March 8, 2011 | 1:42 pm

The Maccabeats back for Purim

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I don’t see it being the hit that their Hanukkah parody of Taio Cruz was, but The Maccabeats have a new song and video for Purim. Check it out above.

March 7, 2011 | 6:54 pm

Find out what Charlie Sheen thinks your Jewish name is

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Charlie Sheen Jewish Name Generator

Looking for more fun with Charlie Sheen, check out the Charlie Sheen Jewish Name Generator. I typed in “Brad” and the response was “Mordechai Goldmansachs”—not as stereotypical as the name my friend gave me when the Daily Bruin published my photo before I joined the paper: Ezekiel Goldbergstein.

Try your luck here.

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March 7, 2011 | 4:31 pm

Orthodox Jewish boys basketball team wins Southern Section title

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

By now, you should know that Jews can play basketball. Not just Jordan Farmar and the NBA’s Jewish legends, but also Four Gs and a Jew (5-0 in the Redondo rec league). Valley Torah boy’s basketball did one better and just won the Div. IV-AA Southern Section championship—the first Orthodox Jewish school to do so.

The Daily News has the story:

I don’t even know what to say right now,” forward Aaron Liberman said. “I am so happy. I don’t even know what is going on. I am just trying to soak it all in.”

Liberman, as he did in a semifinal victory against Rio Hondo Prep, turned into a beast in the fourth quarter, using his 6-foot-8 frame to take over. His three-point play started the backbreaking run and he finished with 15 points, 15 rebounds and five blocks.

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“I think we gave hope and dreams to all the other Jewish schools that it can be done,” Aaron Liberman said.

I would have loved to see a little religion reporting sprinkled in there, but it’s a cool story, regardless of how it was reported. The Jewish Jordan would be proud.

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March 7, 2011 | 9:13 am

Waiting for the Singularity

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s 2011, and the Singularity still hasn’t arrived. But Time magazine seems to see Watson, the IBM supercomputer and “Jeopardy!” champion, as a sign of the human end times. I wrote a bit a few years ago about some of the ideas behind the Singularity—that point in time when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and sets into motion an unpredictable future. Among those would be the ability to live forever by downloading your personality into an AI computer.

Time touches on some of those theories in this article:

Maybe we’ll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we’ll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you’re talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There’s an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it’s an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

Why, yes, this is a way to manufacture immortality.

It’s an expensive, uncertain endeavor. And Time has a lot more about it, including Ray Kurzweil’s prediction for S-Year (2045), here.

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March 6, 2011 | 2:46 pm

C.S. Lewis in ‘his sweet spot’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Cool story from the New York Times’ beliefs writer about the growing legacy of C.S. Lewis:

The afterlife of Clive Staples Lewis, the Oxford and Cambridge scholar who died the day President Kennedy was shot, gets more vibrant all the time. The seven books in his “Chronicles of Narnia” are being made into movies; “The Narnian,” a highly readable biography by Alan Jacobs, appeared in 2005; a stage adaptation of his book “The Screwtape Letters” is touring nationwide; a college is being founded in his honor; and his name is being used to sell Bibles.

Born in Belfast in 1898 and called Jack by his friends, Lewis, who converted to Anglicanism in his 30s, would worry that this attention put him at risk for pride, which he saw as the worst sin.

Michael Maudlin, an editor of the new “C.S. Lewis Bible” — a Bible annotated with Lewis quotations — says he does not want to make of Lewis a “personality cult.” But the cult is here, and growing. This Bible edition does not diminish the cult, but it should not get the blame, either.

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“I would say in the last 10 years, C. S. Lewis has sold more books than any other 10-year span since he started publishing,” Mr. Maudlin said. “He’s not only not declining, he is in his sweet spot.”

Lewis had a lot of influence on me during college, particularly “Mere Christianity,” “The Screwtape Letters” and Lewis’ answer to the “Problem of Pain.” When I started working as a reporter, at The Sun in San Bernardino, I discovered that there is actually a C.S. Lewis Foundation in the Inland Empire, of all places. Mark Oppenheimer writes that next year, a C.S. Lewis College will be joining the fore on the opposite end of the United States.

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March 6, 2011 | 1:40 pm

Gay student site shut down at Harding University

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Back in the days before everyone had their own blog, you could be expelled from public school for starting an underground newspaper. A high school friend of mine was. And while I suppose that’s still a possibility, it seems unlikely in a world where anyone can publish with some free software and a little interest.

Last week Harding University censored an “underground student website” dealing with gay and lesbian issues at the Church of Christ school in Arkansas. University President David B. Burks later defended the decision to censor HUQueerPress.com.

Here’s the story via the school’s sanctioned student newspaper, The Bison:

The e-zine, which was also distributed to several students in the dormitories in the form of a pamphlet, detailed the anonymous experiences of gay and lesbian students at Harding.

HUQueerPress.com was blocked on campus at about 4 p.m. Wednesday. The site included testimonials from current and former students, some of which included explicit sexual detail and offensive language.

In Thursday morning’s statement, Burks reminded students that sexual immorality of any kind, whether heterosexual or homosexual, was prohibited at Harding, citing pg. 11 of the Harding University Student Handbook.

“Harding University holds to the biblical principle that sexual relationships are unacceptable to God outside the context of marriage,” Burks quoted. “Sexual immorality in any form will result in suspension from the university.”

In spite of the university’s regulations, several students, former students and the national LGBT community have protested the actions, declaring them unconstitutional. On Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Harding blocked the site due to “objectionable material,” a petition was posted on Change.org to “Tell Harding University: Don’t Silence LGBT Students.”

I grew up in the Church of Christ. It’s among the most theologically conservative Protestant denominations, though it lacks a typical denominational structure. This move by the university—a university that has curfews for students living in the dorms and, if I correctly recall the stories of a friend who went to Harding, doesn’t allow boys in the girl dorms—really comes as no surprise. And neither does the public response.

Coincidentally, this action comes on the heels of the open letter by gay and lesbian alumni of Westmont College.

(Hat tip: The Christian Chronicle)

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March 3, 2011 | 1:23 pm

Love and basketball and religion

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

UCLA is getting ready to take on University of Washington tonight and hold onto the PAC-10 conference title. In Provo, Utah, a once-glorious basketball season for the third-ranked team in the country isn’t looking so good. Tuesday night the team dismissed its third-leading scorer for violation of the school’s honor code, and last night that led to BYU getting blownout by the unranked the New Mexico Lobos.

I mention this here because BYU’s honor code is a little different than that at other top athletic universities. As a Mormon institution, they have higher standards. And while plenty of college football programs fill their rosters with guys with rap sheets—coincidentally, that is the Sports Illustrated cover story this week—BYU’s Brandon Davies’ dismissal was not for criminal conduct. The Salt Lake Tribune reports it was for having premarital sex:

Two of Davies’ teammates, Jimmer Fredette and Charles Abouo, said Wednesday night after the loss that they stand behind their former teammate and have no resentment toward him, saying they consider him a brother.

“Everyone makes mistakes in their life,” Abouo said. “We are reaching out and trying to help him get through this.”

Something tells me either Southern Methodist University has no such honor code or enforced it even less in the ‘80s than the football team followed NCAA regulations.

Honor codes like this, though, are not uncommon at private sectarian schools. It’s just that athletic programs like BYU’s are incredibly uncommon for those schools likely to have honor codes.

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March 2, 2011 | 2:11 pm

Supreme Court sides with Westboro Baptist Church in funeral-protest case

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve been out all morning, so I haven’t had a chance to comment on the big freedom of speech case to come down from the Supreme Court. That would be the one involving protests of military funerals by the terribly misguided folks at Westboro Baptist Church (as Ed Stetzer tweeted: “The only correct part in the name of “Westboro Baptist Church” is that it is in Westboro.”) Here’s the story from the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects fundamentalist church members who mount anti-gay protests outside military funerals, despite the pain they cause grieving families.

The court voted 8-1 in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. The decision upheld an appeals court ruling that threw out a $5 million judgment to the father of a dead Marine who sued church members after they picketed his son’s funeral.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the court. Justice Samuel Alito dissented.

Roberts said free speech rights in the First Amendment shield the funeral protesters, noting that they obeyed police directions and were 1,000 feet from the church.

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker,” Roberts said. “As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

This ruling is neither disturbing or surprising. While the Westboro picketers are brazen in their offensiveness, their speech is as protected by the First Amendment as that of Martin Luther King Jr., Mario Savio and Charlie Sheen (“Duh, winning.”). I said as much in October, when the high court heard this case:

Personally, I deplore—actually, I hate—Westboro Baptist’s M.O. and what the group stands for. They call themselves Christians, and I’m not one to judge the heart, but we’re not praying to the same God.

Still, sickening as their tactics are, I feel in my heart and in my head that they have the right to be a bunch of jerks.

The Court today confirmed that, and as NPR reported, no one was surprised.

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March 1, 2011 | 6:06 pm

Report: Like Nixon, Julian Assange paranoid Jews are out to get him

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A British magazine has published an article reportedly relaying the details of a rambling phone conversation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Among his complaints: The Jews are out to get him.

The New York Times reports on the story:

The Private Eye article quoted Mr. Assange as saying the conspiracy was led by The Guardian and included the newspaper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, and investigations editor, David Leigh, as well as John Kampfner, a prominent London journalist who recently reviewed two books about WikiLeaks for The Sunday Times of London.

When Mr. Hislop pointed out that Mr. Rusbridger was not Jewish, Mr. Assange countered that The Guardian’s editor was “sort of Jewish” because he and Mr. Leigh, who is Jewish, were brothers-in-law. Later, the article recounted, Mr. Assange asked Mr. Hislop to “forget the Jewish thing,” but he continued to insist there was a conspiracy against WikiLeaks based on the friendship among Mr. Rusbridger, Mr. Leigh and Mr. Kampfner.

In the Twitter feed, Mr. Assange said that “in particular” the Private Eye report that he believed in a “ ‘Jewish conspiracy’ is false, in spirit and in word. It is serious and upsetting. Rather than correct a smear, Mr. Hislop has tried to justify one smear with another.”

“That he has a reputation for this, and is famed to have received more libel suits in the U.K. than any other journalist as a result, does not mean that it is right,” Mr. Assange’s statement said. “WikiLeaks promotes the ideal of ‘scientific journalism’ — where the underlying evidence of all articles is available to the reader precisely in order to avoid these type of distortions. We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world.”

Today, WikiLeaks responded by claiming they have actually been the ones smeared as collaborators in a Jewish conspiracy, “as being agents of the Mossad or of George Soros.”

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March 1, 2011 | 5:32 pm

Harvard minister who took decades ago came out as gay is dead at 68

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes has died. The New York Times has this obit about the late Harvard minister:

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a Harvard minister, theologian and author who announced that he was gay a generation ago and became one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices against intolerance, died on Monday in Boston. He was 68.

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One can read into the Bible almost any interpretation of morality, Mr. Gomes liked to say after coming out, for its passages had been used to defend slavery and the liberation of slaves, to support racism, anti-Semitism and patriotism, to enshrine a dominance of men over women, and to condemn homosexuality as immoral.

He was a thundering black Baptist preacher and for much of his life a conservative Republican celebrity who wrote books about the Pilgrims, published volumes of sermons and presided at weddings and funerals of the rich and famous. He gave the benediction at President Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural and delivered the National Cathedral sermon at the inaugural of President George H. W. Bush.

At Harvard, Mr. Gomes was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the School of Divinity and the Pusey Minister of Memorial Church, a nondenominational center of Christian life on campus. For decades, he was among the first and the last to address undergraduates, greeting arriving freshman with a sermon on hallowed traditions, and advising graduating seniors about the world beyond the sheltering Harvard Yard.

Then, in 1991, he appeared before an angry crowd of students, faculty members and administrators protesting homophobic articles in a conservative campus magazine whose distribution had led to a spate of harassment and slurs against gay men and lesbians on campus. Mr. Gomes, putting his reputation and career on the line, announced that he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay.”

Read the rest here and the Harvard Crimson’s story here.

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March 1, 2011 | 3:32 pm

Yemen’s president blames the Jews for popular uprising

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Why was the Arab News headline “An Israeli conspiracy that never existed” so surprising? Because of garbage like this from president of Yemen:

Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, blamed Israel for planning and funding protests in several Arab states.

“There is an operations rooms in Tel Aviv with the aim of destabilizing the Arab world,” Saleh reportedly said Tuesday during a speech at Sanaa University, adding that the operations room is “run by the White House.”

“The wave of political unrest sweeping across the Arab world is a conspiracy that serves Israel and the Zionists,” he also said.

Yemen has been the site of anti-regime protests for the past two weeks—one of several Arab countries in which protesters have attempted or succeeded in deposing their rulers.

Saleh, who has ruled Yemen for 32 years, has rejected calls to step down.

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March 1, 2011 | 12:20 am

Charlie Sheen is crazy; is he an anti-Semite too?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Charlie Sheen definitely does not have his life in order. And on the morning shows today he said some weird, wild stuff. Looks like he followed that up by ripping his both to the trades, which resulted in the remainder of the “Two and a Half Men” season being cancelled. A real loss to society, I know.

But the question my friend Danielle Berrin says everyone was asking today is not whether Sheen is crazy. We know he is. But is he an anti-Semite too.

She writes at her Hollywood Jew blog:

Sheen had the following things to say about the “Two and Half Men” creator Lorre, whom he was careful to lambast, not by his showbiz name, but by his, uh, real name: Chaim Levine.

“I violently hate Haim Levine,” Sheen said during the interview. “He’s a stupid, stupid little man and a p**sy punk that I’d never want to be like. That’s me being polite. That piece of s**t took money out of my pocket, my family’s pocket, and, most importantly, my second family—my crew’s pocket… You can tell him one thing.  I own him.”

Sheen’s ego seems a bit out-sized for someone who can’t make it through the day without copious drugs. Otherwise why would he rush to play the anti-Semite card? In Hollywood, playing the anti-Semitie card is like pushing the eject button in the James Bond car. It’s a sure sign of Hollywood crazy when you’re going after Jews, because it’s such a Jewish environment; it’s biting the hand that feeds you. For Sheen, who is clearly off his rocker, spouting indignant, almost diabolical diatribes just to be heard, going after his showrunner is burning the last bridge. It’s pushing the red button that detonates the entire ship.

Raging verbal battles are also a way for the uber-fortunate to express what is most primal in them. As much as Hollywood can be a dog-eat-dog type of place, it isn’t Afghanistan and it’s not about survival. So expressing those fiery, angry urges in the form of hate speech is partly a survival impulse. And it wouldn’t be hard to argue that Sheen is hanging on by a very thin thread.

On the other hand, when you’re an addict and say vile things ‘under the influence’, that can be indicative of hate feelings harbored deep within.

Read the rest here.

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