April 17, 2009 | 3:40 am

Catching up with the Jewish Jordan

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Photo: AP

Still doing interviews for my coming article about Jew ball and Lakers back-up point guard Jordan Farmar, I just got off the phone with the original “Jewish Jordan.”

Don’t recognize the reference? Don’t worry. I’ve resurrected this blog post from last June for that:

That was once a name claimed by Tamir Goodman, a red-headed Orthodox kid from Baltimore who could seriously play back in the day. (Goodman is my age.) He had a scholarship at the University of Maryland, but that fell through when he refused to play on the Sabbath, and two years later he signed a contract with Israel’s top team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, and, surprisingly became the league’s first observant Jew. Here he is talking with Gelf:

Anything I’ve ever done, I only did for Judaism. All along, all I’ve ever said is, “I’m just trying to use my God-given talent.“ I’m no different than anyone else—you’re a reporter, a lawyer is a lawyer; for me, my talent is basketball. I don’t know; it’s not like I wanted it, or asked for it. I try to be as simple and as humble as possible all the time.

Goodman is still playing, but he’s proven to be no Jordan. He was a standout high school player, and for the Tribe that was enough.

You can ead the rest of that blog post, which actually focused on Jordan Farmar, here. As for Goodman, his days in the limelight have passed, but he’s made a comeback and is playing for Maccabi Haifa.

On a related note, I will, in the Shaqtastic tradition of self-styled nicknames, heretofore be known as the Jewish J.J. Redick. That’s about all the hyperbole I could afford.

April 16, 2009 | 9:06 pm

Hebrew Union College may close campuses

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last summer, the dean of the L.A. campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion told me his university was considering reducing its workweek to four days. Nothing came of this, but I believe in February the school’s academic senate voted to invoke a pay cut rather than lay off faculty. And now Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the four-campus university, has sent a letter explaining that HUC-JIR’s financial troubles are so profound that two campuses may be shut down:

As a result, Ellenson wrote, the college’s board of governors will meet next month to discuss such “radical” scenarios as keeping just one of its three U.S. campuses, which are in Los Angeles, New York and Cincinnati, where it was founded. Other alternatives include merging some academic programs but keeping more than one campus open in the U.S., he wrote. A final decision is expected in June.

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion also has a campus in Jerusalem, which apparently is not in danger of closing but faces budget reductions.

Cincinnati is the historic home of the college, and the Los Angeles campus has a close relationship, including sharing faculty and facilities, with USC. My colleague, Rachel Heller, is calling around trying to confirm just what’s on the table. Being that this is the last day of Passover, reaching anyone has thus far proven challenging.

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April 16, 2009 | 4:10 pm

Noah’s Ark comes to Hong Kong

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating story about the cult of modern-day ark builders. Though I’m referring to people following in Noah’s footsteps, I don’t mean cult in the pejorative sense. Unless you think there is something a bit too odd about building a 300-foot-long ark that could carry two of every kind.

Here’s a portion of the story, which is pegged to an ark being built by three billionaire Chinese brothers:

These are just the latest additions to a veritable ark armada built around the world by the devout and the merely driven—from a 300-foot-long ark built by a pastor in the Canadian town of Florenceville, New Brunswick, to one built by Greenpeace in 2007 on Turkey’s Mount Ararat, warning of “impending climate disaster.”

Richard Greene, a 72-year-old evangelical minister, began building his full-size ark, in Frostburg, Md., after a vision he says came to him in 1974. Mr. Greene ran out of funds in the 1990s, leaving a giant skeleton of concrete and steel, but he says that 35 years on, he hasn’t lost hope, though he can’t help but be in awe of the other ark-builders. “If I got jealous of what other people are doing, this whole thing would have sunk years ago,” he says. “You just keep on keeping on…But if God doesn’t move a lot quicker, I won’t be around to see the completion of this ark.”

Some latter-day Noahs believe the biblical story of a flood washing away man’s misdeeds resonates in a time of sunken financial institutions and economic tumult. “Things aren’t going so well, and God, even in the midst of all that trouble, has provided an ark of safety, a place where people can turn into and go,” says Nathan Smith, a pastor at the nondenominational Florenceville church.

(skip)

The Kwok brothers, backers of the Hong Kong ark, are heirs to their father’s blue-chip Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd., which at the height of the real-estate boom was the world’s largest property developer by market capitalization. But the brothers squabbled in recent years, and last year the board voted to oust eldest brother Walter Kwok as chairman and installed their 80-year-old mother to succeed him.

The Noah’s Ark project reflects Thomas Kwok’s evangelical Christian faith. During the 1990s, he set up a church on the 75th-floor pyramid atrium atop Sun Hung Kai’s Central Plaza office complex. The Noah’s Ark project was initially hatched as a theme park with rides, until Mr. Kwok decided the project should be something more than that. It was held up in planning for several years, and construction on the ark’s foundations didn’t begin in earnest until 2004.

The Kwoks’ version of the ark, which sits on 270,000 square feet of space and was developed in conjunction with five Christian organizations, houses a restaurant, exhibition hall and children’s museum in addition to the Noah’s Resort hotel. Mr. Kwok won’t disclose the cost of the project, which is beached on a small island in Hong Kong’s harbor most reachable via ferry, at the foot of a busy bridge that connects the city to its airport.

Hmmm ... interesting as this project is, it seems the tens of millions of dollars the Kwoks have no doubt spent on this project could have been put to better used building, let’s say, a land-based ark (aka shelter) for the homeless.

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April 15, 2009 | 7:05 pm

Church of God in Christ ankles Memphis

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Religion News Service blog reports:

The Church of God in Christ has long held its annual Holy Convocation in Memphis, Tenn. How long? More than 100 years.

But come 2010, the historically black Pentecostal denomination will hold its meeting in St. Louis.

“Memphis is our home,’’ said COGIC Presiding Bishop Charles E. Blake in a statement. “We love this city, but we have been offered a better package that is more cost-effective for the membership of our church.’‘

The denomination cited several factors, including discounted hotel rates and the ability to hold convocation activities in one facility instead of several buildings.

The Tennessee city stands to lose $35 million in revenue when the convocation—which draws some 50,000 people—leaves town.

More from the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. Before John Calipari left town, I would have headed to St. Louis too. He’s gone now, but I guess that doesn’t change the country’s economic situation. Unfortunately for Memphis, though, it is going to make things a lot worse.

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April 15, 2009 | 5:32 pm

TMZ: ‘Manny Ramirez Loves Jews, Money’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I hate TMZ so much. Google Reader feed for Jews and Los Angeles just got this misleading headline from the celebrity gossip site: “Manny Ramirez Loves Jews, Money.”

Why, whatever could they mean?

Oh, I see. Manny was spotted at the Grove having his picture taken with a kippah-wearing Jew, and then a TMZ paparazzo asked him about his contract in that buddy-buddy-but-I’m-gonna-screw-you-over manner.

“I understand you just signed a huge contract”—really? That’s some revelation—“Do you feel guilty at all that you’re making so much money in this recession, dude?”

“Hey, I’m not hating,” the cameraman continues, before Manny stops him from backing over another unsuspecting shopper.

You can watch the video here.

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April 15, 2009 | 3:08 pm

Interview with the vampire’s attorney

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ira Sorkin freely admits that it’s his duty as a defense lawyer to “represent people who are hated, despised, disliked,” and of course that is true. Democracy demands that someone defend the loathsome. After all, innocent until proven guilty, right?

But what about Bernard Madoff?

Sure, he’s no Saddam (paging Ramsey Clark) or Slobodan Milosevic (Clark again), but he had already admitted to running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history and drew comparisons to Hitler. So why did Sorkin, who had invested almost $19,000 with Madoff, take on his case?

Madoff’s defense attorney gave the answer to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Here’s an excerpt:

“I had received a lot of anti-Semitic e-mails, cursing me for being Jewish,” Sorkin said, and quoted one of the worst e-mails he had received that said: “As one Jew to another, I deeply regret that the Sorkin family did not perish in the Nazi death camps.”

Sorkin said he had also received some death threats: “They said I should die.” The lawyer said someone had also used his name to carry out some kind of fraud: “It’s hard to say where they came from. People said they are Jews but I don’t know if they are Jews.”

When asked about his feelings as a Jew representing another Jew who is considered to be one of the worst criminals to hurt the Jewish community, Sorkin said he was used to hearing such claims against him.

“The law says that you are entitled to be represented by a lawyer, and every Jew should be proud of that,” he said, “Fortunately, we live in a country where justice is supposed to be color blind. All citizens are entitled to their civil rights. We serve a very important role in the system. Our ability to protect people who don’t do bad things can only happen if we protect people who do bad things.”

Indeed, the better question is: What respectable defense attorney won’t take Madoff as a client?

Read the rest from YNet here. A better profile of Sorkin comes courtesy of The New York Times

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April 15, 2009 | 2:07 pm

In the land of PETA activists ...

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

this is freaking ridiculous

The man with a bacon machine gun is king.

That’s right, the BA-K-47, “crafted out of bacon and genius using a blowtorch,” fires no bullets but still manages to destroy animal-rights activists. It’ll probably also do a number on Muslims and Jews.

The Bacon Explosion sounded like some tasty treyf, but I think I’m going to be sick. Thanks for that, Torchio.

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April 15, 2009 | 1:19 pm

For Jewish nonprofits, ‘a time to close ranks and some organizations’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

You’ve probably already read quite a few stories here about how the Madoff scandal and the economic collapse is changing the organized Jewish community. Last week in the New York Jewish Week, Norman Liss, who has served on his share of Jewish nonprofit boards, said that it’s “time to close ranks, and some organizations.”

Liss wrote:

An early victim of the current recession is CAJE, an agency devoted to, and apparently succeeding at, improving Jewish education. Yet other agencies, whose current function and purpose in Jewish life is far from clear continue to function largely as shells, draining funds from more useful counterparts. They seem to exist primarily to allow their volunteer heads to continue to claim a seat at the table of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Other organizations, founded over a century ago to deal with an immigrant Jewish population, continue to exist under a Jewish umbrella, even though social circumstances have changed dramatically in the interim, such that they serve few, if any, Jews. Some of those agencies control large pots of money that could be put to more pressing Jewish uses. Inertia and nostalgia preserve structures and communal assignments that no longer make sense.

The problems alluded to have existed for many years. But now the need for change is of crisis proportion. Unfortunately, although some organizations are much needed and highly productive with dedicated leaders and membership, many in the leadership of the Jewish community are there for reasons other than the collective interests of the Jewish people, some for self-aggrandizement, and some to network for business. Many have simply been too myopic to recognize that their organizations, which have historically contributed much to the growth and health of Jews in America and to the cause of Israel, either no longer do so or are overlapping with the work of other organizations.

Sound familiar to anyone in Los Angeles?

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April 14, 2009 | 6:35 pm

For Judas, a special place in Heaven or Hell?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” By that measure, no one in the history of Christianity is due a greater heavenly reward than Judas Iscariot, for no one in the Gospels or afterward has been more thoroughly reviled on Jesus’ account. In “Judas: A Biography,” Susan Gubar has amassed a long, grim and often nauseating catalog of the ways in which the Christian imagination has vented its wrath on the disciple who betrayed his master.

That’s how Adam Kirsch opens his New York Times review of Gubar’s new book. He then details some of the more stomach-turning members of that catalog:

According to Papias, an early church leader writing around A.D. 130, Judas’s “private parts were shamefully huge and loathsome to behold and, transported through them from all parts of his body, pus and worms flooded out together as he shamefully relieved himself.” The author of the medieval “Golden Legend” imagined Judas’s early life, which included killing his father and marrying his mother; an Arabic legend conjured an infant Judas obsessively biting himself. Medieval artists portrayed him as a slavering brute, deploying a racist arsenal of Jewish and African stereotypes to contrast him with the lily-white Jesus. No wonder that Dante placed Judas at the very bottom of the Inferno, where he is gnawed by Satan: “his head within and outside flails his legs.”

Frankly, I’ve never understood why Judas gets so much blame. He betrayed my Lord, yes. But somebody had to do it. Judas was, after all, part of God’s plan. However, I don’t think such an argument is going to get Judas past the pearly gates.

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April 14, 2009 | 5:24 pm

Is Reform Judaism a separate religion?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Rabbi Forman

Ben Plonie sent me this email last week:

Here is a story that fits your mission from the Jerusalem Post. Reform Rabbi David Forman, founder of Rabbis for Human Rights (implying that the other Rabbis are against human rights of course) proposes in the Jerusalem Post’s Counterpoint: Let’s declare ourselves a separate religion that non-Orthodox offshoots of Judaism stop trying to demand legitimacy from the Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel in a frontal assult, in order to gain Israeli government benefits and recognition given Christians, Muslims, Bahai and so forth. He believes that they will thus do an end-run around the Orthodox and gain new adherents for conversions and marriages.

That’s his purpose but the important and interesting thing to me is that he is sure that non-Orthodox Judaism can be justifiably shown to be a separate religion, something that the Orthodox have been saying from Day 1. The usual justification for offshoots is that they are the real, the true, the core, the authentic, the meaningful essence lost to the bourgious power structure etc. It seems after a couple of centuries of failure to sweep the grass roots into the fold, they are leaving the field. Booyah!

Interesting insights from a regular God Blog commenter. Thanks, Ben.

Forman’s op-ed ran under the headline “Let’s declare ourselves a separate religion.” Here’s an excerpt worth reading:

Since Israel’s establishment, the Reform and Conservative movements in this country have waged a war to gain recognition as a legitimate expression of Judaism, entitled to equal rights with Orthodoxy. They have consistently maintained that they too are heirs to the Jewish tradition. In the Conservative Movement’s case, it claims, like Orthodoxy, to be halachically based, that is until sociological realities force it to alter Halacha.

Both movements have been steadfast in their refusal to declare themselves separate sects within Judaism. The reason for this is that they believe to do so would sever them from the Jewish people, which is pure bunkum. The gulf between Conservative and Reform Judaism and Orthodoxy in Israel is unbridgeable. The Conservative Movement virtually admitted as much when, at its recent rabbinical convention here, it called for the abolition of the Chief Rabbinate. This week, the Reform Movement’s North American rabbinical association is holding its convention here. Its members have been told by their Israeli colleagues that the prejudicial attitude against them among the Orthodox rabbinate is becoming more and more entrenched.

IN LIGHT of all the above, if, together, the Reform and Conservative movements were to declare themselves a separate religion from Orthodoxy, which in fact they are - perhaps not in some of their ritual and liturgical traditions, but most certainly in their ethical moorings regarding their respectful tolerance and concern for the “other” - the state would have no choice but to grant them the rights and privileges enjoyed by other religions in the country, which would necessarily include control over life-cycle events for their own constituency.

Such a dramatic move would most likely marginalize Orthodoxy.

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April 14, 2009 | 2:25 pm

Father Vic with SoulWow

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Father Vic of SoulWow really sounds a lot like Vince with ShamWow, though his face doesn’t have that just-roughed-up-by-a-hooker look. Here’s to hoping he makes better life decisions.

(Hat tip: Rebecca Woods)

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April 14, 2009 | 1:25 pm

Protect the gene pool from Madoff and friends

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Jewssip took aim at Bernard Madoff in an off-color blog post about a condom campaign aimed at protecting the world from evil. Jewssip writes:

Germany’s Doc Morris Pharmacies missed Bernie Madoff in their new “safe sex” condom campaign.

Getting up to get the Jimmy protector doesn’t just help in the fight against STDs and HIV, but can capture the mad men like Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler or Mao Zedong before they can even conceive plans of destruction.

Jewssip points out that for encounters with hedge fund sperm use a Madoff Condom to Prevent Deposits From Becoming Long Term Investments.

Click here to see the real condom ads for Hitler et al.

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