• Barack Obama (August 4, 1961): “Prosecutor Will Demand Death Penalty for Eichmann When Trial Reopens”

• Hillary Clinton (October 26, 1947): “U.S. Experts Studying Palestine Partition Map for Boundary Recommendations on Monday”

• Shimon Peres (August 2, 1923): “Hooligans Attack Jews in Doz Park”

• Natalie Portman (June 9, 1981): “Israeli Planes Destroy Iraq Nuclear Reactor: Furor Spreads”

• Mark Zuckerberg (May 14, 1984): “Mondale, Hart Take Jackson to Task for His Refusal to Repudiate Support by Black Muslim Leader”

• Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933): “Warsaw Jew Killed on Way to Synagogue”

• Justin Bieber (March 1, 1994): “Clinton Administration Scrambles To Salvage Mideast Peace Process”

• Barbra Streisand (April 24, 1942): “Evacuation of All Jews from Coastal Areas in Holland Ordered by Nazis”

(Staffers)

• Liel Leibovitz (November 9, 1976): “Sartre Says Mideast Peace Can Be Achieved by Israel-Arab Dialogue”

• Matthew Fishbane (December 10, 1971): “Israel, Vatican Swapping Relics”

• Wayne Hoffman (December 8, 1970): “Israel Trying to Persuade U.S. to Use Veto Power in Security Council” (apparently this was once a novel thing)

• Margarita Korol (April 21, 1986): “Tension, Violence Mount in Gaza Strip”

• Abigail Miller (December 20, 1983): “Israeli Forces Continue to Pound PLO Forces in Lebanon”

• Alana Newhouse (February 26, 1976): “Manifesto Calls for Co-Existence Between Israel, Palestinian State”

• Gabriel Sanders (December 21, 1972): “Kahane Gets Israeli Citizenship”

• Len Small (August 28, 1972): “Foreigners Blamed for Rise in Israel Drug Use”

• Marc Tracy (January 3, 1985): “U.S. Sephardic Jews Urged to Revive Their Tradition Before They Assimilate”

Jewish News Archive [JTA]
Earlier: These Were the Weeks that Were

Yet there’s something that would give him even more joy.

“A synagogue,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of synagogues get built, some by great architects, but I still think I could do it better. It would mean a lot to me, both as a Jewish American and an architect, to be able to build my own.”

Meier has designed practically everything else: museums, skyscrapers, and beach houses. He has put his sleek glass-and-white stamp all over the world, a minimalist look that has won him the profession’s highest awards and a movie-star clientele. Yet behind the celebrity lies a privately religious man who has never strayed far from his Newark Jewish roots, and two projects underway are providing Meier ample opportunity to reflect on this identity.

Tonight, Meier will unveil an exclusive line of ritual art to be sold through New York’s Jewish Museum. The launch of these menorahs and mezuzahs coincides with the construction of his first project in Israel, a residential tower in Tel Aviv.

A rendering of Richard Meier’s Tel Aviv tower, to be completed in 2013.

Courtesy Richard Meier & Partners.

Both projects carry deep meaning for Meier. People who have sat at his seder table describe a man who savors tradition. Yet this is a side the public rarely sees. Despite wanting to build his own shul, Meier rarely attends services and doesn’t belong to a congregation. Raised Reform, he went to synagogue only on High Holidays when growing up, and today he sees no need to worship outside the home. “Being a Jew means believing in God,” he says. “It means to think things outside of yourself are more important.”

I caught Meier in between trips to Tel Aviv, and he looked tired sitting in the living room of his Upper East Side apartment. The duplex is filled with decorative items of his own making; being a perfectionist, Meier likes everything to be just so, and he has fashioned things like chairs and dishware for home use. He has also made his own menorah.

“I made it because I needed one,” he says.

In fact he made two, in radically different styles. First there’s the one you would expect from a minimalist, a stark lamp of polished stainless steel. It looks just right in the kitchen, which, true to the Meier brand, is blindingly white.

Then there’s a grim-looking lamp in tin that commands a place of honor in the study amid his favorite architecture books. This “Meier Lamp” was originally produced for the Israel Museum in 1985, and a limited edition of $1,000 reproductions will be introduced at tonight’s event. The architectonic pewter candle-holders resemble heavy chess pieces, a big departure from Meier’s customary spare style. Each candlestick signifies an architectural style from moments of persecution over 4,000 years of Jewish history. They range from the expulsion of Egypt through the ages until the concentration camps of Europe.

“I was trying to express the collective memory of the Jewish people,” Meier says. “They serve as reminders of the pogroms suffered by Jews and their strength through the ages.”

To match the menorah, Meier designed three mezuzahs in silver that will retail for $125. I inspect the entrance to see if there’s one hanging there, but the doorpost is bare. “I can’t figure out how to attach them to the door frame,” Meier admits sheepishly. “It’s steel. If I bore a hole I need something behind it. I’d probably have to use crazy glue.”

He’s a world-famous architect and he can’t figure that out? Meier insists he’s serious.

He finds it easier to redefine the Tel Aviv skyline, where his 32-story glass structure is due to be completed in the autumn of 2013. While a fan of the Bauhaus buildings that surround the spot, Meier hopes that he will shake up Israeli architecture much as he did with his iconic Greenwich Village edifices a decade ago.

But what does it signify to leave a mark in Israel? Meier parses his words carefully, presumably because talking about politics is bad for business. He’d much rather talk about the nightlife—Meier is an inveterate restaurant-goer—which he believes makes Manhattan look sleepy.

“It’s complicated,” Meier says finally. “If you live there, you probably have a different view than if you just read about what’s going on. I spent time with some young architects, and you learn what they go through day by day. Going to work, they travel with submachine guns in the back of their cars.”

While the tower pleases him as an aesthetic exercise, because of the play of light and the sea, he admits that it doesn’t carry the significance of a public building like, say, a synagogue.

The desire to build a shul dates back to 1963, when Meier curated an exhibit on American synagogues for the Jewish Museum. He felt particularly inspired by the work of a fellow modernist, Louis Kahn, and the thought has lingered since.

What a Meier synagogue would actually look like, should it ever arise, would depend on the context, he says. Meier factors in the surrounding landscape when drawing up blueprints. It’s safe to guess that the structure would be white, with lots of glass. But that is getting ahead of ourselves, Meier says. “No one has asked me to build one.”

Judith Matloff teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block.

But there is one big problem. In reference to relations with Jews, the Message reads: “Recourse to theological and Biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.” And there is a bigger problem: Speaking at a press conference, Greek Melkite Archbishop Cyrille Salim Bustros—who is actually based in Newton, Massachusetts (so you would think he would have some sense of relations with Jews)—commented on that passage, saying, “We Christians cannot speak of the ‘promised land’ as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people. This promise was nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people—all men and women of all countries have become the chosen people.”

The word you’re searching for is “supersessionism”: it is the dogma, which Bustros appears to subscribe to, that holds that Christians, and their holy books, replace (or supersede) Jews and theirs where there are points of conflict. It is important to note—as Allen, who owns the Vatican beat as few reporters own few other beats, does—that the landmark Second Vatican Council “has been understood to reject” supersessionism. It is also important to note that supersessionism is a deeply offensive doctrine. Writing some years ago, Tablet Magazine contributing editor Leon Wieseltier named it “the ancient grounds of anti-Semitism,” and noted, of supersessionism’s implicit corollary that Christians have an obligation to proselytize, “An affirmation of the Christian mission to the Jews is a delegitimation of Jewish belief.”

It is Bustros’s statement that has Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon condemning “a libel against the Jewish people and the State of Israel” and the Anti-Defamation League accusing him of “effectively stating that Judaism should no longer exist.” On the Website of the Catholic journal First Things, Tablet Magazine contributor David P. Goldman argues that the Middle Eastern bishops are effectively betraying their own flock, who live in a region where, he argues, the real threat is Iran. Allen reports that the question of whether Middle Eastern Christians are best off in Israel was a subject of debate within the synod.

The Vatican’s attempt at damage control has been to de-emphasize Bustros’s press conference statement, saying, “If you want a synthetic expression of the positions of the synod, you have to look at the ‘Message.’”

But, again, the Message itself reads, “Recourse to theological and Biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.” The good news is that Jews are not exactly bound by Catholic synods. As Wieseltier put it, “My honor makes me unconcerned, except politically, about the Vatican’s view of the Jews.” The bad news is that, politically, this seems cause for concern.

Acrimony with Israel Clouds Close of Middle East Synod [National Catholic Reporter]
Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians, Disappointing Bishops [On The Square]
ADL Protests Archbishop’s Outrageous Remarks About Judaism [ADL]
Related: Unconcern

(“The more shameful aspects”? As opposed to the less shameful aspects??)

“They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” he also said.

OK, so before we take totally legitimate and rightful umbrage, Cantalamessa was not saying that the critics’ case against the Church was exactly as unfounded (or founded, if that’s your thing!) as anti-Semites’ case against the Jews. He acknowledged the problem of “violence against children, of which unfortunately also elements of the clergy are stained.” Cantalamessa’s caveat was with these critics’ notion of collective responsibility: Just as an anti-Semite falsely and maliciously believes that all Jews are somehow responsible for the behavior of a single Jew, he is apparently arguing that these critics falsely and maliciously believe that the whole Church is responsible for the acts of certain bad-apple priests.

Where Cantalamessa is outrageously wrong, of course—and not a little offensive—is that while anti-Semites believe that most Jews are involved in a global conspiracy to control events, the Catholic Church actually is a global, coherent agglomeration that in the past decades has in multiple places and taking orders from the top of the hierarchy moved to cover up, paper over, and otherwise tacitly sanction pedophilia.

Like the Church, Jews know what it feels like to be victims of collective persecution. Unlike the Church, Jews don’t know what it feels like for their victimhood to be deserved.

UPDATE: Apparently, if you can read Italian, then you’d know that this article reports that “certain Catholic circles” believe that much recent criticism of the Church comes from a “New York ‘Jewish lobby.’ ”

At Vatican Service, Persecution of Jews Is Invoked [NYT]

Still, regarding Palestine, the blame goes both ways, right? Surely the Church has no interest in attracting controversy by going out of its way to lay responsibility for the bloodshed at the feet of one side over the other? “The solution to conflicts rests in the hands of the stronger country in its occupying and inflicting wars on another country,” the document argues. “Violence is in the hands of the strong and weak alike, the latter resorting to whatever violence is within reach in order to be free.” Er, this probably will not be the end of this.

Mideast Bishops Convened Amid Exodus, Violence [AP/WP]

Predictably, stodgy viewers found Silverman’s approach offensive (come on, people—“house that is a city”—is sheer! comic! gold!). Among the scolds is Catholic League president Bill Donohue, quoted in an article in America, a Catholic weekly. He says Silverman is being anti-Catholic and that her “filthy diatribe would never be allowed if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel.” Really? Donohue’s obviously not following the comedian on Twitter, where she spares nobody, least of all her own kind, from insult. To wit: “Saw A Serious Man last night — a disgusting yet accuate portrait of us grossy jews down to, like our thicker-ish saliva.”

Sarah Silverman: Sell the Vatican? [America]