November 8, 2007 | 7:20 pm

Priest arrested for stalking Conan O’Brien

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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A priest has been arrested on charges of stalking late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien by writing him threatening notes on parish letterhead, contacting his parents and showing up at his studio, prosecutors said Wednesday.

“I want a public confession before I ever consider giving you absolution _ or a spot on your couch,” wrote the Rev. David Ajemian, who signed the notes “Padre,” said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Ajemian, from the Archdiocese of Boston, was arrested last week while trying to enter a taping session of NBC’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, near where other NBC shows are taped and the famous Christmas tree is put up, Thompson said.

Court papers say Ajemian referred to himself as “your priest stalker” in one note and complained of not being allowed in to see an earlier taping of the O’Brien show.

“Is this the way you treat your most dangerous fans?” the note said.

Well, at least Ajemian wasn’t arrested for the other crime that in recent years has been attached to Catholic priests.

November 8, 2007 | 7:14 pm

‘Mario Bros’ electric show

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

My GeekHeeb colleague put this up on his blog last night. I’m not sure how two Tesla cables and a fiber-optic cable running from a laptop create the theme to “Mario Bros,” but this is pretty awesome, sort of like “The Prestige.” (The Geek Group did a similar demonstration.)

Can someone explain how this works?

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November 8, 2007 | 6:14 pm

On the picket line with Jewish screenwriters

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“Are you Jewish?”

With some discomfort, I asked that question repeatedly of the 300-plus picketers in front of CBS Studio Center in Studio City on Monday, the first day of the strike by the Writers Guild of America.

It was an awkward query not because I feared dismissal—after accounting for noses and facial hair and eyeglasses, I was able to reduce uncertainty to about 20 percent—but because I knew these TV and film writers did not see a connection between Yiddishkayt and the failed contract negotiations that spurred some 12,000 members of the WGA to go on strike at 9:01 p.m. Sunday.

“What’s the Jewish angle?” Andrew Jacobson, a co-writer of “Not Another Teen Movie,” asked me. “I don’t see one except in the most stereotypical sense. This is an issue that affects people regardless of religion or race or gender. It’s writers united.”

Indeed, “Hollywood writer” is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn’t a Jewish story. It’s a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

This was probably the most challenging story I’ve reported since joining The Jewish Journal six months ago. I could not, for the life of me, find my angle, and then I labored long and hard over the wording of this 700-word story. I know, it doesn’t show.

It just seemed like such an awkward topic, a story with characters so obviously Jewish but a theme and plot that has nothing to do with Judaism. And asking film and TV writers if they are Jewish is like asking someone in Vatican City if they are Catholic. When I asked Marc Alan Levy, who wrote the TV movie “Searching for David’s Heart,” he deadpanned, “Yeah. I’m the only one in line.”

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November 8, 2007 | 3:03 pm

More aid to Palestinians means more murders

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This stark graph from Mere Rhetoric shows that homicides in the West Bank and Gaza closely follow the amount of international aid flowing to Palestinians, adjusted for a one-year lag.

We found this CAMERA study through a Minneapolis economics blogger named Captain Capitalism. It looks at what happens to the number of people Palestinians murder in the year after an increase or decrease in aid. Hmm:

 

Every time aid increases, homicides increase. Every time it decreases, homicides decrease. There’s a not uncompelling theory about how cultures degenerate into corruption and depravity when they have to rely on outsiders to literally feed and clothe them. That explains some of what’s going on, but it isn’t enough to explain such a strong and consistent correlation.

(Hat tip: Seraphic Secret)

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November 8, 2007 | 2:24 pm

Rabbi will pay for love

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

My editor got a lot of letters in response to a column a few months ago that said rabbis should encourage Jewish woman to date gentile men. I’m not sure if Rabbi Donald Weber read the column, but shortly after the New Jersey rabbi offered a unique approach to get Jews to marry each other.

Six weeks ago, in his Yom Kippur sermon at Temple Rodeph Torah, a Reform synagogue, Weber offered to personally pay for six-month memberships to JDate, the popular Jewish Internet dating service, for any singles in the congregation who asked.

JDate charges $149 for a six- month membership, and so far, nine people have taken the rabbi up on his offer. He and his wife, Shira Stern, initially pledged $1,000 to the effort but just donated a second $1,000 as more people came forward.

“All they have to do is claim it,” said Weber, who received a slight group discount from JDate. “We’ll do this as long as there’s a need, and as long as there’s a desire.”

 

Well, considering the declining American Jewish population and the crisis of intermarriage that some Jewish sociologists have been crying gevalt over for decades, I hope Rabbi Weber and his wife have a large savings account.

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November 8, 2007 | 12:17 pm

The ‘Jewish hustler’ gets some real green

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Dov Charney is a self-described “Jewish hustler,” and today he hustled some real dough out of the deal that is buying out his clothing company, American Apparel. Mark Lacter, whose LA Biz Observed is my main source of financial news, has the info and reports that AA employees now sign a document stating:

“American Apparel is in the business of designing and manufacturing sexually charged T-shirts and intimate apparel, and uses sexually charged visual and oral communications in its marketing and sales activity.”

Lacter also linked to this New York Times article about Charney:

Mr. Charney has gained a reputation as the Hugh Hefner of retailing, decorating his stores with covers of Penthouse magazine and admitting in interviews to sleeping with employees. In lawsuits filed in 2005, several employees charged him with creating a work environment in which women did not feel safe. They claimed in the lawsuits, for example, that Mr. Charney conducted job interviews in his underwear and gave a vibrator to at least one female worker. Mr. Charney has denied the charges, and judges have dismissed some of the lawsuits against him. In the interview, Mr. Charney said that the media had “exploited American Apparel on certain issues,” adding, “I would never do an interview in my underwear.”

Sure, every know and then an AA ad is innocuous, even cute like that unauthorized billboard of Woody Allen as “der heyliker rebe.” But Charney really has a knack for provocativeness. “I could pull my penis out right now,” he told The Jewish Journal a few years ago, “and I guarantee you no one would be offended.”

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November 8, 2007 | 10:22 am

When you’re wealthy, you don’t need God

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Sometimes, the religious get rich because of their faith, and not always for wholesome reasons. But more commonly, the wealthier people are, the smaller a role God plays in their lives. This was the reasoning behind Jesus’ famous aphorism that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

I’ve repeated this reasoning to my friends often because, being a fairly self-sufficient, not-poor American, it’s easy to forget to say “Thank God” when people ask how I am doing. (I admire Orthodox Jews who are better about remembering this.)

Anyway, I’m a journalist, and for journalists a story becomes newsworthy when a new study that proves reality. Thanks Pew Research Center.

Pew found that there is “a strong relationship between a country’s religiosity and its economic status.” The poorer a country, the more “religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations.”

The United States is the “most notable” exception. Other exceptions are oil-rich, mostly Muslim nations like Kuwait.

There is no simple interpretation of the findings. Perhaps as “people get less religious, they get wealthier,” wrote Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog. “Or perhaps the other way around. Or perhaps there’s something else behind both trends.”

  Mr. Drum concludes that it’s “probably a bit of all three.”

 

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November 8, 2007 | 9:42 am

Correction of the ... whatever

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Editor & Publisher calls this from The Telegraph in London the “Newspaper Correction of the Month (If Not Year).”

Our obituary of Lady Jeanne Campbell (Sept 22) said she had a daughter, Cusi Cram, ‘possibly by a man called Guy Nicholas Lancaster.’ In fact Mr. Lancaster is Ms. Cram’s brother-in-law and was only five when she was born. We apologise to all concerned for our error.

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November 7, 2007 | 7:38 pm

Pat Robertson endorses Giuliani—who cares?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The New York Times, and their veteran reporter of the social conservatives beat, David D. Kirkpatrick, make a big mistake in today’s story about televangelist Pat Robertson endorsing the Republican presidential candidate who has made most evangelicals so comfortable.

Rudolph W. Giuliani scored a coup today by winning the support of Pat Robertson, who, as one of the nation’s best-known televangelists, could help Mr. Giuliani reassure Republicans who are wary of his support for abortion rights and gay rights.

See, right there, they assume that Robertson, the same guy who said on air that the United States should seize the opportunity to assassinate Hugo Chavez, has any cultural currency. In the opinion of a twentysomething evangelical who reluctantly remains a Republican, Robertson’s relevancy is deader than Jerry Falwell’s.

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November 7, 2007 | 2:51 pm

Obama Girl’s Coulter crush

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This brilliant little ditty by Leah Kauffman seems to have gone viral while I was MIA (aka playing poker in Vegas last week; oy vey). Notice the Jerry Falwell cameo and the sound bites from other Ann Coulter memorable moments.

“New York City during the Republican National Convention. In fact, that is what I think Heaven is going to look like ...”

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November 7, 2007 | 2:09 pm

Giuliani’s former police commish to be indicted

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Rudy Giuliani’s personal priest was accused of pedophilia, now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination can expect his former business partner and close adviser, Bernard B. Kerik, to be indicted for tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy.

The grand jury, sitting in Westchester, has been hearing evidence about Mr. Kerik for more than a year as part of a broad federal investigation into a variety of allegations, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

If an indictment is voted up, as prosecutors are expected to request, it would remain sealed until Friday, when Mr. Kerik would be arraigned in United States District Court in White Plains.
   
    Mr. Kerik served under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and questions about the former police commissioner and correction commissioner have been troublesome for Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign. There have been concerns about lapses in the vetting of his background when Mr. Kerik was named police commissioner.

 

And don’t forget when Giuliani got President Bush to nominate Kerik for head of Homeland Security. Michael Wolff at Vanity Fair thinks Giuliani’s relationship with Kerik says a lot about his attitude toward accountability.

And Bernie Kerik. There is no circumstance under which a politician with any sense of vulnerability or accountability or merely the need to maintain a sense of appearances hires Bernie Kerik (no less as the police commissioner). Kerik is from Paterson, New Jersey, where I’m from. He came to live in a house in the suburb just down the road from where my parents lived. I knew or had heard the same stories everyone else—my parents and my parents’ friends—had heard. Which it seems impossible Rudy would not have heard, too. And if, somehow, he hadn’t heard them, we know now from Rudy’s own grand-jury testimony that he was, in fact, officially told—though, he says, it didn’t quite register. In other words, one of the most experienced prosecutors of organized-crime figures has spelled out for him what is widely rumored—that his corrections chief and prospective police commissioner might be Mobbed up—and he doesn’t get it. Yup. And then goes on to become business partners with the guy. And then becomes his sponsor for high federal office.

Let’s not even get into the nature of Rudy’s tolerance for whatever Kerik was into, and just focus on Rudy’s sense of impunity—he’s got no sense of caution. (A likely implosion point for the Rudy campaign is Kerik’s anticipated trial for tax fraud and providing false information to federal authorities when he was vetted for the job of homeland-security chief, which Rudy sponsored him for.) It’s about getting away with it. It’s waving the red flag. It’s his assumption that everybody is a pantywaist, except him.

 

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November 7, 2007 | 1:54 pm

Wycliffe Hall under attack

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Britain’s leading evangelical college is at a breaking point.

Wycliffe Hall, a private seminary that matriculates its own students through Oxford, has seen the resignation of eight of it’s 13 faculty members since a new principal took over last year and allegedly began narrowing the school’s focus to a more conservative theological approach.

Adding to the pain, a review by the University of Oxford published this fall found that Wycliffe and the six other private halls were not providing an education in line with Oxford’s liberal ethos. What happens next, God only knows. But I’ve got a short news piece about it in this month’s Christianity Today.

“If the turbulence that is currently going on does settle down ... [then] this may be seen as a turning point at which Wycliffe went from one approach of evangelicalism to another approach that is just as well,” said Justin Thacker, head of theology for the U.K.‘s Evangelical Alliance. “When Paul and Barnabas split over the issue of John Mark … there were two missions instead of just one. There have been divisions—and they have been painful divisions—but I hope that at the end of the day, each group that splits off goes to do so in the service of Jesus Christ.”

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