November 10, 2008 | 4:21 pm

LA Jews voted no on Prop. 8

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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There is really no surprise here:

On Proposition 8, Jewish Angelinos voted 78 percent against the ban while only 8 percent supported the ban, according to the survey of 1,200 voters in 50 precincts. The remainder declined to respond. The Jews’ vote against the ban was the highest proportion of any ethnic or religious group.

California voters approved the proposition, 52-48 percent.

Los Angeles Jewish voters also voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, giving him 78 percent of votes to 20 percent for John McCain. The president-elect’s Jewish numbers in Los Angeles matched the percentage nationwide.

Among all Los Angeles voters, 72 percent voted for Obama and 24 percent for McCain.

November 10, 2008 | 2:50 pm

President-elect Obama and the Jews: Now what?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

As you now know, Barack Obama’s Jewish problem was no problem at all, with 78 percent of the community casting their votes for the next president of the United States. But now that Obama and the Jews have apparently made amends, and Obama has even hired a guy whose middle name is Israel as his chief of staff, what can Jews expect from Obama, particularly in regards to the ongoing U.S.-Israel relationship?

Instead of offering my own bloviations here, I turned to three American Jews with very different political perspectives. Each of these fellow bloggers were glued to the campaign trail developments for the past two years and have many meaningful things to say. I often disagree with their perspectives, but that doesn’t stop me from linking regularly to their blogs.

Later today, Phil Weiss, an anti-Zionist who has been hoping that hawks’ biggest fears about Obama regarding Israel were true, will offer the first voice in a series of Q&As. (Nothing should be read into that about my own Zionist leanings.) Weiss will be followed by Omri Ceren, a USC PhD student and defender of the right. Lastly, Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, will weigh in.

Stay tuned.

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November 10, 2008 | 1:29 pm

Prosperity gospel may precede megachurch’s foreclosure

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last year, I spoke with a number of Christian credit unions about the mortgage-lending crisis. I was assured by the head of America’s Christian Credit Union that “thankfully, we don’t have the house of the Lord in sub-prime loans.”

The Evangelical Christian Credit Union (ECCU), the nation’s largest Christian lender and, with $1 billion in assets, a rival to big secular lenders, told me they had stayed out of trouble by not offering home loans at all. It appears, however, that $26 million it loaned to the Florida-based Without Walls International Church has become a major liability. ECCU said Without Walls default on a $1 million line of credit and tried renegotiating the conditions of the church’s loans on two properties. The Rev. Randy White refused:

“I’ll be damned if I’m leaving,” White told his congregation Sunday. “I promise you this: I will handcuff myself to that column right there because right is right and wrong is wrong. We are a great church, and the devil has tried to take us out every single way that he can.”

Sounds like a sad story, right? Well, it’s difficult for me to give White, and not his bank, the benefit of the doubt. Why?

This is the same Randy White whose ministry brings in $40 million a year who personally jets about in a $1.9 million business plane, rents a waterfront villa in Malibu and owns a multi-million dollar condos in Florida and Trump Tower in New York.

“Mansions, big planes, money, fame. That’s what it’s all about now,” the Rev. Hector Gomez, a former Without Walls staff member who left in 2000, was quoted as saying last year. “There are prophets for God, and there are prophets for profit. That’s the category they fit in.”

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November 10, 2008 | 4:08 am

Best. Spam. Ever.

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I get a lot of spam comments hawking apartments in Houston or singles services. The spam is usually easy to find because it says things like, and I quote: “this article was so great. thank you. does anyone know if there is anything better”

But there was a spam comment left last week below “China’s penis restaurant: clean or unclean?” that deserved a blog post all its own:

“According to Torah law, is it in your opinion ok to use a male enhancement product to make your pennis bigger?? Honest advice would be greatly appreciated.”

Sorry, Jonathan, I don’t know the answer to that question. I swear. Maybe somebody else can help.

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November 9, 2008 | 8:59 pm

Jesus at the Jewish book festival

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The author and the creator

My church, Bel Air Presbyterian, is down Mulholland Drive from American Jewish University. So after we got out at 12:15 this morning, I headed to the other side of the 405 and slipped into the memoir discussion at the Celebration of Jewish Books (and later avoided Jonathan Safran Foer’s talk).

One of the panelists was David Matthews, not the musician, but the author, whose memoir about facing discrimination as the son of a black nationalist father and a Jewish mother I just ordered. Another panelist, and the reason I popped into this session, was Benyamin Cohen, or Bizarro Brad as you will come to see.

Cohen, son of an Orthodox rabbi, spent a year wandering the Bible Belt in search of something to revitalize his faith. Cohen was never really looking for Jesus. However, he wanted to figure out what made Christians so spiritually fervent. What he found at churches and Christian concerts and even a Catholic confessional caused him to appreciate his own religious tradition more and lays the foundation for his book, “My Jesus Year.”

Cohen’s book doesn’t denigrate Christianity or speak condescendingly of it. The most apparent emotion is Cohen’s own guilt for spending time in the forbidden zone—in fact, he had to visit several rabbis before one would approve of his attending church, even as a journalist. Cohen’s primary hope is that Jewish leaders will see what’s working at churches and apply that to their own houses of worship—save for that whole Jesus thing.

“I look at the book,” Cohen said at the book festival, “as a love letter to Christians.”

I reviewed the book for this week’s Jewish Journal. An excerpt is after the jump:

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November 9, 2008 | 3:11 pm

Jonathan Safran Foer makes me want to vomit

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“Until now, my identity as a writer,” Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote “Everything Is Illuminated,” said last week, “has never overlapped with my identity as an American — in the past eight years, my writing has often felt like an antidote or correction to my Americanism. But finally having a writer-president — and I don’t mean a published author, but someone who knows the full value of the carefully chosen word — I suddenly feel, for the first time, not only like a writer who happens to be American, but an American writer.”

When a friend sent that quote to me, I thought I was going to hurl. I didn’t realize by American was such a bad thing, that following in the tradition of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Michael Chabon was such a handicap.

Foer’s comment reeked of the same elitism as when the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize committee fallaciously explained the lack of American Nobel laureates in literature by saying: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

Foer will be at the Celebration of Jewish Books at American Jewish University today. I’ll be stopping by—more on that later—but avoiding his talk.

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November 8, 2008 | 7:12 pm

Star Wars attack ads

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The presidential race may be over, but this collection of attack ads from the contest between Lando and Emperor Palpatine is still funny.

(Hat tip:Solomonia)

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November 8, 2008 | 1:02 pm

Godless morality

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

God-fearing folks like me are taught that moral behavior comes from diligent reading and observance of God’s Word. Indeed, I was moved by C.S. Lewis’ argument in “Mere Christianity”:

“I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from our parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else,” Lewis writes in the opening chapter of his best-known book for apologetics. “But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different—we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right—and others of them, like mathematics, are real truth.”

Eventually Lewis completes his argument that morality is placed in us by God. Our desire to do what is right, in other words, is an indication of God’s fingerprint on our souls.

I appreciate this line of reasoning as evidence of God, but I don’t believe it can be reversed, that absent from God people will succumb to total depravity (sorry Calvin). Certainly I have had many friends who, though having rejected God, behaved much better than some—many—of my Christian friends. Correlation is not causation; empirical evidence is mixed:

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one’s reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better when exposed to posters with eyes on them.

Maybe, then, religious people are nicer because they believe that they are never alone. If so, you would expect to find the positive influence of religion outside the laboratory. And, indeed, there is evidence within the United States for a correlation between religion and what might broadly be called “niceness.” In Gross National Happiness, Arthur Brooks notes that atheists are less charitable than their God-fearing counterparts: They donate less blood, for example, and are less likely to offer change to homeless people on the street. Since giving to charity makes one happy, Brooks speculates that this could be one reason why atheists are so miserable. In a 2004 study, twice as many religious people say that they are very happy with their lives, while the secular are twice as likely to say that they feel like failures.

Since the United States is more religious than other Western countries, this research suggests that Fox talk-show host Sean Hannity was on to something when he asserted that the United States is “the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth.” In general, you might expect people in less God-fearing countries to be a lot less kind to one another than Americans are.

It is at this point that the “We need God to be good” case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren’t those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don’t go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don’t believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they’re nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren’t exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

The important question here, for religious and non-religious people, is: Why?

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November 7, 2008 | 8:24 pm

Handling Norman Finkelstein

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: Solomonia

I’ve attended two speaking engagements this year for Norman Finkelstein, the notorious anti-Israel critic and Hezbollah cheerleader—first at CSUN, where Finkelstein was accosted by the Jewish Defense League, and later during Palestinian Awareness Week at UC Irvine, when Finkelstein accused writer Jeffrey Goldberg of torturing Palestinians.

I wondered then how much the defamed former professor earned every time he delivered a lecture. Looks like no less than $2,000.

Jewcy, courtesy of Action Palestine, got its hands on notes for booking and working with Finkelstein. Read on:

NOTES RE: NORMAN FINKELSTEIN HIMSELF–No cell phone or laptop, yet needs to check email often(so have a computer handy). Enjoys swimming b4 speaking(clears sinuses). Prefers healthy food, not necessarily kosher. Replies quickly, but can be very difficult via email correspondence. Would say “whatever is fine” when he really means “I will not speak at your school for under $2000 and without a motel room next to the airport”. Would routinely answer only 1/3 of questions asked in emails. Got angry a few times. Also canceled on us 3+ times, twice after signing the contract, because disliked having layover in DC for 2 hrs on flight back to NYC, or thought the honorarium too small. He sometimes reads his emails in a great hurry. My advice=Be succinct. Ask multiple questions in multiple emails. Spell out exactly what is being asked/said. If you hear “Whatever is fine”, then confirm a second or third time, or via the phone. He told us that he was working on a list of suggestions/requirements for hosting him.

In person, NF is an entirely different person–extremely enjoyable to work with, very accessible. Does not care how last name is pronounced, insisted we call him Norman. Open to discussion of politics, but quick to state his opinions. Is a bit of an “Absent-minded Professor”, however, and so tends to get lost, misplace items, forget the schedule, etc. I advise assigning him a helper during his entire time.

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November 7, 2008 | 6:57 pm

Gay-marriage advocates protest outside Mormon temple

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There have been some wild protests in Los Angeles since Proposition 8 passed and same-sex marriage was constitutionally outlawed in California. The ballot measure’s passage owed a lot to support from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is why activists stormed the gates of the Mormon temple in West L.A yesterday.

Renaissance man T.J. Sullivan was there. He’s got a great photo essay, including the one pictured here, at tjsullivanla.com.

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November 7, 2008 | 5:08 pm

Minnesota Jewish battle for Senate narrows to 239 votes

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Minnesota law requires a recount in any election where the margin of victory is less than 0.5 percent, which means Democrat Al Franken, who has narrowed the gap on incumbent Republican Norman Coleman to a mere 239 voters, or one one-hundredth of a percent, may still have won a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Both candidates are Jewish, and therefore won’t help or hinder plans to take over the Senate, but the Democrats certainly wouldn’t mind being one senator closer to a filibuster-proof supermajority. In my opinion, that would not be good for anyone.

I’m still amazed by Franken’s ascension from comedian to liberal talk radio host to being a few votes from the Capitol Building. I mean, I’d vote for Jon Stewart for president and Jay Bilas for Congress, but Al Franken? To be honest, I’m not even really sure who Franken is. But this 2001 article by Mark Hemingway for The American Spectator, through a conservative lens, sheds some light:

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November 7, 2008 | 2:33 pm

From black president to black pope

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Despite Barack Obama’s messianic-like reception, he’s not the black pope I’m talking about. I don’t actually know who that black pontiff might be. I know that when Pope John Paul II died, there were a few African cardinals being discussed as front-runners for carrying on for St. Peter.

But as Gary Stern points out, Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory believes Obama making history as the first black man elected president of the United States has set the stage for the College of Cardinals to someday elect a black pope.

More about what Gregory told the Italian paper La Stampa from the Times of London:

Archbishop Gregory said that the next time cardinals gathered to elect a Pope they could “in their wisdom” choose an African pontiff. “My own election as head of the US Bishops Conference was an important signal. In 2001 the American bishops elected someone they respected regardless of his race, and the same thing could happen with the election of a Pope.”

I’m not sure the two have any connection. Despite the United States’ global power, the Vatican exists on an island whose only outside influence is, in theory, God. Of course, there is no reason this would preclude a black pope; I just don’t think Obama’s election means anything to the College of Cardinals. On the other hand ... maybe it does.

Any thoughts?

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