February 10, 2009 | 5:17 pm

Looking for Obama’s new church

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Missed this segment on “The Daily Show” last week about the Obamas’ search for a new church.

(Hat tip: Benyamin’s blog)

February 10, 2009 | 4:06 pm

Teach evidence for and against evolution? 78 percent say yes

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s not everybody that Charles Darwin receives happy birthday wishes from the Discovery Institute, but I think the headline to the e-mail I just received was a bit sarcastic. The Discovery Institute, which rose to fame a few years ago as a think tank devoted to promoting intelligent design and criticism of evolution, was boasting that in three years support for teaching both the evidence for and against evolution jumped from 69 percent to 78 percent of Americans.

“Media reports insinuate that a right-wing conspiracy of know-nothings and religious extremists is afoot,” John West, associate director of Discovery’s Center for Science & Culture, said in a statement. “But the new Zogby poll reveals a broad-based and well-informed public consensus for academic freedom on evolution. That consensus includes Democrats, Republicans, liberals, moderates, independents, and every race, gender, and age group. The Darwin Lobby has isolated itself from public opinion.”

I couldn’t find the Zogby poll, administered in the last few days of January, online anywhere. Though Discovery’s email linked to their own analysis of the poll results.

Certainly the evidence against evolution should be taught. But I also agree with what Kyle says in the “South Park” episode about 9/11 conspiracy theories: “There’s a lot of holes in the theory of evolution, too. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

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February 9, 2009 | 8:20 pm

A-Rod: ‘God is doing this for a reason’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Watching Alex Rodriguez’s interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, in which he admits using steroids during the 2001, 2002 and 2003 baseball seasons. Gammons just asked A-Rod if he is upset that a drug test that was supposed to be anonymous was leaked to Sports Illustrated.

“No,” the AL MVP from 2003, 2005 and 2007 responded, “God Is doing this for a reason. ... The truth with set you free. This is no one’s fault. This is my fault. I am responsible for this. And I’m deeply sorry for that.”

I hope he is. But I always wonder when people say something bad is happening to them because God has His reasons. Really? Sure you didn’t just do something stupid and now you’ve got to pay the reaper?

The above video is part 1. The God comment was later in the interview; that portion is not online yet.

* Updated: I replaced the previously embedded video with the complete interview.

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February 9, 2009 | 4:54 pm

Jewish charities want piece of the stimulus package

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The U.S. Senate is expected to approve that trillion-dollar stimulus plan tomorrow, and, as I’m sure you’ve heard, everyone is looking for their piece of the pie. (“Rule No. 1,” Rahm Emanuel said after becoming President Obama’s chief of staff, “never allow a crisis to go to waste.”) This includes Jewish charities that are looking to avoid more painful cuts to staff and services.

“The recession has pushed just about every other issue that we deal with in Washington to the sidelines,” said William Daroff, Washington representative of American Jewish federations’ umbrella group, United Jewish Communities. “This is the first-highest priority, the second-highest priority and the third-highest priority.”

Earlier this month, 60 Jewish leaders from around the country descended on Washington for a hastily organized emergency mission to lobby congressional leaders on the stimulus bill.

At the root of the problem are the state budgets that have declined as tax revenues and investments have plummeted. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank devoted to domestic budget issues, estimates that 46 states will not have enough money to cover their budgets this year and the next. In New York, the budget is set to run over by 25% in 2010; in California, the overrun will be 26% if things don’t change. Unlike the federal government, states are generally not allowed to run a deficit, and so the red pen has come out.

In the past few months alone, the crisis has already led to cuts that have seriously affected the services that Jewish agencies offer.

• In New York, the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty laid off 11 staff members and cut out a program for homebound elderly that provided handyman services.

• In Palm Beach, Fla., the local newspaper reported that the Jewish federation cut from its budget 27 staff members and $2.8 million — both reductions of around 15%.

• In Boston, Jewish Family & Children’s Service ended its program for Russian-immigrant teenagers and eliminated one of its so-called naturally occurring retirement communities, which provided services to seniors so that they did not have to move into nursing homes.

These cuts come as the fundraising campaigns of the Jewish federations, which ended last December, raised less than they did in 2007, and endowments returned less. But the largest sources of funding for almost all Jewish agencies are the state and federal governments.

In Ohio, $117 million flows from the government to Jewish agencies around the state. Joyce Garver Keller, who deals with the state government on behalf of Ohio’s Jewish federations, just got the proposed state budget for 2010. She is bracing for nearly 20% cuts in government funding — a drop of $22 million. That will likely affect the state’s eight Jewish nursing homes, its Jewish day schools and the Holocaust memorial in Cincinnati, among other things. As she spoke to the Forward, Garver Keller took note of the stream of messages coming into her inbox, from people asking about the shortfalls.

“It’s sort of like there’s no place to run, no place to hide from this,” Garver Keller said. “It’s all you can do every morning to be positive.”

No surprises in this article from The Forward. I’ve been writing since July about the economic double-whammy for Jewish social service agencies. Madoff, obviously, only tightened the pressure these organizations were feeling. I referenced both these phenomenon in my article this week about the effort to recreate the L.A. Jewish federation. Jewish Family Service, which does great work and receives more state funding than any other Jewish organization, has been particularly pinched.

Here is the problem, though, that I have with social service agencies, schools, research institute and the like receiving anything from the stimulus package: While many are certainly worthy of public funding and unquestionably play important roles in society, they don’t have a lot to do with stimulating the economy.

“Too much of the so-called stimulus package is long-term growth and has little to do with the pathology that the US is suffering from right now,” Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, told me recently. “The biggest problem is the politicians got a hold of spending a trillion dollars and they went nuts. They have a whole list of things they want to spend money on. The National Science Foundation is included in this stimulus package. That is a good thing. It’s great for the long run, but it’s not a stimulus.”

“Lobbyists,” he added, “are just drooling over the opportunity to get some of this money.”

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February 9, 2009 | 2:30 pm

Bishop who denied Holocaust booted from seminary leadership

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

La Reja sketch

Bishop Richard Williamson has been welcomed back into the Catholic Church, amid much controversy and the pope’s demand that he recant statements denying Holocaust, but he’s now persona non grata at the Argentine seminary of the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X that he had run during his excommunication.

The NYT reports:

The seminary announced the dismissal on Sunday in a statement that said the bishop, Richard Williamson was no longer the director of the La Reja seminary on the outskirts of the Argentina capital.

He has said the “historical evidence” argues against Nazi gas chambers and said that only 200,000 to 300,000 people died in concentration camps in the Holocaust.

Bishop Williamson’s views “in no way reflect the position of our congregation,” the Rev. Christian Bouchacourt, the director of the Latin America branch of the Catholic Society of St. Pius X, said in the statement. He expressed “sadness” that Bishop Williamson’s statements had “discredited” the congregation.

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February 9, 2009 | 2:22 pm

Hamas negotiators stopped with millions in cash

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This always happens to me when I’m crossing back into the U.S. from Tijuana:

Hamas negotiators left Egypt without a long-term cease-fire with Israel on Thursday — but not before some members of the militant group’s delegation were stopped at the Gaza border carrying millions in cash.

The delegation walked away from the cease-fire talks because of disagreements over the blockage on Gaza and border security. Talks will continue at a later date.

An Egyptian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the group initially refused to be searched by Egyptian authorities at the Rafah border crossing. When the group relented, authorities found $7 million and 2 million euros ($2.5 million) in cash in their suitcases. Another security official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said $9 million and 2 million euros were found. The discrepancy could not be immediately explained.

The money was later deposited in an account in Egypt by a Hamas member who stayed behind while the rest of the delegation was allowed to return to Gaza, the second security official said. He later returned to Gaza, the second official said.

It was not clear what would happen to the money.

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February 9, 2009 | 1:32 am

After Daniel Pearl: Does the world accept evil?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

As he did last year, Judea Pearl penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on the anniversary of his son’s murder in Pakistan at the hands of Islamic terrorists. This year, Pearl, who is a professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which brings Muslim journalists to The Jewish Journal for a week at a time, asks: “Would Danny have believed that today’s world emerged after his tragedy?”

Pearl writes:

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny’s murder would be a turning point in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of “resistance,” has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words “war on terror” cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism—the ideological license to elevate one’s grievances above the norms of civilized society—was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable “tactical” considerations.

This mentality of surrender then worked its way through politicians like the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. In July 2005 he told Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man’s second nature. “In an unfair balance, that’s what people use,” explained Mr. Livingstone.

Read the rest here.

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February 8, 2009 | 7:41 pm

Remembering Aish HaTorah’s Rav Weinberg

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I neglected to mention that Rabbi Noah Weinberg, founder of the Jewish inreach organization Aish HaTorah, died in his Jerusalem home Thursday morning after months of deteriorating health. He was 78.

“Rabbi Weinberg dedicated his life to bringing a renaissance within Jewish people, to reach out to every Jew and reconnect him to the depth and meaning of our heritage,” the organization he founded in 1974 said in a statement. “The Jewish people are meant to be a light unto nations; Rabbi Weinberg undertook the task to galvanize the Jewish people and inspire us to live up to our mission and be Kiddush Hashem—to sanctify God’s Name in this world.”

At Cross-Currents, Yaakov Menken remembers his first rebbe. An excerpt is after the jump:

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February 6, 2009 | 6:21 pm

Looking for your former masturbator t-shirt?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I know: The headline is jarring. And you thought XXXChurch and the porn missionaries were edgy.

This is one of a handful of new shirts included in the Passion 4 Christ Movement’s ex campaign. I’m speechless. Fortunately, the folks promoting this shirt aren’t. Watch the video after the jump to hear this:

“We want you to rock it. You gotta have confidence though ‘cause cats are gonna be clowning you. We already talked about, you know, you walk into the 7-11 and people are gonna be joking and snickering, and you almost want to direct it to those people and tell them you know, you all laughing probably because y’all still masturbating!”

(Hat tip: Jewcy)

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February 6, 2009 | 3:04 pm

South African politician says she meant ‘Zionists, not ‘Jews,’ control U.S.

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Hajaig

Not everyone who is an anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite. But clearly the rhetoric of today’s anti-Semites is to say that Judaism is a beautiful religion but Zionism the spawn of Satan. In fact, some of their best friends are Jewish ...

And that’s the point of clarification that Fatima Hajaig, the South African deputy foreign minister, has made regarding her statement last month that “control of America, just like the control of most Western countries, is in the hands of Jewish money.”

Hajaig says she meant:

I have just returned from a visit to Japan and learnt of the controversy surrounding some comments that I was purported to have made. I have reviewed the proceedings of the meeting and wish to say, to state the following: Throughout my life I have been opposed to apartheid and all forms of racism. It is this opposition that drove me into exile and to work with the African National Congress for decades. Along with all in the ANC and consistent with the recent resolutions adopted at our Polokwane conference in December 2007, I have long been cognisant of the immense suffering the Palestinians have experienced in the form of expulsions, collective punishment and massacres, of which the recent war in Gaza is but the latest example. It is to this suffering that I spoke at the meeting. I deplore the attempts of Zionists to justify policies that have worsened the crisis in the Middle East, in particular unmitigated state violence directed against unarmed civilians as much as I deplore indiscriminate attacks against Israeli unarmed civilians.

At a singular point in my talk, and entirely unrelated to any South African community, I conflated Zionist pressure with Jewish influence. I regret the inference made by some that I am anti-Jewish. I do not believe that the cause of the Palestinians is served by any anti-Jewish racism. As a member of the South African government and a committed member of the African National Congress, I subscribe to the values and principles of non-racism and condemn without equivocation all forms of racism, including antisemitism in all its manifestations and wherever it may occur.

To the extent that my statement may have caused hurt and pain, I offer an unequivocal apology for the pain it may have caused to the people of our country and the Jewish community in particular. I wish to reiterate that the major issue in relation to the Palestinian Israel conflict is the enormous suffering of the Palestinian people and the struggle for peace for all its’ people based on justice and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

As Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, I reaffirm the government’s commitment to engage all parties in Israel and Palestine to find an amicable and just resolution to the conflict in that region.

Ben Cohen at Jewcy isn’t buying it. He writes:

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February 5, 2009 | 7:09 pm

Even Muslims think Obama is the messiah

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Reuters

Before hearing that President Obama’s first interview since taking office was with Al-Arabiya, Reuters asked the Grand Mufti of Bosnia what he thought of the new American leader:

Americans “think that they have elected him, but I believe that he was elected by God,” Mustafa Ceric told the news service. “Barack Obama is one of these most noble goods of our time and our civilisation, that is why I think he is a gift of God,” he said. “At the moment we feel a trend to change. Whether this change will be really in practice and life, we need time to see.”

There was, of course, plenty of pondering during the presidential race about whether Obama would save the world, or at least America’s reputation in it. And when he won, thousands of committed supporters were left to wander the streets without purpose. I really don’t see how Obama is going to live up to these expectations. But, like Ceric said, we need time to see.

Writing for the Christian Post, Ken Connor warns that Obama is, afterall, “just a man.” He writes:

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February 5, 2009 | 6:31 pm

Remaking a staple of the Jewish community

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The federation model of blue-blood community agencies all being supported by one umbrella organization is a staple of American Jewish life. Jewish federations exist in communities big and small, providing office space and serving as a central fundraiser for key service providers, particularly those helping the needy. In some cities, the federations also serve as quasi community governments and their leaders as representatives to the greater Jewish community.

But in Los Angeles the community has long since outgrown the federation model.

The new chairman of the L.A. federation’s board, Stanley Gold, took over last January with the stated goal of turning the umbrella organization upside down and preparing it for the future.

“It is largely irrelevant,” Gold said at the time. “I’m gonna make it relevant. Gonna make it relevant to the donor community. Gonna make it relevant to the Los Angeles community. And gonna make it relevant to most of the Jewish community. The alternative is a slow dissipation. I’m not going to let that happen.“

No one would argue that the federation looks pretty much the same today as it did a year ago. Its internal governance, its funding structure and relationship with the agencies have all changed; even its president announced that he will step aside at the end of the year. But the question some people are asking—inevitably—is whether Gold’s efforts will be good for the Jews.

My story about these changes for this week’s Jewish Journal picks up after the jump:

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