January 31, 2008 | 3:51 pm

Jews: ‘Voting as if our lives depend upon it’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein had barely slept in days.

A senior at Beverly Hills High School, he’d spent long hours rallying support for Barack Obama, and as the results from the Iowa caucuses poured in, as fellow Obama supporters packed the presidential candidate’s California campaign office in Koreatown, Spitzer-Rubenstein turned jubilant, his enthusiasm mashing together with exhaustion into euphoria.

“Yeah!” he shouted, jumping up and down in a corner where he was hawking T-shirts, bumper stickers and buttons for the Illinois senator. “Obama! Obama! Obama!” he chanted with the crowd. “Fired up! Ready to go! Fired up! Ready to go! Let’s go change the world!”

Then his cell phone rang. It was one of the many high school volunteers he oversees as the L.A. teen director.

“Hi, Amy,” Spitzer-Rubenstein, 17, said. “So it looks like we did it. It’s awesome. You helped make this happen. Yeah, every little bit matters.”

One down, 49 to go, which means many more hours of lost sleep for Spitzer-Rubenstein. Far from alone in volunteering for the candidate he thinks holds the key to a better America, Jews are planted throughout most of the presidential front-runners’ campaigns, from top advisory levels to grassroots street teams.

So much excitement hasn’t surrounded a presidential primary season in 40 years, not since Bobby Kennedy was in the race. And for the first time in at least as long, California’s primary will matter. Until now, only six states have cast their votes for party nominations, with Florida’s vote Tuesday terminating the campaigns of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Maine’s residents will vote Friday and then on Feb. 5, 22 states, including California, Illinois and New York, will go to the polls on what has been dubbed “Super-Duper Tuesday” and “Tsunami Tuesday.” Meanwhile, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an Independent and a Jew, continues to play presidential footsie, presumably waiting to see how the field thins.

With the contest still up for grabs—three Republicans and two Democrats still with a realistic chance of getting their party’s nod—Tuesday’s race is expected to determine the ballot for the general election. And already quite a few Jews have been writing checks, working phones or simply spreading their candidate’s gospel in an effort to court the deciding votes.

Julie Shapiro, a young lawyer for Universal and volunteer for Hillary Clinton, last week started an effort to get other female lawyers fired up about the New York senator. David Slomovic, a father of three, spent recent Thursday evenings opening his commercial real estate office for phone banking for Giuliani. And Dr. Joel Geiderman, co-chair of the emergency medicine department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and vice chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, has spent his free time encouraging lifelong Democrats to switch sides.

“The two visions of America the parties offer could not be any more different,” Geiderman said.

Jews in real estate and Hollywood were quick to get involved, too—support had been strongest for Clinton and Obama, Giuliani and John McCain—endorsing early, opening their homes for fundraisers and crisscrossing the country in support.

“We took our family holiday in Iowa this year,” said Sony Pictures Chairman and CEO Michael Lynton, who hosted Obama at his home last summer and went with his wife and kids to the Jan. 3 caucuses.

Tonight, MGM chief Harry Sloan will host his second fundraiser for McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona. Obama will attend one at the Avalon. And Hillary Clinton will be at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a fundraiser organized by the likes of Peter Lowy, Haim Saban, Barbra Streisand and Daphna and Richard Ziman.

“All of us believe this is an absolutely critical election,” said Michael Berenbaum, an adjunct professor of theology at American Jewish University. “The last four years of the Bush administration have been disastrous. If we don’t get ourselves squared away, it could be the end of the American Century and the end of the way the American Jewish community has been American in this era.

“We are voting as if our lives and futures depend upon it. Not because we fear someone is going to come out and kill us, but because we fear that if we don’t get this right, our children and their children will not enjoy the privileges this generation has enjoyed as Americans—the economic opportunity, the prosperity, the education, all of those elements that have characterized our existence and our flourishing. After Florida in 2000, everybody knows that every vote absolutely counts.”

That is the opening section of my story for this week’s Jewish Journal, which is a bit stale in print but was updated online. I’ll blog more about Jews and the ‘08 election later.

January 31, 2008 | 11:51 am

Feline fuhrer

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

What do you see in the above photo? What you should see is an ad by Germany’s Green Party attacking xenophobic right wingers. What does it say? “You can’t always recognize Nazis at first glance.”

The poster has, not surprisingly, unleashed some sort of public debate, though over what I’m not sure. Haaretz has the story. What I find most amusing is the identity of one of the aggrieved parties: CatsThatLookLikeHitler.com.

Happy New Year to everyone (belatedly). And in today’s news, get this, the German Green Party have elected to use Kitlers in their latest electoral literature. (Click the picture for bigification!) It’s a shame they had to use a Photoshopped Kitler - there are lots of resident furry Furhers on here who would have loved, I’m sure, to be a model for the Greens!

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

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January 31, 2008 | 10:21 am

Correction of the year

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This correction ran Tuesday in the San Antonio News-Express:

Nell and Wallace Crain, a couple who were featured in an Express-News Page 1A story and photo on “the secret to a happy marriage,” died between the writing of the story last summer and its publication in the San Antonio Express-News on Monday. The deaths were not mentioned in the report.

The Express-News apologizes to family and friends of the couple, and to our readers, for the egregious omission.

J. Michael Parker, who wrote the story after spotting and interviewing the Crains at North Star Mall last June, said he learned of their deaths Monday via an e-mail from a Crain family friend. The friend put Parker in touch with Cheryl Crain Sanders, the couple’s daughter, who was gracious in an e-mail to the reporter:

“Thank you for including my parents as an example of ‘love until death.’ The article was thoughtful and well written. ... Your article, while bittersweet to me, will be a great reminder to our family of their love and commitment.”

The couple’s daughter said Wallace Crain died the day before Thanksgiving last year and Nell Crain died Dec. 9. They had been married for 67 years.

Parker explained that he turned in his story to Express-News religion editor Arthur Santana late last summer. Santana said he edited the story, but essentially put it on hold until after the holidays. Two weeks ago, he gave the story back to Parker for updating. However, while he re-interviewed two other couples featured in the story, Parker did not seek new input from the Crains.

“I didn’t feel like Mr. Crain’s comments needed updating,” Parker said. “... They were such a sweet couple. They were what really made the story a story.”

It’s fitting I would see this today because, due to production deadlines, I had a story published today that included some very old news. Most journalists know the frustration of watching an editor hold onto your story so long that you feel the reason for writing the article has passed and worry your subjects have too. But to have that actually occur ... Here’s Parker’s story, with grace and peace to Crain family.

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January 31, 2008 | 1:44 am

‘Politics sort of is the Jewish religion’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Flashback 14 months:

Blaming Judaism for his father’s peculiarities, the first Jewish member of Congress converted to Christianity to hide his heritage and preserve his political career.

But with a name like David Levy Yulee, he was only fooling himself.

Times have changed since Yulee became Florida’s junior senator in 1845 - more than a century before the southern state became a favorite destination for Jewish retirees from the northeast.

After a handful of victories in Tuesday’s election, Jews are poised to have their largest congressional representation ever. This U.S. community of roughly 6 million people - about 2 percent of the nation’s population - will contribute 30 members to the House. With 13 Jewish members of the Senate, the proportion in the upper chamber will be 6 1/2 times greater than that in the general population.

“Jews are just political animals,” said Steven Windmueller, dean of the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

“Politics sort of is the Jewish religion,” he added. “There is just such a passion for being in the game, in the process. Jewish life thrives in societies where democracies work, and that is why there is such a heavy buy-in into the American political process.”

I decided to resurrect this story, which I wrote in November 2006 for the LA Daily News, in light of my story for this week’s Jewish Journal, which I will blog about later this afternoon when it goes online. You can read the rest of the above story here. You’ll notice the same cheesy Roosevelt joke.

(The pictured book, one every person involved with or interested in American Jewry should read, can be found at Google Books and, obviously, Amazon.)

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January 30, 2008 | 3:08 pm

Romney says Mormons not Christians?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From the Unlikely About Face Department:

“Mitt Romney has acknowledged that Mormonism is not a Christian faith.”

That comment was made by a policy expert from Focus on the Family. But if you recall from his faith in America speech, Romney said:

I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history.

In other words: We’re as Christian as Lutherans and Catholics. Romney’s campaign has rebutted the Focus on the Family claim.

GetReligion has the backstory and a bit more explanation:

There’s quite a bit of buzz out there right now in evangelical circles about a series of informational videos that are up and running at CitizenLink.org — which is part of the wider kingdom linked to an activist by the name of James Dobson. The videos feature clips of recent webcasts with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Right now, everyone is asking — will Dobson endorse either (gasp) Mitt Romney or (gasp!) John McCain? It is in that context that the following blog item by Michael Scherer appears at Time, with the pushy headline: “A stealth Mitt Romney endorsement from the religious right’s powerbrokers?”

The clip on Rudy Giuliani is harsh (note that reference to dancing in drag). No surprise. The McCain video says voters have no way of knowing what the senator will do next. No surprise. Then the video on Mike Huckabee is surprisingly critical. No surprise?

After praising Huckabee’s social views, both Perkins and Tom Minnery, a policy expert at Focus on the Family, hammer the former Arkansas governor for his foreign policy views. Minnery suggests that Huckabee does not understand the cause for which American troops are dying in Iraq. Then Perkins suggests that Huckabee lacks the fiscal and national security credentials needed for a conservative presidential candidate. “The conservatives have been successful in electing candidates, and presidents in particular, when they have had a candidate that can address not only the social issues, [but] the fiscal issues and the defense issues,” says Perkins. “[Huckabee] has got to reach out to the fiscal conservatives and the security conservatives.” Ouch.

Now hang on, here comes the buried lede.

So what about Romney? He comes up roses. “He has staked out positions on all three of the areas that we have discussed,” says Perkins. “I think he continues to be solidly conservative.” Then Minnery defends Romney from criticism that he is too polished and smooth. “Mitt Romney has acknowledged that Mormonism is not a Christian faith,” Minnery adds. “But on the social issues we are so similar.”

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January 30, 2008 | 1:58 pm

Fighting anti-Semitism online

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Here’s a boring story from the Jerusalem Post that includes a novel proposal from the Israeli president.

President Shimon Peres urged young students at Yad Vashem on Tuesday to use the social networking site Facebook to fight anti-Semitism. “You can make a collective effort,” he told a student from Guatemala.

Peres was at Yad Vashem to address the 116 students from 62 countries who are participating in an international Youth Congress on the Holocaust. According to a Yad Vashem spokesperson, the group comprised more non-Jews than Jews.

In fact, a search on Facebook for “anti-Semitism” finds 313 groups, including this one. Hat tip to Bloggish, who e-mailed this story to me, saying, “I agree with Peres in theory, but I prefer YouTube in practice.”

(Technorati Profile)

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January 30, 2008 | 12:37 pm

Lieberman riding McCain’s coattails

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Such hyperbole should not be a surprise; in November he compared John Hagee to Moses. And, yeah, Joe Lieberman is a fan of Republican leading man John McCain. But does he really think the Arizona senator is “part Maccabean?”

Lieberman is certainly a good judge, given his own history with unexpected success - including his decision to endorse McCain last December, before McCain’s campaign had fully rebounded from a near-collapse last summer.

Since then, Lieberman has been one of McCain’s most prominent promoters, lending help by soliciting donations from Connecticut contacts and actively stumping on the campaign trail. Now, after a stretch that has seen wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, McCain seems to have bounded to the top of the Republican field and, in the process, catapulted one of America’s most famous Jewish politicians back onto the national stage.

According to observers, Lieberman’s support has been unusually helpful to McCain, giving him a boost with independent voters who contributed to his wins in South Carolina and New Hampshire. In Florida, Lieberman helped give the Arizona senator an edge by turning out Jews, as well as Cuban Americans, in the southern part of the state.

But the real surprise may be yet to come. According to a Lieberman aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity, if McCain wins the nomination, Lieberman is also likely to play a growing role in shoring up what at first blush would not seem to be one of his core constituencies: Christian evangelicals.

“He’s one of those unique campaign surrogates who can travel both in the Jewish community and the Christian community, as well,” the aide said. “I would suspect that as the campaign goes further, Senator Lieberman will probably be active on that front, as well.”

So active, in fact, that speculation has already begun that Lieberman, possibly uninterested in running for a fifth Senate term in 2012, might be rewarded for his support with another shot at the vice presidency, or a Cabinet post in a future McCain administration.

In an interview with the Forward, Lieberman said his decision to support McCain was based on their longstanding relationship and on their history of cooperation on a range of issues, including intervention in Bosnia, action on global warming, the creation of the 9/11 Commission and continued military involvement in Iraq.

“Look, we have been drawn together because we have similar worldviews,” Lieberman told the Forward, adding that they both have the “feeling America has a unique role in the world, of taking the Declaration of Independence seriously. It’s a universal declaration of human rights, and our foreign policy is always better when it’s based on democratic values.”

With Rudy Giuliani planning on dropping out of the race and endorsing McCain, I expect Lieberman’s man will consolidate the Republican Jewish vote, which, until now had been strongest for Giuliani. I don’t, however, anticipate Lieberman being rewarded with this.

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January 30, 2008 | 12:32 pm

CleanFlicks founder accused of sex with minor

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The co-founder of CleanFlicks, a video editing service once used by many Christians, has been arrested in Utah for allegedly paying a 14-year-old girl for sex.

Daniel Thompson, who ran CleanFlicks till the courts shut it down in 2006, had more recently operated Flix Club, a family-friendly edited-movie video business in Orem, Utah. He was arrested last Thursday on two charges of forcible sexual abuse and two charges of forcible sexual activity with a 14-year-old. Thompson is out on bail.

Thompson’s business partner at Flix Club, Isaac Lifferth, was also arrested on similar charges.

As soon as I saw the words “CleanFlicks founder arrested,” my mind jumped to the story laid out above. Why? Because it’s sadly unsurprising to find somebody accused of behavior that they publicly fought against. Ted Haggard and Sen. Larry Craig should sound familiar. For a little more backstory and an explanation of why CleanFlicks was put out, read the rest of this post here.

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January 29, 2008 | 10:23 pm

Rudy’s campaign kaput

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign appears all but formally dead tonight after he finished third in Florida—the state for which he had skipped campaigning in the early primaries and focused most his energy, the state that on Monday he said would pick the Republican nominee.

Perhaps he was living an illusion all along.

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president took impressive wing last year, as the former mayor wove the pain experienced by his city on Sept. 11, 2001, and his leadership that followed into national celebrity. Like a best-selling author, he basked in praise for his narrative and issued ominous and often-repeated warnings about the terrorist strike next time.

Voters seemed to embrace a man so comfortable wielding power, and his poll numbers edged higher to where he held a broad lead over his opponents last summer. Just three months ago, Anthony V. Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s affable senior policy adviser, surveyed that field and told The New York Observer: “I don’t believe this can be taken from us. Now that I have that locked up, I can go do battle elsewhere.”

In fact, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was about to begin a free fall so precipitous as to be breathtaking. Mr. Giuliani finished third in the Florida primary on Tuesday night; only a few months earlier, he had talked about the state as his leaping-off point to winning the nomination.

As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign.

(The presumed end of Giuliani for President unfortunately dates a cover story I wrote for this week’s Jewish Journal. Our paper is sent to the printer on Tuesday afternoon, several hours before the Florida outcome was known, and won’t hit the streets until Thursday. Still, I read back through my article, which takes a look at who Jews are excited about and how they are involved with the campaigns—Rudy was a favorite of Republican Jews—and it didn’t seem stale. Just that it needs an explanation, which it was given in the form of an editor’s note.)

Giuliani’s fall from grace really is amazing. As readers of The God Blog know, I was never a fan of the former mayor, whom I met in New York two years ago. (He was giving one of those expensive 45-minute speeches on “leadership during crisis” at a bail-industry conference that I was writing about for some extra green.) But many Republicans loved Giuliani, and when he entered the race, it was clearly his to lose.

In the past month alone, Giuliani’s support among California Republicans plummeted 14 percentage points from 25 percent.

I just hope he makes it another two days, though CBS News is reporting he won’t.

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January 29, 2008 | 5:40 pm

Germany celebrates Hitler’s rise—sort of

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.

“Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?” asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. “Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility.”

It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms with this history marches on. The Federal Crime Office last year began investigating itself, trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders after the end of the war. And this month Germany’s federal prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict of Marinus van der Lubbe, the Communist Dutchman executed on charges of setting the Reichstag fire; that event’s 75th anniversary is Feb. 27.

The experience of Nazism is alive in contemporary public debates over subjects as varied as German troops in Afghanistan, the nation’s low birthrate and the country’s dealings with foreigners.
Why Germany seems unendingly obsessed with Nazism is itself a subject of perpetual debate here, ranging from the nation’s philosophical temperament, to simple awe at the unprecedented combination of organization and brutality, to the sense that the crime was so great that it spread like a blot over the entire culture.

Whatever the reasons, as the events become more remote, less personal, this society is forced to confront the question of how it should enshrine its crimes and transgressions over the longer term.

Click here for the rest of this article from The New York Times. Others seem to be coming to poorer terms with Hitler’s legacy.

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January 29, 2008 | 5:18 pm

Pat Robertson not popular with evangelicals

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Pat Robertson gets mentioned here every now and then. And a recent poll by Beliefnet confirmed a sentiment I expressed in November when Rudy Giuliani garnered the endorsement of Pat Robertson: “Who cares?”

Only about 19.6 percent of evangelicals. That’s the percentage that have a favorable impression of Robertson. That’s the lowest popularity of the eight Christian leaders survey subjects were asked about. (Billy Graham led the list with 87.3 percent favorable reviews.)

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January 29, 2008 | 11:15 am

Return of the Jedi religion

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A Jedi “church” has been born in a galaxy far far away - North Wales.

The Holyhead chapter of the self-styled Jedi Church, which claims up to 400,000 members worldwide, has sprung up thanks to brothers Barney and Daniel Jones, both Star Wars obsessives.

The “church” is only one of a handful around the planet, said hairdresser Barney, 26, the Anglesey Order Minister, also known as Master Jonba Hehol.

This is a story in which the reporter takes tongue-in-cheek to the extreme. This is what happens when nearly 400,000 Britons claim in a census that their religion is Jedi. Like Voltaire said: If Yoda didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

But what does it mean?

“We will have teachings based on Yoda - the 900-year-old grand master - as well as readings, essays submitted, meditation and relaxation, visualisation and discuss healthy eating.

“The Jedi religion is about life improvement, inner peace and changing your lifestyle so you have a more fulfilling existence.

“It’s based on the films but we have brought things into it because the films are a bit more sci-fi.

“But we have developed on the film’s teachings, introducing teachings we believe the Jedi Knights would seek.

“We used to watch the films over and over again and it came about from that.”

That seems to open the door to all kinds of “religions” based on specific movies. In fact, there’s already a following of Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski. We could call them cults.

(Hat tip: GetReligion)

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