February 26, 2008 | 7:03 pm

LA Times poll: McCain would beat Democrats

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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We already know Hillary Clinton’s campaign has one foot in the grave. But is the Democrat’s overall effort to take back the White House also moribund? Another shocker in a wild presidential election:

WASHINGTON—After a sometimes bitter primary campaign, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain now presents a stiff challenge to either of his potential Democratic opponents in the general election, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

The findings underscore the difficulties ahead for Democrats as they hope to retake the White House during a time of war, with voters giving McCain far higher marks when it comes to experience, fighting terrorism and dealing with the situation in Iraq.

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have made ending the war a centerpiece of their campaigns. But in hypothetical matchups against either Democratic senator, about half of voters polled said McCain, a Vietnam veteran, was best able to deal with the war. Just over a third of voters polled favored the Democratic candidates on that issue.

Overall, McCain would beat Clinton 46% to 40% and Obama 44% to 42%. His lead over Obama is within the poll’s three-point margin of error.

Last night, Karl Rove offered two contradictory remarks/jokes that could explain how Democratic enthusiasm is now behind the eight ball. Rove said he was certain he could get either Clinton or Obama elected, but wouldn’t say how. “I only work for Democrats—and Joe Lieberman.” Lieberman is, of course, a friend and supporter of McCain; Rove is too, despite an icy introduction. But at another moment in his lecture, Rove joked that he secretly was advising both Clinton and Obama, explaining why they had turned so hard against each other.

Such a scenario would certainly bare what President Bush’s former chief strategist said has become known as “the mark of Rove.” “If you can’t explain,” he said, “Rove is responsible.”

Too much credence probably shouldn’t be put into this hypothesis.

February 26, 2008 | 4:10 pm

Karl Rove and the politics of religion

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last spring, Karl Rove was outed by atheist superstar Christopher Hitchens as a fellow nonbeliever.

“He doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”

But last night Rove told me he is in fact a religious person, though he didn’t specify how his Christian roots manifest themselves in his life.

Rove was in Los Angeles to speak at the Gibson Ampitheatre, one of a number of distinguished voices in this year’s Public Lecture Series by American Jewish University. His invitation had caused a bit of consternation in the Jewish community, but he quickly won over many of his skeptics, which I wrote about in an article that will be online Thursday.

“I spent part of my childhood in Utah,” Rove said at a VIP dinner before the lecture. “I went to a high school that is 95 percent Mormon, and only in Utah could a Presbyterian and a Jew both be gentiles.”

Regardless of his own beliefs, Rove, who left his post as chief adviser to President Bush in August, was instrumental in helping Bush monopolize the support of evangelical voters and making religious rhetoric an essential part of presidential campaigns, something we are seeing plenty of this year.

“Roosevelt used to say to his speech writer, Rosenman, Don’t forget the God stuff at the end. That’s a bit colloquial,” Rove said, “but the point is Americans have always valued leaders of faith.”

In fact, as early as 1800, in the race between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, religious piety and divine reverence played an important role in politics.

As Jefferson and John Adams, a publicly devout Christian, slugged it out on the campaign trail, the Gazette of the United States ran this:

THE GRAND QUESTION STATED

At the present solemn and momentous epoch, the only question to be asked by every American, laying his hand on his heart, is: “Shall I continue in allegiance to

GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS
PRESIDENT;

Or impiously declare for

JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!”

Jefferson was vehemently attacked for being a godless, slave-owning (-impregnating) sinner. But the underlying issue was what kind of liberties would this country afford its few voting members and everyone else who lived here. Jefferson favored greater freedoms while Adams sought to strengthen the office of the president. (A proto-Bush?)

Still, many people couldn’t get over the fact that Jefferson didn’t believe in God. And though he eventually won through a complicated process in the Electoral College, some members who didn’t want to give their vote to an atheist said they would rather “go without a Constitution and take the risk of civil war.”

Now, though, Godtalk dominates—whether it is about what kind of Christian John McCain is, why evangelicals can’t stand Hillary Clinton or whether Barack Obama is a “covert Muslim.” The question, and it’s one Rove didn’t answer, is why did religious rhetoric has become so central to running for president. So-called “moral-values issues” were just as important to voters in elections that brought Bill Clinton to the White House as those that elected and re-elected George Bush. Something else is certainly at play.

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February 26, 2008 | 11:41 am

LA’s mayor a member of the Tribe?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Forward has a short profile this week of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, whom reporter Rebecca Spence calls “something of an honorary member of the tribe.”

Los Angeles is a small town, and with half a million Jews in the greater L.A. area, it’s no surprise Villaraigosa has leaned heavily on many Jews along the way, whether it was high school teacher Herman Katz or his best friend on the City Council, Jack Weiss, or chief of staff Robin Kramer.

His predecessors, most notably Tom Bradley, benefited similarly. But Spence presents a man whose philo-Semitism goes a good deal further than political expedience (though he’s still no Mark Paredes).

According to local Jewish leaders, the mayor himself has made a habit of attending synagogue services, beyond the public appearances L.A. mayors tend to make at High Holiday services. He has been spotted at Temple Valley Beth Shalom and at Adat Ariel, both located in the San Fernando Valley — a region that tends to skew somewhat more conservative when it comes to local politics and that, unlike the Westside, went for Villaraigosa’s predecessor, James Hahn, in 2005.

The mayor has also attended Friday Night Live, a popular Sabbath service with live music held at Sinai Temple, a 2,000-family Conservative synagogue located on the Westside. In fact, said Sinai’s rabbi, David Wolpe, when Villaraigosa showed up this past September at his synagogue for Kol Nidre services, he sat in the back, didn’t come up to the bimah and left quietly. “In my experience, that is unprecedented,” Wolpe said. “It’s unheard of that a political figure should desire to come just to be there.” (Despite the frequent synagogue attendance, Villaraigosa, it should be noted, is a practicing Catholic.)

Villaraigosa also has made a point of attending major Jewish events, from Super Sunday to a major rally for Israel during the war with Hezbollah to the recent groundbreaking of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. And he’s developed political relationships with some Israelis, including Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal. (I asked Villaraigosa’s office for an interview last August when I wrote about life in Sderot; they got back to me in late December.)

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February 26, 2008 | 1:10 am

Jesus Christ’s rockstar

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Godfather of Christian Rock, Larry Norman, died Sunday at the age of 60. Admired by the Jesus movement, thought of as a Bob Dylan for Christian music (when Dylan wasn’t Christian), Norman‘s influence can’t be understated. At least, that’s what I’ve read; I’d never heard of him. Here’s more from the CT Liveblog:

“His influence outweighed his sales so much that it’s comical,” Willman said. “He certainly had a heart for evangelism, almost to his detriment I might say. He really could’ve been a star if he were singing about something other than Jesus.”

Norman’s 1972 Only Visiting This Planet album is regarded as one of the top contemporary Christian music albums of all time. His many hits were cutting edge, said Larry Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College.

“The song ‘Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?’ was one of his enduring trumpet blasts against the stogie, old Christian establishment,” Eskridge said. “‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’ fit with the end times, apocalyptic feel that was in the air at the time.”

“I Wish We’d All Been Ready” was also featured in the 1972 end times film A Thief in the Night. In concerts, the singer would give his trademark “One Way” gesture, pointing an index finger toward heaven. Eskridge said Norman was an icon during the Jesus People of the 1960s but distanced himself from the movement when it became a fad and eventually faded.

Norman became less prominent on the music scene after suffering head injuries in an airplane accident 30 years ago, and later he had severe heart problems. He dictated a message to a friend just before his death.

“I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up,” Norman said. “I have been under medical care for months. My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home.”

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February 25, 2008 | 4:55 pm

Anti-Semitism: ‘Jealousy born of envy’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Also in the new Atlantic is a piece by Christopher Hitchens about Jews and “the 2,000-year-old panic.” Pegged to the re-release of an old novel, Hitchens writes that Jews are discriminated against for the opposite reasons other minorities are.

Almost every tribe or ethnicity has a rival tribe or ethnicity that it views as inferior or dirtier or more primitive: the Hutu with the Tutsi, the Sinhalese with the Tamil, the Ulster Protestant with the Irish Catholic, and so forth. The “other” group will invariably be found to have a different smell, a higher birthrate, and a lazier temperament. These poor qualities are sometimes attributed even by Jews to Jews: elevated German and Austrian Jews once wrinkled their nostrils at the matted sidelocks and large families of the poor Ostjuden who had come from the backwoods of Galicia and Silesia; and Ashkenazi-Se­phardic rivalry in Israel sometimes recalls and resembles this hostility. But garden-variety racists do not usually suspect the objects of their dislike of secretly manipulating the banks and the stock markets and of harboring a demonic plan for world domination. Gregor von Rezzori, in his newly reissued novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, meshes the micro and macro versions of interwar anti-Semitism very skillfully indeed:

  They spent their childhood skipping among mounds of horse dung and flocks of gay sparrows, warbling Hebraic words of wisdom in Jewish schools … disappearing then to the next town. They returned gangling, cheeky, precocious, and self-confident a couple of years later, unfurled little red flags, and chanted socialistic marching songs; then they went off again. The next time they came back they were unrecognizable—polished, poised, coiffed, and manicured, lugging doctorates on their proud shoulders; they dug themselves in and became dentists, high-school teachers, professors of music, and God only knows what other intellectuals, married similar solid burghers and produced streams of progeny, teaching them to speak refinedly through their noses, packing them off to the Sorbonne to get equipped the better to meddle with the course of the history of civilization.

“Jealousy born of envy” is the way that Rezzori (1914–1998) elsewhere summarizes this combination of anti-intellectualism fused with the hatred of material success and the suspicion of social and international mobility. If the Jew isn’t a mutinous prole, he is a stinking bourgeois!

(Hitchens began the piece with a joke about Der Stürmer, the Nazi rag depicted above: “A sour old joke from prewar Germany has two elderly Jews sitting in a Berlin park, with one of them reading a Yiddish paper and the other one scanning the pages of Der Stürmer. The latter Jew is laughing. This proves too much for the former Jew, who says: ‘It’s not enough you read that Nazi rag, but you find it funny?’ ‘Look,’ replies the other. ‘If I read your paper, what do I see? Jews deported, Jews assaulted, Jews insulted, Jewish property confiscated. But I read Der Stürmer, and there’s finally some good news. It seems that we Jews own and control the whole world!’”)

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February 25, 2008 | 12:16 pm

Traditionalists: ‘Pope has felt obliged to change the very venerable prayer for the Jews’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

No surprise here regarding the new language for the Tridentine Mass, which will be uttered in four Fridays. The traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X issued a statement over the weekend that it was none too happy that language regarding the conversion of Jews was watered down in the Good Friday prayer.

“Following foreign pressures on the Catholic Church, the pope has felt obliged to change the very venerable Prayer for the Jews, which is an integral part of the Good Friday liturgy. This prayer is one of the oldest and goes back to about the third century. It has thus been recited throughout the whole history of the Church as the full expression of Catholic faith.

The SPPX said the change, which it called an “amputation,” had “the allure of a real transformation, expressing the new theology of relations with the Jewish people. It is part of the liturgical upheaval that is the characteristic mark of the council and the reforms that followed it. While the necessity to accept the Messiah to be saved has been retained, one can only profoundly deplore this change.”

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February 25, 2008 | 10:37 am

Understanding the college spiritual journey

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Speaking of the Pew Forum, the religious research center’s home page features a lengthy Q&A with a leader of UCLA’s “Spirituality in Higher Education,” which I wrote about for the fall cover of UCLA Magazine.

The study found that nearly three-of-four students who are now juniors agreed that “most people can grow spiritually without being religious.” That’s up 12 percent from when these students were freshmen. I think you have to realize that we have, on the one hand, the students’ individual faiths and practices, and on the other hand, their viewpoints about students who might follow a different faith or no faith. To us, this is a positive finding in the sense that students display a good deal of tolerance for differing approaches to religion and spirituality on the part of their peers. In other words, they’re not imposing their own standards upon their fellow beings. Does that mean that they’re seeing the world in more relative terms and in less absolute terms? Yes, I would say so, and this is consistent with the finding that their tendency to embrace an ecumenical worldview also increases during college. This would seem to be bad news for many organized religions, especially the ones making truth claims. Not necessarily. We have organizations like the National Council of Churches and other worldwide religious organizations that try to think about how to enhance understanding across different religions and faiths. Looking ahead to the condition of the world down the road, one would hope that this kind of understanding and tolerance would increase with time. That, of course, may not fit certain belief systems, but I think, on balance, that it’s reassuring to see that the college experience is associated with an increase in this kind of tolerance and understanding of the other.

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February 25, 2008 | 10:25 am

Americans change faiths frequently

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that “constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace”: more than a quarter of Americans leave the faith they grew up with, that about 16 percent aren’t affiliated with any religion and that Protestants are approaching minority status. Some explaining from The New York Times:

While the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found. In the 1970s, Protestants accounted for about two-thirds of the population. The Pew survey found they now make up about 51 percent. Evangelical Christians account for a slim majority of Protestants, and those who leave one evangelical denomination usually move to another, rather than to mainline churches.

To Prof. Stephen Prothero, large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity point to the same desires.

“The trend is toward more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” said Mr. Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, who explained that evangelical churches tailor many of their activities for youth. “Those losing out are offering impersonal religion and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

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February 24, 2008 | 6:56 pm

A Muslim at Hebrew College

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s not often a reader offers you a hat tip on a story you wrote, but thanks Gershon, who sent me an e-mail that said, “Good Muslims are hard to find these days, but it is good to profile them when you do.”

He was referring to a story I had in this week’s paper about a Muslim scholar teaching at Hebrew Union College. (He was not referring to the other story I had about anti-Israel rhetoric at UC Irvine.) Here’s a bit about Ismail Bardhi, who was brought to the attention of HUC’s Scholar Rescue Fund by Reuven Firestone, a professor of Islam and Medieval Jewish studies.

Firestone first met Bardhi in Macedonia six years ago, when the latter was helping organize an international conference on religion and peace, the first to bring together the country’s Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Christian Slavs.

The conference coincided with a violent build-up between the two ethnic groups—including shootings, retaliation shootings and torchings of churches and mosques—that put the young nation on the brink of civil war. But the dialogue that began with Bardhi and his Orthodox Christian counterpart helped dissolve the tension, and the conflict fizzled.

“In Skopje, Mr. Bardhi was the voice of Muslim moderates who greatly promoted in a nonpolitical manner the process of reconciliation between Albanian Muslims and Macedonian Orthodox,” Paul Mojzes, organizer of the conference and co-editor of The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, wrote in a letter of recommendation. (Last March, in an essay titled, “Orthodoxy and Islam in the Balkans,” Mojzes identified Bardhi as “the best Muslim proponent of inter-religious dialogue in the Balkans.”)

The Macedonian peace, however, was short-lived, and two years ago, when Bardhi was nominated to become president of the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, he discovered that the problems had bled into his own religious community. After a former student who had become affiliated with the Muslim nationalists smashed Bardhi’s face with the butt of a gun, Bardhi spent weeks secluded in his home, withdrew from the political race and eventually lost his job for political reasons, he said.

“During the latest elections within the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, professor Bardhi has been the most prominent and trusted candidate,” Ahmet Sherif, a professor at Macedonia’s Institute of National History, wrote in a letter to the Scholar Rescue Fund. “But unfortunately, due to the threatening and sinister actions toward him and his collaborators he chose to withdraw his candidacy as an act of protest.”

Bardhi’s problem was an unwillingness to politicize his faith. He is, as Firestone described him, an “Islamic humanist,” a religious progressive willing to see Islam as “the perfect expression of the divine will,” but not alone and superior on the world stage.

“My topic is quranic exegesis and how we have to be more open between the Quran and Torah, to see how they could speak together,” said Bardhi, 50. “We have spent too long using religion against each other. This is not good for religion or for human beings.”

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February 24, 2008 | 9:43 am

Putin files: Anti-Semitism never dies in Russia

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

MOSCOW - The Jewish community of Russia is worried over a rumor campaign by nationalist parties claiming that Dmitri Medvedev, President Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor, is Jewish.

Russian Jewish leaders declined to comment on the rumors officially, fearing to lend them credibility. Off the record, however, one said: “I pray it isn’t true, because it would only make trouble, for him and for us.”

Medvedev, who recently told a Russian weekly that he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church at age 23, has not commented on these rumors. But Russian Internet sites are full of reports about his alleged Jewish roots.

The rumors are based in part on the fact that his maternal grandfather’s first name was Veniamin - similar to the Hebrew Binyamin (Benjamin) - while his family name, Shaposhnikov, is sometimes a Jewish name. But beyond that, accusing an electoral rival of being Jewish is a tactic that nationalist parties have employed in the past, both in Russia and in other former communist countries.

The concern here is that such “accusations” will arouse centuries-old anti-Semitism in the former czarist state. Russia is, after all, the birthplace of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

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February 24, 2008 | 1:21 am

Huckabee campaigns on SNL

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“I’m not a math guy. I’m more of a miracle guy.”

The words of Mike Huckabee a few minutes ago on “Saturday Night Live’s” mock news show “Weekend Update.” The former Arkansas governor was there to explain, in self-deprecating form, why he remains in the race for the Republican presidential nomination even though he’d still be trailing John McCain if he swept each and every remaining delegate.

“Mike Huckabee does not overstay his welcome,” he said. “When it’s time for me to go, I’ll know. And I’ll exit out with class and grace.”

He then remained behind the anchors’ desk, even after anchor Seth Meyers made it clear it was time to go.

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February 22, 2008 | 3:06 pm

Scholar: Muslims will vote Obama

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Politicians usually appreciate capturing voting blocs. But I have to wonder if predications like this—that Barack Obama is the overwhelming favorite for Muslims—will hurt the candidate more than it will help.

Many American Muslims are genuinely invested in finding a candidate who actually sees the United States as responsible member of a global community, and not just a bully.

And that’s why the overwhelming support of the Muslim community now has shifted to the Democratic side, and specifically to Sen. Barack Obama.

Sen. Hillary Clinton generates little interest among Muslim-Americans. She favors an “undivided” (i.e., all Jewish) Jerusalem, which would signal even further suffering and catastrophe—even ethnic cleansing—for Palestinians who for more than a thousand years have called Jerusalem home.

And Clinton has signed on to a bill that makes war with Iran more likely, as it specifies that Iran is waging a “proxy war” against the United States in Iraq. It is this kind of language that got us ensnared in Iraq in the first place.

Obama, on the other hand, condemned Clinton’s vote on Iran and stressed diplomacy. Obama’s cosmopolitanism—raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, son of a white Midwestern mother and a Kenyan father—also resonates with many Muslims who want their president to be a global citizen, for a change.

When he began his political career, Obama courageously supported the idea that the United States should be a real honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians. Over time, however, he has distanced himself from the Palestinian side.

Yet many American Muslims remain hopeful that a President Obama would bring his vision of peace and justice back to all the areas of U.S. foreign policy, including the bleeding wound that is Palestine/Israel.

Pundits, take note: Overwhelmingly, American Muslims will be casting their votes for Obama.

George Bush owned the Muslim vote in 2000 because of campaign promises that came up exceedingly empty after 9/11, and in 2004 93 percent voted for John Kerry. Observers have been predicting American Muslims would vote strongly Democratic in November. And it’s little surprise that Obama, whose father was Muslim and whose middle name is Hussein, would be the fan favorite.

The problem for the Illinois senator is that one of the efforts to torpedo his campaign has been a handful of Internet rumors that he is a Jew-hating undercover Muslim. Despite assertions to the contrary, and the defense of many prominent Jews and despite the fact that the right Muslim could be a good president, the fear seems to linger with many people I talk to, even though who should know much better.

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