June 30, 2009 | 8:19 pm

Michael Jackson and Jew noses

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Ruth Ellen Gruber has an interesting arts piece from Vienna. It’s all about stereotypes of Jews and other minorities, and making a guest appearance is a portrait of Michael Jackson, who fits right into the theme of disrupting conventions:

Gruber writes for JTA:

Amid all the noisy outpouring over Michael Jackson’s sudden death, the last place I expected to find him was in a Jewish museum. But there he was, his pale, mask-like, surgically engineered image featured as part of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in the Austrian capital.

Called “Typical!—Cliches of Jews and Others,” the exhibition deals with the use (and abuse) of ethnic stereotypes in popular culture. The exhibition, which runs until October, has been shown at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Spertus Museum in Chicago.

It was assembled long before Jackson died June 25 in Los Angeles.

In a life-size photograph from 2002, he is shown with lank black hair framing a long, square stubbly chin, pinched red mouth, huge made-up eyes and a tiny nose with distorted pointy tip.

The photo is used to illustrate how, for better or worse, the King of Pop attempted to destroy stereotypes and, literally, to cut himself away from the confines of physical definition.

Jackson’s “surgical transformations mirrored back to the culture the blurring of boundaries demarcating adulthood, sex and even race,” Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times after Jackson’s death.

The “Typical!” exhibition deals with stereotypes commonly used to categorize African Americans, Muslims, women, Native Americans and others.

But given that it is mounted at a Jewish museum, much of its focus is on stereotypes about Jews. The exhibition poster employs a few sketched strokes to conjure up some: corkscrew curls, a hat and a huge hooked nose.

Indeed, the multitude of variations on the (alleged) size and shape of the Jewish nose form a major theme.

“The paradigm for the ‘typically Jewish’ nose originated in the craniological studies of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,” an information panel informs. A German natural scientist who died in 1840, Blumenbach “claimed to have evidence that Jews had an especially prominent nasal bone.”

Exhibit installations examine the misuse of this and other paradigms in “scientific” teaching, as well as the ways in which they became part of the vernacular shorthand that shapes the way we see others and ourselves.

A section called “the schnoz,” for example, shows a collection of 19th century walking sticks whose handles are formed by exaggerated noses. The contemporary artist Dennis Kardon’s installation “Jewish Noses” features dozens of larger-than-life-sized casts made from the noses of actual Jews to demonstrate the silliness of such nasal cliches. Also, a modern painting ironically comments on the love and success that are supposed to result if one has a nose job.

“I am often asked whether or not Jews have a ‘Semitic’ nose,” reads an exhibition quote by the historian Sander Gilman, who has written extensively about Jewish stereotypes. “After 54 years of experience, I can only answer that every Jew I have ever met has a nose.”

(Hat tip: Holy Weblog!)

June 30, 2009 | 5:31 pm

Billy Graham says atheism a fad for fools

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“There is nothing new under the Sun.” Definitely not atheism, though there has been a much-discussed movement of the godless in recent years. I think it’s overblown. What does the Rev. Billy Graham, the pastor to presidents past who got some bad publicity last week, think?

Well, in this response to a reader’s query, Graham says:

In reality, however, modern atheists have very little new to say. In fact, atheism has been around for thousands of years; even the Psalmist, writing hundreds of years before Christ, referred to them: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’ ” (Psalm 14:1).

Don’t be misled by those who claim God doesn’t exist, because he does.

Read the rest here.

(Hat tip: Almighty God)

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June 30, 2009 | 3:35 pm

Neo-Nazi trash on a rabbi’s highway

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Neo-Nazis stretch of highway Photo: NYT

I found this gem last week and tucked it away, only to lose it when my bookmarked stories to blog got pushed by new ones into oblivion. But this story, one of those stranger-than-fiction dispatches, is worth bringing back from the grave. It concerns the Adopt-A-Highway program and the limits of free speech.

In Missouri, a neo-Nazi group adopted a half-mile stretch of Route 160. The state said it was powerless to prevent organizations from participating in the Adopt-A-Highway program on political grounds, regardless of how reprehensible their ideology is. (Really? I wonder what would happen if NAMBLA tried to get involved.) So lawmakers decided they would dedicate that stretch of highway to the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

And that has Heschel’s daughter, not to mention the neo-Nazis, upset:

“I don’t want Nazis stomping on a highway named for my father. What are they going to do then if they don’t pick up the litter? The whole thing is disgusting,” said Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish history at Dartmouth College.

“It may be an attempt to teach the neo-Nazis a lesson, she said. But I think it’s an affront to my father’s dignity to attach his name to a neo-Nazi highway.”

(skip)

“I understand the good intentions,” Susannah Heschel said. “Everybody wants to get rid of racism…. But I don’t think it should be done this way.”

Representatives of the National Socialist movement in Missouri did not immediately return calls seeking comment about the legislation Sunday. But a statement on the movement’s Web site calls the renaming a lame attempt to insult National Socialist pro-environment/green policies.

The Web site has images of the Confederate flag, swastikas and members in military garb, and says the group fights for the rights of all White American citizens of European descent.

“We welcome this spineless legislation, as it will no doubt spur a backlash from the local people whom will wonder why anyone, especially outside Jewish agitators would attempt to disrespect local citizens that volunteer their time to clean local roads,” the statement said.

I’m not sure where these tale is headed, but you can read the rest of the AP’s initial report here.

After the jump, see what happens when Kramer adopted a highway and turned three lanes into two:

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June 30, 2009 | 2:23 pm

Does Michael Vick deserve redemption?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Michael Vick, the once dynamic star of the Atlanta Falcons who was kicked out of the NFL for dog fighting (that’s the nice way of describing what he was involved in; this isn’t), is trying to make a football comeback and settle with his debtors. Since his court hearing two summers ago, at which Vick pleaded guilty and claimed he had found Jesus, Vick has sought to rebuild his tattered public image.

Religious repentance is an old trick of troubled celebrities, and I’m not yet sure it has helped redeem Vick.

It’s easy to be cynical—I know I was—but the Rev. Michael Bruner, a Presbyterian minister and adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific, recently wrote for On Faith that we should give Vick the benefit of the doubt.

Bruner wrote:

How can anyone know if the redemption of a person is ever sincere—even if they appear sincere? A cynic will claim that Vick is just faking it. But how does the cynic know? Gainsaying someone’s intentions is a zero-sum game. The proof is in the pudding. It isn’t Vick’s thoughts, after all, that are on trial here, but his actions. If any of us were judged by our thoughts, there wouldn’t be enough prisons in the world to hold the guilty. There is only One who knows the heart, and that final judgment is yet to be decreed.

In the meantime, we advocate for and believe in redemption. How can we not? We’re all counting on it for ourselves, so how can we deny it to others? The Lord’s Prayer casts aspersion on those who seek forgiveness from God but aren’t willing to give it to others in return: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

And the great hymn reminds us of our mutual condition: “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”

Like me. Like you. Like Vick.

Bruner then makes comparisons to the redemption of the Disciple Peter, now St. Peter, and to Saul of Tarsus, now St. Paul. He doesn’t put Vick on the same level as these Christian giants, but uses them to display that “the road to sainthood, it appears, goes through the valley of wretchedness.”

You can read the rest here.

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June 30, 2009 | 1:10 am

Michael Jackson’s rabbi mourns the fallen King of Pop

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, with whom I spoke Thursday about the death of Michael Jackson, has penned a reflection for Beliefnet about his estranged friend.

Jackson, he writes was “master of an empty Kingdom,” a terribly flawed man who meant an immense amount to the rockstar rabbi. Boteach told himself he wouldn’t cry the day Jackson died. Death would surely come soon for someone who lived such a destructive life. But last Thursday, sob he did.

It was only when I went back and listened to the many hours of taped conversations that Michael and I conducted so that I would write a book that peered into his soul. Hearing his voice, hearing him say, in his long drawn out way, ‘Shmmmuuuulleeeey,’ That did it. The tears flowed. Yes, I was angry at him. Truly. He threw away his life. He had lived recklessly and orphaned his children. He had medicated away the afflictions of the soul as if they were ailments of the body until his body could no longer tolerate the abuse. He had squandered all of G-d’s blessings. But he touched me nonetheless. He made me softer and gentler. He was highly imperfect and was perhaps guilty of serious, terrible sins for which there might not be any forgiveness. But G-d, was he tortured. And that is no excuse. Because you dare not visit your pain on an innocent party. But did that cancel out the good he tried to inspire in others?

You can read the rest here.

In December 2000, Jackson wrote a piece for Beliefnet titled “My Childhood, My Sabbath, My Freedom.”

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June 29, 2009 | 6:41 pm

Murder of Iowa football coach a case of ‘spiritual warfare’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ed Thomas spotting a player

I heard over the weekend, as most sports fans did, that one of the great Iowa high school football coaches, a man who helped rebuild his small town after a tornado ripped through and killed nine, was gunned down as he supervised weightlifting for some of his players. Ed Thomas was something of a legend, and he was allegedly shot dead by a former player with a drug problem whom he repeatedly tried to help.

But what I didn’t know until reading this phenomenal story from Yahoo! Sports is that Thomas’ murder is actually a religion story:

In recent months, Thomas had tried to counsel his alleged killer at the request of the young man’s family, which attends the same church where Thomas served as an elder, and where the coach’s wife and two grown sons accepted condolences on Sunday during visitation. Some stood in a line that stretched for six blocks, four and five people abreast, for 4-1/2 hours to honor the coach. A handful of men pulled red wagons with coolers filled with bottled water that they passed out to those waiting.

On Monday, the silver-colored casket was lowered into the grave, which one current and two former players helped dig. More than 2,000 came to pay their respects, including Iowa Gov. Chet Culver and University of Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz. About 700 squeezed into First Congregational Church, 700 more watching the service on closed-circuit TV at the Veterans Memorial Building, five blocks away, and scores outside the building, listening to the service via speaker.

The pall bearers included four current NFL players who learned the game under Thomas at Aplington-Parkersburg – or A-P as they call it around here. Many still wonder how four corn-fed boys from a town of 1,900 made it to the NFL within the same decade. The players – Jared DeVries, a defensive end for the Detroit Lions; Aaron Kampman, a defensive end for the Green Bay Packers; Brad Meester, a center for the Jacksonville Jaguars; and Casey Wiegmann, a center for the Denver Broncos – credit the work ethic in Parkersburg and Thomas.

His murder will test this community in a way no natural disaster could.

Hinders, a God-fearing man in a God-fearing town, is among residents who believe it’s no accident the tornado spared all eight churches in Parkersburg. Nor does he believe it’s a coincidence that Thomas – a man known as much for his deep faith in Christianity as for his two state championships and record of 292-84 over 37 seasons – was gunned down.

“You couldn’t pick anybody bigger in this town to shoot,” said Hinders, 60, who has been the town clerk here for 27 years. “That’s evil. …

“It’s spiritual warfare. Satan and God are fighting, and in the end I believe God will win.”

Thomas’ alleged killer, Mark Becker, 24, attended the church where Thomas was an elder. Unlike with Phillip Markoff, no one is asking “Is Mark Becker Christian?” Witnesses claim, though, that he could be heard screaming as he ran to his car: “Make sure Satan knows! Satan’s gotta know!”

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June 29, 2009 | 4:00 pm

Barack Obama and family pick a church?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Inquiring minds have wanted to know since Election Day where the Obamas would attend church. This morning Time magazine offered an answer:

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

A number of factors drove the decision — financial, political, personal — but chief among them was the desire to worship without being on display. Obama was reportedly taken aback by the circus stirred up by his visit to 19th Street Baptist in January. Lines started forming three hours before the morning service, and many longtime members were literally left out in the cold as the church filled with outsiders eager to see the new President. Even at St. John’s, which is so accustomed to presidential visitors that it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” worshippers couldn’t help themselves from snapping photos of Obama on their camera phones as they walked down the aisle past him to take communion.

Amy Sullivan’s report for Time has not, however, been confirmed. David Brody, CBN’s well-connected political correspondent, quotes the White House deputy press secretary saying, “The President and First Family continue to look for a church home. They have enjoyed worshipping at Camp David and several other congregations over the months, and will choose a church at the time that is best for their family.”

Regardless of where the Obama’s are heading for Sunday worship, the most interesting part of Sullivan’s story is this tidbit about the pastor at Evergreen:

Camp David’s current chaplain, Lieut. Carey Cash, leads the services at Evergreen. If the White House had custom-ordered a pastor to be the polar opposite of Jeremiah Wright, they could not have come as close as Cash. (As it is, the White House had no hand in selecting Cash. The Navy rotates chaplains through Camp David every three years; Cash began his tour this past January.) The 38-year-old Memphis native is a graduate of the Citadel and the great-nephew of Johnny Cash. He served a tour as chaplain with a Marine battalion in Iraq and baptized nearly 60 Marines during that time. Cash earned his theology degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth — and, yes, that means Obama’s new pastor is a Southern Baptist.

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June 29, 2009 | 3:05 pm

Billy Mays, legendary pitchman, found dead

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Billy Mays, the greatest pitchman since Ron Popeil, was found dead Saturday at his home in Tampa. Mays was 50, the same age as Michael Jackson, but I’ve got to say his death much more saddening.

Mays wasn’t a pop culture icon, though his beard was inspiring, but his death, likely of heart failure, was a lot less expected than the King of Pop’s.

Mays was best-known for promoting OxiClean, but I always imagined he would have been an amazing street preacher.

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June 29, 2009 | 1:59 pm

Ruth Madoff: ‘the succubus to Bernie’s incubus’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: AP

“Ruth Madoff: Homeless and without a hairdresser as husband gets 150 years in jail.”

Poor Ruth.

Earlier this month, The New York Times wrote in a profile of Ruth Madoff that “she has become perhaps the most vilified spouse of a financial rogue in history.” The Times continued in “The Loneliest Woman in New York”:

life was also ruined. Although no evidence has emerged to date that she conspired or even knew about her husband’s crimes, her plight has evoked no apparent public sympathy. She has been pilloried and turned into a pariah.

The wives of other notorious criminals, like Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Nicholas Leeson, endured rough social sledding but eventually emerged with new careers and new friends. It’s not as if they couldn’t still go out and have their hair done. There wasn’t quite the same pack of gleeful tabloid photographers as there was, say, when Mrs. Madoff bought cheese in the supermarket a few months ago.

By contrast, the public reaction to Mrs. Madoff has been white hot and vitriolic. Rightly or wrongly, she is viewed as an unrepentant beneficiary of ill-gotten wealth, a petite and well-dressed embodiment of the collective, bloated greed that helped topple the stock market and the housing industry.

“She’s perceived as the succubus to Bernie’s incubus,” said Prof. Richard A. Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. “She was inside a circle of people whose wealth has been sucked out of the system.”

The evidence: Ruth Madoff’s high-brow hairdresser told her to get her highlights elsewhere. And now, according to the the New York Post, Madoff, who last week agreed with federal prosecutors to sell their Manhattan apartment, can’t find a room for rent. No landlords want her; even using her maiden name isn’t helping.

“She has nowhere to go,” a broker told the Post. “No one wants someone with her name in their building. People like their privacy.”

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June 29, 2009 | 12:52 pm

Bernard Madoff sentenced to 150 years

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Bernard Madoff, the now infamous conman who admitted to running the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history, was sentenced this morning to 150 years in prison. That’s the maximum, and it pretty much guarantees that the 71-year-old disgraced financier will die in prison.

More from The New York Times:

Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term.

“Objectively speaking, the fraud here was staggering,” the judge said. “It spanned more than 20 years.”

The sentencing came at the end of a 90-minute hearing in which victims told a packed courtroom that the judge should show no mercy and Mr. Madoff himself stood up from the defense table to acknowledge the damage he had inflicted and express regret.

“I’m responsible for a great deal of suffering and pain, I understand that,” Mr. Madoff told the court. “I live in a tormented state now, knowing all of the pain and suffering that I’ve created. I’ve left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren.”

Addressing his victims seated in the courtroom, he said: “I will turn and face you. I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help you.”

It didn’t help Madoff either.

This saga, of course, is not over. The spotlight recently shifted to Madoff’s enablers, to what the money managers who directed funds his way knew and didn’t know. Last week, the SEC sued Beverly Hills investment guru Stanley Chais, a prominent giver to Jewish causes, and for others for allegedly propping Madoff up; the month before, the court-appointed trustee liquidating Madoff’s firm sued Chais, who he claimed was the first name in Bernad L. Madoff Investment Securities Inc’s speed dial. Chais was also reportedly under criminal investigation.

Chais has proclaimed his innocence, and has repeatedly stated that if he’d known Madoff was running a scam, he wouldn’t have kept his own money and his family’s money with him. One of the family members who lost everything when the house of cards collapses was a 75-year-old Santa Monica retiree:

“My personal theory is that he started as a legitimate investor,” Braslau said of Madoff. “He was a real genius. But then this recession happened, and people started asking for their money and he reverted to this Ponzi scheme. It doesn’t really matter, for those of us hoping to recover our money, when he started. There’s no money left.”

“The chance of us recovering any money, I think, is less than zero.”

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June 28, 2009 | 10:35 pm

The Vatican’s worldly mission in the cosmos

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Here’s a story I neglected to mention last week from The New York Times. It concerns the Vatican’s observatory in Arizona—I once met a priest/researcher from there—and it opens with what the Times’ reporter must have thought was a surprisingly worldly scene:

Fauré’s “Requiem” is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio — like a jazz riff on a clarinet — as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican’s observatory on Mount Graham.

The headline for this story was “Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data.” Yeah, I know that’s a bit ridiculous: No telescope is going to revealing angels traveling to and from heaven, and I don’t know anyone stupid enough to believe it might. But the story is worth reading.

An excerpt is after the jump:

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June 26, 2009 | 7:44 pm

Billy Graham and the Jews

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I mentioned yesterday reaction to a 1973 conversation the Rev. Billy Graham had with President Nixon, in which Graham referred to the “synagogue of Satan.” Over at GetReligion today I offered a bit more analysis and examined “Billy Graham’s Jewish problem.”

When a previous batch of 500 hours of Nixon tapes were released in 2002, Graham was forced to apologize for having told the president that he believed Jews had a “stranglehold” on American media that “has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.” Worse yet, he had told Nixon in that 1972 conversation that some of his best friends were Jewish:

“A lot of Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me, because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth, but they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.”

This from a fervent supporter of Israel who had been honored by the American Jewish Committee for being responsible for major advancements in Protestant-Jewish relations.

Painful as it is for me to consider the possibility that a hero of my faith harbored sentiments that would endear him to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Graham’s words seem to speak louder than his actions. And though Graham refused to join in calls for Jews to convert, I have to wonder if his “synagogue of Satan” comment was really directed at those Jews who called themselves Jews but had both missed the Messiah and had stopped living like Jews. In short, those same Hollywood Jews who he thought had “stranglehold” on American media.

But really we don’t know. Graham is 90 now and not doing interviews. And what we know about Graham’s true feelings toward Jews is obscured by previous soft interviews, public exhortations and, now, another round of Nixon tapes.

Read the rest here.

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