February 20, 2009 | 1:19 pm

Bibi works to form coalition government

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Is anyone else having an impossible time following the aftermath of the Israeli election? I know of no other country where the real campaigning begins after the race is over.

The latest:

Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to his moderate rivals Friday to join him after the hard-liner was formally tapped to put together Israel’s next ruling coalition — an alliance that would dilute the power of nationalists bent on derailing Mideast peace talks.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in a seeming about-face, indicated she might be willing to come on board a Netanyahu government.

But Livni, a centrist, would certainly exact a high price: sharing the prime minister’s job she so fervently sought with a reluctant Netanyahu. Should he balk, his alternative would be an unstable coalition of right-wingers sure to collide with the Obama administration and its ambitious plans for ending 60 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Netanyahu urged Livni of the governing Kadima Party and Defense Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party to join his government.

“I call on the members of all the factions ... to set politics aside and put the good of the nation at the center,” Netanyahu said during a low-key ceremony at the president’s residence in Jerusalem.

Friday’s decision by Israel’s ceremonial president, Shimon Peres, to tap Netanyahu ended days of speculation and gave Netanyahu six weeks to put together a ruling coalition.

February 19, 2009 | 5:43 pm

Dow hits a 52-week low

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m starting to wish my financial manager had let me give into hysteria back in September when the Dow fell under 11,000 and I still could have liquidated my savings and gotten out cheap. As the closing bell approaches, the Dow today hit it’s 52-week low. And, yes, this is a religious story for so many reasons. To see why, click here and here and here and here.

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February 19, 2009 | 4:47 pm

The end of the Jewcy people?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Thankfully, Jewcy is not going the way of the buffalo. But it’s staff is now going to have to offer it’s services free of charge. The Fundermentalist reports:

According to a senior staff member of the magazine, its primary funder, theater mogul Jon Steingart, and its president, Tahl Raz, informed the staff on Friday, Feb. 13, that Steingart and its other major backers, Michael Weiner and Michael Steinhardt, were pulling their money from the magazine because they did not see it as a profitable model in a sour economy.

Steingart and Raz told the staff that they would have until the following Friday to vacate the magazine’s offices in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Steingart started Jewcy as a Jewish themed party night at his Ars Nova theater space in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. That eventually spawned a clothing brand that sported off-beat Jewish products, such as women’s underwear and t-shirts bearing such slogans as “Shalom Motherf—er.”

Raz, then a Senior Editor at Fortune Small Business approached Steingart about spinning the Jewcy brand into an online magazine.

The webzine was launched in November 2006 as a for-profit product that featured cultural essays and Jewish content not found in the mainstream Jewish press, including a heavy reliance on blogging.

Steingart, Raz and Steinhardt, however, deemed that the model was no longer sustainable, according to Jewcy’s editor, Lilit Marcus.

I consider this truly sad news. I have long enjoyed and still believe in the Jewcy model, which I liken to Slate for Jews. Sure, it hasn’t been the same since Daniel Koffler left for Oxford last summer. But for two years they have published interesting articles about politics, culture, religion, academia, even food, and they’ve got one of the best names in Jewish journalism.

My amazement at the news was muted, though, by this statement attributed to Marcus: “The site’s traffic has seen a tremendous surge during the past several months and is now at 160,000 visits per month, an all time high.”

Wow. No wonder the machers thought Jewcy was no longer sustainable. That’s only about double the traffic The God Blog received in January. And I’d consider this a modest blog.

Marcus told The Fundermentalist that they’ll keep on truckin’. And I hope they do. They’ve definitely got a good brand. Just a matter of figuring out a way to make it economical. I hear that’s a problem for a range of media outlets these days.

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February 18, 2009 | 6:49 pm

‘Ballad of Bernard Madoff’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Thanks, Guy Handelman, for sending this video of Bernard Madoff.

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February 18, 2009 | 3:09 pm

Stephen Baldwin needs an hour to convert you to Christianity

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In “My Jesus Year,” which I reviewed for both The Jewish Journal and Christianity Today, Benyamin Cohen makes several references to Stephen Baldwin—best known for his role in “Usual Suspects” and for being a born-again Christian.

Recently the two met in the green room of a Fox affiliate. In an hour, Baldwin—can anyone name the fourth Baldwin brother?—thought he could undue what for Cohen has been a lifetime of religious and cultural learning. If I wasn’t already a Christian, this is the kind of conversion I’d hope for.

The rabbi’s son writes:

Stephen Baldwin’s predilection for all things Christ was actually not news to me. I spent a year immersed in Christian pop culture and let’s just say his name came up a time or two. But I never imagined I would actually meet him. I guess it’s divine intervention that we are both here promoting books we wrote—mine, a memoir of my year living like a Christian and his a Moral Majority message masked in detective fiction.

As we were chatting about faith, the fact came up that I had visited 52 different Bible Belt churches and not once had someone tried to convert me. Stephen’s pupils went from their default half-mast glazed-over look to the wide-eyed look of a Baldwin on the prowl. Apparently, I had woken the beast.

“How much time do I have before my segment?” he asked his publicist.

“About an hour,” she called back from across the room.

“An hour,” Baldwin said, “should be enough time to convert you, Ben.”

He was taking this challenge as a badge of honor—that somehow he would be the first Christian to try and convert me—and actually succeed. My first thought? I’ve been an observant Jew for more than three decades and here was a guy who played Barney Rubble in the Flintstones sequel trying to undo it all in under an hour, like a twisted LensCrafters for the soul. Now that’s chutzpah.

I wouldn’t count Baldwin out. This is, after all, a guy who can build a bong with “an avocado,
an ice pick and my snorkel.” Read Cohen’s complete essay here.

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February 18, 2009 | 3:51 am

Elie Wiesel talks about being burned by Madoff

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity lost “substantially all” of its assets in the Bernard Madoff investment scandal. Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, hasn’t spoken much about the losses—he told the Palm Beach Post, “I don’t think any enemy has done so much harm to the Jewish community in America as he has”—but now Wiesel has opened up to USA Today.

Like many who have made Madoff’s list of several thousand victims—individual cases are, obviously, widespread in history’s biggest Ponzi scheme—Wiesel doesn’t care for the distinction:

“I don’t want my name linked with that crook,” Wiesel says, as soft-spoken as ever. “I don’t want to be known as one of his victims. I want my name linked to peace and literature and human rights.”

(skip)

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The irony has been noted: “It takes an extraordinarily heartless conman to swindle a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Nobel Peace Prize winner out of all of his charitable funds,” wrote James Bone in The Times of London.

Wiesel shrugs and says, “People ask, ‘How could he do it to you?’ To me! As if I’m the only one. It’s not about me.”

Nor, he says, is it a particularly Jewish question, despite the fact that Madoff is an Orthodox Jew and that most of his investors were Jewish.

Wiesel says that in the past 20 years, he met Madoff only twice and briefly. “I was introduced by friends — friends that he also betrayed. It’s repulsive.”

He answers most questions about Madoff with his own questions that are left unanswered: “Was he a crook because he was a Jew? Was Ponzi a crook because he was a Christian?”

Since the foundation’s financial loss was reported, Wiesel says, it has been flooded by unsolicited contributions — “big and small, from young and old, Jew and non-Jew. It’s an expression of their outrage.”

You can read the rest here.

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February 16, 2009 | 11:22 pm

‘Do the Jews Really Control America?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Richard Dawkins and Fatima Hajaig might think Jews control America, but do they?

Of course not. But that doesn’t stem endless speculating. I mentioned last week the popularity of Jewish conspiracy theories in Asia. Check out this headline that a blogger for The New Yorker found in a Chinese newspaper: “Do the Jews Really Control America?”

The headline belongs to this article by Qi Yunhong. I have no idea what Qi is saying either, so I’ll let Evan Osnos explain:

The piece goes on to explore Kissinger’s role in the Nixon and Ford Administrations and cites a purported Fortune magazine story which found that, among the forty richest Americans in 1982, four of every ten were Jews. But that’s where the piece takes a distinctly Chinese turn: the author answers his titular question with a hopeful yes, noting that the Jewish people—known to be “permeated with wisdom, full of wit and talent”—the people who gave us Einstein, Freud, Marx, Spielberg—occupy a healthy position of influence in America. Indeed, it is one of rather surprising things that Jewish expats discover upon arrival in China: China is especially good for the Jews. As Chinese friends often say, Jews and Chinese have a lot in common, including a shared emphasis on education, family ties, and migration. China’s bear hug, however, can still catch you by surprise. In an airport lounge not long ago, I sat across from a guy reading a business self-help book entitled, in Chinese, “Why Are the Jews Capable of Making Money: Unlocking the World’s Foremost Merchants’ Money-Making Secrets.”

Sounds like a combination of “Jewish Wisdom for Business Success,” “Jews and Money” and “The Jewish Century.”

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February 16, 2009 | 4:41 pm

Barak: ‘Iran may become an existential threat to Israel’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I thought Iran already was Israel’s existential threat. Defense Minister Ehud Barak told IDF officers Sunday:

“A nuclear Iran is without a doubt the main threat to world order and may lead to mass nuclear proliferation in the entire Middle East. Iran may become an existential threat to Israel.”

“Should Iran obtain nuclear weapons, the sense of security among elements that are affiliated with (the Islamic Republic) will increase immensely, and this will lead to the collapse of the non-proliferation regime and the struggle against nuclear armament in the region.”

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February 15, 2009 | 7:16 pm

Krefetz: For Jews, money is like sex

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I read a pair of books this morning titled “Jews and Money.” The subtitle on the first, by Gerald Krefetz, was “The Myths and the Reality;” the latter, by Edouard Valdman, was “Toward a Metaphysics of Money.”

The books contained a handful of interesting insights that provide a deeper context for the connection between Jews and money—“money and Jews are the same thing: they both wander,” Valdman writes—but it was this comment from Krefetz, explaining why so many Jews work in the financial field, that was most memorable:

“The money game holds a fascination for Jews that some might say is equivalent to sex to the French, food to the Chinese and power to the politician.”

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February 15, 2009 | 1:56 pm

Palestinian university and Bard College join forces

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The New York Times reports that Al Quds University, a Palestinian school in Jerusalem, is going to get a little help from Bard College:

The plan, relying largely on outside financing, includes a liberal arts honors college and a master’s degree program in teaching, both located at Al Quds and granting joint degrees, as well as a model high school to serve as an educational laboratory. The starting date for the first two is September; the high school is to open in 2010.

Nothing like this has ever been tried in Palestinian education, and controversy is expected.

Bard anticipates complaints from some American Jews unhappy because Al Quds is a Palestinian institution partly in Jerusalem — which many Jews consider the indivisible capital of Israel — and because Al Quds is no stranger to radical Palestinian politics. Meanwhile, Al Quds expects some Palestinians to resent the endeavor as vaguely colonialist. And the collaboration by two such disparate institutions is bound to be complicated.

“In Palestinian schools, students are taught the so-called right answer to every question,” Mukhles Sowwan, who runs the Nanotechnology Research Laboratory at Al Quds University, said. “But real education is more about questions than answers. We need to teach our students how to think creatively and critically, and I hope Bard will help us with that.”

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February 15, 2009 | 2:57 am

Valentine’s hoops

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This is a religious non-sequitur, but the godly man, aka Superman, Dwight Howard lost in tonight’s slam dunk competition. And rightfully so. Nate Robinson, a very short 5’9”, was ridiculous.

During the three-point contest, TNT showed this old McDonald’s commercial. (How can this be the same company that advertised McGriddle cakes?) I’m not sure what’s more impressive: Jordan’s shot off the Sear’s Tower or his t-shirt.

Robinson’s and Howard’s dunks are after the jump:

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February 13, 2009 | 9:25 pm

Fun with facial hair

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A man after my own heart:

“I’ve had sideburns, a handlebar mustache, mutton chops, a goatee, the Abe Lincoln look and that thing where your mustache goes up into your sideburns,” says Brian Parkhill, a 25-year-old artist from Long Beach, Calif. “It’s just a fun way to play with your looks. Facial hair is always evolving.”

Parkhill was included in this way-too-long article from MSNBC.com about facial hair making a comeback. It mentions Movember and discusses the psychological impetus—“a direct backlash against metrosexuality and the feminization of modern man”—and feminine response.

My wife is usually supportive for about two weeks; then enthusiasm falls off a cliff. You may have noticed by I’m not only a member, I’m president of the facial-hair-should-be-fun club.

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