April 15, 2008 | 9:30 am

Pope says pedophiles can’t be priests

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Pope Benedict XVI said on Tuesday that following the Roman Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse scandals in the United States, the church is reviewing candidates for the priesthood with the objective of excluding those with a tendency to molest children.

Speaking to reporters on an airplane taking him for his first visit to the United States as pope, he addressed the scandal in the U.S. that has produced more than 5,000 sexual abuse victims since it erupted in 2002 and cost the church more than $2 billion.

“It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen,” he said. “As I read the histories of those victims it is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way. Their mission was to give healing, to give the love of God to these children. We are deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible that this cannot happen in the future.”

Apparently drawing a distinction between priests with homosexual tendencies and those inclined to molest children, the Pontiff said “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia which is another thing. And we would absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry.”

“Who is guilty of pedophilia cannot be a priest,” he added.

The Pope said church officials were going through the seminaries that train would-be priests to make sure that those candidates have no such tendencies. “We’ll do all that is possible to have a strong discernment, because it is more important to have good priests than to have many priests.”

This from the NY Times. It seems like such a simple declaration, and yet it has taken so many years and cost so much pain for it to be made. Here’s more on the pope’s visit.

(That’s a cutout image of the pontiff from the Mercury News.)

April 15, 2008 | 1:34 am

The best rabbis in all the land

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In a scoop reserved for the Jewish Journal‘s often-irreverent Up Front feature, Amy Klein got an advanced copy of this year’s list of America’s top rabbis, which followed last year’s inaugural expedition in ranking the rabbinate.

Last year, when Newsweek published its inaugural list of America’s 50 most influential rabbis, Jay Sanderson, one of the list’s creators, said he was surprised by how much buzz it generated.

“We had hoped it would be provocative and it would open up conversation about religious leaders in America today,” Sanderson said.

But he was shocked at how many newspapers and bloggers—more than 100—picked up the story. Even the Aryan Nation Web site used the list to show how the Jews run Hollywood, he said.

Jews around the country—including many rabbis—were talking about who made the list, who didn’t make the list, who shouldn’t have made the list and what would be a better list.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance, again topped the list of influentials. A new category was added this year, though, that ranked top pulpit rabbis, and it too was headlined by an Angeleno: Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple, who at this time seven years ago gave one of the more memorable Passover sermons in a long, long time.

Sanderson collaborated on the list with News Corp EVP Gary Ginsberg and Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton, whose Jewish journey I profiled last fall. Newsweek‘s got the list up now.

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April 14, 2008 | 6:13 pm

Singleton confuses Osama and Obama

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yeah, the guy who is running into the ground the parent company of my old papers, media baron Dean Singleton, showed the error today of axing so many of his editors when he referred to Mr. Most Wanted as “Obama bin Laden.” From the AP wire:

Sen. Barack Obama’s name has been mangled plenty of times, though not always in the presence of 1,200 news executives and TV cameras.

It happened Monday at The Associated Press’s Annual Luncheon, where the Democratic presidential candidate spoke and took questions. Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP’s board of directors and head of Denver-based MediaNews Group, slipped when asking the senator if he could envision sending many more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where “Obama bin Laden is still at large.”

Obama gave a quizzical look and said, “I think that was Osama bin Laden.” Singleton quickly replied, “If I did that, I’m so sorry.”

“No, no, no,” the senator said. He called it “part of the exercise that I’ve been going through over the last 15 months, which is why it’s pretty impressive I’m still standing here.”

The crowd laughed and gave him a sympathetic round of applause.

Here’s more from Editor & Publisher.

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April 14, 2008 | 2:47 pm

Einstein’s Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Bintel Blog has a good post defending the Zionism of Albert Einstein (yes, that Einstein):

Was Albert Einstein “the first post-Zionist”? Jason Maoz, editor of the right-wing Orthodox weekly, The Jewish Press, thinks so. In fact, Maoz goes so far as to suggest that the famed physicist could properly be labeled a “villain.”

“Einstein, because of his iconic status as the 20th century’s preeminent scientific genius, has largely escaped Jewish criticism for his antipathy to the notion of a Jewish state,” writes Maoz, who isn’t one to give the wild-haired physicist a free pass.

Alas, Maoz presents a very selective presentation of the relevant facts, cherry-picking quotes that paint Einstein in the worst possible light. True, Einstein was critical of political Zionism and disliked the idea of a specifically Jewish state. But Einstein also lent his voice and his celebrity to the Zionist cause of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine — and he did so at the early date of 1920. He remained a consistent and strong advocate of the effort to settle Jews in Palestine, and he publicly berated the Diaspora anti-Zionists of the American Council for Judaism, calling the group “a pitiable attempt to obtain favor and toleration from our enemies by betraying true Jewish ideals.” And when Israel was founded, he hailed the newborn state’s achievements, expressing his “joy and admiration” in a 1949 radio address.

Did history prove Einstein naïve and wrong (perhaps even somewhat dangerously so) on the question of a Jewish state? Certainly. His almost-unshakable faith in the immediate possibility of harmonious co-existence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine led him to overlook certain harsh realities. Einstein believed that if not for the policies of Britain, the Arabs of Palestine would have peacefully accepted the mass-influx of Jewish immigrants. This was clearly unrealistic.

In fact, that optimism was shared by another titan of the Tribe in the 20th century: Theodor Herzl, whose Utopian dreams of coexistence in Zion were detailed in his novel “Altneuland.”

Here is footage of Einstein meeting David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister.

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April 14, 2008 | 12:45 pm

Kristol on Obama’s ‘bitter’ religious believers

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Barack Obama’s recent closed-door comment about “bitter” country folk who “cling to guns or religion” has been getting a lot of play, thanks in large part to Hillary Clinton’s willingness to castigate him for it. Here’s more via Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish:

Bill Kristol, trained in the same politics as Hillary Clinton, now argues that Obama’s remarks in a fundraiser q and a are the “real Obama” - and that his voluminous writing and speaking about the sincerity of his own religious faith, and of others, are presumably “masks.” The reason for inferring Obama’s Marxism is the following point Obama artlessly made about the way in which economic distress can alter people’s tolerance for others:

  “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Is this indistinguishable from saying, along with Marx, that all religion is an obviously false consciousness caused by the alienation of the world-historical class struggle? No, it obviously isn’t. It’s saying that economic distress does often in human history express itself in more rigid forms of religion, more reactionary cultural identification, less tolerance of “the other.” Since large swathes of human history have shown this to be true - and perfectly arguable without any materialist understanding of religion - Kristol is deliberately distorting to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator of religious faith for political ends, rather than as a genuine Christian. He’s calling him a lying, Godless communist.

(Image: Time)

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April 14, 2008 | 10:41 am

Is Hillary God’s choice for prez?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At the Democratic presidential forum last night, Sen. Hillary Clinton was asked a question quite comical when considering the event’s host (Messiah College in Pennsylvania).

There was a moment of levity on Sunday night when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was asked at a nationally televised faith forum whether she believed “God wants you to be president?”

“Well, I could be glib and say we’ll find out,” Clinton said to laughter from the audience.

“But I—I don’t presume anything about God. I believe, you know, Abraham Lincoln was right in admonishing us not to act as though we knew God was on our side,” she said.

I’m glad she opted for grace and didn’t deem herself the next divinely appointed President of the United States of America. Don’t get me wrong: There is no endorsement I’d rather have. It’s just kind of frowned upon when you tell the populace that God spoke to you and said He had picked you to lead this nation.

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April 13, 2008 | 2:18 am

Rev. Lee and the true meaning of Passover

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In the discussion over what Rev. Lee did and didn’t say, David Sackman contributed a lengthy commentary so insightful that it deserves its own post. Here’s the top of his thoughts.

I am disturbed, not by the content, but by the direction, of the entire discussion regarding the relationship between Blacks and Jews, and particularly by the discussion about comments supposedly made at a recent awards ceremony here in Los Angeles.

I am Jewish, of European ancestry; my wife is Black, with Chinese and Native American ancestry included. What shall we tell our son this Passover, when we re-tell the tale of how his Jewish ancestors were freed from slavery in Africa?

Shall we trade accusations against each other, like those reported in “Allegations in e-mail split Jews and Blacks” in the April 12 LA Times? The statement reputed to have been made there, that some Jews in the entertainment industry exploited and profited from Black performers, is probably true. It is also true that Jewish union leaders, lawyers and agents in the entertainment industry have fought for better wages and working conditions for Blacks and others in the industry. Many Jews played crucial roles in the struggle for civil rights, and undoubtably there were some on the other side as well. We can go back farther to trade accusations. Were there Jews who owned slaves and were involved in the slave trade? Probably so; and yet there were also Jews fighting for abolition. Does it matter whether those on one side outnumbered those on the other?

To be honest, I must tell my son that his African ancestors were on both sides as well. How else did Africans become African-Americans? Did a few Europeans (perhaps including some Jews) march into Africa and march out with tens of millions of slaves? Actually, it was their African “brothers” who sent them into slavery. Whether it was for small reasons like personal squabbles, or large reasons like tribal warfare, it was primarily Africans who sent other Africans into slavery, just as Joseph was sold into slavery in Africa, by his own brothers!
So is the point of the Passover story that the Hebrews were the “good guys” being held in slavery by “evil” Africans? NO! Emphatically NO! And neither should the point of the current discussion be to lay blame on anyone.

The rest can be read here.

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April 11, 2008 | 2:01 pm

Jews, power and the Palestinian refugee crisis

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At the Hillel Summit in Washington last month, I listened to Ruth R. Wisse, a Harvard professor of Yiddish and author of “Jews and Power,” deliver a passionate 40-minute lecture on why American Jews should stand up for that imperiled sliver of Mediterranean coast we have been fortunate enough, for almost 60 years now, to call Israel.

You can listen to the lecture here.

Wisse’s talk was moving, and I had wanted to read her book, so I picked a copy up on the way out and worked through it on my flight back. (It’s 184 pages and a very quick read.) In “Jews and Power,” Wisse makes a point that she repeated during her speech—that Arab countries, not Israel, are responsible for the Palestinian refugee crisis. From pages 140-141:

Palestinian Arabs are to be pitied with the tens of millions of refugees of the twentieth century. But Palestinians are doubly unfortunate because theirs is the only such displacement that is prolonged for political advantage. Originally, the Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 were a relatively small and easily assimilable group, moving often no more than several miles among people who spoke their language and shared their religion and culture. Leaving aside the refugees of the two world wars, as well as Jews driven from Arab lands in numbers equal to the Arabs who fled from Israel, the two massive conflicts that framed Israel’s War of Independence—India’s war over the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and the Korean War of 1950-53—produced more than 20 million refugees between them, yet most of those refugees were reabsorbed within a generation. Only in the Arab case did a coalition of rulers, with millions of square miles and great wealth at their disposal, foster and cultivate the state of emergency as a means of sustaining a casus belli.

Look no further for an example of such politicking than the life and times of Yasser Arafat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and common crook. The consequences, of course, have been significant and seemingly incessant.

Less than a week after I returned, I came across this article, and this image, in the New York Times:

GAZA — In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew.

“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.”

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.

Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Hardly an eye-opener—in fact, a bit surprising in its gee-whiz tone—this article reiterated what we already know. But it made me think of Ruth Wisse, whose latest book, without question controversial with the Jewish left, begins its final chapter (page 173) by discussing the contradictions of Jewish power:

Just as no Jewish initiative could have solved the German problem that culminated in Nazism, no Israeli initiative could correct “what went wrong” in Arab societies. Jews could only hope to enhance their own security through the avoidance of fatal mistakes and nudge the Arab world to greater maturity by making it clear that Israel was in the region to stay.

The second—internal—problem that could not be alleviated by the creation of Israel alone was the relation of Jews to political power. Zionist thinkers had expected sovereignty to result in political normalization without being able to anticipate the role that a tiny Jewish state might play in the international struggle for power. In trying to withstand the Arab assualt, Israelis, Jews, and concerned third parties tripped again and again over the same issue of power that had impeded the development of Jewish political history to begin with. If historians once mistook the absence of sovereignty to mean that Jews stood outside politics, modern students of the problem too often assumed that the resumption of sovereignty guaranteed political parity between Israel and the nations. Jews were said to have reversed their political fortunes once they began governing themselves and an Arab minority in a country of their own. Equating “statehood” with “power,” the new experts confused Zionism’s potential with its achievement, as if the acquired option of Jewish self-defense had erased Arab advantages in numbers, resources, and land.

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April 11, 2008 | 12:39 pm

Canada: Adieu, Juifs

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The number of Canadians identifying as Jewish fell by about 10 percent between 2001 and 2006. Lots of numbers from the Canadian Jewish News: Down nationally 33,000 Jews from 348,000, with the steepest decline, about 14 percent, occurring in Quebec.

In Quebec, the total was 71,380, down from 82,450 in 2001. Just over 38,000 offered Jewish as their sole ethnic origin. In Montreal alone, the figure is 68,485 (down precipitously from 80,390). The numbers are worrisome to a community that has been on the decline for at least 30 years and still speaks of itself as being 90,000 strong.

(skip)

Canadian Jewish community demographer Charles Shahar is at a loss to explain the figures. “It’s difficult to interpret. My initial reaction is surprise… It’s very strange, shocking, really,” he said.

The reporter seems to be shocked, too. She spends much of the rest of the story quoting “baffled” experts and positing possible explanations: “statistical aberration,” declining birth, leveling immigration and, most comically, increase in Canadian-dominant identification.

(Thanks, Bintel Blog)

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April 11, 2008 | 10:05 am

A brave new Holocaust exhibit

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

With a mix of excitement and trepidation, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage announced this week that it is planning to stage an exhibition devoted to the writer Irène Némirovsky in the fall.

The exhibition, the first museum show ever devoted to the recently rediscovered French author, is in many regards a coup for the 10-year-old institution. It is also, by the museum’s own admission, something of a risk.

In certain respects, Némirovsky, who perished at Auschwitz in 1942, is a natural subject for the museum that calls itself “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.” That one of the author’s final pieces of writing, the unfinished manuscript discovered more than 50 years after her death and published as “Suite Française” in 2004, has become an international sensation only enhances her appeal. And yet, choosing Némirovsky — a convert to Catholicism who published in right-wing journals and whose early work contains what can only be seen as deeply unsympathetic portrayals of Jews — is a departure. It is also, some observers of the museum world say, a daring and historic move.

“Holocaust museums are so often concerned with communicating a clear and unambiguous message,” said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor of performance studies at New York University and an authority on contemporary Jewish museums. “By taking up the subject of Némirovsky, the Museum of Jewish Heritage is showing a willingness to lift things beyond the realm of black and white. The show may well be controversial, but it will open up a new kind of conversation.”

Read the rest of that story from The Forward here.

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April 10, 2008 | 4:38 pm

Explaining the growth of Republican Jews

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

For years, no respectable Jew would admit to being a Republican, even if they would vote for Ike or the Gipper. Today, this is no longer the case. The ranks of Republican Jews are swelling, something I discovered last summer and again this winter.

Why is this? Well, first let’s return to the e-mail from Jewish philanthropist Daphna Ziman that accuses the Rev. Eric Lee, a leader in Los Angeles’ black community, of espousing virulently anti-Semitic views. (Lee has denied her account and today apologized for any “misunderstandings.”)

In forwarding this e-mail along, which has happened countless times now, Larry Greenfield, California director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, added this commentary:

“Daphna and Dick Ziman are friends of mine, and very partisan Dems and friends of Hillary.

They are respected citizens and honorable people.

If they are souring on Obamamania, this could be a good sign that realism is creeping into Jewish liberal minds.
Anti Americanism, Anti Zionism, Anti Semitism mark todays left.  THE POINT IS THE LEFT HAS TAKEN OVER THE DEMOCRAT PARTY. LETS ASK JOE LIEBERMAN.”

The problem with that argument is that the Zimans aren’t just “friends” but are major supporters of Hillary Clinton, and Daphna previously questioned whether Obama is a safe vote for Israel.

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April 10, 2008 | 4:01 pm

Rev. Lee ‘unequivocally’ denounces anti-Semitism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Rev. Eric Lee, the local head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has been trying to smooth the waters since Jewish philanthropist Daphna Ziman accused him of saying blacks and Jews would never come together because “The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us.”

Yesterday Lee issued an official statement denying Ziman’s account. And today he sent her an apology, which just arrived in my inbox and I have pasted below in its entirety.

It is with deep regret and my sincerest apologies that any comments I have made have caused you pain and distress.  It was never my intent to insult you or the Jewish community, with whom I have a respected and long standing relationship.  It is my hope that any misunderstandings may be clarified such that both our communities may move forward with mutual respect and a commitment to our shared struggles against any form of injustice.

As a Christian, and as an African American, we have long embraced the history of Israel’s plight of slavery, oppression, deliverance and freedom as symbolic of African American’s plight against slavery, oppression, deliverance and freedom.  Our communities are joined together in this struggle.

I unequivocally denounce any anti-Semitic sentiments, statements and behavior and assure you that such hatred is not reflective of my character and my work.  Specifically, I do not believe, and the SCLC does not subscribe to the belief, that Jews control the entertainment industries or are responsible for negative characterizations of African Americans.  As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  My commitment is to ensuring justice is promoted for all of G-d’s people.

I am reminded of a part of a Seder ceremony in which the children of Israel are fleeing Pharaoh’s army and celebrate the drowning of their pursuers in the Red Sea.  G-d’s response was disappointment because all are His children. I wholeheartedly believe that we are all G-d’s children and in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “we must learn to live together as brothers, or we perish together as fools”.

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