February 27, 2009 | 5:49 pm

Focus on the Family’s James Dobson resigns

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Holy cow:

James Dobson resigned as chairman of Focus on the Family but will continue to play a role at the Colorado Springs-based organization he founded, The Associated Press reports. Dobson’s wife, Shirley, also resigned from the Focus board.

Dobson, 72, already turned the ship over six years ago to Jim Daly, the organization’s president and chief executive officer. He will continue to host Focus on the Family’s radio program, write a monthly newsletter and speak out on moral issues, Daly told Eric Gorski of the AP.

“One of the common errors of founder-presidents is to hold to the reins of leadership too long, thereby preventing the next generation from being prepared for executive authority,” Dobson said in a statement. “... Though letting go is difficult after three decades of intensive labor, it is the wise thing to do.”

That’s the wisest thing he’s said in years.

February 27, 2009 | 4:46 pm

Alabama town’s first $50,000 Jews arrive

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last fall, Peanut Elvis offered $50,000 to Jews willing to make aliyah to his tiny Alabama town and help grow a small and struggling Jewish community. Recently, Dothan’s first new Jewish family, the Reeds (like where Moses was found by Pharoah’s daughter) made the move:

With one new family already in the fold, and hundreds of others expressing interest, the goal is to bring as many as 19 more Jewish families to this mostly Christian town of 58,000 in rural southeast Alabama over the next five years.

Getting thousands of dollars in assistance was nice, the Reeds say, but leaving their home in Sanford, N.C., for Alabama was an easy decision: Matt Reed was able to get a job quickly near Dothan, and his wife’s relatives were members of Temple Emanu-El years ago.

The friendliness of the people was the final clincher, they said.

“It’s been freaky how easy this has been,” said Matt Reed, 25, taking a break from moving boxes inside his new home on Whatley Drive. The curly-haired Ayden, 2, plays with a new trash can while his mom watches after Sam, just 6 weeks old.

Michelle Reed’s Jewish family has roots in Dothan, while her husband was raised Mormon and is in the process of converting to Judaism. Their mixed background wasn’t a drawback for program organizers — as many as half of Temple Emanu-El’s members have similar histories.

The couple heard about the relocation program through family members in Alabama and applied in September because Matt Reed was finishing a stint with the Army at Fort Bragg, N.C. They moved to Dothan after he left the service on Feb. 1.

“We always wanted to raise our kids Jewish, but we didn’t want to do it in North Carolina,” said Michelle Reed, 26. “We didn’t know anything about the temples up there. The one here my parents actually got married in.”

You can read the rest of the AP report here. Thanks for the link, Laurel.

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February 27, 2009 | 3:02 pm

Married before man? Maybe. God? Yes.

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Misleading headline of the year from Yahoo! News: “Rabbis rule joking teens legally married.”

See, this wasn’t an 8-year-old offering his girlfriend a Crackerjack ring and asking her if she’d be his wife. It was a 14-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy standing in their Israeli schoolyard, reciting Jewish ritual vows and accepting the marriage rings in front of God and witnesses.

That, and what a spokeswoman for Israel’s Rabbinical Courts said was the consummation of their marriage, was enough to make them man and wife in the Jewish state.

Spokeswoman Efrat Orbach, describing the girl as the youngest Jewish divorcee in Israel’s modern history, said the couple was granted a rabbinical divorce this week.

That’s the sticking point for me. I’m not a big believer in the institution of marriage as recognized by the state, and I’m certainly too liberal to be a fundamentalist. But two becoming one flesh is the uniting of man and woman that God intended. And, um, that union is only approved in the Bible when it comes with the institutional commitment.

Thanks for the link, Dennis, though I think we disagree on this one.

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February 27, 2009 | 1:53 pm

Police question LA mayoral candidate about threats against opponent

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Zuma Dogg (Photo: LAist)

The Los Angeles mayoral race on Tuesday’s ballot is really a 10-candidate uncontested campaign for incumbent Antonio Villaraigosa. The mayor’s opponents largely lack name recognition and money, and little newsprint has even been dedicated to covering the campaigns.

But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been drama. At least, there was plenty of it last night when L.A. police questioned David “Zuma Dogg” Saltsburg, a City Hall gadfly and sometimes journalist, about whether he made a death threat against another candidate.

That other candidate would be Craig X Rubin, the Reagan Republican and former pot pastor who revealed his candidacy on The God Blog last fall. You may remember Rubin as the founder of Temple 420, a house of worship that used cannabis as a sacrament for communicating with God. The church landed Rubin in court, though he avoided jail time.

Here is what Rubin, now a pastor at The Family Church in Pasadena, claims happened:

Rubin said he believes it all began during a forum at UCLA on Wednesday when Saltsburg stormed out. Saltsburg apparently thought that Rubin and another candidate were mocking his comments embracing W. Edwards Deming’s 14-point management philosophy.

“I don’t know where the anger came from,” Rubin said.

Rubin called police and officers came to his home in the San Fernando Valley, where he filed a formal complaint.

“As a pastor, I felt kind of conflicted about it,” Rubin said. “You know, turn the other check. But I really did feel threatened.”

Zuma Dogg denies threatening Rubin. Fortunately, the controversy isn’t likely to cost him the election. The video after the jump—maybe:

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February 27, 2009 | 10:45 am

The economy and the Jewish future

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Historian Jonathan Sarna

I’ve done a lot of bloviating about the consequences for the Jewish community of the economic downturn and the Bernard Madoff investment scandal. But Jonathan Sarna, the imminent American Jewish historian, recently gave a speech to the Jewish Funders Network that provides everything you need to know about how American Jews became so wealthy and where the community is headed.

The Jewish Journal has published a transcript of his talk. Here’s what I found to be the most telling part:

At the moment, following billions of dollars in losses to Jewish endowments and a significant decline in annual gift giving, different sectors of the American Jewish community are busy explaining to all who will listen why their particular area of the Jewish economy has to be preserved at all costs. Human services (obviously a priority in tough times); Jewish education (as necessary as oxygen); Jewish camping (shapes Jewish memories and lifelong associations); innovative Jewish start-ups (they are the most efficient sector of the Jewish economy and in many ways the most creative); Birthright Israel (perhaps the most successful program we have established in decades & critical to preserving American Jews’ ties to Israel). And so on and so forth—more or less every program is too good to give up. In a way, the community is like my university: everyone understands that we need to cut back in hard times. The faculty simply insists that: nothing be cut from crucial areas like the arts, the humanities, the sciences, the social sciences and the co-curriculars. Everything else is on the table!

The problem in the American Jewish community at large is that, aside from killing off CAJE: The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education and the American Jewish Congress, nobody has put forth serious ideas about how to cut the Jewish communal budget by one-third. That, however, might well be what we need to do. Foundations, even not taking into account the Madoff losses, are about one-third poorer than they were this time last year. If the downturn stretches into 2010, annual campaigns may be down by one-third as well.

Inevitably in downturns, the weaker organizations are the first to fall. As Warren Buffett observed in his usual colorful way, “you don’t know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out.“ My own guess is that, at the very least, many of the Hebrew colleges, many of the bureaus of Jewish education, several of the Jewish museums and some other shakier Jewish organizations will not survive this downturn.

Orthodox Jewish organizations are apparently in the worst shape. Orthodox Jews have been disproportionately involved in banking and the stock market, and were also disproportionately hurt by Madoff ($2 billion, by one account, were lost by members of a single Orthodox synagogue). They also are heavy users of our most expensive Jewish institutions (synagogues and schools). I have felt for a long time—and for numerous reasons—that Orthodoxy’s rise had run its course. My sense is that the downturn will confirm this. I do not expect to see same kind of Orthodox growth moving forward as we have seen since 1960s, and my guess, sadly, is that some significant Orthodox institutions will not survive.

Sarna goes on to detail seven trends to watch:

I do not have high confidence that we can predict the future today any more clearly.

But this much I am prepared to predict: the economic downturn will end, the stock market will turn around, Jews will begin to make money again, and Jewish funders will regain their confidence and search for new ways to make our community better and stronger.

Let’s hope that this happens soon.

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February 26, 2009 | 7:47 pm

That’s William Lobdell in the corner

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The former LA Times reporter’s memoir, “Losing My Religion,” was published yesterday. It’s an expansion of the 2007 Column One William Lobdell wrote about losing his faith on the religion beat. It’s not a malady I share, but it’s a book I plan to read.

So far his memoir is selling well—currently No. 5 on Amazon in religious memoirs and No. 6 in memoirs by journalists—and Lobdell has been happy about the early reviews. I particularly liked the quick treatment from Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist:

He’s not out to (de-)convert you, just to tell you how he became an atheist himself. In that sense, this is a book that religious people can read from front to back without wanting to burn it. (Which I suspect will make it less popular among die-hard atheists, unfortunately.)

If you’re someone who only recently became an atheist, or someone who’s only thinking about it, this is a book that could help you along the way. If you’re religious, it can help you understand why some atheists choose the path that we do.

Lobdell, my source this cartoon of Obama the Muslim radical, blogs here.

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February 26, 2009 | 6:56 pm

Bad bishop apologizes for Holocaust denial

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: Reuters

The Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop who was reinstated last month by the pope, only to embroil the Catholic Church in quite the controversy, and who was booted from the seminary he led and subsequently his home in Argentina, has apologized for comments. He didn’t, however, recant them as Pope Benedict XVI had demanded.

The AP reports:

“If I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them,” Williamson was quoted as saying in the statement carried by the Zenit Catholic news agency.

Last month the pope, seeking to help heal a rift with ultra-traditionalists, lifted a 20-year-old excommunication decree imposed on Williamson and three other bishops who had been consecrated without Vatican approval.

The move immediately caused an uproar among Jewish groups. Benedict later condemned Williamson’s remarks and spoke out against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

“Observing these consequences I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks,” Williamson added, according to Zenit.

There was additional news yesterday that Williamson had assaulted an Argentine reporter while leaving the country. The video is after the jump; this new controversy seems overblown.

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February 26, 2009 | 6:39 pm

A little historical humor: How many commandments, giveth the Lord?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Watching Mel Brooks’ “History of the World: Part I” while eating lunch. Just passed the part about “these 15—oy—10, 10 commandments for all to obey.”

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February 26, 2009 | 4:04 pm

Jews, mammon and anti-Semitism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

My perspective on the Leonard Abess story was shaped by an op-ed I wrote two weeks prior regarding the on-again, off-game economic blame game that haunts Jews. I’ve been writing about the financial scapegoating aimed at Jews and reading a lot of books on the history of Jews and money, and the Christian Science Monitor decided to publish my commentary in tomorrow’s paper and online now.

I opened by mentioning Zaccheus, Fagin and Shylock, and then got into the medieval history that pushed Jews into moneylending and prepared American immigrant Jews for their meteoric rise from rural peddlers to international financiers. It concludes:

The saga of Lehman Brothers came to a sudden end Sept. 15, not coincidentally at the same time that Jews once again became the scapegoat for this country’s, and the world’s, economic problems.

Since then, conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites alike have been busy bombarding financial blogs, Jewish journalism outlets, and their self-serving forums with comments about how former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Lehman Brothers, and others are orchestrating this crisis to crush the goy.

It’s the same trope that’s been repeated since long before the rise of the House of Rothschild: The “international Jew,” as Henry Ford deemed this global tribe, starts wars and manipulates markets for self-gain and schadenfreude.

And it’s just as vacuous now as it was then. Jews are certainly prominent in the US financial market, but they remain an underwhelming minority.

Time magazine’s list this month of the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” includes, by my count, six Jews – which means that more than 75 percent of the culpable were not Jewish. Among the blameworthy were former President Bush, disgraced subprime lender Angelo Mozilo and, ahem, the american consumer. There is little Jews can do to kill this old canard. But they can learn from the mistakes that enabled one of their own to use the communal bonds in American Jewry to orchestrate the biggest con in US history.

Though some Jewish money managers have proved to be scoundrels at best, like Shylock, it is not because they are Jewish – just as Christianity did not inspire Ken Lay to cheat Enron’s shareholders. Indeed, Jews may be the easy historical target, but scapegoating misses the moral of our own failures. The real responsibility lies with all of us.

You can read the entire op-ed here.

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February 26, 2009 | 3:32 pm

San Berdoo’s really cool Jew

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

San Bernardino, home of the first McDonald's

My first newspaper job was at the San Bernardino Sun. Just about the only Jews in town worked at the paper. (That’s an exaggeration, but, seriously, a third of the metro reporters were Jewish, and that doesn’t include me.) And I don’t think anyone, Jew or gentile, thought the place was cool.

Memories of my Inland Empire salad days came flooding back when I read David Suissa’s column today titled “Uncool Jew.”

Suissa really can’t be spoken of highly enough, and this column is evidence why. Here’s the lede:

“Where are you from?” is a simple enough question. But when I asked Lisa Alcalay Klug the other day, she did everything she could not to answer. At first she tried to change the subject, and then she just smiled and said, “Right outside of Los Angeles.”

“But where outside of Los Angeles?” I wanted to know. What was she trying to hide? Was her coyness connected to her new coolness? Many of you might know that for the past few months, Klug has been traveling the country promoting her new book, “Cool Jew,” which has put her right up there on the Jewish hip-o-meter. So, was her hometown not in keeping with being a cool Jew?

Apparently so, because she finally blurted it out: “San Bernardino.”

Ouch. Is there any place less cool than San Bernardino? No wonder she kept stalling. Out of sympathy, I mumbled something about San Bernardino having a cool Chabad rabbi, but that didn’t get me far.

Eventually, after our long morning conversation at Delice café last week, I discovered the real reason why Klug was hiding the identity of her hometown. It wasn’t because San Bernardino is not a very hip place. Rather, it was because that was the place where she was introduced to that ancient malignancy called anti-Semitism, where, growing up, the attacks of “dirty Jew” she heard in school had to compete with the teaching of “proud Jew” she heard at home.

Both sides left a mark on her.

Klug is one of the many presenters this weekend at Jewlicious Festival. A full list of presenters, including this guy, is available here. I was going to be on a panel with Bizarro Brad, aka Benyamin Cohen, but he couldn’t make it out from Atlanta and now I’m scrambling to put together a 30-minute talk. Scary.

Regardless, I hope you’ll come by at 1:30 Saturday if you’re there.

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February 26, 2009 | 2:09 pm

Sacred space? FBI uses informants to infiltrate mosques

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: The Telegraph

The case of Ahmadullah Niazi, an Irvine man arrested last week for allegedly lying on his citizen and passport docs about terrorist ties, has been getting plenty of attention. But less discussed is the anti-terrorism strategy that led to Niazi’s arrest.

In 2007, Niazi contacted the FBI about a new convert at his mosque who was radicalizing fast. Turned out the jihadi hopeful was actually an FBI informant who had joined several Orange County mosques:

An FBI agent interviewed Niazi in June 2007 and again in April 2008. Niazi met with Muslim advocates after the second interview and told them the agency had threatened to make his life a “living hell” if he did not become an informant, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“He was in tears, crying. He said, ‘I came to this country to be free, to be a human being and now I’m being asked to be a spy,” Ayloush said after the hearing.

The convert, whose behavior earned him a restraining order from the mosque, which I blogged about that July, was Craig Montielh. He filed court documents yesterday admitting that he was the FBI’s man in Irvine. But, according to the LA Times, he claims that Niazi is not so innocent:

Monteilh said in interviews that he had alerted the FBI to Niazi after meeting him at the Islamic Center of Irvine in November 2006 and spending eight months with him. Monteilh said he called himself Farouk Al-Aziz and posed as a Syrian-French American in search of his Islamic roots. Monteilh told the FBI that Niazi befriended him and began to lecture him about jihad, gave him lessons in bomb-making and discussed plots to blow up Orange County landmarks.

“He took me under his wing and began to radicalize me,” Monteilh said.

The FBI declined to comment on Monteilh’s allegations, which could not be independently verified. Niazi’s attorney, deputy federal public defender Chase Scolnick, also declined to comment.

Whether Niazi is innocent or guilty will take some time to sort out—and we may never really know. But the interesting question, to me, regards the appropriateness of law enforcement infiltrating religious organizations. This is what led LAPD to close Temple 420. And, despite what Muslim advocates are saying, it doesn’t only occur in mosques and isn’t simply racial profiling, though I’m sure some is involved.

The question is whether law enforcement should be allowed to invade sacred space in the name of public safety. And if so, are my prayer requests going to make it into a report somewhere?

Thoughts?

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February 26, 2009 | 2:36 am

The Jewish banker with the really big heart

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In his speech last night to a joint session of Congress, President Obama singled out a Jewish banker not getting a bad rap for the financial crisis. While Herb and Marion Sandler got rich by selling a troubled savings and loan to Wachovia and Bernard Madoff stayed rich by out and out stealing from beacons of American Jewry, Leonard Abess is being haled a hero.

Abess’ story, which I learned of last week while searching for info on Beverly Hills-based City National Bank, couldn’t being getting attention at a better time. Since the global economy collapsed in September, Jews are getting much more than their fare share of scapegoating. Then Madoff heaped on an extra helping for anti-Semites, confirming all the worst stereotypes about greedy Jewish moneylenders and making Jews wistful for Shylock.

“Guys, the naked truth is that there’s something wrong with you. You are extrmely evil and hateful and should have no right calling anyone “antisemite”. And so what if someone hates you? It’s like hating cholera or aids. You guys are the disease. Everything you touch turns into sh—,” a commenter identified as Marcellus wrote in one of my original posts about Madoff—and there were plenty of comments with far more venom.

But when Abess sold his City National Bank of Florida, he did a real mitzvah and gave $60 million in bonuses back to his employees. Here’s what Obama had to say and a little extra reporting from JTA:

“I have also learned that hope is found in unlikely places; that inspiration often comes not from those with the most power or celebrity, but from the dreams and aspirations of Americans who are anything but ordinary,“ Obama said in the first of a number of references to the upper reaches of the Capitol, where a president’s chosen “heroes” sit with the first lady.

“I think of Leonard Abess, a bank president from Miami who reportedly cashed out of his company, took a $60 million bonus and gave it out to all 399 people who worked for him, plus another 72 who used to work for him,“ Obama said, as Abess barely contained his emotions. “He didn’t tell anyone, but when the local newspaper found out, he simply said, ‘I knew some of these people since I was 7 years old. It didn’t feel right getting the money myself.‘“

According to the biography of Abess posted by City National Bank, Abess is a board member of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation and the Anti-Defamation League.

“Leonard Abess, who gave millions to employees, is a Miami Jewish federation leader,“ William Daroff, the United Jewish Communities’ Washington director, Twittered with pride.

“Leonard and his family have been very generous supporters of the fed for as long as I can remember,” Jacob Solomon, the executive vice president of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, told JTA.

“They really bring to life what we mean when we say the Jews should be ‘ohr la-goyim,‘ “ a light unto the nations.

It’s natural for Jews to kvell about such generosity. And that’s what I thought William Daroff was doing, until I realized that “twittered” was capitalized. I follow Daroff’s tweets, but I guess I missed that one; funny to see it mentioned in a JTA article.

Anyway, the pride in Abess’ action is well placed.

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