• Gal Beckerman catches the Times continuing to serve as a daily magazine of Jewish life and culture. [Forward]

• Eric Alterman sets the current debate over what is proper discourse about Israel in its historical context. Conclusion: The right has always tried to police what the left can say (though he is against “Israel-firster”). [The Nation]

• Jennifer Rubin has a smart post on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s successful playing of Israeli politics and President Obama’s unsuccessful attempt to derail Bibi’s plans. [WP Right Turn]

• Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, will be made an honest man of by his longtime partner. [JTA]

• Robert Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein on Welcome Back Kotter, died at 60. [Newark Star-Ledger]

• Senior editor Matthew Fishbane discusses his article on the imperiled Jews of Venezuela.

While Adbusters’ editors don’t pull the strings of Occupy—Lasn only dispenses advice to the leaders of the leaderless group—the magazine is currently enjoying a torrent of mainstream media attention for its catalyzing role in the movement. In the past month, Lasn and Adbusters Senior Editor Micah White—Trotsky to Lasn’s Lenin—have been treated to generous profiles in The New Yorker, the New York Times, NPR, and the New Republic.

While Adbusters is “not the only radical magazine calling for the end of life as we know it,” wrote Mattathias Schwartz in a November profile of Lasn in The New Yorker, “it is by far the best-looking.” The same week, the New York Times rhapsodized that Lasn “had spent much of his career skewering corporate America, creating ‘subvertising’ campaigns like ‘Joe Chemo,’ which deftly mocked the Joe Camel cigarette ads of the 1990s.” It’s a tub-thumbing, deeply ideological magazine but “with its vivid artwork and photography, snippets of poetry and glossy fake ads … Adbusters feels less like a manifesto than an evocative brochure,” the Times commented.

Yes, Adbusters offers endless finger-wagging about the evils of McDonald’s and moralizing photo spreads of skinny models—the sort of pop activism that the mildly foolish regard as deeply clever. But there is more to Adbusters than the clichéd mocking of mega-corporations and capitalism. Sometime after the Sept. 11 attacks, Lasn, once single-mindedly focused on the supposed psychological terrorism of corporate advertising, expanded his coverage to include the problem of actual terrorism. In the era of Iraq and Afghanistan, Adbusters developed a foreign policy—one that centers on outlandish and viciously anti-Israel conspiracy theories.

Thus when the streets leading to Zuccotti Park, the site of the Occupy Wall Street encampment, were sealed by New York City police on Nov. 15, preventing journalists from covering the eviction of protesters that night, it “made Lasn think of the bloody uprising in Syria,” according to The New Yorker’s Schwartz. Tahrir Square, the seat of the Egyptian revolution, is invoked frequently by the Occupiers; The New Yorker quotes one organizer who visited Egypt during its revolution saying that “It was the same [in Cairo] as here.” The current death toll in Egypt is close to 1,000. In Syria, it’s over 4,000.

For regular readers of Adbusters, this type of breathless overstatement will be familiar. But its profilers have mostly overlooked the magazine’s frequent flights of extreme hyperbole and its writers’ penchant for conspiracy theory. “In only the last few months,” an Adbusters writer fretted in 2003, “America has advanced tremendously from emerging to realized fascism.” In 2006, the magazine continued tracking the National Socialist takeover of the United States with an article titled “Is Right-Wing America Becoming Fascist?” While in the post-Bush era, discussions of Hitlerism have disappeared from the pages of Adbusters—fascist powers, after all, tend not to change leaders via democratic elections—Lasn has shifted his focus to the supposed Nazism of another sinister government: Israel.

In 2010 Adbusters ran a photo essay comparing the situation in Gaza with the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising: Pictures of dead Palestinians and burning buildings were juxtaposed with images of Nazi brutality. The accompanying text explained that in the Warsaw Ghetto, “Acts of rebellion … were brutally suppressed and German retaliation was often strikingly disproportionate.” In response to criticism from Canadian Jewish groups, Lasn declared that there are “striking similarities between the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II and the open air prison of Gaza,” illustrating the point with photos from the United States Holocaust Museum. (The museum later sent the magazine a cease-and-desist order.) As was the case with his sloppy Syria comparison, Lasn didn’t mention that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising precipitated the murder of 70,000 innocents, most of whom were carted off to extermination camps.

From the March-April 2004 Adbusters.

Much of the recent media coverage of Adbusters makes glancing reference to Lasn’s now infamous 2004 “list” of Jewish neoconservatives. Among a list of 50 Bush Administration officials and prominent conservatives, the magazine denoted those he believed were Jewish with an asterisk next to their names. Lasn apparently sees ethnicity as a key data point, essential for understanding U.S. foreign policy. “Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?” Lasn wrote. “Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the US is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of them are Jewish.” These Learned Elders were, of course, concerned not just with the reshaping of the world in the image of the United States, Lasn implied, but with the survival of Israel.

To Lasn, there is an obvious moral equivalence between the mullahs in Iran and the government in Jerusalem, between the cave-dwelling terrorists of al-Qaida and the elected government of the United States. A 2004 double-page spread in Adbusters showed two photos—one of President George W. Bush, one of Osama Bin Laden—accompanied by the question, “Who is morally superior?” In the same issue, two photos of Hamas leaders killed by Israel, Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, were contrasted with Bush and Ariel Sharon: “If Yassin and Rantisi, why not Sharon and Bush?”

Most Americans don’t see the moral parallels between Hamas’ spiritual leader and the former president, according to Adbusters, because newspapers like the New York Times are “perniciously biased” in favor of Israel, offering the opinion of Richard Falk, a Sept. 11 conspiracy theorist and former booster of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, as supporting evidence. The Times correspondent in Jerusalem, Ethan Bronner, is hopelessly pro-Israel, since he has “a son who served in the Israeli army.” Nor will it “be a surprise to learn” that the Times’ other Jerusalem reporter, Isabel Kershner, is “an Israeli citizen who is married to an Israeli citizen.” Both journalists, Adbusters fretted in a November blog post, have “deep ties to the Israel of today” and, therefore, cannot be trusted to report news objectively. Can Catholic journalists cover the Holy See? Or those with relatives on active military service in the United States cover the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan? Or is there perhaps something particularly tribal about Jews?

A more trustworthy Israeli writer, according to Adbusters, is the Israeli-born jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, a self-identified “proud self-hating Jew” who has, in essays posted on his own website, praised the “prophetic qualities” of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and wondered “if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them” on a death march at the close of the war. Lasn has published multiple pieces on Israel by Atzmon, despite a history of extremism that has made the Israeli anathema even to many on the anti-Zionist left (the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom recently disassociated itself from him).

Leafing through back issues of Adbusters, a reader is introduced not just to the notorious Atzmon, but also to a largely unknown team of cranks and risible “experts” expounding on the dual threats of American and Israeli power. An author named Jim Kirwan opined in the May/June 2005 issue of Adbusters on America’s “dreams of empire” in a piece first published on the Holocaust-denial website Rense.com. Contributor Ken O’Keefe, an anti-Zionist activist who, like Atzmon, was recently disowned by many of his former comrades, recently told Iranian state television that Israel was behind Sept. 11 and argued, on Twitter, for the expansion of the OWS brand to include “Occupy Rothschilds.” An article in the July/August 2010 issue on the “imperial decline” of the United States cites as an expert the Jew-obsessed conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen, who recently claimed that the Mossad was behind Anders Breivik’s gruesome terrorist attack in Norway. Michael Hey, a former associate editor of Adbusters, offered a short piece in the March/April 2007 issue with the punchy title, “Not in the news: 9/11 was an inside job.” And so on.

Lasn frequently published the work of husband-and-wife team Bill and Kathleen Christison, Sept. 11 “truthers” obsessed with Zionism’s “global political and financial power,” who impute almost Rasputin-like powers to Jewish neoconservatives. (Bill died in 2010.) A 2007 article by Kathleen Christison subtly titled “Elliot Abrams: Dual Loyalist and Neocon Extraordinaire,” claimed that the former deputy national security adviser was “a key figure behind the fighting going on … at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon” and “engineered the Hamas-Fatah split that erupted into fighting in Gaza.”

Such is the apocalyptic vision of Adbusters, in which the ravages of capitalism and corporate power compete only with Zionism to cause the most harm to planet Earth.

You did it for literature: Of all of Sontag’s intellectual heritage, this sentiment—expressed in various essays and interviews in various shades of austerity—may prove the most endurable. How many of us, after all, still do it for literature? How many measure, as Sontag commanded us to do, every attempted bit of writing not in light of its putative contribution to our fame and fortune but against the yardstick of absolute cultural necessity?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. Or, at least, they oughtn’t be. As technology keeps widening the boulevards down which dross marches into our computers, our smart phones, and our minds, we are surrounded by more and more evidence that Sontag’s credo is both fiercely urgent and deeply ignored. Nothing about blogs or tweets or status updates or other similar channels of immediacy encourages much thought of posterity, after all, and few, if any, wonder if the 140-character update they’re about to unleash into the ether contains anything that might be considered of service to the greater cause of human development. The very thought, likely—that what we write, that everything we write, should serve to bolster Literature, Culture, Humanity, and other capital-letter concepts—will seem, to most contemporaries, uncool. If there is anything our mediated era sanctifies it is the right—indeed, the obligation—for all to have an opinion, and to share these opinions on social networking platforms that turn them into commodities.

If this sounds to you like a bit of old-fashioned alarmist piffle, kindly avail yourself of last week’s New York Times Magazine and turn to page eight. On the bottom of the page, under the headline ”Analytics,” the newspaper printed several illustrations of envelopes, each embossed with a number. Each number represents the number of readers who had emailed the newspaper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, to call him a particular name: Eight insisted he was “a leftist,” six chose “elitist,” four cried “communist,” and 21, in true American fashion, opted for four-letter words. What’s fascinating isn’t that people, given access to email and Keller’s address, might choose to opine; that, after all, is what the Internet is for. What’s truly astounding is that the purveyor of all the news that’s fit to print would supplement its traditional letters to the editor page with such a numerical aggregate of rageful readers’ missives. What value do these slurs-by-the-numbers hold? Without context, what is a reader to learn from the mere fact that three anonymous correspondents think Keller a socialist? This is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or worse: As we’re swept by the meaningless, easy rage—can you believe these people said Bill Keller wasn’t as smart as his daughters? The morons! For shame!—we lose track of the real, and necessary, questions we should be asking. What we need, then, is some sort of device to steer us back on path, a device like Balaam’s ass.

The hero of this week’s parasha, Balaam is a fascinating figure. Although not much is said about this seer in the Bible, the Talmud is filled with introspection and speculation about his particular powers. In Tractate Berachot, for example, Balaam’s particular and awesome powers are explained: Alone among mankind, he had the gift of divining the precise moment in which the Almighty was wrathful—even omnipotent beings are angry, every now and then, for no good reason—and making use of this knowledge to his advantage. Like cursing on command: As this week’s parasha begins, Balaam is summoned by the Moabite king Balak to cast a spell on the Israelites, an upstart nation he fears and despises. Balaam hesitates, but God appears and assures him that all is well. And so, soothed by the divine promise, and thrilled with the promise of a house filled with Moabite gold, Balaam mounts his ass and rides to meet Balak.

What happens next is too lyrical to summarize adequately. The ass sees an angel of the Lord, understands that Balaam is riding toward disaster, and stops mid-trot. Three times this happens, and three times the prophet curses the poor animal, until the ass, blessed with speech, protests, and Balaam, shocked, finally sees the angel himself and realizes his mistake. When he finally meets up with Balak, he has nothing but blessings to bestow on God’s chosen people. The Moabite is mad, but Balaam is unfazed. “What the Lord puts into my mouth,” he states, “that I must take care to say.”

Most of us, lacking a magical ass, haven’t the advantage of receiving word directly from the heavenly source. But there’s still a lesson to be learned from Balaam: Turning to Balak, the seer asks, “How can I curse whom God has not cursed, and how can I invoke wrath if the Lord has not been angered?” He understands, in other words, that anger and expletives are potent things, not mere words but vehicles for spiritual matter, and that hurling them unnecessarily and injudiciously can cause disaster. He understands, in other words, what Sontag, too, understood, and what so many of us, opining furiously online, seem to have forgotten: Words have mighty consequences, and we should give them very careful thought.

What does testing-induced gut-hork have to do with Jewish parenting, you may ask? Well, I think putting kids through this kind of torture for exceedingly pointless reasons is antithetical to our values.

Here’s why. Standardized tests are no longer being used for the purposes for which they were designed. They aren’t being used to give an overall picture of a school, to trigger teacher development and training, or to help principals concretely support struggling classes. A single test can now determine the fate of a student and can trigger huge sanctions against a school or financial rewards for individual teachers and principals whose students do well. And all this can induce people to cheat—a most un-Jewish value.

Messing with the tests to improve kids’ scores artificially seems to be a very real problem. Last week, the Washington Post reported that nearly 4,000 schoolteachers and parents have signed a petition urging federal officials to investigate possible cheating on standardized tests during the reign of Michelle A. Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor. In March, a USA Today investigation found that from 2008 through 2010, there were unusually high rates of answer changes—penciled-in bubbles being erased and re-filled-in differently—at 103 D.C. schools. At one school, more than 80 percent of the classrooms had tests flagged by McGraw-Hill, the testmaker, for unusual answer-changing tendencies.

Let’s look at the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, which Rhee frequently pointed to as proof of the success of her sweeping reforms (which basically amounted to an ever-increasing emphasis on testing and huge rates of firing teachers and principals in large part because of their test scores). Rhee called Noyes one of the “shining stars” of D.C.’s educational system. In 2006, only 10 percent of the school’s students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math; two years later, 58 percent were at that level. Awesome! The reading test gains were similar. Rhee made sure the staff was rewarded for their fabulosity: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher received an $8,000 bonus, and the principal received $10,000.

Yet according to USA Today, Noyes’ scoring irregularities were legion. On the 2009 reading test, for instance, seventh-graders in one classroom had almost 13 wrong-to-right erasures on their answer sheets; the average in D.C. was less than one. “The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians,” the paper reported. A former D.C. principal told the paper that Rhee informed her and her colleagues that they were expected to increase scores by at least 10 percentage points every year.

As educational historian (and recent Daily Show guest) Diane Ravitch points out in her brilliant (and easy-to-read, non-jargon-y, and deeply depressing) book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, we should always be suspicious of humungous differences in data from year to year. Real, meaningful change doesn’t happen by leaps and bounds; it happens incrementally.

Ravitch’s perspective is fascinating, because she is someone who has truly had a turnaround—done teshuvah, in fact—on her earlier views on testing. Her book is a very public mea culpa. She’s a former United States assistant secretary of Education who was appointed by George H.W. Bush and was formerly aligned with conservative thinkers on accountability and school choice. “First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, told the New York Times last year. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.”

Indeed, that’s the role public schools have always served for American Jews. Ravitch tells a story in her book about how she didn’t get into a private school in her Texas hometown because, according to her parents, the headmistress didn’t like Jews. After that, her parents were big supporters of public education. Ravitch writes that she initially applauded No Child Left Behind and other testing-driven initiatives, but when she looked at the results and at the actual outcomes (high test scores don’t actually indicate knowledge and learning; the new accountability policies don’t involve helping teachers teach better and principals administer better) she changed her mind.

“Accountability, now a shibboleth that everyone applauds, had become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education,” Ravitch writes. “Testing, I realized with dismay, had become a central preoccupation in the schools and was not just a measure but an end in itself. I came to believe that accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools as states and districts strived to meet unrealistic targets.”

Ravitch says she’s too essentially conservative to embrace an agenda driven by speculation and uncertain results. And it was that (very Jewish!) conservatism about values, traditions, and the need to protect communities that made her change her tune and publicly break with her former allies. But Ravitch’s conservativism is the kind that squares with both American and Jewish values, struggling, as it does, with the notion of the individual versus the community and the question of whether America truly is a meritocracy.

As Jews, we dig community. Al tifrosh min hatzibur, we’re told: Do not separate yourself from the community. Our prayers are written overwhelmingly in the first person plural. But standardized testing is the furthest thing from communitarian. Wealthy families buy tutoring. Upper-middle-class kids come into school with the huge advantage of being read to more often at home. Testing enforces existing divisions and even increases them. And being Jewish means you shouldn’t just worry about your kids; you should be concerned about everyone’s kids. That means working to improve all schools—yes, even if your kid goes to Jewish Day School—in meaningful ways, because that’s part of the responsibility of living in a democracy.

And no one’s kids should be barfing from anxiety at the age of 8.

Had the Times published an article on Passover apps the same day Tablet did, but not published an article on San Francisco’s Distillery No. 209’s kosher-for-Passover gin a day after Tablet did, it would have been enough.

Had the Times published an article on San Francisco’s Distillery No. 209’s kosher-for-Passover gin a day after Tablet did, but not published an article on the Washington Haggadah exhibit nearly a week after Tablet did, it would have been enough.

Had the Times published an article on the Washington Haggadah exhibit almost a week after Tablet did, but not published an article on the debate over whether quinoa is kosher for Passover several days after Tablet did, it would have been enough.

Anyway, the Times piece on the Washington Haggadah, by Edward Rothstein, is actually quite good—give it some of your time. But if you want a more original Haggadah, you might wish to try the version we put together last year with contributors as diffuse as writer Andre Aciman, boxer Dmitriy Salita, and the artist Andrea Dezsö. Our friends at Nextbook Press have posted an interesting excerpt from its latest book, Sacred Trash, about all the different Haggadot structures found among the papers in the Cairo Geniza. And you can find all of our Passover coverage—some of which covers topics the Times hasn’t even subsequently reported on!—at this one handy page.

iPassover [Tablet Magazine]
To Get Easter and Passover Celebrations Right, Use an App [NYT]
Refill [Tablet Magazine]
Gin and Passover: No Longer Contradictory [NYT]
National Treasure [Tablet Magazine]
Put Yourself in the Story of Passover [NYT]
Off the Table [Tablet Magazine]
For Passover, Quinoa is Popular, But Kosher? [NYT]
The Tablet Haggadah

It is fitting, then, that The Awl’s altogether brilliant parody of Times link-bait contains plenty of Jewish mentions.

It’s not all manual labor and pinyin at Yael. After three summers in the Catskills, Anna Williams has also become an authority on Borscht Belt comedy. Anna’s interest in 1930s Yiddishkeit led her directly to Rebecca Smythe, a blogger from Brooklyn.

On a once-gritty block in Canarsie, Smythe is opening what she says will be New York’s first coffeehouse inspired by Yiddish musicals.

There is also mention of the West Bank, the Book of Deuteronomy, kosher, and, um, a rabbi from Buenos Aires. Plus, animals. Bravo.

The Most Emailed ‘New York Times’ Article Ever [The Awl]
Related: Next Year in the White House: A Seder Tradition [NYT]
In Treatment [Tablet Magazine]

Jonathon Rosen

Day 27, 7 a.m.
My editor wakes up and has much to do before the day begins, none of which includes reading the manuscript I sent him almost a month ago. He is very busy! He dresses in his nicest suit and tie; today he has a lunch with a writer who isn’t me, and there is a lot of “interest,” as they say in the business, about his 700-page pile of predictable non-threatening drivel. My editor kisses his wife and son goodbye, feeds the cat, doesn’t read my manuscript, and heads out to work.

Have a good day! his wife calls.

I will! he replies.

Perhaps my manuscript is in his bag, beside his Blackberry and his iPad and his MacBook and his iPhone and his Kindle, or perhaps he forgot it at home since it doesn’t have a touch-screen or titanium cover, or perhaps he cut it up and used it as kitty litter, or perhaps he never brought it home in the first place. He has so very much to do! He needs even more assistants! He hurries to the subway, but stops first at the coffee shop, where he chats with the semi-attractive girl behind the counter and reads the New York Times instead of my manuscript while enjoying a Morning Glory muffin. It’s gluten-free! What a cool place Brooklyn is!

8:30 a.m.
Rush, rush, rush, what a hectic life my editor leads! The train is filled with other busy cool white people from Brooklyn. What skinny pants they all have on! What blasé countenances they all wear! What obscure books they all carry, none of which are mine because my editor is so very busy! He could read some of my manuscript now, of course, but the train ride into Manhattan isn’t very long, and he doesn’t want to take away from important Pretending-To-Check-Email-While-Ogling-Strange-Women time. There’s no cell service in the subway, silly!

Still, the girl in the red hat is pretty cute. Maybe at the next stop he can rub up against her? You’re right, editor—I bet she does want it! Either way, this is no time to be reading some goddamned manuscript. Best to wait until later when you can concentrate. Reading is hard!

9:30 a.m.
At last my editor settles down in his office, puts his feet up on his desk, and doesn’t read my manuscript. What did Arianna Huffington have to say today? Oh boy, I bet it was confrontational and opinionated! Perhaps Arianna has a manuscript my editor could read before mine? Something about blogging or populism or how to fix the whatever it is she thinks is broken? Michael Moore is sure giving the president the business this morning. Is Michael still cool? Is he over? Should my editor buy more graphic novels? What’s up with manga? What does Bookslut think? What does the Times publishing blog say? Phew. What a busy, busy day.

Uh-oh, says his assistant, knocking on his office door—meeting in someone’s office about Something! Will my editor never get a chance to read my manuscript? Is it an emergency meeting, he wonders? Is something going on in the publishing world? Is it over? Is publishing dead? Have they run out of trees? Oh Dear God, is it the iPad? Is it selling? Has it saved us yet? Has it killed us yet? No, no, no; they just need to discuss the final typeface for a book that isn’t mine. Should it be the same typeface as we use for every other goddamned book? Yes? No? Oh, what a day this is turning out to be! Whoops, time for lunch with another author. What a fast-paced business publishing is. If you blink once, you’ll miss one entire blink’s worth of time.

1:00 p.m.
Red?

I could do red.

I’m OK with white.

Red’s good.

Cabernet?

Yeah, let’s do that.

Should we get a bottle?

I don’t know.

How much are you going to drink?

Let’s just get a bottle.

OK.

Cab?

Sure.

What are you getting for an entree?

I was thinking of the veal.

Etcetera.

2:30 p.m.
Wow—by the time he gets back to the office my editor is pretty shit-faced. Still, there is a lot to do beside reading manuscripts; the publishing business has gotten so very complicated these days, what with book videos and, you know, book videos.

Make that scene longer! he says. Make that scene shorter!

He’s a director!

3:30 p.m.
The day is almost over now, so my editor closes his office door, grabs my manuscript, puts his feet up on his desk, and stares out the window.

Maybe I really could be a director? he thinks. What would that be like? I bet it would be great! Or an agent. I could be an agent.

Ninety minutes later his assistant knocks on the door. He is going to be late for his dinner with another author who isn’t me. If he were an agent, he could have dinners all day long!

He stands, sighs, and tosses my manuscript into his drawer.

It’s terrible what’s happened to publishing lately; there’s hardly any time to read at all.

5:30 p.m.
Cocktail?

Sure.

Pardon me, Miss. I’ll have a martini.

I’ll have one, too.

Well, which is it, Mr. Author, are you going to have one or two? Ha ha. Are there any dinner specials?

Etcetera.

It tells of Joseph, now reconciled with his treacherous brothers, and his struggle to keep Egypt afloat during a terrible and prolonged drought. Disgruntled, the people come to Joseph and demand satisfaction. “Give us food,” they say. “Why should we die in your presence, since the money has been used up?” But Joseph is tough and effective. He collects all the remaining cash, barters food for livestock, and sustains the economy throughout a volatile period. He is a paragon of good government and the embodiment of personal responsibility.

Assange is not. The man who famously expressed his glee at crushing bastards has never specified just who the bastards might be, but his behavior leaves little room for doubt: While he does not appear to be a classical, ideological anarchist, Assange seems imbued with the lawless spirit that represents so much of what is good and what is reprehensible about the Internet; the bastards he enjoys crushing are people with power, and it is their power, more than any concrete fault or inherent flaw, that makes them worthy of crushing.

Rising to Assange’s defense this week, Glenn Greenwald criticized a column by my friend and co-author Todd Gitlin, who condemned Wikileaks. Taking offense with the assertion that the Wikileaks leak was an indiscriminate data dump, Greenwald argued instead that Assange and Co. acted responsibly and judiciously. “WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has,” Greenwald wrote. “Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them (The Guardian, the NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel, etc.). Moreover, the cables posted by WikiLeaks were not only first published by these newspapers, but contain the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm.”

But the partnership between Wikileaks and the media is not an easy one. How uneasy? The New York Times—as the paper’s Executive Editor, Bill Keller, recently told readers in an online conversation—is “not a ‘media partner’” of Wikileaks. It’s hard to imagine the Gray Lady going to such lengths to disassociate itself from, say, Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg, and for good reason: Before giving his purloined documents to the Times, Ellsberg sent copies to Henry Kissinger and Senators William Fulbright and George McGovern, pleading with them to reevaluate the Vietnam war. Only after none was taken did he turn to Times reporter Neil Sheehan. Assange, on the other hand, took a different route. As the AP reports, “days before releasing any of the latest documents, Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released. The ambassador refused, telling Assange to hand over stolen property.”

These are more than just divergent attitudes. To Daniel Ellsberg, whistle-blowing was the final step that came only after every other imaginable course of action has disappointed. Assange made no such concentrated effort. The invitation he extended the ambassador is as disingenuous as the one offered to the media: Unlike Ellsberg, Assange had the Internet, and, most likely, he intended to publish the documents no matter what and let his so-called partners in the press, the U.S. government, and just about everybody else scramble to cast themselves in the drama he was writing and directing.

Which makes Assange the anti-Joseph. While the ancient Hebrew, a high official in the Pharaoh’s court, used his power to protect the institution of government during trying times, Assange used his technological savvy to elevate himself to the government’s level, impudently offering the State Department a shot at a joint copy-editing effort as if the American ambassador in London and the founder of a website were equally endowed partners.

Herein lies the problem: To think that an individual and an institution—a government, an embassy, an army—are entitled to the same privileges and expectations and should butt heads on the same playing field, leveled by technology, is not only spurious but suggests a deep ontological confusion. Governments have their powers and responsibilities, and Assange seems envious of the former and oblivious of the latter.

It is a shame, then, that the often-astute Greenwald missed the larger point of Gitlin’s piece, namely that Assange and his fellow Wikileakers are interested not in reforming government but in subduing it. They want the machinations of military and diplomatic affairs—machinations that must, by definition and necessity, remain frequently unlit—made visible for all to see and inspect, but, possessing no understanding of how government actually works, offer no concrete ideas for enlightenment. This is the raw and terrible power of the data dump as metaphor; that Assange preselected a few of his many documents for publication does little to endow him with responsibility or respectability. In leaking the documents—be it some or all of them—without bothering, as Ellsberg had, to put them in the appropriate context and draw concrete conclusions and try first to bring them to the attention of higher-ups in the government, Assange is like a child who hurls a brick through a window and then boasts of having exposed the fragility of glass.

Among the more interesting news on the Wikileaks front this week was Assange’s announcement that he’d sent the cables obtained by Wikileaks—all of them—to more than 100,000 supporters around the world with the instructions to reveal them should something happen to Assange or his organization. The files, he assured worried souls, were thoroughly encrypted. Beyond the obvious irony on display—a hacker’s assurance that the information he wants protected is perfectly safe—this act calls into question Greenwald’s assertion that Assange never indiscriminately published his entire trove. Sending a file to more than 100,000 people, even if it is encrypted, is an act of publishing; that Assange’s lawyer labeled the file the “thermonuclear device” further suggests that the Wikileaks mindset is more reminiscent of the rogue bent on destruction than of the activist committed to change.

In his long lifetime, Joseph had his share of both activists and rogues. And he had the wisdom and wherewithal to bless the former—even when, like his brothers, they were guilty of terrible sins—and vehemently reject the latter. Let us follow his lead.

If you wanted to read something much like the above, only before he won the Booker (as opposed to, say, a week after he did), you could have checked our interview with him, which ran last Monday.

If you now want to read something amazing by Jacobson and haven’t had time to run out to your nearest bookstore and pick up the winning novel, The Finkler Question, you can read his amazing profile of American ping-pong legend Marty Reisman.

And if you want to read an actual review of the Man Booker-winning book … well, unfortunately the Times can’t help you there. But Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch gave it the full treatment at the beginning of the month. (He hated it. Kidding!)

Booker Prize Winner’s Jewish Question [NYT]
Related: The Plot Against England
Smash [Tablet Magazine]
Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]

If Jews REALLY Ran the Media [CollegeHumor]
Earlier: Sanchez Says Jews Run Media, Is Fired

We made plans to meet in early November, after a lecture I was giving at New York University. But Salem didn’t show. I went back to my hotel that night and had chalked it up as a lost opportunity. The phone rang at 2 in the morning. It was Salem, summoning me to a meeting outside 26 Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI’s New York office. Very cloak and dagger, but that’s how this man rolls. You don’t infiltrate the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing without practicing a little tradecraft. Anyway, when my cab pulled in to Foley Square a few minutes later, Salem was standing in the shadows.

That was the start of a series of interviews that led to some astonishing revelations about two of the most infamous al-Qaida murders since Osama Bin Laden formed his terror network. The first one—in fact, arguably the first blood spilled by al-Qaida on U.S. soil—occurred on the night of November 5, 1990, just after Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Defense League, finished a speech at the Marriott East Side in New York.

Kahane, a volatile figure who had been expelled from the Israeli Knesset in the mid-1980s and returned to the United States to warn American Jews about what he believed to be a “second holocaust” at the hands of radical Islam, was gunned down by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian émigré. The New York Police Department initially labeled him a lone gunman. I have argued that it was much more than that: an unsolved murder with dire implications for the war on terror.

Now, as a result of new intelligence I’ve learned from Salem, it’s clear for the first time that the rabbi’s death was directly linked to Osama Bin Laden. More surprising, there was a second gunman on the night of Kahane’s murder: a young Jordanian cab driver named Bilal Alkaisi. Alkaisi was also identified in FBI files I’ve obtained as the “emir” of a hit team in a second grisly al-Qaida-related homicide months after the assassination—the 1991 murder of Egyptian immigrant Mustafa Shalabi. The identities of the alleged killers in that second slaying have now become known as a result of information from Salem that prompted the New York Police Department to reopen the Shalabi case.

But the real news is that Alkaisi, originally indicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was cut loose by the feds in 1994 and presumably remains at large. This new intelligence, about a pair of historic terror-related homicides in New York City, lay buried for years in the files of the Joint Terrorism Task Force—until I obtained them from a government source.

As I tell it in “The Spy Who Came in for the Heat,” an investigative piece I wrote for Playboy’s September issue, Emad Salem was arguably the most important asset in the U.S. war with al-Qaida. But my interviews with him and the intel they have kicked loose provide shocking new insights into the ongoing failure of the FBI to reform its counterterrorism capabilities almost a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In order to fully appreciate the significance of these two murders in the history of the war on terror, we need to go back to the summer of 1989, when George Bush was in the White House and terrorism was considered a backwater assignment at the FBI.

The First Shots Fired in Bin Laden’s War Against America

The story begins a year and half before El Sayyid Nosair, wearing a yarmulke, walked into the Morgan D Room at the New York Marriott and killed Kahane.

On four successive weekends in July 1989 (according to trial testimony), agents from the FBI’s Special Operations Group followed a group of “ME’s”—FBI-speak for “Middle Eastern Men”—from the al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to the Calverton shooting range, a large outdoor sand pit located at the end of Long Island.

Firing a series of weapons, including AK-47s and hand guns, the “ME’s” at the Calverton range included Nosair, then a 34-year-old janitor from Port Said, Egypt, who reportedly popped Prozac and worked in the basement of the Civil Courthouse on Centre Street in Manhattan; Mahmoud Abouhalima, aka “The Red,” a 6-foot-2-inch Egyptian cab and limo driver; Mohammed Salameh, a diminutive Palestinian; and Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti who had graduated from Rutgers University. According to interviews with former FBI agent Jack Cloonan, each of them had been instructed by Ali Aboelseoud Mohamed, an ex-Egyptian Army commando from the unit that assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Mohamed was the focus of my last book, Triple Cross. In the early 1980s, shortly after being purged by the Egyptian Army for his radical views, Mohamed came under the influence of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Cairo surgeon who had been jailed for a time for the Sadat murder and went on to form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. By the end of the decade, after al-Zawahiri met Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad group into what would become al-Qaida, Ali Mohamed became the terror network’s principal espionage agent.

In 1984, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA briefly in Hamburg, Germany, got past a watch list to enter the United States a year later, enlisted in the U.S. Army and, astonishingly, managed to get posted to the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, where elite Green Beret officers study. From there, he traveled to New York City on weekends to train the Calverton shooters.

Mohamed was so trusted by Bin Laden that he moved the Saudi billionaire’s entire entourage from Afghanistan to Sudan in 1991, set up al-Qaida’s training camps there, and trained Bin Laden’s personal body guards. He was also one of the principal planners in the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed at least 223 and injured thousands.

Three of Mohamed’s Calverton trainees were convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot. Nosair was convicted in the Kahane killing. A U.S.-born Muslim named Clement Hampton-El was convicted with Nosair in the 1993 “Day of Terror” plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, the United Nations, and 26 Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI’s New York office.

At the time of the Calverton surveillance, the FBI’s Special Operations Group clearly knew that these men were terrorists in training. New York Police Det. Tommy Corrigan, a former senior member of the NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, told me in an interview for Triple Cross that the surveillance stemmed from a tip that PLO terrorists were threatening to blow up casinos in Atlantic City. But for unknown reasons the FBI shut down the surveillance. By the end of that summer of 1989, the “ME’s” and their Green Beret-linked leader faded back into the shadows.

***

In July 1990, following a path similar to Ali Mohamed’s, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual “emir” of al-Qaida who became known as “the blind sheikh,” got a visa, slipped past the same State Department watch list, and landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was met at the airport by Mustafa Shalabi, a big, burly 30-year-old electrical contractor from Egypt who ran the Alkifah Center at the al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn.

The Alkifah was the principal U.S. office for the Makhtab al-Kidimat, often referred to as the MAK, a worldwide center of storefronts through which millions of dollars in cash was collected to support the Afghan Mujahadeen war against the Soviets, as Steven Emerson documents in American Jihad. By 1989, a year before Abdel-Rahman arrived in New York, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had merged their new terror network with the MAK. Its leader, Abdullah Azzam, had been killed in a car bomb in Pakistan in November of that year. Once al-Qaida’s takeover of the financing network was complete, Bin Laden’s group had what amounted to a New York clubhouse at the Alkifah Center.

“Prior to that time—1988, ’89—terrorism for all intents and purposes didn’t exist in the United States,” says Corrigan, the retired Joint Terrorism Task Force investigator. “But Abdel-Rahman’s arrival in 1990 really stoked the flames of terrorism in this country. This was a major-league ball player in what, at the time, was a minor-league ballpark.”

In Corrigan’s view, the arrival of Abdel-Rahman was “a real coup for the local cell members like Shalabi, Nosair, Abouhalima, and Ayyad.” Before long, as court documents show, Abdel-Rahman was preaching at three separate mosques: the Abu Bakr on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn; the Al-Salam, located on the third floor of a dingy Jersey City building; and the Shalabi-connected al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue. At first, Shalabi welcomed the sheikh with open arms—even installing him in a Brooklyn apartment. But their warm relationship wouldn’t last very long. Abdel-Rahman coveted the cash rolling into the Alkifah—as much as $2 million, a year according to The New Yorker’s Mary Ann Weaver, but no one knows for sure. In any case, as the months went by, Abdel-Rahman began quarreling with Shalabi openly in the mosques.

***

By the fall of 1990, one of the Calverton trainees was growing more and more restless. El Sayyid Nosair, the janitor who worked in the courthouse basement, had joined Abdel-Rahman’s ultra-violent Islamic Group, or Al Gamma Islamyah, and he was itching to make his bones for the jihad. The newly uncovered FBI documents reveal a confession by Nosair that on the night of the Kahane murder he was aided by Alkaisi, then a 25-year-old Jordanian immigrant who worked as a cab driver in New Jersey and instructor at the al Farooq Mosque.

Describing Alkaisi as “a veteran of jihadist activity overseas,” including Afghanistan, Nosair told the feds that the two of them entered the Marriott East Side and that, just after Kahane had finished speaking, Nosair exclaimed, “This is the moment.” He then lunged forward with the same chrome-plated .357 Magnum photographed by the FBI at Calverton and fired the single shot that hit Kahane in the neck, blowing him to the floor.

As I later learned from Alkaisi’s former attorney, Robert L. Ellis, Alkaisi “left the Marriott and escaped by way of the subway station at 51st Street and Lexington Avenue.” Meanwhile, as Nosair rushed from the conference room, he was grabbed by Irving Franklin, a 73-year-old Kahane supporter. After a brief scuffle, Nosair shot the old man in the leg and raced toward the hotel’s front door, searching for a taxi.

His intended getaway driver was Mahmoud Abouhalima, who had been waiting outside, but moments earlier, the doorman had waved him away from the entrance, according to reports. So when Nosair ran from the hotel, he mistakenly got into a taxi driven by Franklin Garcia, a New York City cabbie. Suddenly, a young follower of Kahane jumped in front of the cab and prevented it from moving.

In the back seat, Nosair realized the error and pointed the barrel of the .357 at Garcia’s head, whereupon the taxi driver burst from the cab. Nosair then exited the taxi and ran down Lexington Avenue with the gun, where he was spotted by Carlos Acosta, a uniformed U.S. postal inspector, who drew his service weapon. Nosair fired first, wounding Acosta in the shoulder, just outside the edge of his flak vest, but the heroic officer dropped to his knee and returned fire as Nosair started to run, striking the Egyptian with a single shot. A pair of ambulances rushed both Nosair and Kahane to Bellevue Hospital’s trauma unit, where they were operated on in parallel stalls. The shooter survived; Kahane did not.

***

Later that night, Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh (another Calverton shooter) regrouped at Nosair’s home in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. But they were soon taken into custody as material witnesses by New York police after the house was raided. According to a series of FBI documents, detectives and FBI agents also seized 47 boxes in the raid—material that included prima facie evidence of an international bombing conspiracy with the World Trade Center as a target. Among the files seized was a potential hit list of prominent Jewish figures, including federal judge Jack B. Weinstein, a legendary jurist known as “the lion of the Eastern District.”

The seized material also contained documents presumably left by Ali Mohamed, including Green Beret training manuals and communiqués from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that investigators believe he’d pilfered from Fort Bragg, a sign of al-Qaida’s intent to attack strategic U.S. targets. There was a Joint Chiefs of Staff “Warning Order,” addressed to eight separate U.S. military command centers, the White House, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, plus the U.S. embassies in Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia.

The presence of these documents, many labeled “top secret for training,” not to mention Abouhalima and Salameh, suggested a conspiracy in the Kahane murder. Yet the very next day, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Borelli concluded that the killing was a “lone-gunman” shooting. “There hadn’t been any political assassinations in New York in more than a decade and Borelli didn’t want one on his watch,” Newsday reporters Jim Dwyer, David Kocieniewski, Diedre Murphy, and Peg Tyre wrote in their book on the World Trade Center bombing, Two Seconds Under the World.

Although the raid on Nosair’s house was conducted by New York police and the FBI—which had the Calverton photos not just of Nosair but also of Abouhalima and Salameh—the latter two were released within hours and never charged in the crime.

***

By the summer of 1990, just about when Shalabi picked up Abdel-Rahman at JFK, the Brooklyn Alkifah Center was grossing more than $100,000 per month in cash for the “struggle.” So when Nosair was arrested, Shalabi took it upon himself to raise the money for his legal fund, particularly after star attorney William Kunstler signed on for the defense. By the time Nosair’s trial began in late 1991, $163,000 had poured in—$20,000 of which, court documents would later show, came from Osama Bin Laden, who had been contacted by Nosair’s cousin.

But Shalabi was intent on making his own decisions. While respectful of al-Qaida, the terror network that had consumed the financing system known as MAK, Shalabi remained loyal to Abdullah Azzam, his old mentor, who had wanted to use the money to set up a Taliban-like government in Afghanistan. That put him in direct conflict with Bin Laden and the Egyptians around him, who wanted the funds to be used for the worldwide jihad. And even though Shalabi himself sponsored Abdel-Rahman’s visa entry into the United States, he balked when Abdel-Rahman demanded that some of the Alkifah’s monthly income be used for a fund to help overthrow Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

And so by the late summer of 1990, tensions were mounting between Shalabi and Abdel-Rahman. In the Brooklyn-based Abu Bakr Mosque, Abdel-Rahman began denouncing Shalabi openly as a “bad Muslim.” Abdel-Rahman even suggested that his fellow Egyptian was embezzling the Alkifah’s funds. Handouts were circulated under the Sheikh’s name. “We should not allow ourselves to be manipulated by his deviousness,” the leaflets said. Other handouts included mini fatwas declaring that Shalabi was “no longer a Muslim.”

Soon Shalabi began to fear for his life.

Continue reading: A murder case reopened. Or view as a single page.

Headline implying this can all mostly be chalked up to the narcissism of small differences: Check.

Opening anecdote involving peaceful practice of benign religious ritual: Check.

“Then the bulldozers arrived at dawn”: Check.

Justify article by noting that this small conflict is in fact microcosmic of the larger one: Check.

Note that yet at the same time this one conflict is unique and idiosyncratic (in this case, the Arabs in question are Israeli Bedouins, not Palestinians): Check.

Quote Israeli spokesperson to the effect that Israel is acting within the law: Check.

Quote esteemed left-wing Israeli professor begrudgingly agreeing but nonetheless disagreeing with Israeli policy: Check.

Buttress that with prominent left-wing Israeli novelist (in this case, Amos Oz): Check.

Close on Jews and Muslims protesting Israeli policy together: Check.

A Test of Wills Over a Patch of Desert [NYT]
Earlier: A Settled Schtick

Lead with acknowledgment that everyone knows and writes about the fact that Yiddish is dying: Check.

Superimpose cultural connotations of Yiddish onto subject of article, with a phrase like “flinty Yiddish contrarianism”: Check.

Name-drop Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer: Check.

Note that language is actually on the rise in Hasidic communities: Check.

Name-drop a Gentile Yiddish enthusiast (in this case, Shane Baker, whom Tablet Magazine has profiled): Check.

Mention the Lower East Side and a particular Brooklyn neighborhood (Brownsville, in this instance): Check.

End on mournful note: Check.

I’ll be honest: I could read a new one every week.

Shop That Speaks Yiddish Needs a Rich Man’s Help [NYT]
Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Amid Dying Languages, Yiddish Lives On

Anat Even-Or

When I was a kid, I was tall. Crazy tall. I was 5 feet 3 inches by the time I was 10. Everyone thought I’d ultimately reach 6 feet, like my Aunt Belleruth. Sure, Aunt Belleruth was gorgeous, but I wanted to look like everyone else. I envied Carolyn Schachter and Allison Page, the most petite girls in my class at Providence Hebrew Day School. They were adorable; I was a Sasquatch. I was fortunate that Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure hadn’t come out yet, or everyone would have called me Large Marge.

My first crush, Yoni Springer, was shorter than me. Of course, everyone was shorter than me. He was the smartest kid at camp and had the cutest smile. But he only liked me as a friend. I figured it was because I was dorky and awkward and uncute. I didn’t entirely blame my height, but my height was a huge part of why I felt dorky and awkward and uncute.

That’s why it was fascinating for me to read a children’s book called Short: Walking Tall When You’re Not Tall at All by John Schwartz, whose childhood problem was exactly the opposite of mine.

I grew up tall in Rhode Island, the biggest little state in the union. Schwartz grew up tiny in Texas, the biggest big state in the union. (We know each other in the online community The Well though we’ve never met in person.) Today, Schwartz is a reporter at The New York Times who often writes about science. He’s also 5 foot 3 inches tall.

Short is unusual for a book aimed at middle-grade readers—it’s a mix of memoir and reported nonfiction, a look at the science of shortness. Schwartz methodically demolishes popular claims that short people are less successful in life than tall ones. He talks to scientists whose research is frequently cited as “proof” that short people have worse lives (fewer friends, less money, less brainpower) than tall folks, and he lets them explain that their work has generally been misunderstood or misquoted. He teaches young readers how to examine studies critically: Who performed or paid for this research? (Hint: If it’s a company that wants to make money by selling human growth hormone to parents of short kids, is it a shock that the research seems to prove that shortness causes misery?)

Schwartz teaches readers the difference between correlation and causation, something a lot of adults don’t even understand. He gives kids some of the grossness they love, in a discussion of the Chinese propensity for stretching limbs surgically to meet height requirements for certain jobs. One of the scientists Schwartz talks to, David E. Sandberg, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, did research showing that being short does not actually cause kids lasting psychological trauma or hurt their popularity with their peers and yet found his work cited by the FDA as proof that short kids have huge problems.

All this science-y stuff is presented conversationally and leavened with lots of personal stories and humor. Schwartz makes the point that being funny and social was his key to popularity in school. “We all compensate in one way or another,” he told me in an interview. “Everyone has something that sets them apart—you might think you’re too fat, too scrawny, too smart, too big-nosed.” So, why must shortness be pathologized? Maybe what makes us different can actually make us special.

Schwartz wasn’t traumatized by being short. He told me that the only person who ever got to him was his mother. “There was this pipe at my elementary school that ran between one part of the building and another,” he said. “The boys would jump up and slap it, and I couldn’t. Not only was I small, I was not athletic in any way. I couldn’t touch the damn pipe, and it bothered me. I had a little heart-to-heart with my mom, telling her this. The next time she was at school, she called, ‘Johnny!’ I turned around and there she was, standing under the pipe, resting her hand on it and smiling. She’s 5 foot 10 inches. She was teasing me, but it was also her way of saying, ‘This is no big deal.’ All the kids who’d seen me try to touch that pipe laughed. It just killed me. I’d confided in her and she made fun of me. But after that, I stayed after school and made a run at that pipe again and again until I could hit it. And I came home and told her. And she smiled.”

My favorite thing about the book isn’t Schwartz’s short stories. It’s the education in media and science literacy, which every kid should have. “We’re dependent on science to make sense of the world,” Schwartz said. “The founders of our country understood that the free flow of information is vital to democracy, and if you don’t have the tools to approach science, you can’t be an effective citizen. You can’t make informed decisions about climate change. You won’t understand economics enough to know whether the stimulus package is working. I used shortness as a topic kids might care about as a way to learn how to think about science.”

I’d add that so many kids are suspicious of authority; we parents should try to channel that suspicion. For instance, there’s no more effective smoking-prevention strategy than to tell kids “cigarette companies want to take advantage of you.” (Telling them “smoking is dangerous” or “smoking is only for grown-ups” is tantamount to inviting Joe Camel to the kid’s birthday party.) So, why not teach kids how science has been manipulated to sell growth hormones and create attention-getting headlines in the attention-starved popular press?

One great audience for this book: boys who don’t like fiction. I always tell my friends whose sons don’t read to give them graphic novels, sports bios, or an encyclopedia of farts and vomit. Now I’ll also recommend a funny book about marketing and the misuse of science.

Finally, a confession: I’ve never been attracted to short guys. (Let me quickly say that I’ve never had a problem with fat and/or bald ones.) But I suspect that’s a holdover from my youthful self-image as Olive Oyl. We all have our mishegas. I’m not tall or skinny now—I hit 5 foot, 5 inches when I was 12 and then simply stopped growing, at least vertically. Now I’m only a bit taller than the average American woman. (She’s 5 foot 4 inches. The average American man is 5 foot 10 inches.) But the heart wants what it wants, to quote someone one shouldn’t ever quote on the subject of human attraction. When I was dating, I was still carrying my own baggage. But things change. I was never attracted to back hair, techno, or the art of Victor Vasarely, but I love Jonathan, my husband, and now all those things are fine by me. So, I’d say to short boys (the book, alas, doesn’t really go into the problems specific to short girls): You’ll find someone who will love you. Look at John Schwartz: happily married to his high-school sweetheart, with three gorgeous kids. All of whom are taller than he is. But who’s measuring?

Isaiah is case in point. Even as he embarks on what is known as a haftorah of consolation, the old man is adamant not to allow the gleaming glories of the future to blind us to the dark vagaries of the past. The return of the exiles? The coming of the messiah? We’ll get to that in a moment, quoth the prophet; but first, let us figure out how we got into the spiritual mess. Before he praises and promises and exalts, Isaiah leads off with a stern sentence: “Those who destroy you and those who lay you waste shall go forth from you.”

At first glance, there’s something almost perverse about this assignation of blame. The same sermon, after all, ends thusly: “For the Lord shall console Zion, He shall console all its ruins, and He shall make its desert like a paradise and its wasteland like the garden of the Lord; joy and happiness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and a voice of song.” Why muddle such a pure vision of happiness with talk of destruction and waste?

Herein lies the particular splendor of the Hebrew prophets. To them, redemption is never divorced from responsibility, and it requires not surrender to some celestial force of good but a set of hard choices and harsh reckonings. In other words, it requires agency. This is why it is important to begin any talk of redemption with a mention of destruction: If we don’t know why we were doomed, there’s no chance we could ever save ourselves.

For affirmation of this principle, look no further than Julian Assange, the driving force behind the website Wikileaks. This week, Assange provided three newspapers with more than 90,000 classified Pentagon documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan. As leaks go, this one is a deluge.

As is standard operating procedure for our shell-shocked media, the story was reported loudly and in brief, leaving anyone lacking the time or disposition to thumb through nearly a decade’s worth of field reports without any real understanding of what the hell had just happened.

To hear Assange put it, that’s precisely the point. The Australian-born hacker is an advocate of “scientific journalism,” a method of reporting that consists of releasing reams of data and documents; unfettered access to sensitive information, goes the theory, allows for empirical examinations and leads to uncontested truths.

In theory, this is a fine idea. And it’s an idea, Assange frequently argues, that’s been proven effective—just look at Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, another massive leak that contributed to major policy changes and ended a wrongful war.

But the Pentagon Papers are as far from Wikileaks as Ellsberg is from Assange. The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, contained a coherent historical narrative and exposed the perfidy of the Johnson Administration and its deliberate obfuscation of the truth regarding the escalating war in Vietnam. They were compiled by men of great expertise and then studied for months by journalists at the Times prior to publication. Wikileaks’ data dump, on the other hand, is just that. Looking for context? Searching for conclusions? You’re going to have to do it yourself, which, unless you possess the skills, the training, and the experience, is a lost cause.

Ellsberg, of course, possessed all three. He attended Harvard and Cambridge, graduated at the top of his class at the Marine Corps Basic School, and served as a platoon leader before joining Robert McNamara’s staff. Assange is a hacker, arrested and fined for forcing his way into the computer networks of numerous organizations around the world, from an Australian university to a Canadian telecom company. If we take Assange’s “scientific journalism” metaphor seriously, we could safely say that while Ellsberg was qualified to analyze information pertaining to war, Assange’s credentials and qualifications should carry him no further than the lab’s cafeteria.

The silver-haired activist, of course, holds that everyone’s an expert, that experts are frauds, and that authority—any kind, anywhere, always—is oppressive and needs to be punished. In a now-famous turn of phrase, he explained the motivation for his life’s work thusly: “I enjoy crushing bastards.”

That’s a swell attitude for a sophomore, but not very instructive for anyone hoping—as Assange repeatedly stated was the case—to influence policy and public opinion. And it explains, perhaps, the leak’s relative lack of resonance: As soon as serious students of the war had their chance to analyze Assange’s treasure trove, they realized—and we with them—that there was nothing new in Wikileaks’ tall stack of reports. The Pakistani intelligence service is secretly supporting the Taliban? A great revelation, unless you happened to read The New York Times two years ago, when a story titled “Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say” was clandestinely buried on the front page of the newspaper. Civilian death toll? A sensational scoop to anyone too lazy to have followed the detailed and often credible count offered by at least one human rights organization. In short, all that remains of Assange’s act, less than a week after his big reveal, is the echo, fast fading, of self-congratulation and the sulfuric whiff of self-importance.

Had he been just another Internet gadfly, another trader in cat humor or conspiracy theories or any of the other intellectual roadkill that clutters the information superhighway, it might have been easy to dismiss Assange, as one does a Breitbart or a Drudge, as a pernicious prankster. But Assange is made of different stuff. He is interested in sweeping reforms, not partisan trickery, and his actions do stimulate a much-needed debate about freedom of information in the digital age. For these reasons and others, he’s been honored with laurels ranging from an Amnesty International award to a TED talk. To many fawning fans online, his is the future face of journalism.

This is nothing short of a disaster. As the recent leak demonstrates, Assange and Wikileaks represent the Internet’s worst indulgences and most fatal shortcomings. Rather than contextualize and analyze, this new journalism hurls data, raw and incomplete. Rather than devote time to studying a subject in depth, this new journalism focuses on subduing its sources. Rather than act responsibly, this new journalism shoots first and asks questions later. After all, why take on the burdens of leadership or submit to the demands of research or brave the battlefield when “crushing the bastards” on a website is so much easier, so much more fun?

Which brings us back to Isaiah. This week, the prophet has two important lessons for us. The first is that responsibility precedes redemption and that both involve hard work. The second is that unless we’re careful, we’ll bring about our own downfall. Let us remember both lessons next time we read the news.

If this bill passes, future historians will inevitably wonder why, at a critical moment in its history, Israel chose to tell 85 percent of the Jewish diaspora that their rabbis weren’t rabbis and their religious practices were a sham, the conversions of their parents and spouses were invalid, their marriages weren’t legal under Jewish law, and their progeny were a tribe of bastards unfit to marry other Jews.

It’s a sad state of affairs, one this magazine has been covering for at least half of its existence—beginning with a story that Alana alludes to when she mentions “an American Haredi rabbi who had become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion [who] resigned from his organization in December after accusations that he solicited phone sex from a hopeful female convert.” She’s referring to Leib Tropper, whose power, corruption, and lies we investigated last January (and which, frankly, we’ve been mystified about the non-reaction to):

-Allison Hoffman’s profile;

-Marissa Brostoff on one woman’s side of the story;

-Hoffman on the wealthy, possibly crazy heir who bankrolled Tropper;

-Hoffman on how other Haredi rabbis have been reluctant to condemn him;

-Oh, and you can listen to the tapes.

Below, a helpful cheat sheet for Alana’s essay:

• “Even if you are Orthodox—and especially if you are modern Orthodox—your rabbi likely doesn’t make the cut,” Alana writes. “(Don’t believe it? Go ask him.)” An under-covered aspect of this bill is the extent to which, again to use Alana’s words, “the criteria used by the rabbinate are driven by internal Haredi politics, not observance.” Which makes it all the more odd that while the Reform and Conservative movements have spoken out strongly against the bill, as have a host of other American Jewish organizations, Orthodox organizations such as the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel have been silent.

• The philosophy behind the bill, according to Alana, “is well outside the consensus established by Hillel—arguably the greatest rabbi in all of rabbinic Judaism and whom, as Joseph Telushkin argues in a forthcoming book, was willing to convert a pagan on the spot, simply because he’d asked.” The book in question is Hillel: If Not Now, When?, coming in September from Nextbook Press.

• Your final cheat sheet item? This bill is probably not a good idea.

The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]
Conversion Bill Dismays U.S. Senators [JPost]
Related: Hillel: If Not Now, When? [Nextbook Press]

• Über-Jew Harold Bloom tackled Anthony Julius’s new tome on British anti-Semitism.

• As presaged Friday, Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch struggled with whether we must throw out the baby that is Martin Heidegger’s mainstream philosophical contribution with the bathwater that is his undeniable Nazism.

• Also as presaged Friday, Francine Prose reviewed a new biography of Irène Némirovsky as well a collection of the French-Jewish writer’s newly translated stories.

• And Francis Fukuyama, in the course of an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, argues that the crazy/brilliant German philosopher transformed from a run-of-the-mill casual anti-Semite to “a principled anti-anti-Semite” and enemy of “German chauvinism.”

And a bonus! In the Week in Review section, film critic A.O. Scott declared that this is the year of Generation X’s midlife crisis in an essay whose central juxtaposition was the new Noah Baumbauch film Greenberg and the new Sam Lipsyte novel The Ask, which both feature similarly schlemiel-like protagonists. Wish we’d thought of that connection. Oh, wait, our very own Marissa Brostoff did.

Related: Look Out! [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Kirsch, Heidegger, and Némirovsky, Oh My!

Kirsch reviewed the correspondence between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (his lover!) in 2004 for Nextbook.org, Tablet Magazine’s precursor.

Paul La Farge reviewed an earlier Irène Némirovsky biography for Nextbook.org in 2006.

And Francine Prose discussed Anne Frank on a Vox Tablet podcast last year.

This NYT podcast is really good by the way. Not, you know, National Magazine Award-winning good, but good.

Book Review Podcast: Heidegger, Irène Némirovsky and Anti-Semitism [Arts Beat]

• In a similar vein, J.J. Goldberg argues that the silent majority of American Jews is getting drowned out. [Haaretz]

• An environmental group warns that the stretch of the Jordan River from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea is in danger of drying out. Between Israel, Jordan, and Syria, 98 percent of river water is diverted. [JTA]

• Yuri Foreman: The ESPN profile. [ESPN]

• Prime KO, a Japanese joint on the Upper West Side “where kosher aspires to be cool,” opens. [City Room]

• Jewish Funds for Justice, which initiated a Gulf Coast charity after Hurricane Katrina, is asking for donations related to the oil spill. [Jewish Funds for Justice]

Check out Deputy Editor Gabe Sanders’s interview with Chilean-American author Ariel Dorfman from the PEN festival.

Martel’s “misconceived and offensive” book, Kakutani writes,

has the effect of trivializing the Holocaust, using it as a metaphor to evoke “the extermination of animal life” and the suffering of “doomed creatures” who “could not speak for themselves.”

The reader is encouraged to see the stuffed animals Beatrice and Virgil—who have endured torture, starvation and humiliation—as stand-ins for the Jews, and to equate the terrible things they’ve witnessed—referred to as “the Horrors”—to the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

She concludes by calling the novel “disappointing and often perverse.” Yikes.

It’s worth noting that many reviews were positive: a “masterpiece about the Holocaust”; “complex and nuanced”; etc.

Our podcast is not a review, but rather an interview with the author. We’ll let him have the last word on The Scroll: “The Holocaust was so unbelievable, such an assault on innocent civilians,” he tells Senior Editor Sara Ivry.

I think its unbelievability will increase with time. Now, that the knowledge is still historically fresh … because we know it was true, can in a sense still smell it in the air of Europe, we believe it, and it’s believable. But in 50 years, when you read Elie Wiesel, when you read Primo Levi, it will be unbelievable. … I’m afraid people will not disbelieve it, but just not connect with it, and what will help connect is if we use the tools of art. Because great art is timeless.

Of course, the real last word is the book itself.

From ‘Life of Pi’ Author, Stuffed-Animal Allegory About the Holocaust [NYT]
Animal Planet [Tablet Magazine]

Even if Paterson doesn’t resign, though, his weakened position—among other things, he’s a lame duck, having announced he won’t run for re-election—only makes Ravitch more powerful. “He is widely seen as the only adult left in Albany,” the Times reports. Many Democrats, for example, are urging Paterson to make Ravitch the one in-charge of crucial, and unfailingly contentious, budget negotiations.

We learn a bit about Ravitch’s life: he’s a classic New York City éminence grise, ensconced in the especially Gotham power centers of real estate, politics, sports, and, yes, Jewish philanthropy.

Another of Ravitch’s prime assets is that nobody sees him as a threat because he has zero further political aspirations: as he says, “My disability is my strength. I’m not a candidate for anything.” The one time he was a candidate for something—the 1989 Democratic mayoral primary—he came in third. “Aides remembered him as a horrendous candidate,” we’re told, “always saying something impolitic when he wasn’t grossing people out by picking his ears.”

Which just goes to prove that old saying: those who can’t run for governor, become lieutenant governor; and those who can’t govern, become governor.

The Accidental Lieutenant [NYT]

Related: Question of Influence in Abuse Case of Paterson Aide [NYT]

Earlier: NYT Story Opens Door For Ravitch
Paterson Won’t Run; Is Ravitch Next?

• In public and private, the Obama administration tsk-tsked Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to landmark two Biblical sites in Israel-controlled West Bank. [AP/Haaretz]

• Israel has become crucial to California’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, with candidate Tom Campbell’s support for the Jewish state being questioned by two rivals. [LAT]

• Now that the New York Times has published a fairly damning story regarding New York Gov. David Paterson and his alleged intervention in a longtime aide’s assault case, it’s worth noting that the lieutenant governor—who would assume the job if Paterson leaves—is Richard Ravitch, a Jew. [NYT]

• Selma G. Hirsh, a longtime staffer and then official at the American Jewish Committee, died at 92. [AP/NYT]

• Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) decries Republican health-care “chutzpah.” It’s really funny (and great, if you happen to agree with Weiner’s analysis).

• Dubai has 15 new suspects in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, all of whom carried European or—in a new twist—Australian passports. The Scroll will have a full update later today. [Ynet]

• The Los Angeles Times press critic argues that New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner should be kept in his job—and not booted since his son joined the IDF—because he is a scrupulous writer and reporter. [LAT]

• It turns out that Israel’s most valuable Palestinian informant during the Second Intifada was the son of a prominent Hamas founder and official. [Haaretz]

• At least one Palestinian group has vowed to resume attacks in Israel in response to the landmarking of Abraham’s and Rachel’s tombs. [Ynet]

• Jewish-American leader Mortimer B. Zuckerman continued maneuvers toward running for Senate from New York as a Republican. [NYT]

Rabbis in Training Receive Lessons in Real-Life Traumas [NYT]

For the record, various folks and groups have accused Bronner of being biased about the Mideast in every imaginable way; it is those who accuse him of being biased in Israel’s favor who are in dudgeon over this. In my opinion, it is literally impossible to have his job and not face those criticisms. (Also, for the record, Keller says he would be inclined to keep Bronner in his post even if his son is deployed in combat.)

Should Bronner keep his job? The question is not inside baseball: there are few if any individuals who are more influential when it comes to shaping mainstream U.S. perception of the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian situation than the lead Times reporter. Let’s grant that Bronner’s actual journalism has been, under hypothetical totally objective standards, completely without bias and beyond reproach. Hoyt calls Bronner an “excellent reporter”; I agree. We can also grant that, in an ideal world, Bronner’s “work” and not his “biography” would be the sole standard by which he is judged.

Hoyt and I agree that Bronner has been fair-minded. But Hoyt and I also agree with Alex Jones, a Pulitzer-winning Harvard press expert. He told Hoyt: “The appearance of a conflict of interest is often as important or more important than a real conflict of interest. I would reassign him.” Such a move, frankly, is unfair to Bronner, “but the newspaper has to come first,” he added.

Assuming another of the Times’s excellent reporters is subbed in for Bronner, it’s difficult to see who would be harmed by Bronner’s move other than Bronner, who would not be the first person to have his career or personal life compromised in some manner by the completely legitimate behavior of a loved one. This is the price of doing business. Surely someone who has covered the Middle East for a quarter-century has learned that the world is not always a fair place.

Too Close to Home [NYT]

Earlier: Report: NYT J’lem Chief Has Son in IDF

Prior Times Jerusalem bureau chiefs include James Bennet, now the editor of The Atlantic, and Thomas Friedman, now the über-columnist. When it comes to shaping U.S. opinion about Israel, it’s a pretty prominent and important gig.

‘New York Times’ Fails to Confirm Jerusalem Bureau Chief’s Conflict of Interest [Electronic Intifada]

For thousands of people who convert to Judaism, Christmas is a difficult day of balancing what was once intimately theirs but now represents, in some ways, the essence of what they are giving up.

We are surprised that the Times resisted the temptation to point out a small coincidence in its piece: the paper of record’s lead anecdotal convert, Charlotte Jett, shares a name with maybe the most pop culturally famous convert, Sex and the City’s Charlotte Goldenblatt (née York). But the article is worth your time, and important to read: after all, Christmas is only 362 days away!

Why Is This Christmas Different From All Others? [NYT]

David Lehman’s Top Ten Christmas Songs Written by Jews

10. “The Christmas Waltz,” music and lyrics by Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne. “Listen to Sinatra’s version of this interestingly self-referential lyric.”

9. “Silver Bells,” music by Jay Livingston, lyrics by Ray Evans.

8. “Winter Wonderland,” music and lyrics by Felix Bernard. “Michael Feinstein was my source on this one. And I’m surprised! The lyrics involve an impromptu wedding ceremony performed by a Parson Brown. The most interesting lyrical moment is the rhyme of ‘snow man’ and ‘no, man.’”

7. “Santa Baby,” music and lyrics by Joan Ellen Javits and Philip Springer. “Very enjoyable song. The closest thing to a jazz song here. ‘Santa Baby, hurry down the chimney to me.’ It adapts the conventions of Christmas songs to become a kind of love and seduction song. Eartha Kitt sings a swell version.”

6. “Sleigh Ride,” lyrics by Mitchell Parrish. “Sometimes people encounter it as a musical backdrop. On a personal note, I remember flying between the U.S. and England in the 1970s, and at Heathrow or Gatwick or JFK, you would always hear that. I had never liked it particularly, but because of the association it is very dear to me. Parrish—born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky in Lithuania—wrote the lyrics to one of the most famous of all jazz standards, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’”

5. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” music by Buck Ram, lyrics by Walter Kent. “Like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Have Yourself,’ this song was popular during World War II, and it appeals to a certain nostalgia and homesickness, not only on the parts of the troops abroad, but the loved ones at home.”

4. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “This is a great song that is sometimes overlooked when people think of great Christmas songs, in part because of the other major Berlin effort in this category, and in part because it is one of the few songs on this list that can be done come snow or shine, year in and year out.”

3. “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music by Julie Styne. “This is my own favorite of the ‘Jingle Bells’-type Christmas song. I love the way it is used as the exit music in Die Hard.”

2. “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), music and lyrics by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. “These first two picks are traditional Christmas songs—they mention the holiday explicitly, are full of heartfelt sentiment, and may jerk a few tears.”

1. “White Christmas,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “Bing Crosby’s version is the best-selling single ever.”

NYT Goes to Midwood [Ditmas Park Blog]
Where Prosperity Breeds Proximity [NYT]

And yet! The story has at least two thoroughly enjoyable, even heart-warming set-pieces that just may, on balance, justify its existence. We learn that following an incident in Billings in which the windows of homes with menorahs were smashed, the townsfolk put menorahs in their windows. That’s sweet. (Let’s leave aside that such a shocking act of vandalism took place all the way back in … 1993.) Even sweeter and more adorable is the tale of Miky, the bomb-sniffing German sheperd who was raised in Israel but now plies his trade in Montana. Miky’s handler had trouble communicating with Miky because of the language barrier—Miky understands Hebrew, not English, you see—but after consulting with the local Lubavitcher rabbi and learning to articulate the hard “ch,” the trainer and Miky get along famously. Even more famously, now that they have been featured in the Times.

“So all is well in the Jewish community here because the Hasidic rabbi is helping the Montana cop speak Hebrew to his dog.” With a sentence like that, it is not surprising that, two days, later, the article is the third-most-emailed Times story. (As Slate’s Jack Shafer has noted, the surest way to write a popular article is to make it about an animal.) So we suppose it’s a win for the Times, a win for Miky, and perhaps even a win for the Jews. It’s certainly a win for the article’s author, Eric A. Stern—who, we learn at article’s close, is “senior counselor to Gov. Brian Schweitzer.” (Beats paying a reporter.) Looks like the article’s popularity is a win for Montana most of all.

Yes, Miky, There Are Rabbis in Montana [NYT]

It’s a Fine Broth of a Campaign [NYT]

A Rabbi Whose God Is a Loving and Long-Suffering Mother [NYT]
Once Political, Now Just Practical [NYT]

It was the lead obit, it appeared the day after he died, it featured a flattering photo, it ran to a respectable length, it accurately identified most of the highlights of his uniquely colorful and controversial career, and it didn’t mention his dropping the dime on Daniel Ellsberg, which caused the Times to blacklist him at the time, until three-quarters of the way down in the piece. Instead, the obit highlighted his lawsuit against the hospital he held responsible for his daughter Libby’s tragic death. It was fair.

But for me, it didn’t capture what made Sidney Sidney, which had to do with his unique take on both his journalism and his Jewishness. Since I was there, so to speak, at the creation, herewith my Sidney Zion, aka El Sid.

I first met El Sid in the fall of 1956, when we were fellow students at Yale Law School. I was attempting to launch Monocle, which we called “a leisurely quarterly of political satire.” (That meant it would only come out twice a year.) A classmate said that if I was starting a satire magazine, I had to meet Sidney. When I asked why, he said meet him and you’ll see why.

I met, I saw, and he conquered. In the obit, the Times called Sidney Runyonesque, and indeed the cigar-smoking, scotch-sipping, Hit-Parade-humming Sidney’s first story for Monocle—about the integration of a grade school in Arkansas, over the opposition of its governor, Orville Faubus—was called “The Day They Put the Snatch on Orville.” It included a cast of characters right out of Runyon, and it was written in Runyon’s trademark present-tense Broadwayese.

We immediately hit it off, and not just because we, as would-be journalists, were both fans of Yale’s odd-man-out law professor, Fred Rodell, who taught his seminars at Mory’s, a local bar, so that he could partake of their libations. What really impressed Sidney was his discovery that in 1946, when I was in the eighth grade, I had worked as a “volunteer” (actually, we were paid $2 an hour) to pass a contribution basket at Ben Hecht’s play, A Flag is Born, which advocated for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The money, although nobody said it out loud at the time, was going to support the Irgun Zvai Leumi, Menachem Begin’s militant underground movement.

Hecht, it turned out, was Sidney’s hero. Not just because he was a journalist’s journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and man about town, but because, as the author of A Guide For The Bedevilled—Sidney’s bible—he was a Jew’s Jew. Sidney, who kept track of these things, reminded me that after A Flag is Born closed, Hecht had used his own proceeds from the play to take out an ad in The New York Herald Tribune congratulating the Irgun on blowing up British trains, robbing British banks, killing British Tommies.

Not that we were in political sync across the board. We both saw ourselves as First Amendment absolutists in the Black-Douglas tradition, and we both had a healthy contempt for what we thought of as Harvard-inspired Frankfurterian judicial self-restraint. But Sid, it turned out, had been chairman of the Eisenhower for President Club while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, whereas I, in the argot of the day, had been “Madly for Adlai.” When I asked Sid how he could have supported the Republican, he passionately explained that Roosevelt, whom he considered an anti-Semite, “didn’t lift a finger” to save the Jews of Europe. As Ben Hecht had once put it, FDR was “the humanitarian who snubbed a massacre.”

Monocle, it turned out, was a short-lived magazine. It graduated from Yale Law along with the rest of us, and after a number of years as what we called “a radical sporadical,” it expired in 1965. But it had a long-run impact on Sid’s life.

He met his wife-to-be, Elsa Heister, at a Monocle party. And in 1962, when the New York newspapers went on strike, Monocle put out a parody of the New York Post, called The Pest, to which Sid contributed a column in the cryptic style of the paper’s incomparable columnist, Murray Kempton.

Nora Ephron, herself a contributor to The Pest, tells what happened next: “The story was that the editors of the Post were in a rage. [They] wanted to sue. And Dolly [Schiff, the newspaper’s legendary owner] said, ‘Don’t be idiots. If they can parody us they can write for us. Hire them.’” And that’s what happened. After the Post, Sid went on to report on and cogitate about the law for The New York Times, to columnize for the Daily News, and to write for periodicals too numerous to mention.

I’ve already said that Sid had a love-hate relationship with the Times. Let me give an example. In his last years at the Times, Sid got a tip that Judge Henry Friendly, then perhaps the preeminent appellate court judge in the country and prominently mentioned as a possible U.S. Supreme Court nominee, many years earlier failed to disqualify himself from ruling on a case in which he had a conflict of interest. Assured by Managing Editor Abe Rosenthal that if he got the goods the Times would print the piece, Sidney spent the next weeks definitively documenting the story. But when the time came to print it, Rosenthal was overruled by James Reston, who was then running the paper. Reston summoned Zion into his 10th floor office, and from behind his imposing desk, explained that if Friendly actually received a Supreme Court nomination, the Times would run the story. But absent that, Reston was not about to run a piece that would cast a dark shadow on Friendly’s otherwise distinguished career.

“The difference between you and me, Mr. Zion,” Reston said, “is that you were brought up as a poor Jew on the scrappy streets of Passaic, New Jersey, whereas I was brought up in the Church of Scotland outside of Glasgow.” At this point, Sidney rudely interrupted. “I thought that the difference between us,” he said, “is you are sitting there, whereas I am sitting here.”

In 1971, after he quit the Times to co-found Scanlan’s Monthly with Warren Hinckle, Sidney made worldwide news and incurred what seemed at the time the everlasting enmity of his erstwhile Times colleagues because he named Daniel Ellsberg as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. He was roundly denounced as a snitch, an informer. How could he do such a thing?

For better or worse, here’s how. From Sid’s perspective, the Times was campaigning for a Pulitzer Prize that it didn’t deserve. The man who took the real risks was the man whom the Times said the world would never know. Oh yeah?, said macho Sid, who vowed to prove his prowess as an investigative reporter and bragged that he could find out who it was in a matter of days, and did just that. After he announced his find on the radio, the world descended on Sid The Informer.

This all struck me as ironic, because Sid himself had long detested those who played the informer. In fact, one of the first pieces Scanlan’s ran was titled “Hello, Informer,” a reprint of Elia Kazan’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Scanlan’s sent him a check for $150, which he never cashed.

A few weeks before Sidney died, my friend Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I had dinner with him at Frankie and Johnnie’s, one of his favorite haunts, and wouldn’t you know it, we had a long and loud argument about Israel. It was two against one—or three against one, since the woman at the next table vociferously took objection to my point that not all those who objected to the settlements or Israel’s failure to honor Palestinian human and civil rights and liberties were “anti-Israel.” There were cries and gnashing of teeth, but had there not been, it wouldn’t have been Sid. And now the world is poorer without his furor.

Although he fasted on Yom Kippur and went to shul on the High Holidays, I never realized that Sidney, who fraternized with more than his share of mobsters, who spent too many evenings commuting between the bars at Gallagher’s, Frankie and Johnnie’s, and Elaine’s, was particularly religious. So I was surprised to learn at his funeral that his daily ritual included the laying of teffilin. According to the rabbi, “totafot,” the word the Torah uses to describe the teffilin, is either untranslatable or means “immovable.” Now that I think about it, I am no longer surprised. El Sid was definitely untranslatable, and he was certainly immovable.

Victor Navasky, a political columnist for Tablet Magazine, is a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.

In The Loop is made up, almost entirely, of talk (you could watch it with your eyes closed). It’s also about talk—about poor word choice, about good word choice that is mangled by spin doctors, about how people say one thing and mean another. But for all the talk, the one audience that is never spoken to in the movie is the public; In The Loop’s tidal wave of words takes place entirely behind closed doors. In In The Loop, all this empty and covert chatter results in farce. It strikes us, though, that unless the U.S. and Israel untangle their communication lines, and unless both of their publics are treated as grown-ups, what follows could be far less funny.

Why Won’t Obama Talk to Israel? [NYT]
Previously: Columnists to Obama: Talk To Us!

Senior Obama administration officials bristled at Benn’s suggestion that “The Arabs got the Cairo speech; we got silence,” reports Atlantic blogger (and Tablet Magazine contributing editor) Jeffrey Goldberg. They noted that in Cairo Obama rebuked Arab leaders’ exploitation of the Palestinian issue and unequivocally condemned Palestinian terrorism. The officials’ defense of Obama may be accurate; it may even be that Benn and Burston are demanding an unfair amount of the new president. (Benn all but admits as much, writing, “In the 16 rosy years of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Israelis became spoiled by unfettered presidential attention.”) But perceptions, fair or unfair, sometimes matter most, and Benn’s and Burston’s reading of the Israeli people’s perception carries a great deal of weight. Besides, if Obama is not embarrassed about what he is asking the Israeli people—and we see no reason why he ought to be embarrassed—then he should have no problem asking them to their faces.

Why Won’t Obama Talk to Israel? [NYT]
Mr. Obama, Have a Talk With These Israelis, And Soon [Haaretz]
The White House Reacts to Aluf Benn’s Arguments [The Atlantic]

A Piece of Brooklyn Perhaps Lost to Time [NYT]

One of the items that historians have done a neat job of obscuring as irrelevant to the modern Jewish experience is the role of performance psychics in Jewish life. Legitimized as “prophets” in the ancient period, they have become, in subsequent eras, excused as products of their times or categorized as special “mystics.” But even by the time the Renaissance was in full swing, science and mysticism still mixed in weird and uncomfortable ways: mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton, for example, was a big fan of alchemy and divination, among other matters of the occult. (Apparently, rationality has never been beholden to the laws of motion and gravity.) In the modern period, where science and reason begin to edge out the occult, the terms “fraud” and “charlatan” are bandied about as terms to describe those who work as palm readers, phrenologists, and telepaths. But that didn’t make them disappear or make people any less interested in their abilities, including some with top flight educations.

Khokhmes hayad is an 1882 reprint of a 1799 reprint of a Hebrew palm reading manual that dates to the 16th century. This is just one of many examples of such Jewish occult manuals. The frequent reprinting of such manuals over many centuries is but one indication of their popularity.

Indeed, Jews have worked in the occult for as long as they have been Jews. Instances of necromancy and other occult activities are peppered throughout the Bible and the Talmud, as well as later rabbinical texts. Indeed, prophesying is hardwired in the tradition. Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1939 monograph, “Jewish Magic and Superstition,” for example, regales the reader with an excellent exposition of the history of Jewish occult activity.

With the advent of the Enlightenment and political and social emancipation it brought in its wake, Jews were expected to have abrogated this silliness. But shtetl superstitions simply migrated in variant form to cities, where—in an attempt to slap a veneer of sophistication on their ancient crafts—occultists often presented themselves as “scientists” or “professors.” They could be found in Jewish neighborhoods in Warsaw, Krakow, and New York City plying their trades.

One such specimen, a man named Abraham Hochman, came to prominence in mid-1890s New York, following the 1895 publication of Fortune Teller, a popular booklet reprinted several times—as were his subsequent Yiddish publications on astrology and fortune telling. Operating out of a building he owned at 169 Rivington Street, Hochman was a Lower East Side fixture who told fortunes, read palms and foreheads, and found lost spouses and kin for people in the neighborhood. He kept innocent men out of prison, found lost property and, occasionally, knew which horse would come in at the track. When business flagged, he contacted journalist friends and pulled stunts, most of which were reported upon assiduously in the Yiddish press, to attract customers.

Occasionally, when Hochman did something really dramatic, news of his exploits would appear in the general press. The New York Sun, among other outlets, reported on an episode in May 1904, when a bushy-haired Hochman waltzed into the Essex Market Police Court and inexplicably paid the bail for Abie Langener, who’d been arrested with seven other youths on a burglary charge. The magistrate asked why Hochman was paying bail for someone he didn’t know.

“I can read the future,” he replied. “I have read this man’s mind and know he is innocent. I can also read your mind. You will discharge him when the case comes up before you tomorrow. If he were guilty, I would know it and I would not bail him out. I will be here tomorrow to show you that my predictions come true.”

Hochman did, in fact, show up the following day. And, sure enough, when Langener and another suspect were brought before the court, the magistrate released them due to lack of evidence.

“What did I tell you?” said Hochman.

The psychic was mobbed outside the courthouse by hundreds of friends of the accused who, according to press reports, practically tore off his clothes. It’s not clear why this would be necessary and, in any case, the courthouse bailiffs came outside to rescue him from his demonstrative well-wishers.

But Hochman was usually surrounded by a mob, though typically of what they called “wildly gesticulating women.” The stoop of his Rivington Street studio was frequently crammed with flailing ladies, often accompanied by children all desperately trying to find missing husbands and fathers. These men ranged from immigrants who had conveniently “forgotten” about their families in the Old Country, to guys who couldn’t tolerate the cramped quarters of their 300-square-foot tenements and their half dozen screaming kids, to jerks who ran out of money and disappeared. The situation was so bad, the Jewish Daily Forward, the largest-circulation Yiddish daily in the world, began running the “Gallery of Missing Men,” a page full of mug shots and descriptions of these nefarious characters to help locate them and bring them to justice. (The National Desertion Bureau was also founded to help women and children whose husbands and fathers were on the lam.)

Forverts’ Gallery of Missing Men, 1909

Locating missing husbands was a Hochman specialty. He gained quite a bit of fame for this ability when, in 1903, the press reported on the predicament of Minnie Cohen, whose her husband went missing for a month. Minnie decided to avail herself of Hochman’s services. With a dollar in hand, she made her way through the labyrinthine snarl of panhandlers and pushcarts to Hochman’s office. He informed Minnie that her husband would be up to no good at the corner of Pitt and Grand Streets at exactly 10 o’clock that night. So sure was he of his prophecy that he promised to give her 50 dollars if he turned out to mistaken. With unshakable faith in the Hebrew Seer of Rivington Street, and hope in the possibility of getting a wad of cash if her runaway husband didn’t show, Cohen pulled a cop out of the Essex Street Station and told him what Hochman had said. When they got to the corner of Pitt and Grand, Minnie’s truant husband was there, scratching his back on a lamppost. Officer O’Grady arrested Cohen’s husband and brought him into the station, where he was held on a $100 bond and instructed to begin paying his wife Minnie two dollars a week alimony. “Venus is ascendant—husbands beware!” Hochman asserted to the women gathered on his stoop.

News of his exploits made Hochman realize that he could expand his psychic constituency further than the local Hebrews. He went straight for the top: one day in the spring of 1905, Hochman went chugging into the Grand Street clubhouse of Tammany Hall thug Florrie Sullivan, grabbed the local strongman’s hand, and told him that he dreamed that the horse King Pepper was going to come in first, paying eight to one. Sullivan, who forswore belief in the occult, nevertheless took a bet on Hochman’s advice. King Pepper won, making Sullivan a small fortune. Hochman’s gambit worked; he became the Sullivan gang’s official mind-reader and phrenologist. Hochman was so successful that his son Frank’s 1906 bris, which brought out a full police battalion and included performances by Yiddish theater actors, was besieged by thousands of well wishers, who devoured 320 pounds of chicken and six crates of fruit. On account of this sumptuous affair, an entire block of Rivington Street was closed down for two days.

Even The New York Times was not immune to the lures of Abraham Hochman. Tongue in cheek as it may have been, the Times still reported on the 1904 story of how Hochman’s psychic abilities helped to locate Jacob Greenberg’s (of the Essex Street Greenbergs) missing horse, cart, and load of grapes.
Unlike most clairvoyants, Hochman was happy to share his secrets, publishing his prophetic techniques in books and articles. He based his method on what he called his “Astro-biblical chart,” which anyone could use to answer questions like “will I fall in love?”; “should I take dance lessons?”; “does my husband know I’ve been bad?”; “should I get a job as a tailor?”; “is my landlord in love with me?” Determining the answer required readers to hold some herbs or nuts in the right hand, count backwards by sevens with the left hand, add whatever remained to the number of the question, and find the corresponding number on the astro-biblical chart, which provided the name of a Hebrew symbol and a natural element. Then, inquirers were to take the Hebrew symbol and the element and consult Hochman’s system of charts for another number which led to the answer chart, whereupon a person would punch in the original number subtracted after the initial step of nut-holding and backward counting. That is your answer. How could it miss?

Hochman disappears from the papers around 1910. Nobody seems to know what became of him, though Yiddish-speaking clairvoyants, palm readers, and psychics continued to hold Jews in their thrall. In 1933, for example, a dybbuk was exorcised in a Harlem tenement. But that’s a story for another time.

Eddy Portnoy, a Tablet contributing editor, teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University.

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