy the other daily magazine of Jewish life and culture. [NYT]

• China and Russia have reportedly been aiding Iran with its nuclear program since the 1990s. Thanks, guys. [Washington Times]

• Super-brief primer on next Monday’s Quartet talks from Aaron David Miller. [Wilson Center]

• Note the mutual useless stereotypes of Manhattan and Florida. [NYT Magazine]

• If you think of Lebanese politics as the English Premier League—“all about the relaxed rules about foreign ownership and player transfers—it becomes easier to understand (mainly if you already understand the EPL). [Karl reMarks]

• Francophilic intellectual Arthur Goldhammer blogs a review by Sylvie Kauffmann of an autobiographical book by Dominique Moïsi called Un Juif Improbable. But I’m sure there are plenty of non-Jewish French intellectuals. [French Politics]

• Influential film historian Robert Sklar died at 74. [NYT]

Viggo Mortensen as Freud? David Cronenberg directing? Keira Knightley receiving spank-therapy? Sign me up!

“She was born just before the revolution, in June 1991,” Rabbi Lazar told me after the ceremony as he, his wife, and their new machetunim paced nervously outside the yichud room, where the bride and groom go to spend a few minutes alone. “Before that, people were walking with their heads down, hiding their Jewishness,” he said. “To talk about a wedding in the street—it was unheard of. We feel that these 20 years with her, they’ve been a rebirth.”

Berel Lazar was the midwife of this change. Born in postwar Milan, Italy, to parents who were among the first of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s emissaries to the backwoods of Judaism—“There was no kosher even,” his sister Chani told me—Lazar found the next frontier when he came of age: the Soviet Union. He traveled to the slowly imploding empire in 1987 as a rabbinical student; there he worked to establish underground yeshivas and to help refuseniks make contact with the outside world. By 1989, he had helped open a Jewish school in Moscow. Unfortunately, after the revolution, most of its hoped-for students soon abandoned Moscow and the Soviet Union, their parents deciding against staying in a country that had singled them out—and held them back—for being Jewish. Ironically, those who left assimilated abroad, and those who stayed—often intermarried couples—soon found more and more opportunities to be Jewish and live Jewishly in a country that was also undergoing a Christian revival. (Also, the target of nationalist discrimination shifted from the Jews—most of whom had left—to migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.) Whatever one makes of Chabad’s presence in places like American college campuses, the Hasidic group’s impact in Russia has been undeniably positive: Moscow now has three large and flourishing synagogues, not all of which are Chabad-sponsored, Jewish schools and kindergartens, an annual Yiddish Fest to celebrate Purim in a hip, young way, and Chabad representatives in nearly 50 cities across Russia, in strange, small places like Barnaul and Dzerzhinsk and Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk. And that’s not even counting the missions in the broader former Soviet Union.

And so when it was time for the sheva brachot, the seven blessings, at Blumi Lazar’s wedding, the guests who came up to read them and their translations were not personal friends or friends of the bride and groom but allies in Rabbi Lazar’s fight to resuscitate Jewish life in Russia.

But the bride had been the guinea pig in that fight, pointed out Riva Zaklos, the wife of the rabbi of Bryansk, a city in Western Russia on the border with Ukraine. (“No one comes to Bryansk,” Zaklos, a native of Israel, told me in Russian. “Every time someone comes, I say, ‘What did you lose here?’ ” She and her husband have scraped together 5,000 Jews there and started a preschool that serves kosher food. There have even been some Jewish weddings.) “Blumi was the first one to go to Jewish pre-school, the first one to go to Jewish school here, and everyone watched her, watched how she did,” Zaklos said, nursing a virgin raspberry mojito. Waitresses circled with hors d’oeuvres, mixing with beautiful women in long, sparkling dresses and a dazzling array of sheitels, wigs, that looked like they were from shampoo commercials. (The men were separated from us by a wall, a mehitsa.)

Blumi’s sisters wore salad-green princess dresses; Isaac’s wore navy with beaded accents. “You always need two colors,” Zaklos explained, “one for the bride’s sisters, and one for the groom’s. Otherwise, how can you tell?” The dresses presented another issue: With so many children in each family, there were that many weddings, and you couldn’t, of course, wear the same dress to too many weddings, especially not contiguous ones. “So, we just swap dresses,” Zaklos explained.

Behind her, women were discussing complicated fusions of family trees—“No, no, no, Chani’s dad is Berel’s brother-in-law!”—while others carried babies who were either their children or their grandchildren. “You know the difference between religious weddings and Reform weddings?” Chani Springer, Blumi’s aunt and Rabbi Lazar’s sister, asked me. “At religious weddings, the mother of the bride is pregnant. At Reform weddings, the bride is pregnant.”

The mother of the bride, Chani Lazar, née Deren, seemed done with that after 12 children. But even after all those kids, she has not lost her girlish figure, hemmed in by a lush mustard-green gown with a fluffy hem that resembled the mouth of a tuba. Her eyes red and moist, she said, “Every mother should be so happy,” and went back to chirping with her friends and micromanaging the proceedings.

It was through Chani Lazar that Blumi found her groom: Chani’s sister—also a Blumi—married a man named Yisroel Rosenfeld, and the families became extremely close. In her youth, Chani Lazar used to spend lots of time at the Rosenfeld house. Then one day, Blumi suggested that she had someone in mind for Blumi Lazar: her nephew, the son of the Chabad emissary to Bogotá, Colombia. After a period of discovery and due diligence on each other—“research,” those in the community call it—Isaac flew to Moscow in the dead of the Russian winter to meet Blumi and, after a few meetings, they got engaged.

At their wedding, four and a half months later, the two were lost in the swells of infinite family members and friends from around the world, members of the Russian Jewish community, people who were their parents’ friends and allies in Moscow and Bogotá, people whom they probably hadn’t even met. On the jumbo screens in the reception hall—where there was not nearly enough seats for the women—you could see them: Isaac’s black hat lost in a mosh pit of hundreds of dancing black hats; Blumi’s veil over her long blond hair bobbing through the roundelays of women, circling her and cheering. The innermost circle, though, was a group of teenage girls who danced around the placidly happy Blumi. They were her students at the Jewish school, where she has taught Jewish studies for the last two years.

Julia Ioffe is Foreign Policy’s Moscow correspondent.

• But a U.N. Security Council resolution against Syria is unlikely thanks to the opposition of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, all upset over what they see as abuse of the force authorization for Libya. [Turtle Bay]

• After talks in Cairo, Hamas and Fatah still do not agree on a prime minister. [WP]

• Unemployment in Gaza stood at 45.2 percent in the second half of 2010, according to a U.N. Relief and Works Agency report, despite a loosening of the blockade. [NYT]

• The Israeli-American whom Egypt alleges is a Mossad agent denies it. [Ynet]

• Yet another person blames the closing of the Yale anti-Semitism institute on politics. For a week, my educated sense has been that the closing is a red herring; here is a persuasive explanation of why. [WP]

Rare report from a refugee camp inside Syria, where journalists typically aren’t permitted.

• Somehow made it through the whole week without posting this profile of David Mamet, focusing on his conversion (to conservatism, that is; he remains Jewish—actually, that has a lot to do with it). [The Weekly Standard]

• A guilty verdict was handed down in Israel’s sensational Rose murder case. [NYT]

• IHH, the Turkish group behind the flotillas, condemned the killing of Bin Laden. [Meir Amit]

• Most of those Korean-Jewish babies are being raised Jewish. [Forward]

• If l’affaire DSK has revealed one thing, it is that France no longer has an anti-Semitism problem. [The Daily Beast]

• Anne Frank wedding cards! [Regretsy]

• Sheldon Adelson backs (though not necessarily endorses) Newt Gingrich. [Jewish Week]

Les Lieber is the coolest 99-year-old you or anyone else knows (and to answer your immediate objection, Jacques Barzun is not 99, he is 103).

• Egypt arrested more than 100 protesters outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. [The Lede]

• Lars Von Trier: First a “Jew,” now a “Nazi,” always a jackass. [Roger Ebert’s Journal]

• Maureen Dowd on DSK. Much of this is good and funny, though comparing him to Wolfowitz is kind of despicable. Anyway. [NYT]

• Right-wing parties are on the rise throughout Europe. [Guardian]

• AIPAC sez: Don’t boo the prez. What if you want to say “Boo-urns”? [Ben Smith]

Every time people tell me they don’t like Israel I just want to tell them about how Israel saves cute kangaroos’ lives.

III.

Israel Shamir is reported to have a handful of names. The Guardian noted that Magnus Ljunggren, a retired professor of Russian literature at Gothenburg University, claims that Shamir has at least six names: Shamir’s birth name was Izrail Schmerler; in 1992 he became a Swedish citizen and went by Jöran Jermas; and then after he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem he took the name Adam Ermash.

I know one of your names is Jöran Jermas, right?

Yeah, well, I have so many names.

Where does that name come from? Because that’s on your Swedish passport, right?

Ah, eh, you know when people started to attack me I started to be worried about my freedom of movement. One wants to be able to move, so as not being stalked.

So, which is your real name?

Israel Shamir.

What about Izrail Schmerler?

What’s that?

Well, people said that’s your birth name.

That’s something that I really can’t say anything about.

Shamir is a chameleon. As we sat in Moscow last winter, and as he told me how he loved the snow and ice and liked to ice skate in Red Square, he looked Russian. In the picture on his website, where he appears to have a little darker skin and is wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh around his neck, he looks more Palestinian. And I am sure, if he were wearing a kippah while reciting verses from the Talmud in Hebrew that day, I’d think he was Jewish. It is hard to pin down the truth, but Shamir said he was born in Siberia to Jewish parents, moved to Israel in the 1960s, fought in the ’73 war as a paratrooper, and then became a journalist, living in London and working for the BBC. After that, he lived in Japan for a while and then returned to Israel to work for Haartez.

Shamir gave a speech at Tufts University in April 2001 about Arab-Israeli relations. The Tufts student newspaper reported that Shamir said: “Israeli people represent a virus form of a human being because they can live anywhere.” Shortly after, Palestinian rights groups, and two men in particular, Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish, sent out a mass email warning about Shamir’s anti-Semitic views disguised as leftist pro-Palestinian activism.

You once described Jews as a virus in human form.

I never did; no, that’s an invention of Jerusalem Post. Yes, I remember when they did it. That’s absolutely a silly thing. And then they quoted it so many times; I did not say that. People accuse me of everything, you know, so I’m used to it.

This goes back to the smear jobs. Why do you think you’re a target?

Well, you know, first of all some things that I say is complicated. And it’s easy for people to make misrepresentations. Maybe because people are unhappy with what I say and they want to smear me so I will look more awful. Why not to say truth, you know? I say things just how they are, you know?

In 2001, Shamir and Norman Finkelstein spoke at Columbia University. After the speech a Jewish man came up to Shamir and asked, “Are you Jewish?” Shamir told me that he was silent. He could not answer the question because he was in a transition from Judaism to Christianity. I asked him if he is Jewish, and he said quickly and assertively, “Now I am surely not.” I asked how he could not be Jewish if his mother and father were both Jews. He said, “It is a question of choice. I believe it is a question of choice.”

Being published on David Duke’s site, and having a regular gig writing for Russia’s anti-Semitic newspaper Zavtra, one would think Shamir wouldn’t have much Jew-loving company. He leaned back, itched his mustache, and said, “I met many people who are described as anti-Semites but I didn’t meet more than one who would be in real terms hating real human beings. They could hate the concept or hate an idea, but to hate Jews on a personal level, I never came across such thing.”

In Shamir’s eyes, being an anti-Semite is a good thing. If you are never called an anti-Semite, then it means that you support warmongering, brainwashing, and the subjugation of native people, in the name of Israel.

What if someone said: “I hate Jews and I wish Hitler killed all of them.”

People say such things.

Would that be labeled anti-Semitic?

Well, you know I’ve heard it very often from Sephardic Jews in Israel. I heard it quite a few times actually. [Laughs.] “Pity you didn’t burn in Auschwitz, a pity all of you didn’t burn in Auschwitz.” I heard it many times.

That’s awful.

Well, yeah. I don’t think that much about it.

Shamir had the poker player’s gift of never letting his guard down. He never committed to a concrete statement, no matter what the topic was. Once the questions got more controversial, he smoked contemplatively and stared out the window to the gray wall. At some point, though, he brought up Auschwitz, and I felt as though someone had just given me an ice pick. I chopped away.

That’s interesting you said “burn in Auschwitz” because your definition of Auschwitz is that it was a Red Cross internment camp. What is your definition of Auschwitz?

I’m not even interested in Auschwitz, you know? I have no interest in it. What I said there is something different. What I said there was that it was perceived as—internment camp.

By who?

By everybody. By Jews in Palestine, by Europeans, by English, by Russians, by Americans. You know when the rumors of mass annihilation came to Palestine they were strongly refuted by the Jewish authorities. It was reported by many publications that life was so awful. Things are so bad as it is and people come and bring such horrible stories … that was published in many newspapers in Israel in those times. The Jewish authorities were very strongly against this sort of rumor. And it was universally thought—yes, it was a deportation camp, nothing especially wonderful about it, nobody thought it was a resort, nobody did. People thought it was a deportation camp, quite awful place.

So, it was a concentration camp?

Yeah, but when I say concentration camp is a word that was used a long time before during the Boer War, when the English fought against the Boers in South Africa. There they built concentration camps; that’s how the word became coined.

This definition of concentration camp didn’t help Shamir’s point, for more than 26,000 women and children died in the South African camps from hard labor and starvation. Shamir stubbed his cigarette out as if tapping out an aggressive form of Morse Code, smashing the butt again and again. I put my butt in the ashtray and he stubbed it out, too, as if I hadn’t done a good enough job.

So, Auschwitz as being a place to exterminate Jews …

This idea came to existence only after the war.

So, it’s a rumor?

No, no, no. I don’t say that at all. No.

But you said, “the rumor of mass annihilation.”

I can repeat more clear. I am not all that interested in what was in reality. I am interested in perceptions. Something I am dealing with is perceptions. So, perceptions during the war was that it was quite awful deportation camp, where people were deported and kept, worked hard labor, this sort of thing. That’s how it was perceived. Only after the war, different perception came. And that was a perception of mass annihilation, and mass murder, and all that.

So, it’s not a fact that there was mass annihilation?

Shamir lost his relaxed demeanor, shifted in his seat, and contracted his shoulders. He covered half his face with his tanned, wrinkled hand and continued, trying to keep it together.

That’s, not, I did not say that at all. I didn’t even say that, I didn’t even intend to say this or other way. What I say is that there was no such perception during the war. This perception came after the war.

But so which one is true?

I am not even interested in this kind of question. That is something that is very much outside of my interest.

But can you comment about if these concentration camps were for mass murder?

Ah, I have really no knowledge about it at all. I was not interested in it because I reject the idea that it is important, you see?

IV.

The waiter arrived and placed a cappuccino in front of Shamir. He politely thanked him in Russian. Shamir added no sugar, sipped from his cup, and then quickly popped a sugar cube in his mouth. I could hear his tobacco-stained teeth crush it with quick staccato crunches.

How far along are we with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Meaning?

Well, that the Jews have a goal of world domination.

Ah, well, well, well. That is kind of a very good and very complicated question. Basically the Protocols describe in this or another way some idea of creating impoverished world. A world where there is no spirit.

Do you think that is real? And that’s what’s happening?

Well, I do think that this process takes place. It’s the process of impoverishing the spiritual component of the world. This process surely goes on.

But are the Jews behind it?

Well, in total, I don’t think so.

So, you don’t think the Jews are behind that?

Not that much, not that much.

But a little bit?

Well, let’s say that it could fit some Jewish ideas. It could be explained by some Jewish ideas. For instance, the idea that there should be no religion, that the Gentiles should not have a religion: That is kind of an important Jewish concept. We should try to understand why people thought it is connected with Jews. That this kind of Kali Yuga process, the process of impoverishing the world. How come? Why people thought it is connected with Jews? Anyway that’s an interesting question. That’s what I say the possible explanation is that it is connected with the Jewish concept that non-Jews do not have direct access to God.

So, you write about how especially American goyim are brainwashed by Jewish media lords. Can you explain that a bit? How far are we? Do you think I am a brainwashed goy?

Well, first of all I don’t know. How would I know? That’s something I don’t know. It is very much impossible to know. There is a huge part of brainwash, for sure. That is what goes on a daily basis.

And what do they try to brainwash? What do the Mammonites—and what you say are quote-unquote the Jewish media lords—what are they trying to brainwash?

Well, they try to induce you with the feeling that Jews are very, very wonderfully special.

Are they not?

No.

They same as everyone, or worse?

The same, absolutely same. They try to induce with concept that whatever happens to Jews has some kind of special meaning for the world.

So, what are you trying to say? That Gentiles and Jews are the same?

Well, what I say is a little more complicated than that.

It was nearing the end of our interview. My smokes were dwindling quickly, and Shamir had already started on his second red-and-silver pack of Dunhills. I asked him: “And what’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear ‘Jews.’ ” His chin was in his right hand as his eyes looked toward the bar. He was silent for nine seconds. “Not again,” he said, punctuating his curt sentence with a long laugh. “Not again? What do you mean by that?” I asked. With no hesitation he replied, “That I am very tired of hearing this word.” He laughed heartily.

V.

On Tuesday, I sat staring out the window, watching the frozen trees and the frozen pond across the street. Every now and then large chunks of ice fell from the 12-story roof and smacked the street, or got buried in a pile of snow. This was my second-to-last day in Moscow, and I had a feeling the day before was the last time I would ever get to see my man. I called Shamir, but he didn’t pick up. I called two more times within a half hour, but no one answered. I reread certain sections of his work and tried to make sense of the man I’d been studying and the man I met. There were two different Shamirs, if not more: the anti-Semitic writer who unabashedly admits that Jews have used the Holocaust to benefit themselves and who believes that “Jewish Media Lords” have hijacked the newspapers and TV to brainwash readers into thinking that Israel is always right and Jews are the chosen people. Then there was the person I met: a gentle, polite man, who was not easily provoked and was frozen solid.

Then I received an email from Shamir. It said, “I am leaving Moscow for a stay in a monastery and will be unable to see you. I explicitly request you: Do not publish a single word without me checking the text first.” I realized that this man was afraid of what others said about him. He was discreet and controlling. He had different names for a reason. He had something to hide: a certain fear, a certain darkness, that had consumed him. Who knows what the origins of his fear are? “This time of certainty is over,” Shamir writes. He insists that Gentiles need to stand up to the elite Jews in government, the media, and anywhere else they’re hiding, or risk, he says, falling “into a New Dark Age, into a bleak anti-Utopia, and our children will not forgive us for our passivity. Or we still can pull and push, and hope for the best.” His hope is to transform his private darkness into a light that others will follow. In the meantime, he hides himself.

Two weeks later I received a Facebook message from Paul Bennett, Shamir’s editor and fellow writer on Counterpunch, a biweekly newsletter that describes what it does as “muckraking with a radical attitude.” The email started to outline how smart and misunderstood the “underdog” is and how we can learn a lot from a man with Shamir’s intelligence. But then it became a little bit threatening. “I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to understand why it would pay better to attack Shamir than to support him, but I think you may be young enough and still idealistic enough to appreciate his fine points,” wrote Bennett, a U.S. citizen, a proclaimed fan of Shamir’s, and the editor of the English versions of Shamir’s books.

Maybe he doesn’t mean it. Maybe he just wants to make a splash. But after five months following the man, I don’t think that is the case. Shamir has disguised his prejudice against Jews in the guise of a moral dilemma—to be or not to be a Jew­—and by making the right decision for other humans to follow. Reading Shamir’s work is like looking at a map of Moscow’s metro. The city and its metro system are built in circles: The innermost circle is Red Square and the Kremlin, and the outermost circle is the outskirts of the city, but they are all connected. From the center, you can easily go out to the edge. Shamir leads you to believe that you, as a reader, are getting to the epicenter of morality by admitting that elite Jews in power are evil Mammonites whose main goal is to make Jerusalem the spiritual capital of the world and to enslave the Gentiles. But the more you read, the more you try to analyze, the further away from morality you actually become.

In his Facebook message, Bennett continued to explain why as “a budding journalist” it would pay not to smear “our friend.” “When we speak to him we must realize that we are one degree away from global movers and shakers like Julian Assange,” he wrote. In the early 2000s, Shamir was nothing but a marginal anti-Semite and a prolific writer. But at that time one could write him off as a lunatic, or a self-loathing-Jew, or just a weirdo. But now, with Assange’s backing, Shamir has become a legitimate source of news and facts with a legitimate platform that is hard to ignore. His ideas may be heretical, mad, coming too fast to digest, but the Age of Assange has made Shamir less eccentric, more central—a dangerous man.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

Outside my window in Moscow everything is frozen, the thick ice-coated ground, the wind whining through alleys between the gray apartment buildings that stick out from 5-foot bases of hard snow, the orange dump trucks full of snow chugging along the street. Seven floors down, men in blue and orange overalls and black snowcaps are smashing the 3-inch-thick layers of ice coating the sidewalks with wooden-handled-and-metal-ended ice picks. Then there’s me, waiting in my thermals for the supposed Russian representative of WikiLeaks, a man who says his name is Israel Shamir, but who is also known as Jöran Jermas, and Adam Ermash, and who spends his time between Sweden, Israel, and Russia.

I have spent too much time in the paranoid corners where Shamir’s articles appear, on websites that claim the Jews planned the attacks of Sept. 11, Jews convinced the George W. Bush Administration to go to war in the Middle East, Jews have nuclear weapons not to just destroy Lebanon and Iraq and Syria, but Europe, too. Shamir says he was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1947 to Jewish parents but in 2004 was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. While he claims to be a Palestinian activist, a believer in the “One State Solution,” his work reads more like right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda. He writes and speaks about the existence of “Jewish Media Lords” who have hijacked newspapers and TV to brainwash Americans into carrying out “Judaic goals,” which include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he writes in one of his books, Cabbala of Power, “The Jewish ‘plan’ is no secret; there is no need to re-read The Protocols or to ask Jews what they want.” In addition to having accused Israel of all manner of crimes, he has also been labeled a Holocaust-denier by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Shamir and I first corresponded via email four months ago. After he canceled a planned interview in February, we began talking on the phone every week, but he still refused to schedule an interview. The most he would promise me is that if I come to Moscow and called him, he might meet me, but then again he might not. “Things are getting very complicated,” he explained. “All I might have is an hour.”

The day before I left New York for Moscow, I bumped into Norman Finkelstein, a scholar and Holocaust-doubter who was denied tenure at DePaul University because of his published work, The Holocaust Industry, which claims the factual account of mass-extermination has been exploited so Jews can “gain immunity to criticism.” I had emailed Finkelstein early in February, after Shamir told me they were friends. Finkelstein wrote back, “I want nothing to do with this article. [Shamir] is a maniac.” So, when on another day on Gravesend Neck Road in Brooklyn outside of a closed-down Russian Apteka, I saw a tall man with gray thin hair wearing a brown corduroy blazer with a Palestinian flag pin on his lapel, I recognized him as Finkelstein and approached. As two young boys ran past us wearing kippas, he elaborated on his email: “He’s sleazy—Shamir said we were friends because he’s sleazy, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he stated while his nose ran in the February wind. “He has invented his entire personal history. Nothing he says about himself is true. And you won’t get this article published anywhere.”

One night before my trip, I realized that I started to believe this dark character who crawled out from the perverse nooks of the Internet to save my goy soul from the people he called “Jewish Media Lords.” I was sitting up on my couch at 4 a.m. reading a Shamir article about IDF soldiers who steal Palestinian organs and sell them on the black market. Then I read an article that called Jews “Christ-Killers” and another that said “a Jewish media lord—and one of the nastiest: Arthur Sulzberger Jr.” owns the New York Times. Hardly convincing, but then why was I starting to doubt the Times? I realized I had better get some sleep.

When the sun came up that first morning in Moscow, I called Shamir and told him I was in town. He told me that it’s “too hard to tell” if he would be able to meet. He suggested that if I called him at 2 p.m., he might have a better idea. If we met it would be at the Dom Zhurnalista, the Journalist’s House, off Arbatskaya metro station. While I waited and smoked, I re-read Shamir’s Cabbala of Power. Jews as a group, he argues, don’t know what they want, but at the very least they want war. Shamir quotes the Bible to explain, “‘The locusts have no king, yet they attack in formation …’ (Proverbs 30:27) and devastate whole countries as if by plan.” In Masters of Discourse Shamir writes, “There are no important media outlets in the US that are not owned or controlled by Jews.”

I was drifting in the silver smoke sitting near Red Square. I was there to meet a marginal weirdo and a notorious Holocaust-doubter. But I was also meeting a man who has real power in the newest form of journalism. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, had given Shamir access to cables and made him the organization’s representative in Moscow. Is Shamir crazy, or not? The question seemed important.

On March 1, 2011, the New York Times published an article about a report about a phone conversation that was never recorded. According to this article, Julian Assange told the British magazine the Private Eye that there is a Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks led by British journalists, including editors of the Guardian. The report, written by the publication’s editor, Ian Hislop, was based on a phone conversation Hislop had with Assange on Feb. 16, 2011. During the conversation, Hislop claimed that Assange stated the Jewish conspiracy to smear WikiLeaks was spearheaded by the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, investigations editor David Leigh, and by Index on Censorship’s John Kampfner. Although Rusbridger is not a Jew, Assange stressed that he is “sort of Jewish,” because he and David Leigh, a Jew, are brothers-in-law. But what really bothered Assange was a different article by the same publication titled, “Man in the Eye: Israel Shamir,” which claims Shamir is a Holocaust denier. Assange said that the article was “crap”—one more example of the Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks.

At 2 p.m., I called Shamir. He said he would meet me in one hour. I pulled it together, drank one more cup of coffee, and jumped on the subway. I was close.

II.

I first became curious about Shamir when the original reports came out in December in Russian and Swedish newspapers, and then in Reason and on the blog of New York Magazine, which claimed that he was the Russian “content aggregator” for WikiLeaks, as well as a “Holocaust denier.” I became more curious when I read an excerpt of the aformentioned Private Eye article about Shamir’s alleged anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying beliefs and his direct relationship with Assange. And I became very interested when I read WikiLeaks’ statement on its website: “Israel Shamir has never worked or volunteered for WikiLeaks, in any manner, whatsoever. He has never written for WikiLeaks or any associated organization, under any name and we have no plan that he do so. He is not an ‘agent’ of WikiLeaks.”

A spokesman for WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, confirmed this when I called to ask if Shamir was directly connected to the organization. “No, he is not,” said Hrafnsson. “He only worked on the Cable Gate release, like hundreds of other journalists.” Then the line went dead.

In Moscow, on my way to meet the man, I exited Arbatskaya Station and walked underneath the busy bul’var. I came out to see snow, ice, and a big black iron gate, behind which lay a courtyard and the Journalists’ House. In front of the big beige building was a set of stairs, which led down to a café. Through the window, I could see Shamir sitting at a table.

We said hello. Shook hands. “How do you like Moscow?” he asked me in fluent English, but with a Russian accent tinged with a Hebrew one, or possibly the other way around. I reached for my cigarette. He did the same. Shamir had recognizable human qualities, like a strong handshake and a fine smile. It felt nice to talk with someone, because I had been alone during my days of wandering and waiting around Moscow. Then I remembered that I was dining with a man who dedicated his life’s work to writing about why it’s wrong to be a Jew. And I knew from my reading of his work that there was something in his ice-hard anti-Semitic soul—be it anger, prejudice, or a reincarnation of an ancient darkness into modern anti-Israel sentiment—that genuinely scared me. I thought about an excerpt from Cabbala of Power: “In order to save the world from possible spiritual devastation, the Jewish state must be dismantled. … It can be done softly, without bloodshed, by creating a democratic state for all residents of Palestine, native and adoptive Palestinians. It won’t be a Jewish state, but Israeli Jews will eventually be absorbed by Palestinians, as the Jews of old were absorbed by Palestinians during the 2nd to 7th centuries.”

To me, it read like soft-core ethnic cleansing. But it was too late to analyze, as I was already studying his tan, wrinkled face and his thick, bristly mustache. Israel Shamir was a short man, neither fat nor skinny. His gray-and-black loose curls puffed around his cranium, and he sat with his elbows on the table after he fumbled to get his voice recorder to work. His hands touched, rubbed, and pressed his mustache, forehead, and temples incessantly throughout our conversation. He ordered the salad with sliced radish on top, and I ordered the borscht.

We talked about Julian Assange, of whom he said, “My acquaintance with him is so superficial. I have this very superficial view of the man.” He scratched the base of his nose above his lip. He turned his head and looked at the gray painted brick wall of the stairway out the window.

I know that when Assange was in Ellingham Hall in the Norfolk County that you went to visit him. He introduced you as “Adam.” I know you have a couple different names. Why were you introduced as Adam?

Well, Adam is my real name as well, Christian name as well. I actually use it quite often.

Yes, Adam Ermash, right?

Just Adam. Usually in many books I have it “Israel Adam Shamir.”

It was also reported that at Ellingham Hall, with Julian Assange and you were introduced as Adam, that you asked for cables about the Jews. Why did you ask for cables about the Jews and did you get any?

Oh, yeah, I have a lot of cables about the Jews. [He grins.] I have thousands of cables about the Jews.

And what do the cables say about the Jews?

Oh, it’s a very entertaining thing. I want to write about it, but I haven’t had time yet. But I think it is a very entertaining subject. A lot of cables about Jews.

Give me one example, what does a cable say?

One of them for instance that was published by me in a Russian newspaper a couple of weeks ago, there was a piece by the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow saying that Russia has no anti-Semitism.

And does Moscow have anti-Semitism?

No, surely not.

He finished his salad and put his napkin on his lap and pulled out one of the two packs of Dunhills he brought. He smoked cigarettes constantly, and he smoked with heart and vigor; he truly seemed to enjoy the act of smoking. The waiter stopped by, and Shamir ordered a cappuccino politely and nonchalantly. Our pasta did not look appetizing—noodles with chucks of tough meat in a brown oily sauce.

What is hatred?

That’s something I don’t, I’ve never experienced.

You’ve never experienced hatred?

Nuh-uh.

He was silent for 10 seconds until I asked the next question.

Well, on your site you say you’re a lightening rod for smear jobs. Do you think people hate you?

Well, they have a practical meaning also. I don’t think someone smears me because somebody hates me personally all that much. That would be very odd. I mean, provided I don’t feel hatred for others, would be strange to think someone hates me all that much.

Do you think you could be provoked to hate? What if you saw a murder?

Yaaaa …

As I understand you’ve seen terrible things that murderous Jews have done. When you were in the settlements you saw the hilltop youths—

One gets annoyed, you know. One gets annoyed. Ah, one gets annoyed. But I kind of personally don’t think I have ever felt such strong, passion as hatred. Hatred is very strong passion. I don’t think I’ve ever came close to it.

When you write about the IDF as SS soldiers in Gaza?

No, that’s not out of anger. That’s not even out of very strong anger. Or any way, that’s what I try, not to write … angrily. First of all, if one writes angrily, people do not read it. [Laughs.]

It would take days for the Moscovite ice pickers to chop through his ice. But every now and then, Shamir gets tired of smiling and laughing things off.

When I was in the West Bank there was definitely hostile feelings towards the Palestinians.

Yes. [Laughs.] Yes. Very silly, very silly. My mother lives in a settlement, called Eli.

Eli? I’ve been there.

Yeah, oh, you know. And she’s very much a settler. Very ideological. Very keen on all this stuff. She can speak forever about how awful everybody else is to them. I’ve tried many times to tell her why not kind of look at it differently, why not to see that people can live together? Basically to try to live together peacefully. That would be good enough. But kind of she didn’t really like it.

It must be hard for her to read your stuff.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes …

What does she say about your books?

Well, she doesn’t like it. [Laughs.] She doesn’t like it.

I think about how he described the Hilltop Youth once in his book Flowers of Galilee. “They seemed like nothing you ever saw. To their shaven heads, black boxes were strapped by narrow black belts; black belts crisscrossed their bare arms. The Jews put on the phylacteries … for a morning prayer, but on these young men they looked like the amulets of a warlike tribe. They wore dark trousers and dark tee shirts; white shawls with black stripes flew behind their backs. Their rifles were pointed at us. They looked possessed by some strange demon.”

Shamir continued talking about his Jewish settler mother. “Well, that’s the way with mothers. So we don’t have to worry about it all that much. We don’t have obligations of this sort towards our mothers,” he said casually. He rested his left arm on the table and held his chin in the cup of his right hand. It was getting dark outside, but our interview was far from over.

For the second installment of this article, click here.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

• Prime Minister Netanyahu has appealed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to stop the Gaza flotilla scheduled for May. [Haaretz]

• Haaretz breaks news of secret negotiations with Russia to dissuade it from supporting a European Union initiative to lay out two states along the 1967 borders. [Haaretz]

• Israel’s watchdog will probe Netanyahu’s travel and campaign spending following reports—vigorously denied—of abuse of funds. [AP/WP]

• Daily life in Sderot. [The Daily]

• The Kabbalah Centre, embattled. [Page Six]

A slim plurality of Americans who view Israel positively comes as no surprise. That Russians, despite historic (and waning) anti-Semitism, should feel sympathy with a state with a huge population of their co-nationalists makes sense. And China? China loves the Jews.

Which leaves … Ghana. My theory is simple: Soccer. John Paintsil, who famously pulled an Israeli flag from his shorts and waved it in celebration after scoring a goal in the 2006 World Cup Finals (in honor of his club team, Hapoel Tel Aviv), was playing for his native Ghana. Also, Ghanaian Jews. Go Ghana.

Israel Negatively Viewed, Survey Finds [JTA]
Related: Sub-Saharan Shabbat [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Matzah Ball Soup for the Chinese Soul
Cable Reports Lower Russian Anti-Semitism

The cable’s release may represent pithy timing on WikiLeaks’s part, given that this week also brought a report from a judge’s assistant that the criminal charges and eight-year prison sentence against Russian Jewish oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky were politically (though not, explicitly, ethnically) motivated.

Speaking of pithy! Commentators have noted that WikiLeaks has taught us that some of our top diplomats possess literary touches you would not expect; and Beyrle, a George W. Bush appointee who has served in Moscow for nearly three years, is no exception. “From ‘Oy, Vey’ to OK” is how he headlines one section, where he traces the history of Russian anti-Semitism. Another section is titled, “Some of [Russia]’s best friends are Jews.” And he provides a compelling portrait of Chabad Rabbi Berel Lazar, who comes off as something of an operator, paying obeisance to the Kremlin and receiving funds from prominent but more docile Jewish oligarchs like Lev Leviev, Roman Abramovich, and Boris Berezovsky. Ambassador Beyrle: When you retire, we hope you’ll consider contributing to Tablet Magazine!

More to the point, Beyrle is judicious on the fact that Russia’s progress is fragile—“the [economic] crisis could easily exacerbate latent anti-Semitism,” he notes (this was in December 2009)—and that claims such as Lazar’s assertion that there is more anti-Semitism in Europe than in Russia must be “taken with a grain of salt.” “Anti-Semitism has been a part of Russian culture for such a long time,” he argues, “that it would be unrealistic to expect it to disappear overnight.” But he is persuasive that life for Russia’s Jewish community—which, a little oddly, he seems to peg at one million, when it’s more like 200,000—is better than it has been in a very long time. His credibility is aided, of course, by our knowledge that he didn’t expect us to be reading this.

I asked Gal Beckerman, author of the award-winning history of Soviet Jewry, When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone, about the Jackson-Vanik comment at the conclusion. “Amazingly, it’s still on the books and annoys the hell out of the Russians,” he told me of the law, whose repeal is supported by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. “It means they can’t get Most Favored Nation trading status, which they need in order to be admitted to the World Trade Organization, something they very much want. Getting rid of J-V is also on the Obama administration’s list of to-dos in their attempt to ‘reset’ the American-Russian relationship.” He added, “Whatever other problems Russia has with democracy and human rights, free emigration is not one of them. Since this was the initial intent of the bill, it should have been repealed a long time ago.”

Anti-Semitism on the Wane in Russia [WikiLeaks]
Related: Russian Tycoon’s Trial Was Rigged, Assistant Says [NYT]

• But by destabilizing Lebanon, its base, Hezbollah’s gambit was not without its risks. [NYT]

• How ‘bout China and Russia! China flat-out refused Iran’s offer for a tour of its nuclear facilities, seen as fuzzy at best since the United States was not invited; and Russia such a tour would not be a replacement for negotiations and U.N. inspects. [AP/NYT]

• The man said to be in charge of laundering money to Hamas from sources such as Iran—previously the assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s job—was arrested in (where else?) Dubai. [Ynet]

• Yossi Alpher notes that the recent moves toward Palestinian statehood do not touch issues like the right of return and so actually could, judo-like, be used by Israel to move toward a final deal on rather favorable terms. [JPost]

• Israel and Greece, which have drawn closer as Israel and Turkey have bickered, formed a regional force for dealing with natural disasters. [JTA]

For me, the news served as a doleful affirmation: The alleged criminals seem to have had the same thought I did when I filled out my now-deceased grandmother’s application for reparations years ago. The details of her story were true: She spent 26 months incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto, managing to escape a month before it was liquidated and her parents and maternal grandparents were murdered. But as I considered the application’s thin verification requirements, I thought: How easy this would be to fake.

So I did.

For the last year, I have been inventing stories of Holocaust suffering: a mother suffocating her wailing child to save the other Jews hiding in a cellar; a ghetto work detail sorting the blood-spattered clothes of murdered Jews; Belarussian Nazi collaborators pausing between executions at street tables loaded with chicken and beer. But rather than feeding some criminal scheme, these stories are at the heart of a novel I’ve been writing—the story of a young writer, a failure in New York magazine journalism, who, in frustration, takes to forging Holocaust restitution claims at the prompting of old Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach and other parts of Soviet Brooklyn.

In the book, as in real life, these are people who have suffered unimaginably—as Red Army soldiers in World War II; as Jews in the Soviet Union; as immigrants in the United States—but not in the way the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany specifies they need to have suffered to qualify for the reparations the German government has been making to Holocaust victims since 1952.

Slava Gelman, my fictionalized letter-writer, wants to resist the logic of these old immigrants even as his heart breaks at their misery. He, too, is a Soviet émigré; his elders brought him to America so he wouldn’t have to live by the deception that they did. In the Soviet Union, Jews were kept out of elite institutions and posts; Jewish veterans who had lost limbs at the front were taunted for having sat out World War II; a Jewish woman could hardly touch a loaf of stale bread at the food store without having her “grubby Jewish fingers” berated by the cashier. Soviet Jews lived in an inconceivable limbo of unfairness and hypocrisy. Many would have been too happy to forget their faith, but their countrymen never allowed them to.

I was also born in the Soviet Union, where Jews like my grandfather had no choice but to live by the black market. Ostensibly a barber, my grandfather developed a clandestine barter network that would impress a CIA station chief. A haircut on the side for a stick of salami; salami for free Aeroflot tickets; free tickets for the ear of a powerful person in case trouble comes. The only way to get by was to cheat the system—there simply wasn’t enough to go around fairly. It’s hard to think of a regime that claimed to do as much in the name of its people while impoverishing them more—materially, physically, morally. It’s hard to fault an ex-Soviet person for feeling owed. But, as a character in the novel says, “the Soviets aren’t offering restitution. The Germans are offering.”

***

The low burden of proof required by the reparations program wouldn’t tempt the average American: The law is the law here. That is the wonder of this country, for all its flaws: There’s enough to go around. Connections, pedigree, and money all help, but so many ordinary people can achieve what they’d like simply by working fairly and honestly. You can afford to be decent here.

Had the defrauded funds been American rather than German, it isn’t hard to imagine the news sticking in some immigration-obsessed Tea Party congressman’s craw, with its easy iconography of interlopers illegally sucking down precious native resources. The law is the law; the Holocaust-fund suspects should be prosecuted. So should, for that matter, those who cross the border illegally. But what should find no tolerance is the nativist demonology that so often accompanies news of malfeasance by a small portion of a minority group. The Russians have gotten off easy, their persecution limited to movies like Red Dawn and Gary Shteyngart’s novels. But what of more hideous gestures, such as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s video of faceless Mexican marauders scaling the walls of our innocent land? The vast majority of illegal Mexican immigrants are here to make money to put clothes on the backs of children in Puebla—money earned doing work most Americans won’t deign to do, and for a pittance. Since so much modern journalism seems to have squandered its traditional mandate to force primitive instinct to contend with nuance, perhaps fiction has to step in.

The poison inside the people who allegedly defrauded the Holocaust fund would be inside you, too, if you had lived as Jews in the Soviet Union. Whatever their sins, these people are heroes, too, for having survived it. The struggle to defeat its legacy requires a daily application of conscience and will, even for members of my generation. I actually envy Slava, my own fictionalized protagonist, for the way in which he chooses America at the end of the book. Fiction is freeing that way; that’s one of its limiting seductions. For some, in real life, it’s simply too late.

Nothing is more uplifting than the American gospel of self-reinvention, but America forgets that human nature sometimes has a limit. That is part of America’s vital, ferocious, oblivious beauty. But it’s too late for those who traded their complimentary American synagogue memberships for cash; for those who sign for imaginary pills and massages to split profits with doctors who file for Medicare reimbursement; for those for whom it’s still 1977 in Minsk.

Slava spends only the 400 pages of my book arguing with his grandfather about the meaning of justice; I have spent more than a decade arguing with mine. In this time, I have achieved things I never imagined, but I have changed nothing about what men like our grandfathers see in the world. That creates one kind of conundrum for the American legal system, and another for Russian-Americans of my age. Our grandparents are our shame, but they are also our wisdom, courage, and tenderness. They gave up everything so we could have more. But in the United States, they remain Soviet—that singular cocktail of cunning, fear, paranoia, ambition, materialism, anti-intellectual refinement, tribalism, prudery, soul. It is the lasting curse of our magical, hideous birthplace. How do you forgive and revere these people at once? How do you honor someone whose definition of honor is entirely different from yours?

I found my only answer in fiction: Consider them individually, as the idiosyncratic, reduction-imploding human beings that they—that we all—are.

Boris Fishman is a 2010-2011 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

• The Haaretz journalist accused of helping Anat Kam, the reporter accused of espionage, returned to Israel for questioning and a possible indictment. [Ynet]

• Five shells were launched from Gaza, two falling inside Israeli territory. No one was injured. [JTA]

• A new Russian census will likely show a decline in the Jewish population of at least 25 percent over the past decade. [JTA]

• “The thing about Russia is that, for a satirist, it’s almost too easy,” says contributing editor Gary Shteyngart, on book tour there. [NYT]

• La Patti gets the Sunday Styles treatment. God help us. [NYT]

The model for the memorable Bronx judge in Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities died at 88. Both Burton B. Roberts (the real-life judge) and Myron Kovitsky (Wolfe’s judge) were Jewish, but in the movie version, the judge is black, because when you can get Morgan Freeman …

• Israeli officials, however, say they do expect Arab League backing for President Abbas’s decision. [JPost]

• Settlers seemed pleased, anyway. [JPost]

• Russia is refunding Iran’s down-payment for a sophisticated anti-aircraft system—further proof, says the U.S., that Russia is welcomely toughening up in its dealings with the Islamic Republic. [Laura Rozen]

• Guess who hasn’t been discovered? Really any of the over 30 suspected killers of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh [WSJ]

• A top Israeli energy tycoon discusses his rate battle with the Israeli government. [LAT]

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Harold Bloom on Isaac Bashevis Singer. [NYRB]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three hundred of us had been flown in for the founding conference of a new Moscow-based watchdog organization, World Without Nazism. For the event’s kick-off, conference participants gathered in a sun-dappled Vichnoyi Slavy Park, home to the city’s Monument of Eternal Glory at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier. We were each handed a red carnation, arranged in parade formation, and led 100 yards toward a massive obelisk memorial. My moment of supreme disorientation occurred just a few steps into the procession, when from behind the bushes came a jolting martial thunder: Previously unseen Brezhnev-era trucks topped with what looked like air-raid sirens had begun blasting the opening chords of “People, Awake!” a 1941 hit from the back catalog of the Red Army Choir. After we reached the obelisk, the very loud Soviet anthem gave way to another, and then another.

“We’ll come back with victory!” promised the all-male choir. “The Red Army is the strongest!”

Under this siege of Soviet orchestral swells, I struggled to remember my purpose in Kiev. Was I here for a conference on combating anti-Semitism? Or had I been cast in a shitty remake of Battle at Kursk?

A similar schizophrenia defined the rest of the inaugural conference of World Without Nazism (WWN), a new initiative from the World Congress of Russian Jewry and its president, the Kremlin-connected mini-oligarch Boris Shpigel. On the opening morning of proceedings, the event distinguished itself by becoming what might be the only conference to receive official letters of support from both Hillary Clinton and the autonomous government of South Ossetia. At the podium, speakers spoke of trivialization and denial, though it was not always clear whether they were referring to the Holocaust, or the decisive sacrifice of millions of Red Army soldiers. At the Hotel Prezidente, where the conference was taking place, whores prowled the muzak-cursed lobby as aggressively as they would have 15 years ago.

The most potent symbol of this schizophrenia is also its primary source. While the new organization aspires to global influence and credibility—a kind of Moscow-based Anti-Defamation League that would partner with the European Union and the United Nations—its founding president and public face is a man whose fortunes depend in part on framing Jewish interests to fit the view from the Kremlin.

Boris Shpigel is a bald, round man who looks older than his 57 years and is given to slumping in his seat. He emerged early in the Boris Yeltsin era. Like others who prospered during the 1990s, he anticipated the coming curve and founded the pharmaceuticals firm Biotek shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By the time Vladimir Putin assumed power, Shpigel had grown his firm from a small research outfit south of Moscow to a major producer dominant in more than 70 markets across the Eurasian expanse. In 2002, he helped found and lead the Party of Russia’s Rebirth, a centrist social-democratic party that enjoyed the blessing of Mikhail Gorbachev (and, thought some, the Kremlin, which had been known to fund center-left parties designed to siphon off support from the Communists). By the time Shpigel was elected president of the World Congress of Russian Jewry in 2007, he was a major player at the nexus of business, diplomacy, and culture among Russia, Israel, and the Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora. Today, as a Duma member, Shpigel sits on committees that handle everything from public institutions to the funding of science, culture, education, and health care.

Concerns over coziness with the Kremlin have dogged WWN’s parent organization, the World Congress of Russian Jewry. When it was founded in 2002 as an outgrowth of the Lubavitch-led Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, some worried the WCRJ was too intertwined with the Russian government to be an effective advocate. Since assuming the WCRJ presidency, Shpigel has only helped validate these concerns. During Russia’s conflict with Georgia over South Ossetia in the summer 2008, Shpigel issued an overheated statement on WCRJ letterhead calling for a tribunal to investigate what he termed acts of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” committed by the Georgian military. Though the casual use of such language is anathema to responsible Jewish leadership, Shpigel did not hesitate to echo the Kremlin’s bombast. It was left to Shpigel’s deputy at the Congress, Israeli Knesset Member Ze’ev Elkin, to dial back the statement. The role of the WCRJ, an exasperated Elkin told Haaretz, is to worry about the well-being of Jews worldwide, not get involved in “geo-political conflicts.”

Yet viewed from Moscow, the growth of far-right activity in the former Eastern bloc is hard to disentangle from geo-politics. This is especially true when this activity bubbles up behind NATO lines, embodied by groups espousing anti-Russian and anti-Semitic rhetoric. WWN’s early fire has been directed toward the Baltics, where attacks on Soviet war monuments are increasingly accompanied by efforts to celebrate the Nazis (as well as their local collaborators) and edit the history of the Holocaust. In July, WWN’s first official statement targeted a decision by Riga’s Administrative Court to sanction a public demonstration honoring the Nazi occupation government. WWN was quick and correct to publicize and condemn the decision. But its letter contained a whiff of Kremlin anti-Western boilerplate, blaming EU leniency for the rise of far-right nationalism in the region.

That the European Union has indeed failed to rigorously enforce laws on extremism and denial does not change the fact that the WWN’s condemnations, if they are to be taken seriously, must be matched by efforts to shame authorities in Russia itself, which is home to a growing culture of far-right street violence targeting Jews, activists, and, especially, migrant workers from Central Asia. Notably, WWN was silent in late August when 100 skinheads attacked a concert in the central Russian city of Miass, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of a 14-year-old girl. (The organization did, however, find time in August to issue a statement in opposition to Manhattan’s Park51 development, aka the “Ground Zero Mosque.”)

One speaker in Kiev publicly addressed these issues and urged the new organization to recognize the historical crimes of communism, even as it challenges official efforts in Eastern Europe to equate and conflate those crimes with those of the Nazis. That speaker was Dovid Katz, a former professor at the University of Vilnius (and Tablet contributor) and the curator of HolocaustInTheBaltics.com. “While we reject the theories of ‘equivalence’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes,” said Katz, “we must be careful never to join those who would deny or mitigate or trivialize the enormous crimes committed by Stalinism and Soviet domination of many lands and peoples against their will.”

“It is also very important that our movement has a democratic Western atmosphere,” he continued. “It must never be seen to be in any way subservient to today’s Russian area politics. We should be meeting in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, not just Kiev, Moscow, and Minsk.”

Regardless of where it holds future meetings, and however compromised by Kremlin ties it may be, WWN hardly lacks for urgent work. As the multinational cast of speakers in Kiev made clear, there is a rising “brown tide” in Eastern Europe and throughout the continent. Well-organized neo-fascist political movements are on the march in Hungary and Italy. In the Baltics, monuments to the Holocaust are being removed and the Nazi occupations publicly glorified. Far-right thugs and activists prowl the streets, march on capitals, speak in universities, and organize online, often in flagrant violation of the law.

If World Without Nazism is to join the fight against these developments, it must overcome suspicions that it is little more than just a PR operation for the Russian foreign ministry. Here’s hoping that it does.

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

• Mideast leaders expressed hope concerning what will follow last week’s direct peace talks. (Except for Avigdor Lieberman.) [NYT]

• A detailed look into who is funding both sides of the Park51 debate. [Politico]

• Palestinian Authority security forces face their toughest challenge yet—you can expect a continued uptick in West Bank violence as direct talks proceed apace. [LAT]

• Israel and Russia signed their first military deal, pledging cooperation in fighting nuclear proliferation and terrorism and leaving the door open to Russia’s buying further Israeli-made drones. (Defense Minister Barak had also sought to prevent missile sales to Syria.) [LAT]

• An interview with a Reform rabbi who has taken the lead in trying to force Israeli courts to grant greater accomodations to Progressive Jews. [LAT]

• And the best bit of optimism you’ll read concerning them, courtesy former U.N. Ambassador Martin Indyk. [NYT]

• Expect to see a “quiet freeze”: The construction moratorium would be permitted to expire in September, on schedule, but Bibi and Defense Minister Barak will not sign building permits. [Haaretz]

• Israel is asking Russia to halt its sale of anti-shipping missiles to Syria. [Haaretz]

• Mohamed ElBaradei, the onetime head of the U.N. nuclear inspectors, has teemed up in his native Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood in a signature drive to try to effect constitutional change. [WSJ]

• Martin Earnest Dannenberg, a Jewish U.S. counterintelligence special agent during World War II who discovered (along with a Jewish Army translator) an original copy of the Nuremberg Laws in a small German town, died at 94. [LAT]

• Yehuda Krinsky, the leader of Chabad-Lubavitch movement and Newsweek’s most influential American rabbi, accuses Mayor Bloomberg of selling out his people … for adopting the Yankees over their native Red Sox. I am making none of this up. [NYT Magazine]

• Is President Obama convinced that current sanctions are working? Or does he think further engagement is crucial? Various reporters whom the president personally briefed cannot agree. [Laura Rozen]

• Condé Nast’s decision to move to lower Manhattan illustrates its despicable insensitivity to 9/11. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• “The original Fanta was a Nazi product.” I knew there was a reason I despised that atrocious jingle. [Slate]

• In a suit brought by the Chabad movement, a U.S. federal judge ruled that Russia is illegally in possession of thousands of Jewish documents seized during the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War as well as by the Nazis and then in turn captured by the Soviets. [Moscow Times]

Andy Warhol, one of the Gentiles most commonly mistaken for a Jew, was born on this day in 1928. Here he is eating a cheeseburger.

To back up briefly: Recall that last October, the Western powers, led by the United States, offered Iran a deal under which the Islamic Republic would turn over its unenriched uranium to Russia and in return receive 20 percent enriched uranium. Iran turned it down. Then, in May, Turkey, Brazil, and Iran announced that they had reached the same deal, only with Turkey, not Russia, making the swap. This was an attempt to persuade Security Council holdouts, namely China, that sanctions weren’t necessary. It didn’t work—China and 12 other countries either voted for or abstained on the economic sanctions, which passed. The only countries that voted against them? Those would be Turkey and Brazil.

Earlier this week, Turkey and Iran announced that they considered their deal to still be in play, despite the sanctions. The Turkish foreign minister said it could serve as a helpful “framework” (of course, it itself was based upon the earlier, Western-supported “framework”).

But later in the week (still with me?), Iran also said it might enter into talks with the West without preconditions and could also agree to stop enriching fuel. You know, maybe. “There’s a concern that Iran is pursuing the fuel swap as a way to weaken sanctions and avoid the important questions,” writes the Wall Street Journal. Ya think?

The good news is that this new Iranian openness suggests that the new sanctions, which were generally perceived as toothless except to the extent that they demonstrated unity and the West’s ability to get Russia and China to take a harsher line, may actually be doing some damage. Which is why it’s not surprising that the United States, though skeptical, is interested in talking to Iran.

It is worth noting that the Iranian nuclear question generally and the competing fuel swap deals specifically are those rare issues that unite AIPAC and J Street: They both consider an Iranian bomb to be an extremely bad thing, and they both consider the Turkish deal to be insufficient.

And the clock continues: Every day that Iran is promising more negotiations with the West is a day it can develop its fuel and technology and the rest. It is also a day on which Israel can decide Iran has had quite enough time and that, instead, a different course is to be pursued. Bottom line: You should be rooting for talks with the West, and a deal with the West, ASAP.

Iran Offers To Resume Nuclear Talks, Rein in Enrichment [WSJ]
U.S. Seeking Fuel Swap Meeting with Iran [JPost]
Turkey, Brazil FMs: Iran Nuclear Agreement Still Alive [Haaretz]
Earlier: Reining In Iran http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/34195/reining-in-iran/

• West Bank settlers yesterday protested the demolition of a single home. [NYT]

• Russia, in many ways one of Iran’s prime patrons, has seen its relations with the Islamic Republic deteriorate significantly since it voted for sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. [NYT]

• Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, expresses bewilderment at why some in Israel, led by David Rotem, would push their conversion bill at a time like this. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen wonders why we haven’t heard more about the lives and deaths of the nine flotilla activists, including the one American, and wonders whether, say, a Jewish kid caught in some crossfire would receive the same non-attention. [NYT]

• Soon after the United States raised the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic status from “bureau” to “delegation,” France went a step farther, raising it from “delegation” to “mission,” which includes an ambassador. [NYT]

• Turkey has banned IDF flights in its airspace and will not invite Israel to its military exercises. [NYT]

• Elena Kagan vowed to be a “modest” and “deferential” justice during the first day of her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. [NYT]

• Israeli police announced the April arrest of seven Palestinian men accused of plotting attacks against Jews and Christians in Israel, Somalia, and elsewhere. [NYT]

• Not clear yet if there’s a Jewish angle, but holy crap Russian spies! [NYT]

• The “Three Weeks” of mourning begin tonight; it marks the day the Babylonian king entered Jerusalem on his way to destroying the Temple (the first time). [Arutz Sheva]

• The Obama administration praised Israel’s easing of the Gaza land blockade. [Haaretz]

• I linked yesterday, but the big news of the day remains the thousands of Israeli ultra-Orthodox who protested a Supreme Court decision integrating religious schools, opening them to Sephardim from Arab and North African countries. [NYT]

• A Forward writer reminds Times readers that, through their emigration battle, Jews were in the front guard in the movement to change the Soviet regime. [NYT]

• Congratulations to the Los Angeles Lakers, who defeated the Boston Celtics to repeat as NBA champions. Special shout-outs to back-up guard Jordan Farmar, who is Jewish, and starting forward Ron Artest, who thanked his shrink afterward. [WSJ]

• Former Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Florida) is being strongly considered as America’s next ambassador to Israel. He would constitute a “high-impact political appointee.” [Laura Rozen]

• F.W. de Klerk, the final leader of apartheid-era South Africa, vigorously denied the report that Israel offered to sell his country nuclear weapons. [JPost]

• Amnesty International, which believes Israel committed war crimes in last year’s Gaza conflict, accused the U.N. Security Council permanent members of shielding it from consequences. [Haaretz]

• A federal judge ruled that police acted constitutionally in uncovering a plan to blow up two Bronx synagogues. So the case will proceed. [NYT]

• Iranian President Ahmadinejad sniped at Russia for backing sanctions at the Security Council. [NYT]