October 17, 2007 | 2:46 pm

Major Jewish philanthropist creates investigative journalism nonprofit

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Now there’s a headline with a lot of words I like. ProPublica could be a godsend that fills the investigative-journalism gap left by massive budget cuts. Or it could be a way for creator and chairman Herbert Sandler to shape the news. Sandler, who last year he donated $500 million to various causes, mostly non-Jewish, gets a mention in a story I have in tomorrow’s Jewish Journal about the new world of Jewish philanthropy. More on that later.

October 16, 2007 | 9:06 pm

Rudy talks the the talk with Jewish hawks

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

He’s not the apple of evangelical Christians’ eyes, but Rudy Giuliani is clearly the Republican Jewish Coalition‘s guy, what with his terrorist-fighting image and his employment of Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Pipes. Giuliani spoke to the RJC in Washington this morning. Here’s some excerpts, via JoinRudy2008:

A lot of you are the first Republicans in your families, right? Am I right?

A lot of you get grief for being Republicans, right? As a three-time candidate and eight-year mayor of New York City, I know what you’re talking about. Wow.

I remember this happened so many times, I get all the incidents confused. But one that was particularly poignant was this man who was very, very old and frail came up to me and he grabbed my hand and he said, You’re the first Republican I ever voted for. I said, How old are you? He said, I’m 92 years old.

I said, In over like 80 years of voting or whatever, you couldn’t find another Republican to vote for? He said, I thought it was sinful.

Wow, has Giuliani been taking speaking lessons from President Bush? From here, he didn’t take long to mention Sept. 11, and then he started hitting the right notes for many Jews, Republican and Democrat.

We’re the ones that really want peace in the Middle East, real peace, what it really means. Peace has to be based on realism, not romance. It’s shocking that 60 years after the Holocaust, the Jewish people are still required to negotiate for the right to exist.

This should be beyond negotiation. Someday I hope that Jews and Arabs can sit down together to negotiate borders, water, trade. It’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen more quickly if we remain strong and we remain really, really clear.

You cannot negotiate with someone who is threatening to destroy you and your family.

(skip)

What are you going to negotiate with them about? How many of your kids they’re going to kill or when they’re going to do it?

You’ve got to negotiate with people that at least make a step toward giving a reasonable possibility of getting a sensible result.

In the case of the Palestinians, here’s what it is, two big ones. First of all, the Palestinians have to say and acknowledge and mean it that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.

Number one, because Israel’s already negotiated its existence. That negotiation happened a long time ago and that’s over and they’ve just got to kind of move on.

Second, second, they have to be willing to say, We forsake terrorism and we’re going to help to reduce and eliminate terrorism and they need to show their good faith by that condition remaining that way for some period of time. It’s as simple as that — or as hard as that.

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October 16, 2007 | 3:26 pm

‘Don’t have the house of the Lord in sub-prime loans’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When my wife and I sold our condo two years ago and returned to LA, we looked at homes but decided to sit on the sidelines and wait for the market to settle. Good decision. What a mess that beautiful bubble has become. The median-priced home sold in Los Angeles in September was $25,000 lighter than in August and the number of sales was down 30 percent!

The downturn has been fueled by sub-prime loans, which, obvious to anyone in California, were used not just by the poor but also those who wanted to stretch for a bigger home. Even Christian lenders got involved in the sub-prime market, though not as commonly as other mortgage companies, and I’ve got a piece about how the tailspin is affecting these financial institutions in the current issue of Christianity Today.

HomeBanc Corp. brought a Christian ethos to the seemingly lucrative market of sub-prime home loans. Flush with a staff of believers, the Atlanta-based company opened meetings in prayer and counted a megachurch founder its head of human resources.

But in mid-August, the company, which Fortune magazine ranked the 67th-best to work for earlier this year, filed for bankruptcy, reportedly laying off most of its 1,100 employees and closing 22 branch offices.

HomeBanc’s demise was brought on by the same factor that led to its rise—a housing market that expanded, then shrank, on the back of risky home loans. Other Christian lenders felt the pinch, too. But unlike HomeBanc, most weathered the storm well, buoyed by the security of limiting loans for homebuyers.

The Evangelical Christian Credit Union, the largest Christian lender (and, with more than $1 billion in core assets, a rival to the largest secular lenders to nonprofits), never entered the home market. Other Christian lenders protected their home loans by staying away from sub-prime lending.

“Because of what we stand for and because of who we serve, we can’t afford to put people into those loans,” said Linda Tashiro, chief operating officer of the San Dimas, California-based Christian Community Credit Union. “We have to sleep at night.”

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October 16, 2007 | 3:22 pm

Do it ... Come on ... Do it

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The All-Bran challenge: Do it, feel it.

Slate has a funny commentary on the boldness of a bran ad that shows “barrels actually plop out from behind that guy’s butt.”

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October 16, 2007 | 2:50 pm

‘Right With God’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Hanna Rosin has written a lot about the mash-up of young evangelicals and politics, a topic I keep returning to as the 2008 presidential campaign heats up. Well, I just came across a 31-month-old article Rosin wrote about evangelicals finding a home on Capitol Hill, and, though it bears mainly stale news masked by good writing, it’s worth blogging about because the lede focuses on a regular reader of The God Blog who happens to work at Pepperdine and attend my church with her husband.

Lyric Hassler talks about her Christian rock phase the way some of us talk about crushes on Sean Cassidy, or acid-wash jeans, or the hundreds of hours we wasted memorizing Pink Floyd lyrics. “Uchhhhhh, embarrassing,” she says. The gaudy soundtrack of the “Christian ghetto” she lived in as a teenager. Lyric the high school “Jesus freak,” chastising her church youth group for wasting time on frivolous pizza parties, ignoring any TV that wasn’t “The 700 Club.”

“It just makes me wince,” she says now that her ghetto self is long gone, now that she’s made it here, to Washington, to the languid Friday afternoon tea time in a congressional cafeteria, to her starched white blouse and a stint on the presidential campaign and a husband who works in the Senate, to a salon of what she calls “Christian intellectuals.”

She is still the same Lyric Hassler, still young (26), still a Christian, still evangelical enough that some of her colleagues on the Bush campaign found her piety “a little weird,” she says. But the kind of weird that blends in without too much trouble. “I’ve come a long way, in terms of Christian maturity,” she says.” I’m not afraid of what the secular world might do to me.”

“Uccch.” It’s the sound of a movement shoving aside its past like so many pairs of braces. The conservative Christian political movement that burst on Washington in the ‘80s, the activists with their aborted-fetus placards and their heady plans to colonize school boards and their here-and-now visions of the Apocalypse, their early years are now a source of embarrassment to themselves.

Amen to them. No more thundering sermons on Wiccans and floods and child molesters, caught on tape and leaked by a political opponent. No more pronouncements about “signs” showing up in California. No more horrors from the Book of Revelation.

It’s what Ralph Reed dreamed of, and now it’s finally here. Christians in politics are ready to trade in their guerrilla fatigues for business suits and a day job. This year evangelicals in public office have finally become so numerous that they’ve blended in to the permanent Washington backdrop, a new establishment that has absorbed the local habits and mores.

 

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October 16, 2007 | 11:36 am

Paper checks in on ‘reluctant Republicans’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Dallas Morning News had a story yesterday about the young evangelical Christians I call the “reluctant Republicans” crowd.

For many conservative evangelical Christians younger than 30, family values mean more than the issues of gay marriage, abortion and prayer in school. Poverty, health care and the environment are also matters of faith.

“There’s an awareness to be more savvy and to say, ‘I can’t be completely captured and represented by someone like Jerry Falwell.’ I don’t think that flies anymore,” said Ms. Gonzalez, a graduate student at Baylor University. “Family really shapes your definition of values more than attending a political rally or being involved politically.”

Evangelical Protestants have been one of the most faithful Republican voting blocs in recent presidential elections, but there are abundant signs the movement is fracturing as the 2008 contest approaches. The younger generation in particular is less wedded to the GOP and to the moral-values agenda espoused by an influential corps of Christian conservative leaders.

 

The article refers to this study by the Pew Forum that found President Bush’s favor had fallen with younger evangelicals.

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October 16, 2007 | 3:10 am

‘Gingerly, Romney Seeks Ties to Christian Right’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Tell me something I didn’t know already. Re-reportage from the NY Times:

He has invoked the Rev. Rick Warren, a popular evangelical author and megachurch pastor. He has quoted Scripture and alluded to the Gideon Bible as favorite late-night reading. And he has cited his belief in Jesus Christ as his personal “savior.”

As Mitt Romney has had to grapple with suspicions about his Mormon religion during his presidential run, he has tried in various ways to signal his kinship with evangelical Christians, who represent a crucial constituency of the Republican base but consider his religious beliefs to be heretical.

He faces a delicate task in trying to stake out common ground with conservative Christians, while not running afoul of deeply rooted evangelical sensitivities about any blurring of distinctions between Mormonism and conventional Protestantism.

Romney’s got a date Friday with the Values Voter Summit (because everyone else votes for things they don’t value). His aids still aren’t sure if he’ll directly address his religious beliefs then. Polls continue to show many Americans would not vote for a Mormon president, no matter how qualified they may be.

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October 16, 2007 | 12:51 am

Reporter killed in Iraq covering sectarian violence

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Like we need a reminder that things are really bad in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 14—On Sunday afternoon, Salih Saif Aldin set out for one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods. He knew exactly where to go. He nodded, smiled, grabbed his camera. There was nothing he needed to say.

Saif Aldin always came back—from death threats, from beatings, from kidnappings, from detentions by American soldiers, from the country’s most notorious and deadly terrain—but on Sunday he didn’t. The 32-year-old Iraqi reporter in The Washington Post‘s Baghdad bureau was shot once in the forehead in the southwestern neighborhood of Sadiyah. He was the latest in a long line of reporters, most of them Iraqis, to be killed while covering the Iraq war. He was the first for The Washington Post.

“The death of Salih Saif Aldin in the service of our readers is a tragedy for everyone at The Washington Post. He was a brave and valuable reporter who contributed much to our coverage of Iraq,” said Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Post. “We are in his debt. We grieve with his family, friends, fellow journalists and everyone in our Baghdad bureau.”

At 2 p.m., Saif Aldin took a taxi from The Post’s office to Sadiyah to interview residents about the sectarian violence there between Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents. It was his third trip to the embattled neighborhood within a week. For him, there were no red zones, no green zones, no neighborhoods out of bounds.

Two hours later, a man picked up Saif Aldin’s cellphone and called a colleague at The Post to say he had been shot.

Residents of the neighborhood and Iraqi military officers at the scene said Saif Aldin was killed while taking photographs on a street where several houses had been burned. His wounds appeared to indicate he was shot at close range. His body was later observed lying on the street, covered with newspapers.

 

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October 15, 2007 | 11:41 pm

Is this Heaven?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

No, it’s Colorado. Rockies continue their divine run, sweeping their way into the World Series.

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October 15, 2007 | 4:33 pm

If I stopped shaving and lived like an Israelite

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A clever review of A.J. Jacobs comical book, “The Year of Living Biblically.”

If I were to write this review while trying to live biblically, here are some of the rules I would have to follow:

Love thy neighbor. Jacobs is a fellow journalist and thus a neighbor of sorts. I would have to strive to be as generous as possible, and point out right at the outset that this book is an inspired idea and that Jacobs is alarmingly adept at keeping the joke alive for 365 days.

Thou shalt not covet. I would have to confess my jealousy that Jacobs already had a movie contract in place before the book had even been published, and that even though I have spent much more time around young-earth creationists than he has, he thought of a much funnier way to describe them (people who believe in an earth that’s “barely older than Gene Hackman”).

Thou shalt not bear false witness. I would have to admit that every once in a while, as he wrote about walking down some New York street in a shepherd’s robe strumming his 10-string harp, or throwing small stones at a random suspected sinner, or eating crickets or burning myrrh each morning, I thought to myself, What’s the point, really?

But having a point is slightly beside the point. Jacobs is a stunt journalist, although that term seems belittling to the monumental self-improvement projects he subjects himself to. In his last book, “The Know-It-All,” Jacobs read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in an attempt to make himself smarter than his showoff brother-in-law.

In “The Year of Living Biblically,” he attends to the soul, turning himself from a guy who is “Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant” into a follower of “the ultimate biblical life.” This means spending a year strictly following a typed list of more than 700 biblical rules, including the obscure (don’t wear garments of mixed fibers, bind money to your hand, pay the wages of your workers every day) and the potentially awkward (don’t touch your wife seven days after her “discharge of blood,” bathe after sex and don’t tell lies, in their many variations).

Read the rest of Hanna Rosin‘s review for The New York Times here.

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October 15, 2007 | 1:43 pm

American soldier goes Harry Caray at Iraqi checkpoint

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Wow. Here’s an American soldier at an Iraqi checkpoint—based on the vans and striped shirts, I think it’s legit—impersonating Will Ferrell impersonating Harry Caray, one of the best shticks “Saturday Night Live” has ever had. Considering the death toll in Iraq, I’m not sure it’s so funny in real life.

Deadspin says:

It’s a delicate maneuver to be sure, but if we can pull this off for laughs, it’s only a matter of time before everything else over there falls into place.

Hmmm. I thought Bush said that the U.S. doesn’t torture?

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October 15, 2007 | 1:20 pm

The Forward wants to hire Joe Torre

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m not sure how much Joe Torre knows about the Jewish community, but the associate publisher of The Forward told the New York Post he’d gladly hire one of the greatest managers in baseball history of George Steinbrenner gives him the boot.

I’d absolutely hire him. He’s the world’s master at managing gigantic egos and journalism and publishing certainly have a lot of those.

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