• Contributing editor Seth Lipsky outlines how an upcoming Supreme Court case will address and potentially adjudicate U.S. policy on whether Jerusalem is the capital of Israel—something both this administration and the previous one resisted doing. [WSJ]

• Daniel Radcliffe (the guy who plays Harry Potter) has a Jewish mother and identifies as a Jewish atheist. You know, 50 years ago, Gryffindor wouldn’t let us in. [92Y]

• Jews … in Majorca, Spain! [NYT]

• One Eran Broshy is an alternative Dan Snyder-Simon Wiesenthal Center connection. I still prefer Tom Cruise. [Atlantic Wire]

• Abraham Foxman argues that 2008’s near-deal revealed in the Palestine Papers actually argues against a unilateral declaration of statehood. [Forward]

Sir Paul McCartney will marry Nancy Shevell, a New York Jew. Here’s hoping them happiness!

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

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

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

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

It happens that I have known Joseph for some decades, because during the years I was foreign editor at the Wall Street Journal he was a reporter in the paper’s New York bureau. One day he came to me in a mood of frustration; he had been wanting to write for a competing paper in favor of Haitian democracy and against the regime of the then-dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, a wonderful journalist in his own right, would have none of it, and so Ray had asked if he could have lunch with me.

When he explained his problem, I said, without a great deal of ceremony, that a reporter just had to do what the managing editor wanted. Rather than cut the lunch short, however, I asked Ray to tell me about his family. He told me that there was just he and his brother, Leo. I asked what Leo did, and Ray told me he was publisher of the Haiti Observateur. When I looked quizzical, Ray told me that it was the largest Haitian newspaper in the world—published in Brooklyn. When I asked who owned it, Ray replied: “I do.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “You own the largest Haitian newspaper in the world and you’re covering a business beat for the Wall Street Journal?”

To make a long story short, Ray Joseph quit the Wall Street Journal and went to edit his own paper, long a tribune for Haitian democracy. And when, a few months later, the Duvalier regime was finally ousted and the transition to democracy began, Ray was named Haiti’s charge d’affairs in Washington and its representative to the Organization of American States, where he signed the accord setting the stage for the first democratic elections. Ray resigned when the elections elevated Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency. Ray confided to his friends that the elections were fair and democratic but had been won by a non-democrat. So Ray returned to editing the Observateur.

The next time I saw him was when Howell Raines, then editorial page editor of the New York Times, joined the editors of the Forward for dinner. I’d invited Ray, because I’d been in touch with him during the period when Aristide was trying to trade on the fact that he speaks Hebrew and had spent time in Israel to curry favor with the Jewish leadership in the city. After the dinner, Ray confided to me that he had resented me for years.

The grudge he’d nursed was that he’d thought I was being cynical—a cats-paw for the top editors at the Wall Street Journal—when I’d suggested he go work for his own paper. He hadn’t realized until I’d fetched up at the Forward that neither I nor anyone else had wanted him off the Journal and that I actually believed in the importance of not only the big newspapers like the Journal but also the smaller papers.

When we launched the New York Sun, Ray came on as a columnist. He was still editing the Observateur when Aristide was driven into exile and the Haitians became free to set up a new government. It was a Sunday, February 29, 2004, and I telephoned Ray to offer congratulations. He invited me to rush out to Brooklyn for a small reception with some of his friends. Speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge, I asked my driver to stop by the house where my wife and I live so that I could invite one of the children.

One of our boys, then 11 years old, piled into the car, and when he and I walked into the modest living room in which Ray had gathered his friends, we received a standing ovation—for the Sun’s support of the democratic movement in exile. Ray went around the room, introducing us to each of the two- or three-dozen guests. This one a future chief of staff of the army, that a future justice of the high court, the next an about-to-be government minister. The details escape me. What does not escape me is the inspiring nature of the idealism of those who had gathered around plates of petites four and coffee at a turning point toward Haitian democracy.

When we left, I leaned over to my son and said, “That’s what it’s like to start a country.”

Ray Joseph himself drew the assignment, again, of representing his government in Washington, where, in the years since, he has been doing an eloquent job in seasons of hard work and frustration. He would be among the first to acknowledge how much work yet needs to be done, even without an earthquake. Whether Robertson was trying to make a useful point about the importance of religion and culture in Haiti, I do not know. He certainly failed. But he set Ambassador Joseph up for a riposte that will be remembered.

Ray, himself a devout Christian, did not attack Robertson, or even name him. What he did say, on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, was this: “I would like the whole world to know, America especially, that the independence of Haiti, when the slaves rose up against the French and defeated the French army, powerful army, the U.S. was able to gain the Louisiana territory for 15 million dollars, that’s three cents an acre, that’s 13 states west of the Mississippi, that the slaves’ revolt in Haiti provided America.

“Also the revolt of the rebels in Haiti allowed Latin America to be free. It was from Haiti that Simon Bolivar left with men, boats to go deliver Gran Columbia and the rest of South America. So what pact the Haitians made with the devil has helped the United States become what it is.”

It was a glimpse of a great newspaperman turned diplomat and a reminder, at a time of a crisis, of the history and sacrifices we share with the tragic nation to our south and of at least a part of the logic of the vast humanitarian response that we are witnessing today.

One feature, no doubt, was that Sharon was an includer, a welcoming figure. This didn’t comport easily with his image through much of his career as a hawk. But one could see it in various encounters, beginning with the way he and his wife, Lili, ran his breakfast table at his farm in the Negev desert.

Also, The Scroll will take stock of the news and semi-news of the day.

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

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

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

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

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

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