The following are some results from the Public Religion Research Institute Jewish Values Survey. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that American Jews are very liberal politically, not very religious, and when it comes to theology, the largest number believe in Mordechai Kaplan’s impersonal deity.
The other morning I saw a segment on TV about the new movie Blue Like Jazz. The movie is based upon Donald Miller’s book,Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Miller and the book are associated with the Emerging Church Movement. The Wikipedia entry reminded me a little bit of discussions within the Jewish community about independent minyanim, post/trans/non-denominationalism, etc.
Below is the movie trailer.
Last year in Israel the documentary film The Hangman was broadcast. This film is about Shalom Nagar, the man who hung Adolf Eichmann. As a result of his experience as Eichmann’s executioner, Nagar became religious and eventually a shoḥet, a ritual slaughterer. Below are two clips about the documentary.
This clip (Heb.) is an interview with Nagar about his journey to religion.
According to Lila Gabrin, a Muslim woman who lives in Israeli Arab town Um El Faḥam, she was actually born as Helen Vershubsky in Auschwitz and arrived in Israel in 1948. Below is a news segment that was broadcast on Israel Channel Two about this most unusual story. (Heb) The video can also be viewed here.
Prof. Avraham Goldberg z”l passed away in Israel and was buried Saturday night. Prof. Goldberg was an important figure in the field of the modern study of Talmudic literature in the second-half of the 20th c. You can read here and here about the scholarly and personal side of Prof. Goldberg. יהי זכרו ברוך.
Two and a half weeks ago the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon hosted a War Game scenario that examined the aftermath of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The following is a very brief summary of an article written by Tsur Erlich that described this War Game scenario. The entire article in Hebrew can be found here at Tsur’s blog, and a PDF of the article can be found here.
Below is a list of the people who participated and the roles that they played:
Prof. Ephraim Inbar-Israeli Prime Minister
Eitan Ben-Eliyahu-Member of the inner cabinet
Israel Maimon-Member of the inner cabinet who is responsible for the home front
Dr. Eldad Pardo-Iranian government
Dr. Mordechai Keder-The Palestinians, Hezbollah, and Arab countries
Ofer Shelah-President of the United States
Amit Segel-Israeli and world media
Amnon Lord-facilitator of the War Games
On October 15, 2012, Israel made a decision to Iranian nuclear facilities. This came after three different sources, independently verified to the Mossad that Iran began to transfer its equipment for nuclear enrichment and weapons research to fortified areas in Qums. After a fourth source, the most highly placed Israeli asset since Ashraf Marwan, independently verified these actions, Israel decided to act. In the days before the attack the Prime Minister of Israel and those involved in the decision attempted to act as if it was business as usual, but this was difficult.
The American presidential elections were just weeks away, and the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was neck-in-neck. In an attempt to make things easier for the United States, Israel and the Palestinians had begun a series of secret negotiations.
The Israeli attack was originally going to be in two stages. During the first stage Israel would attack the uranium enrichment plant at Nataz. If after this attack Iran was not convinced that they should stop their nuclear program, a second series of attacks would take place. This series of attacks would target a larger number of nuclear facilities associated with the Iranian nuclear program. The decision to attack in two stages was a compromise position between the Prime Minister and a number of cabinet ministers who were worried about a large-scale attack.
During the War Game simulation, there was opposition to this two-stage attack. Both Israel Maimon and Eitan Ben-Eliyahu said that staging a small first strike would be ineffective and possible even counter-productive. Ofer Shelah claimed that the US president would exert strong pressure on Israel to stop any future attacks. After this initial discussion, a decision was made to attack Iran with one major strike.
On October 16, Operation Diamond got underway. The President of the US was not notified beforehand. The uranium enrichment plant at Nataz, the heavy water reactor at Bark, and a number of other important nuclear facilities were attacked. The pilot reported direct hits. As a result of the bombing, at Nataz there was a small radioactive leak. Israel lost ten planes.
The first responses were from America. Obama was clear in his condemnation of the attack. He said that the Israeli claim that the Iranian program became protected was only relevant with regard to Israeli weaponry. If needed, America would have acted to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He also criticized the timing of the attack, so close to the American elections, saying that it bordered on interfering with the election process. Israel could have waited a few more weeks. Israel should cease the attack immediately. What was absent from his statement was any mention of sanctions against Israel.
Iran was surprised that Israel acted alone, and said that this would only hasten her destruction. The official Iranian announcement said that the Israeli action was a total failure. Maybe they destroyed a few building, but the young jihadis and scientific cadre are still intact. Iran warned Saudi Arabia about increasing its oil output and said that it is now their intention to destroy the Dimona reactor.
Iranian opposition figures were arrested, and 1,500 Iranian tanks were sent to the Iran-Iraq border, under the pretense of preventing an American invasion of Iraq. Hassan Nasralah received orders to fire a rocket barrage of no more than ten hours. The time limit was in order to prevent Israel from justifying an invasion of Lebanon.
Nasrallah was not overjoyed at the Iranian command, claiming that his first interest is Lebanon, not Iran. He limited Hezbollah’s response to sporadic rocket fire on Northern Israel for a number of hours.
Hamas’s reaction was similar. They claimed that Iran had already transferred its allegiance to the Islamic Jihad, and they were not beholden to the Iranians.
Hameini didn’t really count on Nasrallah or Hamas, and therefore declared that Iran is in a state of war with Israel. This resulted in a number of mega-attacks that targeted the Israeli hi-tech sector in the area around Herzilia, an attack on Talpiot cadets, a special technology unit in the Israeli Air Force, and a low-grade radioactive release in Tel Aviv.
Conservative media outlets in the US criticized President Obama’s response, and the general tone was of support for Israel. Numerous European media outlets claimed that America was actually involved behind the scenes with the Israeli attack.
In Israel the media stood behind the government and its leader. The Israeli government decided to go on the diplomatic offensive and attempted to shore up dialogue with the United States, but PM Netanyahu did not want to initiate a conversation with President Obama after his harsh condemnation of the Israeli attack.
Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, one of the participants in the War Game, called for an increased effort to dialogue with the Americans. Iran was trying to drive a wedge between America and Israel, and that must be prevented.
One day after the Israeli attack the Hezbollah missile barrage was continuing, even though the ten hours had passed. The Iranian missile barrage of central Israel was at its heights. Twenty israelis were killed in these attacks. An American ship was also attacked in the Straits of Hormuz, although it was unclear who carried out the attack.
The price for a barrel of oil tripled and world markets began to drop.
Obama received word of Israel’s attempts at opening a dialogue, but felt that Israel had endangered his chance at being reelected. He told the cabinet that the red light that they had been projecting during the past year hadn’t been bright enough. Obama decided to call upon “both sides” to cease hostile acts.
The embargo against contact from Bibi at the White House continued, although a high-ranking minister succeeded in speaking with the American president. Obama admitted the Israelis had succeeded in delaying the Iranian program, and told him that everyone should wait a few weeks and see what happens.
Iran saw this as an opportunity to strengthen ties with a number of Arab countries, and to weaken, if not get rid of, the sanctions regime on Iran. At the same time Iran decided on a number of terror attacks against Israel targets, both in Israel and abroad: a car bomb attack against the Tel Aviv stock exchange; a missile attack against an Israeli airliner, in addition to numerous attacks around the world. The Iranians also released a video of five Israeli pilots begging for their lives.
Israel decided to threaten more strikes against Iran, but to only see these as threats, not wanting to escalate things any further.
Obama continued to dialogue with Israel through back channels. Nasrallah let the Hezbollah rocket attacks slowly peter out. The Egyptians did not do much beyond beyond not being too careful about preventing a few attacks against Israel from Sinai. The Israeli government started to funnel massive amounts of money towards civilian relief efforts.
In Iran they began to realize the extent of the destruction. Their nuclear program has been set back seven years.
A few days before the presidential elections, Obama made it clear to the Iranians that all attacks against Israel must stop, threatening military action if necessary.
The Israelis also wanted to limit escalation and didn’t respond with any more attacks on Iran, although they realized that the larger question is that a delay of the Iranian program isn’t enough. The Iranians must be convinced, even through violent means, that they should completely stop their program.
The Oxford University and Vatican libraries are to jointly digitise 1.5m pages of ancient texts and make them available free online. The libraries said the digitised collections will centre on three subject areas: Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books and Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books.
David Hazony has written a column in the Forward, calling for American Jews to learn Hebrew in order to keep up with the “Israeli-civilization bus.”
Herein lies our trouble. The more time goes by in which American Jews fail to get on the Israeli-civilization bus, the less qualified they become to say anything at all about who we are and what we should or shouldn’t do. The harsh truth is that any discourse that says “I love Israel, but I can’t stand Israelis,” “I love Israel, but could never live there,” “I love Israel, but can’t stand that horrible rabbinate, that horrible Lieberman, that horrible heat,” or, “I love Israel even though I don’t know Hebrew” — all these are variations of a single bizarre theme, a theme very different from what Jews used to be, a theme in which ignorance and love are seen as somehow compatible, in which what you’re loving isn’t really Israel at all, but your own saucy dreams. But there is a simple solution to all this, perhaps incomplete and sure to cause many American Jews to bristle — but frankly it is the only way forward if this peoplehood thing is going to work. It’s the 800-pound falafel ball sitting in the room.
Many people may not be aware of the flourishing Hebrew culture that once existed in America. This culture included poets (see e.g. Alan Mintz’s Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry
It is one of the great tragedies of American Judaism that the knowledge of Hebrew has not been a priority for this community. If Argentinian Jews can acquire a high-level knowledge of Hebrew, why can’t a significant number of American Jews? For some discussion of this question see Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects
Hazony’s article is a good opportunity to post an article that has been sitting on my computer for some while. The late Gershon Shaked was an Israeli literary critic and after a sabbatical in America during the early 1980′s, he wrote a long missive about his time abroad. This article was published in the now defunct Jerusalem Quarterly and IMHO is still of great importance. In his article, Shaked compares American Judaism to the Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt of late anquity. Some discussion of his article can be found in Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects
Gershon Shaked-Alexandria-On Jews and Judaism in America
For a recent discussion of a related issue, see Yehuda Kurtzer’s article, A.B. Yehoshua Should Pipe Down. A historical treatment of late antiquity can be found in the article “A Split Jewish Diaspora : Its Dramatic Consequences” by Aryeh Edrei and Doron Mendels. (part I, part II)
The following advertisement is from Monday’s Makor Rishon. The conference is about the Jewish majority of Israel and migrant workers, illegal aliens, etc. The speakers seem to be a strange mix of serious scholars, politicians, and people, among them rabbis, whose ideas could probably be described as xenophobic.
