Tonight, former Florida Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler is hosting a private dinner for Abu Mazen with some 30 Jewish community leaders and former officials, among them Alan Solow of the Conference of Presidents, AIPAC’s Lee Rosenberg, ADL’s Abe Foxman, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and former NSC Middle East official Elliott Abrams.

I guess that the obstructionist, anti-peace, and neocon Jewish leadership of Peter Beinart and Andrew Sullivan is planning to either ambush Abu Mazen at dinner, or just not give him dessert.

A US military analyst, Bradley Manning, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking classified combat video and documents to a whistle-blower website. Specialist (Spc) Manning, 22, from Potomac, Maryland, is being held pending further investigations.

Hopefully Specialist Manning will have as many vocal defenders as Anat Kam who will decry the muzzling of free speech and the encroaching dictatorship in America. Manning was turned in by a patriotic hacker who felt that his actions were a danger to U.S. national security.

The specific statutory authority for the Coast Guard Law Enforcement mission is given in 14 USC 2, “The Coast Guard shall enforce or assist in the enforcement of all applicable laws on, under and over the high seas and waters subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” In addition, 14 USC 89 provides the authority for U.S. Coast Guard active duty commissioned, warrant and petty officers to enforce applicable U.S. law. It authorizes Coast Guard personnel to enforce federal law on waters subject to U.S. jurisdiction and in international waters, as well as on all vessels subject to U.S. jurisdiction (including U.S., foreign and stateless vessels).

The only federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction in both U.S. waters and on the high seas, the Coast Guard’s enforcement of U.S. laws and treaties focuses on conducting multi-agency counter-drug operations, interdicting illegal migrants and contraband, protecting living marine resources, maritime homeland security and helping to stem weapons proliferation, among other critical tasks.

See here for some current applicability of interdiction on the high seas.

Their principal objection is based on tznius, modesty, in the understanding of Rabbi Avi Shafran, Agudah’s director of public policy.
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“Tznius isn’t a mode of dress. It includes the idea that women are demeaned and not honored when they’re put in the public eye and put on a pedestal. The position he [Weiss] has created violated the concept,” Shafran said. Whether the ordination violates a specific halacha (Torah law), is unimportant, he explained.
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“Putting a woman in front of a group of men and women on a regular or ad-hoc basis is violative of tznius. Halacha accomplishes much more than the letter of the law. There is nothing in the Shulchan Aruch about keeping a cat in the aron kodesh. It’s technically permitted but it’s wrong to do.”

Is Rabbi Shafran saying that technically woman can be rabbis, “but it’s wrong to do”? Also, can someone tell this guy that he should try out his analogies on someone before he uses them in an interview. It’s always convenient to throw around the tznius (modesty), argument. This argument was also used by some in the Conservative movement who opposed the ordination of women rabbis. See the following statement by Rabbi David Feldman in Seymour Siegel ed., Conservative Judaism and Jewish Law, p. 301-302.

The most forbidable problem, from a strict halakhic point of view, is that of sex segregation and the attitudes and practices associated with it. This is illustrated by the incongruous suggestion of Professor Meir Friedmann, written as a Responsum to the President of the Jewish Community of Vienna in 1893. If you want to institute, or re-institute, aliyot for women, he wrote, “it goes without saying” that a special, covered stairway should be set up, leading the women, unseen, from and to the women’s gallery!

I learned the following Gemara today, and I can’t help but thinking about how for some men, things really haven’t changed all too much when it comes to how they think of women.

Trans.:

A Tanna taught: One cup [of wine] is becoming to a woman; two are degrading, [and if she has] three she solicits [sex] publicly. [But if she has] four she solicits even an ass in the street and cares not.

Ketubot 65a

It very well may be that I am being overly critical of some people, and I know that there are even people within Rabbi Weiss’s own congregation who were very opposed to “Rabbah” and are very upset at what has happened, as I imagine that there are also those who are very supportive. Additionally, this source is talking as much about wine and alcohol as it is about women. I am not saying that all people who oppose women’s ordination hold such opinions, but I do think that for some of them, deep down inside, things might not be so different.

Next Sunday, May 14, is the JOFA Conference, and it promises to be an interesting one.

I argue that American Jews, like other Americans, have become much more interested in personal spirituality, and this has transformed American Judaism. Until the end of World War II, religion was seen as an ascribed part of identity rather than an achieved status. It was ascribed because, like one’s race, it was seen as being immutable. In 1955 a Gallup poll found that only one in twenty five Americans had switched religions. But, by the mid-1980s, American society had changed dramatically. There are many reasons for this shift, including changing social mores, geographic mobility, globalization, and so forth. As American Jews began to search for existential meaning, the organizations and institutions began to feel more and more pressure to respond to that need.

Cyrus has been dead for two and a half millenia and was forgotten by his own people though remembered with honor by others. The defenders of Masada too were forgotten by their own people, and remembered only by a renegade who wrote for a foreign audience in a foreign language. Yet both have been recovered, reinterpreted, and given a new role in the modern history of their respective nations. (41)

I was reminded of this comparison after reading this post by Yaacov Lozowick. The Jewish and Persian people have a long history of interaction and contact, not all of it so positive. We’ll see what the future holds.

A partial review by The Jerusalem Post Monday revealed at least $600 million in Jewish charitable funds were wiped out by the collapse of a Wall Street investment firm, with perhaps another $1.5 billion in unconfirmed losses.

Jonathan Sarna sees far-reaching repercussions,

The Madoff crisis marked an unprecedented loss to the “Jewish economy” – the networks of Jewish institutions, donors and charities that include universities, schools, hospitals and community centers, agreed Jonathan Sarna, a scholar of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “I know of nothing [in history] on this scale,” he said. Sarna predicted that the wholesale destruction of fortunes and endowments would prove to be a turning point in American Jewish institutional life, which over the past twenty years has moved from a model of community funding – collecting small donations from a broad swath of donors – to focusing on a handful of “cowboy” mega-donors who launched hugely successful programs like birthright israel outside of the traditional federation system. “The reduction of billions – not millions but billions – in the Jewish economy means that there is just not going to be enough money to sustain all the institutions and initiatives that have been created,” Sarna told The Jerusalem Post. “We will be a poorer community for that.”

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

When I read one of Rashi’s comments on this week’s parashah, I couldn’t help but think how historic this week’s events have been. On Genesis 12:11, which describes Abraham asking Sarai to try and pretend that she is his sister, Rashi says the following.

ופשוטו של מקרא הנה נא הגיע השעה שיש לדאוג על יפיך, ידעתי זה ימים רבים כי יפת מראה את, ועכשיו אנו באים בין אנשים שחורים ומכוערים, אחיהם של כושים, ולא הורגלו באשה יפה.

The simple meaning of the verse is: Behold, now the time has arrived when we must be concerned about your beauty. I have known already for a long time that you are of fair appearance, but now we are coming among black and ugly people, the brothers of the Cushites, and they are not accustomed to a beautiful woman. (here)

Abraham Melamed in his book The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture: A History of the Other wrote,

In their commentaries on Genesis 12:11, most medieval commentators echo the wonder of the Midrashic authors as to why Abraham should become aware of Sarah’s beauty precisely in the context of their journey into Egypt.
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While Bereshit Rabbah does not so much as mention blacks (cushim), simply describing the Egyptians as ‘ugly and black’, Rashi identifies them explicitly as ‘brothers of the blacks’. Nahmanides adheres to Rashi’s commentary without even mentioning the Midrashic source. While David Kimhi does not identify the Egyptians as true blacks, or even specifically as having dark skin, he gives full prominence to the usual stereotypes of the ugly, lustful inhabitants of the south…

Also see these comments by Jonathan Schorsch from his book Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World.

A change has come, we were alive to see it.