February 13, 2009 | 7:15 pm

Understanding Islamic creationism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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A friend at Religion News Service recently interviewed Salman Hameed, an assistant professor at Hampshire College who writes the Science and Religion News blog. The focus of their conversation was Islamic creationism, which I’ve discussed before. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: How does Islamic creationism differ from the traditional Christian views on the issue?

A: Young-earth creationism—the notion that the earth is 6,000 years old—is completely missing in the Muslim world. The Quran is ambiguous—it deals with a six-day creationism, but at one place it said the length of a day may be 10,000 years, at another point it says the length of each day may be 50,000 days. So, Muslims had accepted the scientific answer to the age of the earth, which is in billions of years. There was no conflict with scientists.

Q: Does this difference reflect that the Quran was revealed 2,000 years after Genesis, when people had more scientific knowledge about the world?

A: That’s more of a question for the Quranic scholars. The Quran simply doesn’t have creation accounts laid out, as in the book of Genesis. A lot of biblical scholars say Genesis can be interpreted in different ways; with the Quran, the creation accounts are more ambiguous.

Q: How was Darwin’s theory of evolution originally received by Muslims?

A: The Quran has a lot of detail about the creation of Adam. It says Adam was created out of dirt, but in another place it talks about life being created from water. People can use their imaginations. You can bring in a theistic evolutionary theory—that God used evolutionary processes to create Adam.

After the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” a lot of reformers thought evolution can still be worked out in an Islamic context, so the debate did not play a central role in science and religion in the Muslim world. It’s happening now, though.

Q: Why is creationism gaining ground in the Muslim world?

A: Now you have more access to the Internet, to false and true information about evolution. In the next five to 10 years, views will solidify over what is the perspective of Islam regarding evolution. We do not have a central pope-like authority, especially in Sunni Islam, and there are different parties jockeying to be spokespersons. At the present time, the most dominant voice we have is from creationists like Harun Yahya, defining evolution as a Western propaganda or worse, linking it purely with atheism. For Muslims, if evolution gets equated with atheism, they will reject it because religion plays a central role in their culture.

You can read the rest here.

February 13, 2009 | 4:36 pm

Miserable and loving it

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Thank you Mollie for this clip of Louis CK.

“We live in an amazing, amazing world,” the comedian told Conan, “and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots.”

The headline from Barefoot Meg was what got me: “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy.” Yes, people are filling their lives with “convenience” and entertainment. But so what?

Reminds me of why the SlingBox creator told me he’d root to get rid of technology:

“Everyone always has said, ‘Oh, computers or e-mail or whatever are going to make your life easier. It’s going to give you more time to spend in leisure.’ Who are we kidding? There is nothing farther from the truth. It just means you can work harder, harder and faster, faster.”

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February 13, 2009 | 3:20 pm

10 reasons to love Jews on Valentine

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s been a really bad couple of months for Jews—what with the Bernard Madoff investment scandal, on top of the weight of the economic collapse, and the unpopular war in Gaza. That’s exactly why Edmon J. Rodman writes that Jews could use a nice Valentine’s Day card. He’s not sure what that would look like. But he gives 10 good reasons why the world should love Jews:

1. Inventing tzedakah boxes. Low tech. High concept. Coin goes in here—tzedek, justice, comes out there. Portable, cheaply reproducible and hopefully copied by everyone, the box is a powerful communal tool. Dating from the Temple, it provides an anonymous, easy method to contribute. Lives have been rebuilt with it, forests planted, mouths fed, study supported, all from something as simple as a cardboard can.

2. Cooking kasha varnishkes. A side dish of just buckwheat groats and bowtie noodles; think of it as Jewish aromatherapy. The smell gets right up in your head. Like in an old animated cartoon, the aroma transports you to another place: your mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen The Jewish obsession with food has led us to creating food pantries and organizations such as Mazon, “food” in Hebrew,” and Sova, “to be satisfied,” in Los Angeles.

3. Writing a ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract, where everything is spelled out: the responsibilities of the groom and the rights of the bride. Long before Victoria’s Secret, this document exposed other secrets, including a wife’s conjugal rights.

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February 13, 2009 | 3:39 am

Symposium at UCLA pours on the anti-Israel hate

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

UCLA, May 2007

Move over UC Irvine.

Tom Tugend has a heavily detailed article in this week’s Journal about a symposium held at UCLA last month that has angered supporters of Israel and cast fear upon many Jewish students. “Even three weeks later,” Tom writes, “some outraged critics across the country continue to weigh in and to characterize the symposium as an ‘academic lynching,’ a ‘one-sided witch hunt of Israel,’ a ‘Hamas recruiting rally’ or, at the very least, ‘a degradation of academic standards.’

The symposium was organized by the Center for Near East Studies, and though it’s panel of four included two Jews, each was not only a staunch critic of Israel’s assault on Gaza but of the state of Israel itself. The flare-up has been so bad that UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who happens to be Jewish, issued a statement Monday urging calm.

Tom writes:

The final speaker was UCLA English literature professor Saree Makdisi, who stated that when Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the continuing blockade “made Gaza a prison and [Israel] threw away the keys.” He added that it was Israel’s “premeditated state policy” to kill Gazans and stunt the growth of their children.

While the four professorial talks were delivered and received quietly, interrupted only occasionally by applause, emotions escalated during the closing question-and-answer session.

Most of the questioners were adults, well beyond student age, and their softball questions about control of Washington by the Jewish lobby and how to divest from Israel were easily fielded by the speakers.

The mood changed when a few pro-Israel attendees got their chance, according to audience members. When Eric Golub asked Hajjar whether she would consider as prosecutable crimes Hamas’ murder of Fatah rivals, the use of civilians as human shields and recruitment of suicide bombers, the professor responded, “If you think I favor suicide bombings, then you have that Zionist hat on your head screwed on way too tight.”

Hajjar later retracted her comment, but her initial response was met by audience cheers and chants of “Zionism is racism,” “Zionism is Nazism,” “Free, Free Palestine” and “F…, f… Israel.”

Although there were no threats of violence and a policeman was at hand, when the meeting concluded, some members of the audience engaged pro-Israel students with further cries of “f… you.”

Shirley Eshaghian, a psychology senior and president of Bruins for Israel, said she left the symposium shaken.

“I never felt so unsafe on campus,” she said. “People were shouting, and I had this horrible feeling that I, as a Jew, was being attacked; that I was being called a Nazi.”

You can read the rest here. The most surprising element to me is that peaceniks in L.A.‘s Jewish community—people who publicly criticized Israel’s incursion into Gaza, who have been at odds with the pro-Israel campus organization StandWithUs and who thought my article last summer about anti-Semitism on college campuses was way overblown—have been just as concerned about the symposium.

“This symposium constituted a reprehensible academic abuse by CNES,” Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the Hillel leader and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now, told Tom. “The center was for many years an internationally respected institution, but it is becoming more and more representative of only one point of view. UCLA has been a pretty calm place, but this symposium has pierced the calm.”

Thoughts?

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February 12, 2009 | 7:08 pm

Happy belated birthday, Darwin

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I missed this editorial observer yesterday on the occasion of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. (Seems like we’ve been “celebrating” scientific Christmas, and thanking Darwin for his contributions, for the last year.) Verlyn Klinkenborg writes:

Perhaps one day we will not call evolution “Darwinism.” After all, we do not call classical mechanics “Newtonism.” But that raises the question of whether a biological Einstein is possible, someone who demonstrates that Darwin’s theory is a limited case. What Darwin proposed was not a set of immutable mathematical formulas. It was a theory of biological history that was itself set in history. That the details have changed does not invalidate his accomplishment. If anything, it enhances it. His writings were not intended to be scriptural. They were meant to be tested.

As for the other fate of so-called Darwinism — the reductionist controversy fostered by religious conservatives — well, Darwin knew plenty about that, too. The cultural opposition to evolution was then, as now, scientifically irrelevant. Perhaps the persistence of opposition to evolution is a reminder that culture is not biological, or else we might have evolved past such a gnashing of sensibilities. In a way, our peculiarly American failure to come to terms with Darwin’s theory and what it’s become since 1859 is a sign of something broader: our failure to come to terms with science and the teaching of science.

(skip)

Darwin recedes, but his idea does not. It is absorbed, with adaptations, into the foundation of the biological sciences. In a very real sense, it is the cornerstone of what we know about life on earth. Darwin’s version of that great idea was very much of its time, and yet the whole weight of his time was set against it. From one perspective, Darwin looks completely conventional — white, male, well born, leisured, patrician. But from another, he turned the fortune of his circumstances into the most unconventional idea of all: the one that showed humans their true ancestry in nature.

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February 12, 2009 | 4:02 pm

Is the stimulus bill anti-religious?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Harvard Memorial Church

I received an e-mail yesterday from the flak for the evangelical organization TheCall. It complained that the stimulus bill, almost, finally finished, included a provision that would encourage colleges and universities to discriminate against religious organizations that meet on campus.

Section 803 of the Senate “stimulus” bill establishes a grant program for colleges and universities to make renovations.  A small provision buried in Section 803 withholds that funding from any facility used for “sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission.”

There are dozens of religious students groups on most public universities and many private schools, too. Religious inquiry, after all, is an essential part of college.

The leader of TheCall, Lou Engle, said, “This small provision, buried so no one could find it, would pressure school administrators to ban these groups, effectively destroying their ability to conduct outreach and evangelization to students who hunger for it.”

I think that’s an apocalyptic reading of the provision, which appears to me to be written to prevent funds from going to the construction of a new chapel. This wouldn’t prevent colleges from allowing student groups to meet in a student union built with money from the stimulus.

Nonetheless, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee blasts the provision on his blog, via the Bible Belt Blogger:

“The dust is settling on the “bipartisan” stimulus bill and one thing is clear:  it is anti-religious,” Huckabee wrote, adding. “You would think the ACLU drafted this bill…”

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February 12, 2009 | 3:38 pm

Pope confirms: Holocaust denial is bad

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ya think?

Pope Benedict, trying to defuse a controversy over a bishop who denies the Holocaust, said Thursday “any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable,” especially if it comes from a clergyman.

The pope also confirmed for the first time that he was planning to visit Israel. Vatican sources say the trip is expected for May. It would be the first by a pope since John Paul visited in 2000.

Benedict made the comments in his first meeting with Jews since the controversy over traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson began in late January. Williamson denies the full extent of the Holocaust and says there were no gas chambers.

The pope told Jewish leaders: “The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah (Holocaust) was a crime against humanity. This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures ...”

For a little background on the Bishop Williamson controversy, click here and here.

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February 12, 2009 | 12:30 pm

The Mormon leader of the ZOA office

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Paredes, left, with Rabbi Wolpe

The Zionist Organization of America’s West Coast office has had quite the revolving door, with, by my count, four regional directors since the end of 2006. The latest selection for the post is Mark Paredes, who happens to be Mormon and one of L.A.‘s most famous philo-Semites.

Paredes, who had been working as national director of Latino outreach for the American Jewish Congress and previously served at the Israeli consulate, moved into the office Monday. He’s the only employee. I e-mailed him yesterday to see why he’s spent his career in Jewish life and what he has planned for making ZOA relevant in Los Angeles again.

ZOA West has struggled for years. Why do you think that is?
While I have spoken with the collective “institutional memory” of the ZOA in Los Angeles in order to get the lay of the land, I’m not a person who dwells on the past. Sometimes it takes a combination of the right people with the right talents and a little bit of luck to make things happen in a big way. With apologies to Shakespeare, the past is not necessarily prologue.

What about job longevity? I count at least three people who have held your position since late 2006.
Since I expect to succeed in this position, I’m not worried about longevity. Also, keep in mind that there is a new dynamic in the organization: Gary Ratner is the new national executive director. Gary and I work well together, and he was the executive director for the LA office of a national Jewish organization for many years. He knows what we need to do to make inroads here, and we are excited about working with ZOA President Mort Klein to organize events for our supporters in the Western Region. I am also fortunate to be able to work with the indefatigable Julie Sager, our LA-based Director of Campus Activities.

What is your formula for turning ZOA around?
I plan to bring together Jews, both religious and secular, who are proud to be Zionists, who are willing to defend Israel and the Jewish people,  who want Israel to negotiate peace only with partners who have already renounced terror and incitement and recognize Israel, and who believe that Jews have the right to live in the Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria. Belief in these principles transcends movements and the religious/secular divide, and it’s my job to organize events that will inspire our supporters and attract other defenders of Israel to the ZOA banner.

Sixty-one years after the creation of the state of Israel, you think there’s still a need for the Zionist Organization of America?

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February 11, 2009 | 9:37 pm

Bar Refaeli: from Heeb to SI’s swimsuit edition

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Maybe you’ve seen by now the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. (Sinners.) A few months after Bar Refaeli, the Israeli ex-pat, graced the cover of Heeb, she landed one of the best gigs in modeling. Coincidence? Unlikely. Another Heeb model, Esti Ginzburg, made the cut.

Here’s an interview Refaeli did with Time about modeling and Israeli politics:

This was your third year in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. The previous two years, were you sitting there with your fingers crossed?
The first year I didn’t expect it at all. Last year, when they came to Israel, I thought, Hmm, they came to my home country — maybe, you know, there’s a reason for it. But I didn’t get the cover, and it’s O.K. because working with Sports Illustrated is such a big compliment anyway that it’s not even a disappointment. Now that I am on the cover, I understand how exciting it is.

Who was the first person you told?
The first person I called was my mom, because she knew already. So I called to shout at her. She’d known for a few days. I’m like, “How can you do that?” She always tells me everything.

Is it true you’ve been modeling since you were 8 months old?
Yes. Since I was 8 months old, till I was 12, I did commercials and ads and cute little stuff for kids. Then I had braces on my teeth. They took them off when I was 16, and then I started modeling more seriously and doing more fashion.

What was your first job?
I don’t remember what the word is in English, but you know those things they put around babies’ necks when they eat? A bib? Those things. But the ad is still on, to this day. It’s really weird. They’re still using that, 23 years later.

You’re Israeli. Are you voting in the elections?
I am in New York, so I can’t.

How do you think they’re going to go?
I actually don’t know who I would vote for. If I knew I was going to, I’d probably research more. I think I’d probably go for [Foreign Minister Tzipi] Livni, but I don’t know.

Livni, in case you didn’t hear, beat out Bibi, though the race is far from resolved.

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February 11, 2009 | 4:46 pm

The popularity of Jewish conspiracy theories

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ian Buruma, a journalist who has written extensively about Asian culture, has an interesting article about the popular of Jewish conspiracies in the Far East. Buruma writes:

A Chinese bestseller, entitled “The Currency War”, describes how Jews are planning to rule the world by manipulating the international financial system. The book is reportedly read in the highest government circles. If so, this does not bode well for the international financial system, which relies on well-informed Chinese to help it recover from the current crisis.

Such conspiracy theories are not rare in Asia. Japanese readers have shown a healthy appetite over the years for books such as “To Watch Jews Is To See the World Clearly”, “The Next Ten Years: How to Get an Inside View of the Jewish Protocols”, and “I’d Like to Apologize To the Japanese, A Jewish Elder’s Confession” (written by a Japanese author, of course, under the made-up name of Mordecai Mose). All these books are variations of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the Russian forgery first published in 1903, which Japanese came across after defeating the Czar’s army in 1905.

The Chinese picked up many modern Western ideas from the Japanese. Perhaps this is how Jewish conspiracy theories were passed on as well. But Southeast Asians are not immune to this kind of nonsense either. The former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Bin Mohammed, has said that “the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” And a recent article in a leading Filipino business magazine explained how Jews had always controlled the countries they lived in, including the United States today.

In the case of Mahathir, a twisted kind of Muslim solidarity is probably at work. But, unlike European or Russian anti-Semitism, the Asian variety has no religious roots. No Chinese or Japanese has blamed Jews for killing their holy men or believed that their children’s blood ended up in Passover matzos. In fact, few Chinese, Japanese, Malaysians, or Filipinos have ever seen a Jew, unless they have spent time abroad.

So what explains the remarkable appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories in Asia? The answer must be partly political. Conspiracy theories thrive in relatively closed societies, where free access to news is limited and freedom of enquiry curtailed. Japan is no longer such a closed society, yet even people with a short history of democracy are prone to believe that they are victims of unseen forces. Precisely because Jews are relatively unknown, therefore mysterious, and in some way associated with the West, they become an obvious fixture of anti-Western paranoia.

(Hat tip: Yid with Lid)

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February 10, 2009 | 9:37 pm

Reviewing ‘My Jesus Year’ for Christianity Today

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Back in November I wrote two reviews of Benyamin Cohen’s “My Jesus Year.” The first, for The Jewish Journal, ran in the second week of the month and coincided with Cohen’s speaking at L.A.‘s Celebration of Jewish Books. The second review, for Christianity Today, disappeared for a few months but was published online today. It’s significantly different than the other review I wrote and talks more about my Jewish journey, which I had written about for The Journal right after Yom Kippur.

Here’s an excerpt that touches on my family’s Jewish history and why I joined The Journal, both themes I’ve blogged about before:

I had anticipated reading Cohen’s memoir since learning of it in the spring. I saw in its premise, and in Cohen’s portrait, a mirror image of myself. Bizarro Brad, if you will.

Borrowing a characteristically short phrase that Cohen repeats throughout his book: Let me explain.

Both my grandmothers were Jewish. So too was my paternal grandfather, from whom the name Greenberg comes. But my mom was confirmed Catholic and my dad never became bar mitzvahed. When I was young, my parents met at Protestantism, and I continue today to be a God-fearing, church-going Christian.

Last year, though, I joined The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, making the move from the Los Angeles Daily News with an impetus as personal as it was professional.

I had been fascinated since becoming a religion reporter a few years before with understanding my split identity: To the outside world, I was Jewish, but to anybody who knew me, I was Christian. I thought working in the Jewish community would help me sort myself out.

“Be careful, man,” a Daily News colleague told me. “That community will change you more than you’ll change them.”

I considered that an unfair warning. For one thing, I wasn’t looking to change anyone but myself. I’m not with Jews for Jesus; I’ve never felt called to evangelize Jacob’s children in particular. As a Christian, I would like to see the whole world come to a saving knowledge of Jesus, but evangelism wasn’t the job for which I was hired, and I considered using my employment to do so as professionally indefensible.

Instead, I saw the new gig as an opportunity to grow culturally as a Jew while strengthening my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. I did this mostly in subtle ways: reporting on Christian Zionists and their close relationship with Jews, immersing myself in Jewish culture and history and learning to see the world through that lens, walking the Holy Land, watching Jon Stewart.

You can read the rest here.

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February 10, 2009 | 7:03 pm

Was A-Rod blaming God?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Alex Rodriguez seemed mature yesterday when he admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs from 2001 to 2003. Maybe even a bit contrite. But I can’t shake the feeling that A-Rod doesn’t feel true guilt for his actions – only the consequences.

“God is doing this for a reason.”

That was A-Rod’s response when ESPN’s Peter Gammons asked if the Yankees third baseman was angry with the players union for not destroying the results of what were supposed to be non-disciplinary, confidential drug tests. Implicit in those words is: God could have given me a free pass.

Well, of course He could have. But should He have? That’s for God to decide. What is clear, though, is that A-Rod made a choice to use anabolic steroids, and now he is being called to account. It’s a cop out to claim otherwise.

God is used to being the scapegoat. Michael Vick, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton – they each claimed a road-to-Damascus moment when they hit bottom. God, they wanted us to know, was the reason their lives had flown so far out of control. He wanted them to be broken so he could bring them back.

But is that really how God works. In fact, the Bible demonstrates just the opposite. It is Satan who kills Job’s family and slaughters his cattle and covers his body with sores. And Job was already a righteous man. The Christian Bible suggests the same. In urging Christians at Corinth to expel an immoral brother from their church, Paul writes: “Hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.”

Certainly, God is allowing this to happen to A-Rod for a reason. Hopefully it will make him a better man. But we live in a world of free will – without getting into an intractable debate about predestination – and A-Rod, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time, chose to cheat. He needed, as he said, “an edge.”  So the question Rodriguez needs to ask himself is not why “God is doing this,” but what he can learn from his own mistakes.

Personal honesty will not restore Rodriguez’s reputation, which had been troubled for a while anyway, but it may save his character. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John and A-Rod paraphrased on ESPN: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

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