April 13, 2009 | 9:40 pm

Jew ball

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Watching “The First Basket” right now. Doing some research for a profile of Jordan Farmar, who is, at this point, the only duel member of the tribe and the NBA. I mentioned the film a few weeks ago. You can read more about it here.

April 13, 2009 | 3:17 pm

Suri Cruise about to enter Scientology school

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s got to be really tough living under the heat lamp that surrounds Suri Cruise. Tougher still has got to be living with Tom Cruise as your papa. Suri turns three this week, and word has it that she’ll be entering a Scientology pre-school. Get ‘em while they’re young, I guess:

The Cruises are sending their daughter five days a week to the Church of Scientology’s £6,000-a-year New Village Academy in Los Angeles, launched last year by Tom’s friend, fellow actor Will Smith.

“The children have a lot of responsibilities from a very young age,” says a source. “The school is particularly strict about nutrition, demanding a low-carb, low-sodium and low-sugar organic diet.”

(Hat tip: Holy Weblog)

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April 13, 2009 | 2:49 pm

The Jackie Robinson of Mecca

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: NYT

Every year on April 15, I pay my taxes and Major League Baseball remembers the enormous contribution of one player, Jackie Robinson. It seems unlikely Islam will ever create a day to celebrate the achievements of Sheik Adil Kalbani, but he too will be remembered for breaking the color barrier.

Kalbani became the first black Muslim—not to be confused with membership to the Nation of Islam—to lead prayers in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, last fall.

On this Easter weekend, Kalbani was the subject of The New York Times Saturday profile:

Since then, Sheik Adil has been half-jokingly dubbed the “Saudi Obama.” Prominent imams are celebrities in this deeply religious country, and many have hailed his selection as more evidence of King Abdullah’s cautious efforts to move Saudi Arabia toward greater openness and tolerance in the past few years.

“The king is trying to tell everybody that he wants to rule this land as one nation, with no racism and no segregation,” said Sheik Adil, a heavyset and long-bearded man of 49 who has been an imam at a Riyadh mosque for 20 years. “Any qualified individual, no matter what his color, no matter where from, will have a chance to be a leader, for his good and his country’s good.”

Officially, it was his skill at reciting the Koran that won him the position, which he carries out — like the Grand Mosque’s eight other prayer leaders — only during the holy month of Ramadan. But the racial significance of the king’s gesture was unmistakable.

Sheik Adil, like most Saudis, is quick to caution that any racism here is not the fault of Islam, which preaches egalitarianism. The Prophet Muhammad himself, who founded the religion here 1,400 years ago, had black companions.

“Our Islamic history has so many famous black people,” said the imam, as he sat leaning his arm on a cushion in the reception room of his home. “It is not like the West.”

It is also true that Saudi Arabia is far more ethnically diverse than most Westerners realize. Saudis with Malaysian or African features are a common sight along the kingdom’s west coast, the descendants of pilgrims who came here over the centuries and ended up staying. Many have prospered and even attained high positions through links to the royal family. Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, is the son of Prince Sultan and a dark-skinned concubine from southern Saudi Arabia.

But slavery was practiced here too, and was abolished only in 1962. Many traditional Arabs from Nejd, the central Saudi heartland, used to refer to all outsiders as “tarsh al bahr” — vomit from the sea. People of African descent still face some discrimination, as do most immigrants, even from other Arab countries. Many Saudis complain that the kingdom is still far too dominated by Nejd, the homeland of the royal family. There are nonracial forms of discrimination too, and many Shiite Muslims, a substantial minority, say they are not treated fairly.

“The prophet told us that social classes will remain, because of human nature,” Sheik Adil said gravely. “These are part of the pre-Islamic practices that persist.”

You can read the rest here.

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April 13, 2009 | 1:25 pm

Contemplating God

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“Tonight I was in a meditative mood. I was absorbed in the contemplation of nature; I admired the immensity, the movements, the harmony of those infinite globes.
I admired still more the Intelligence which directs these vast forces. I said to myself: ‘One must be blind not to be dazzled by this spectacle; one must be stupid not to recognize the Author of it; one must be mad not to worship Him’.”

That comment comes, surprisingly, from Voltaire. It was included in a compilation of godly remarks made by Nobel laureates and influential scientists. Read more at the Not About Religion blog.

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April 10, 2009 | 5:41 pm

Kosher pet food for a doggie Seder dinner

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: Chicago Tribune

I’ve heard of raising your dog Jewish, and I’ve scoffed on the occasion of a $10,000 bark mitzvah, but this might take the cake: Kosher pet food.

Yep. And you thought dropping Iams for organic was excessive. Evanger’s Dog and Cat Food Company has the offerings, which will be on display at a pet Seder at Wigglyville pet store in Chicago.

Frankly, I’m not sure what I find odder: helping your pets keep kosher or subjecting them to the Four Questions. (How is this night different from all other nights? Well, let’s start with the fact that your dog is eating food off the top of the table and chomping on matzo instead of a peanut butter biscuit.) Strange indeed.

Here’s the story from The New York Times:

It might sound odd, but for Jews who consider Rex to be part of the family, Passover presents a quandary. Even though rabbis do not advise restricting dogs to a kosher diet, the Torah is clear about ridding homes of grains, not just avoiding consuming them, during Passover week, and pet food often contains rice, barley and other grains.

Those who keep kosher year round, meanwhile, believe that combining dairy and meat for any reason, even to feed to a pet, violates Jewish law.

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April 10, 2009 | 2:52 pm

Secular judge rules against rabbinical court in Torah scrolls case

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Not among the disputed scrolls

Since her husband died in 2002, Rita Pauker has been fighting to have returned to her a set of four Torah scrolls that Rabbi Norman Pauker left his Sherman Oaks synagogue when he retired in 1994. She achieved a major victory when in January the Beit Din, a rabbinical court, ruled in her favor.

But the scrolls current steward, Rabbi Samuel Ohana, refused to comply, even though he had agreed to the arbitration. Ohana has held that the scrolls belong not to Pauker but the synagogue, Beth Midrash Miskhan Israel.

“He called me in front of his wife,” Ohana told me two years ago, “and he said, `Rabbi, I cannot bear having these Torahs gathering dust in my garage. Take them. Please.’”

Pauker sought to have a secular court confirm the arbitration determined by the Beit Din. But a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled this week to vacate the arbitration award. Why? Because it agreed with Ohana that one of the three rabbis on the Beit Din should have been disqualified. Ohana’s complaint was that Rabbi Nachum Sauer made this comment long before ruling on the case:

“Lending a Torah to a synagogue is a common way Jews fulfill a mitzvah, or a good deed,” said Rabbi Nachum Sauer, who teaches Torah studies at Yeshiva University High Schools of Los Angeles. “It is on long-term loan to their synagogue, but he still owns it.”

Now, as a journalist, this is a bit awkward. We try to stay out of the stories we are reporting. And, you see, I was the reporter who called Sauer and got that quote.

I had asked him who would own a set of scrolls if they were given to a synagogue for regular use but not officially deeded over. Sauer told the court that his comment was “in response to a general inquiry, and not based on the facts of the instant dispute.”

But the judge ruled: “the fact remains that Rabbi Sauer’s above-cited quotation could create a strong impression in the mind of a reasonable person that the that the matter had been prejudged by him.”

Fair enough. But why then did Rabbi Ohana agree to settle the case before the Beit Din in the first place? After all, Ohana called after my story ran to berate me. Sauer’s comment couldn’t have been a surprise.

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April 10, 2009 | 12:52 pm

Forget the facts in financial scapegoating: Clinging to Jewish names and faces

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

My cover story for this week’s paper was a long time coming. But it’s finally here.

The article, “Why Blame the Jews?,” digs deeper into the topic that wrote about for The Christian Science Monitor in February. You’ve seen the topic on this blog off and on since the U.S. economy fell off a cliff in September. Times are tough, and when that happens, almost like clockwork, victims rediscover their favorite scapegoat. The Jews.

Here’s an excerpt from my story:

Anti-Semites have long fed off fallacious claims that Jews drink the blood of gentile financial calamity. And, reality be damned, they wasted little time before lobbing such attacks this go-around.

Given the anonymous nature of the Internet, it’s impossible to know whether such sentiments signified a new surge in hatred of Jews or were simply a sign of increased efforts by an angry few. But it appears that more than just the usual suspects have bought into the conspiracy theories and abject anti-Semitism. In February, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported 40 percent of Europeans in seven countries — Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Spain — believe Jews have too much power in business and nearly a third blame Jews for the economic crisis.

“Jews run the world,” Draskovics Andras, a leader in the right-wing Hungarian Guard movement, said in remarks televised on Hungarian TV last month. Jews “need only 2 billion people for their tricks, and the rest of mankind will be executed.”

Though less socially acceptable in the United States, anti-Semitic attitudes appear to be just as common.

In January, Neil Malhotra, an assistant professor at Stanford School of Business, and Yotam Margalit of Columbia University set out to determine just how much blame Americans were assigning to history’s favorite scapegoat. And though the ADL regularly finds that fewer than 20 percent of Americans harbor anti-Semitic attitudes regarding Jewish business practices, Malhotra and Margalit’s study suggests that the historic urge to outsource blame is bringing in at least a few new faces.

Primed with news articles related to the crisis, including one about Bernard Madoff, the macher who made off with billions from the American Jewish community and admitted to running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, study participants were asked the question: “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” They then had to choose between “a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little and not at all.”

“Among non-Jewish respondents,” Malhotra told The Journal, “a strikingly high 24.6 percent of Americans blanketly blamed ‘the Jews’ a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.”

The campaign against the Jews began shortly after Lehman’s collapse. On Oct. 2, a rumor, based on insinuation and wishful thinking, began circulating on anti-Semitic blogs that before going belly-up Lehman had diverted $400 billion — that’s billion with a “b” — to accounts in Israel.

The origin of this claim was a Bloomberg article reporting that before the company’s collapse, its assets fell from $500 billion to less than $100 billion — a drop of $400 billion. A Lehman trustee attributed this to a “proverbial run on the bank.” The article contained no mention of Israel or Jews or any recipient of these billions, but anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists knew the only answer for the money’s disappearance was Jewish clannishness and trickery.

“The reality is irrelevant. Anti-Semites and bigots and people who accept stereotypes have nothing to do with reality. Facts don’t matter. They create their own,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, said in an interview.

“Sometimes in bigotry you use a modicum of facts to build your conspiracy,” Foxman said. “If the economy was not in crisis, bigots could not use the economy as a platform on which to operate. Lehman, Bear Sterns, the current Fed chairman, the previous Fed chairman — but that assumes a classic anti-Semitic canard that all these people are in these positions because they are Jewish and therefore act out their Jewishness.”

This is familiar territory for the Jewish people. From poisoning the well to plunging Weimar Germany into desperate poverty, Jews have often been blamed for otherwise explainable tragedies (such as poor sanitation and war reparations).

Anti-Semites looked to the business pages and found Jewish names being mentioned in almost inverse relation to the stock market’s decline.

They turned to Washington and found Jewish economists being blamed for policies that precipitated the crisis and labeled as Jews several policymakers who aren’t, such as former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his successor Timothy Geithner.

And then in early December, anti-Semites received an early Christmas gift: Bernard Madoff.

Never mind the culpability of the policies of President Bush and President Clinton, the mortgage lending practices of the likes of Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo — let alone the conspicuous consumption of the American consumer.

Anti-Semites prefer to discount the facts and cling to convenient Jewish names and faces.

You can read the rest of the my story here.

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April 10, 2009 | 12:28 am

Not everyone happy about Obama Passover dinner

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I listened to my commentary on “Which Way, L.A.?,” and amazingly I didn’t sound ridiculous. What is ridiculous, though, is the basis for a Passover story in the Los Angeles Times.

It turns out that while President Obama becoming the first U.S. president to host and attend a White House Seder was seen as a nice gesture by some of his supporters, others were miffed. Why? Because they weren’t invited and their delicate egos couldn’t bear the slight.

The Times reported:

“Apparently Jewish [residents] here and in neighboring states are now calling wondering why they have not been invited,” one staffer wrote, asking to take the event off the public schedule. The White House, which kept the dinner on the schedule because it had been announced, would not say who had sought invitations.

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Jewish cousin, Rabbi Capers Funnye of Chicago, thought that though Seders are traditionally held in the spirit of inclusiveness, it might be a bit much to host all those seeking to celebrate at the White House.

“I would hope that there would be a sense of understanding that . . . also, Seder is about family,” said Funnye, a convert to Judaism, who was not at the White House. “I think you would certainly have to limit it. . . . You want to be inclusive, but you also want to be prudent in being inclusive as well.”

Here’s who was invited. Big news, I know.

The NYT’s Caucus blog filed this dispatch last night after the Seder had been celebrated:

The Seder, held in the Old Family Dining Room at the White House with several aides and their families, included the traditional Passover dishes, matzo ball soup, brisket and kugel. The White House chefs prepared the meal after consulting family recipes from several Seder participants.

The Caucus also included this barn-burning revelation: “Mr. Obama is not Jewish.”

Not a Jew, not a Muslim. What is he? Oh yeah ...

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April 9, 2009 | 8:25 pm

Actors: ‘I’m a California doctor who must choose between my faith and my job’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

After the jump, a video from the National Organization for Marriage shows how different people of faith will be harmed by the push for gay marriage. The video includes a disclaimer now that the commercials’ speakers are paid actors, but that wasn’t always the case. Then someone found the auditions tapes that can be seen above.

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April 9, 2009 | 7:05 pm

How is this night different from all other nights?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ll be on “Which Way, L.A.?” on KCRW. Just got off the phone with host Warren Olney. His radio program airs from 7 to 8 p.m. tonight. I’ll be talking about President Obama’s White House Seder.

You can here the interview by tuning into 89.9 KCRW or clicking here.

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April 9, 2009 | 3:42 pm

Vatican leaders get holy dance from lap-dancer turned nun

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Before becoming Sister Nobili

Sister Anna Nobili used to lap dance in Italian nightclubs. Now she dancers for a holy audience in Vatican City. From the BBC:

Several years ago, she swapped her old life for the Church, after a visit to the shrine of St Francis in Assisi, a place of pilgrimage for millions of Catholics in Umbria.

Sister Nobili, then joined the order of nuns called the Working Lady Nuns of Nazareth House, and it is through them that she tours prisons and hospitals performing her modern Christian dance.

She says the Church is very open to what she does.

“They understand that our hearts belong to Jesus, that means our moves also show that he is alive, and that he is a God of joy, not one of sadness,” she explains.

“He is a God who dances not one who stands still.”

(Hat tip: Holy Weblog)

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April 9, 2009 | 2:30 pm

Rick Warren talks about politics, gay marriage and the resurrection

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

On “Larry King Live” on Monday, the Rev. Rick Warren said stopping gay marriage was “very low” on his priority list. Interesting enough. But Sarah Pulliam, in an interview with Warren for Christianity Today, got answers from Warren on a broader range of issue. (Believe it or not, evangelicals think about more than just homosexuality.)

Here is a sampling:

I know a lot has been happening recently at your church. Just a few weeks ago, you baptized 800 in one day.
I was in the water for over five hours. I had webbed feet. It had to be a record. You know, it says in Acts that at the day of Pentecost, 3,000 were baptized and added to the church that day. We had 2,400 added to the church that day. The world belongs to Saddleback. When we started Saddleback, it was a white suburban church. We speak 65 different languages. It’s the United Nations. I baptized an Egyptian General; I baptized probably 50 or 60 nationalities.

After you posted an invitation to the baptism and membership, some bloggers criticized the promotion. In the promotion, you said new members could have their photo with Pastor Rick and get a free one-year subscription to The Purpose Driven Connection. Why did you advertise the event that way?
In the first place, I think every person should take a picture with the pastor who baptizes them. That’s a memento, that’s a spiritual hallmark. That’s not anything new. It wasn’t like, oh, this is something we’ve never done that’s going to attract people. In the past 10 years, Saddleback has baptized over 20,000 new believers. We are, without a doubt, the most evangelistic church in America. There are churches that are bigger than Saddleback, but there are no churches that reach more people for Christ than Saddleback. There are no churches that send as many people into the missions field. There’s not a church that has sent 8,000 people into the missions field.

The magazine is simply the index of the resources for people to start a small group. And they thought that drew people? (laughs) What about the 20,000 people who have joined in the past 10 years? It certainly wasn’t a promotional event.

(skip)

You haven’t spoken to the media in several months. Why did you decide to start doing interviews again?
It’s Easter week. Easter week I typically make myself available. I didn’t ask to pray at the inauguration — it wasn’t my idea in the first place — and as soon as it was over, I felt like I needed to put my head down and focus on the enormous harvest. People see me out there — I speak to Muslim groups and Jewish groups, I’m actually having a Passover Seder tomorrow night. People never need to doubt why I do what I do, even when associating with people gets me in all kinds of hot water. Jesus got into hot water for the people he associated with. Fundamentalist groups say Warren hangs out with Jews and Muslims and gays and on and on. The point is, I’m not allowed to not love anybody.

Read the rest here.

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