• Staten Island’s Democratic congressman fired his communications director for leaking a list of his midterm opponent’s Jewish donors under the title, “Grimm Jewish Money Q2” (“Grimm” is the opponent’s unfortunate last name). [Politico]

• A tour of Ariel Sharon Park, a remarkable, state-of-the-art waste-management facility in Tel Aviv. [Slate]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Benny Morris discusses what is open (and what isn’t) in the Israeli archives. [Chronicle of Higher Ed.]

• Renowned NBA blogger Bethlehem Shoals (née Nathaniel Friedman) plumbs Amar’e Stoudemire’s purportedly Jewish background, and finds murky evidence both ways, and nothing dispositive. [Fanhouse]

• The FBI had been keeping a file on Howard Zinn for six decades. [FBI]

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) brings it.

By the way, given who officiated his wedding, I think it’s safe to say that Weiner will be in Rhinebeck this weekend congratulating the happy couple. We weren’t invited, but we wish them mazel tov anyway.

First there’s Sam himself, who teaches (and models) a combination of reportorial skills and deep background knowledge of subject matter in a way that I think would have inspired me even had my beat been technology or theater or anything, rather than Jews. He provides feedback on student work that, frankly, would ordinarily cost you upwards of $50,000 a year. The students in my class ranged from talented freelancers just out of college to tenure-track Jewish studies professors, which meant highly engaged discussion during class—and a cohort of folks helping each other get their stories published, to this day.

My favorite thing about the class, though, was that I got to read, discuss, hear from, and meet about a dozen of our foremost experts on Jewish history and Jewish life: The same scholars and writers one often needs to call when writing, say, a Tablet Magazine article, would show up as guest lecturers.

All of this gets done in only four or five all-day meetings over the course of a school year—which I found to be a reasonable time commitment even as a full-time reporter.

Application guidelines and more information about the seminar are here. Enjoy.

(Okay, I’ll lay my cards down: I did not like Lee’s column last week; I thought it sloppily seemed to blame bloggers for their commenters, which is a fallacy. This week’s column, however, argues more persuasively and with more nuance that certain bloggers are sounding dog-whistles to certain commenters, and while I do not agree with every word of it, I urge folks of all political stripes to give it a full read, because that argument deserves to be grappled with. Also, while I am generally inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, I do think Stephen Walt* needs to respond to one charge Smith made: Namely, what the hell is he doing linking to this?)

Meanwhile, blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh published a long, good, consideration of Lee’s first column over the weekend.

“The mainstreaming of anti-Semitism,” Yousefzadeh argues,

need not occur solely and exclusively via the explicit repetition of the most openly vile anti-Semitic verbal sewage. One can take a large body of work into account, take note of the picture that is drawn from that body of work, and even absent specific objectionable statements, become disquieted and disgusted by the larger context of that work.

This is debatable! But it is worth debating, rather than merely writing Lee off. Please take a look (or a second look) at Lee’s second column, and continue the debate.

Playing With Fire [Tablet Magazine]
The Case of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer [The New Ledger]
Related: Mainstreaming Hate
Lee Smith Ups The Ante [Daily Dish]
Earlier: So That Happened

* Mr. Walt, if you’re reading this: You say you’re an Alan Furst fan; check out our recent podcast with him. Kumbaya!

Some words of wisdom for The Washington Post Company, the current owner of a wonderful magazine: Don’t sell to Drasner. In addition to helping publish Zuckerman’s New York Daily News, Drasner invested a minority stake in Daniel Snyder’s ownership of the Washington Redskins. The following decade has been one of fleeting mini-success that has served only to punctuate steady mediocrity, culminating in last season’s 4-12 catastrophe.

Now, granted, the Skins are back on the right track, with a new general manager, head coach, and quarterback, and are poised to go 10-6 and make the playoffs (mark me down!). But Drasner no longer owns any stake—Snyder bought him out—so he gets no credit for this. In fact, in case you didn’t notice, I have just decided to make him my scapegoat for my past ten years of mostly-misery.

So, Washington Post Company: Read your own paper, and make the wise decision.

Audio Tycoon’s Newsweek Bid Said To Be Favored [NYT]

It adds:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.

Founded in 1913, the ADL, in its words, “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all.” Except when it does the precise opposite.

Statement on Islamic Community Center Near Ground Zero [ADL]
Earlier: Ground Zero for a Fight

Chelsea Clinton’s wedding is this weekend, and gossips the world over will be gawking at the famous guests. We at A Yidisher Pop are no different. This week’s installment, then, is dedicated to the Wedding of the Year; what, we wonder, might each of the event’s famous guests bring the young couple as a gift?

אָפּראַ זאָגט אַלע געלאַדענע חתונה געסט: “קוּקט אונטער אייַערע געזעסן… דער לעצטער מאָדעל אויטאָ!!!”

Transliteration: Opra zogt ale geladene khasene gest: “kukt unter ayere gezesn… der letster model oyto!!!”

Meaning: Oprah tells the wedding guests: “Look under your seats… It’s a brand new car!!!”

פּרעזידענט אָבאַמאַ שענקט אַ צוויי וואָכעדיקע חתונה-נסיעה מיט אַ שיפֿל אין דעם מעקסיקאַנער גאָלף.

Transliteration: Prezident Obama shenkt a tsvey vokhedike khasene-nesie mit a shifl in dem meksikaner golf.

Meaning: President Obama gives a two-week honeymoon on a small boat in the Gulf of Mexico.

טעד טערנער גיט אַוועק לאַרי קינגס מעמוּאַר, “ווי באַנייַט מען אַ ווייַב: ליב האָבן אוּן צוּזאָגן קאָסט ניט (קייַן סַך) געלט.”

Transliteration: Ted Terner git avek Lari Kings memuar, “vi banayt men a vayb:  lib hobn un tsuzogn kost nit (kayn sakh) gelt.”

Meaning: Ted Turner brings Larry King’s memoir, “How to renew your wife: Love and promises shouldn’t cost you (too much) money.”

באַרבראַ סטרייַסאַנד לאַד אַלעמען אייַן צוּ איר לעצטן, לעצטן, לעצטן — באמת איר לעצטן — קאָנצערט.

Transliteration: Barbra Straisand lad alemen ayn tsu ir letstn, letstn, letstn — be’emes ir letstn — kontsert.

Meaning: Barbra Streisand invites everybody to her last, last, last — really her last — concert.

Future and Past tense, and good wishes to the couple!

The future tense in Yiddish is built with the verb Veln וועלן + the infinitive. For example, if we were invited to Chelsea’s wedding (it’s not too late!), then:

איך וועל עסן — I will eat
דוּ וועסט טרינקען — You will drink
ער וועט לייענען די כתובה — He will read the Ketubah
מיר וועלן זינגען — We will sing
איר וועט דאַווענען — You will pray
זיי וועלן זיך אַרוּמנעמען – They will hug

The past tense is constructed with one of two auxiliary verbs, conjugated in the present tense: Hobn האָבן , to have, or Zayn זייַן, to  be, + past participle. Verbs that take Zayn are mostly motion verbs (to go, to travel); most of the rest take Hobn. The past participle of verbs often requires the prefix Ge גע. For example:

איך האָב געשיקט אַ ליבעסבריוו – I sent a love letter
דוּ האָסט עס באַקוּמען – You got it
ער האָט עס געפֿוּנען – He found it
זי האָט אים געקוּשט – She kissed him
מיר האָבן געוווּסט – We knew it
איר האָט עס איבערגעלייענט – You read it through
זיי האָבן חתונה געהאַט – They got married

איך בין געפֿאָרן צוּ דער חתונה – I traveled to the wedding
דוּ ביסט געלאָפֿן מיט שמחה – You ran happily
ער איז געבליבן פֿאַרחלומט – He remained dreamy
זי איז געווען גליקלעך – She was very happy
מיר זייַנען געגאַנגען צוּזאַמען – We walked together
איר זייַט געשטאַנען בייַ דער חופה – You were standing by the Chupah
זיי זייַנען אַלע געווען פֿריילעך – They were all very happy

So even though we’re probably not going to get an invite from the Clintons, here’s our bit of advice for the newlyweds:

אַז איר קריגט זיך, קריגט זיך אַזוי אַז איר זאָלט זיך קענען איבערבעטן

Az ir krigt zikh, krigt zikh azoy az ir zolt zikh kenen iberbetn

When you fight, fight in a way that lets you make up.

Mazl tov!

• Yet! Western officials believe Abbas will reverse his position and agree to direct talks in the next month. [Ynet]

• Syrian President Bashar Assad visits Lebanon today, for the first time in five years, to meet with Lebanon’s and Saudia Arabia’s leaders. The summit seems connected to the impending international indictments for the assassination of a former Lebanese leader, for which Syria was credited. [WSJ]

• Not wanting to fall behind the Western Joneses, Australian imposed its own sanctions on Iran. [Jewish Journal]

• Charles Krauthammer notes (as I did) the increasing pressure Iran apparently feels itself under. [WP]

• The Jordan River spot where John the Baptist is said to have baptized Jesus has become too polluted for use. [WP]

Isaiah is case in point. Even as he embarks on what is known as a haftorah of consolation, the old man is adamant not to allow the gleaming glories of the future to blind us to the dark vagaries of the past. The return of the exiles? The coming of the messiah? We’ll get to that in a moment, quoth the prophet; but first, let us figure out how we got into the spiritual mess. Before he praises and promises and exalts, Isaiah leads off with a stern sentence: “Those who destroy you and those who lay you waste shall go forth from you.”

At first glance, there’s something almost perverse about this assignation of blame. The same sermon, after all, ends thusly: “For the Lord shall console Zion, He shall console all its ruins, and He shall make its desert like a paradise and its wasteland like the garden of the Lord; joy and happiness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and a voice of song.” Why muddle such a pure vision of happiness with talk of destruction and waste?

Herein lies the particular splendor of the Hebrew prophets. To them, redemption is never divorced from responsibility, and it requires not surrender to some celestial force of good but a set of hard choices and harsh reckonings. In other words, it requires agency. This is why it is important to begin any talk of redemption with a mention of destruction: If we don’t know why we were doomed, there’s no chance we could ever save ourselves.

For affirmation of this principle, look no further than Julian Assange, the driving force behind the website Wikileaks. This week, Assange provided three newspapers with more than 90,000 classified Pentagon documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan. As leaks go, this one is a deluge.

As is standard operating procedure for our shell-shocked media, the story was reported loudly and in brief, leaving anyone lacking the time or disposition to thumb through nearly a decade’s worth of field reports without any real understanding of what the hell had just happened.

To hear Assange put it, that’s precisely the point. The Australian-born hacker is an advocate of “scientific journalism,” a method of reporting that consists of releasing reams of data and documents; unfettered access to sensitive information, goes the theory, allows for empirical examinations and leads to uncontested truths.

In theory, this is a fine idea. And it’s an idea, Assange frequently argues, that’s been proven effective—just look at Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, another massive leak that contributed to major policy changes and ended a wrongful war.

But the Pentagon Papers are as far from Wikileaks as Ellsberg is from Assange. The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, contained a coherent historical narrative and exposed the perfidy of the Johnson Administration and its deliberate obfuscation of the truth regarding the escalating war in Vietnam. They were compiled by men of great expertise and then studied for months by journalists at the Times prior to publication. Wikileaks’ data dump, on the other hand, is just that. Looking for context? Searching for conclusions? You’re going to have to do it yourself, which, unless you possess the skills, the training, and the experience, is a lost cause.

Ellsberg, of course, possessed all three. He attended Harvard and Cambridge, graduated at the top of his class at the Marine Corps Basic School, and served as a platoon leader before joining Robert McNamara’s staff. Assange is a hacker, arrested and fined for forcing his way into the computer networks of numerous organizations around the world, from an Australian university to a Canadian telecom company. If we take Assange’s “scientific journalism” metaphor seriously, we could safely say that while Ellsberg was qualified to analyze information pertaining to war, Assange’s credentials and qualifications should carry him no further than the lab’s cafeteria.

The silver-haired activist, of course, holds that everyone’s an expert, that experts are frauds, and that authority—any kind, anywhere, always—is oppressive and needs to be punished. In a now-famous turn of phrase, he explained the motivation for his life’s work thusly: “I enjoy crushing bastards.”

That’s a swell attitude for a sophomore, but not very instructive for anyone hoping—as Assange repeatedly stated was the case—to influence policy and public opinion. And it explains, perhaps, the leak’s relative lack of resonance: As soon as serious students of the war had their chance to analyze Assange’s treasure trove, they realized—and we with them—that there was nothing new in Wikileaks’ tall stack of reports. The Pakistani intelligence service is secretly supporting the Taliban? A great revelation, unless you happened to read The New York Times two years ago, when a story titled “Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say” was clandestinely buried on the front page of the newspaper. Civilian death toll? A sensational scoop to anyone too lazy to have followed the detailed and often credible count offered by at least one human rights organization. In short, all that remains of Assange’s act, less than a week after his big reveal, is the echo, fast fading, of self-congratulation and the sulfuric whiff of self-importance.

Had he been just another Internet gadfly, another trader in cat humor or conspiracy theories or any of the other intellectual roadkill that clutters the information superhighway, it might have been easy to dismiss Assange, as one does a Breitbart or a Drudge, as a pernicious prankster. But Assange is made of different stuff. He is interested in sweeping reforms, not partisan trickery, and his actions do stimulate a much-needed debate about freedom of information in the digital age. For these reasons and others, he’s been honored with laurels ranging from an Amnesty International award to a TED talk. To many fawning fans online, his is the future face of journalism.

This is nothing short of a disaster. As the recent leak demonstrates, Assange and Wikileaks represent the Internet’s worst indulgences and most fatal shortcomings. Rather than contextualize and analyze, this new journalism hurls data, raw and incomplete. Rather than devote time to studying a subject in depth, this new journalism focuses on subduing its sources. Rather than act responsibly, this new journalism shoots first and asks questions later. After all, why take on the burdens of leadership or submit to the demands of research or brave the battlefield when “crushing the bastards” on a website is so much easier, so much more fun?

Which brings us back to Isaiah. This week, the prophet has two important lessons for us. The first is that responsibility precedes redemption and that both involve hard work. The second is that unless we’re careful, we’ll bring about our own downfall. Let us remember both lessons next time we read the news.

• Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban is trying to get Oliver Stone’s forthcoming ten-part Howard Zinn adaptation off the air. [Jewish Journal]

• Conservative by any other name? Arnold Eisen, the Jewish Theological Seminary’s chancellor, said the movement was “open” to changing its name, most likely to Masorti, or “traditional,” which is what it’s called in Israel. [Forward/JTA]

• Jason Diamond pens a moving (seriously!) tribute to his number-one childhood shiksa crush, who just so happens to be getting married this weekend. [Jewcy]

• Some detective work appears to show that, specifically, it is Amar’e Stoudemire’s maternal grandmother who is the Jewish one. Which, of course, would make him the Jewish one as well. [Just ASC]

• Speaking of which: He clarifies, “I think I might have some Hebrew Roots.” Oh, Amar’e, don’t let us down now. [@Amareisreal]

To back up briefly: Recall that last October, the Western powers, led by the United States, offered Iran a deal under which the Islamic Republic would turn over its unenriched uranium to Russia and in return receive 20 percent enriched uranium. Iran turned it down. Then, in May, Turkey, Brazil, and Iran announced that they had reached the same deal, only with Turkey, not Russia, making the swap. This was an attempt to persuade Security Council holdouts, namely China, that sanctions weren’t necessary. It didn’t work—China and 12 other countries either voted for or abstained on the economic sanctions, which passed. The only countries that voted against them? Those would be Turkey and Brazil.

Earlier this week, Turkey and Iran announced that they considered their deal to still be in play, despite the sanctions. The Turkish foreign minister said it could serve as a helpful “framework” (of course, it itself was based upon the earlier, Western-supported “framework”).

But later in the week (still with me?), Iran also said it might enter into talks with the West without preconditions and could also agree to stop enriching fuel. You know, maybe. “There’s a concern that Iran is pursuing the fuel swap as a way to weaken sanctions and avoid the important questions,” writes the Wall Street Journal. Ya think?

The good news is that this new Iranian openness suggests that the new sanctions, which were generally perceived as toothless except to the extent that they demonstrated unity and the West’s ability to get Russia and China to take a harsher line, may actually be doing some damage. Which is why it’s not surprising that the United States, though skeptical, is interested in talking to Iran.

It is worth noting that the Iranian nuclear question generally and the competing fuel swap deals specifically are those rare issues that unite AIPAC and J Street: They both consider an Iranian bomb to be an extremely bad thing, and they both consider the Turkish deal to be insufficient.

And the clock continues: Every day that Iran is promising more negotiations with the West is a day it can develop its fuel and technology and the rest. It is also a day on which Israel can decide Iran has had quite enough time and that, instead, a different course is to be pursued. Bottom line: You should be rooting for talks with the West, and a deal with the West, ASAP.

Iran Offers To Resume Nuclear Talks, Rein in Enrichment [WSJ]
U.S. Seeking Fuel Swap Meeting with Iran [JPost]
Turkey, Brazil FMs: Iran Nuclear Agreement Still Alive [Haaretz]
Earlier: Reining In Iran http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/34195/reining-in-iran/

In Races for Congress, Some Jewish Incumbents at Risk [JTA]

Meanwhile, last week Netanyahu visited ailing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and this week he stopped by Amman to chat with Jordanian King Abdullah II, with whom his relations had been frigid, in order to build up support for direct talks.

And, lo and behold, in a clear diplomatic victory for Bibi, the Arab League endorsed the talks yesterday. Which means the pressure is now on Abbas, who doesn’t want direct talks until the proximity talks deliver written assurances considering borders and security. Why does Netanyahu think direct talks are good for Israel and Abbas think they are bad for the Palestinians? And why does Obama think they are good for everybody?

Aaron David Miller, an extremely knowledgeable and center-left observer (Lee Smith profiled him for Tablet Magazine) points out that, historically, direct talks have almost never produced peace: “Every successful agreement that has endured—save one—came not as a result of sustained direct talks but from heavy-duty U.S. mediation,” he argues (the exception is the generally anomalous Israeli-Jordanian peace of 1994). If Netanyahu is aware of this—and presumably he is—then why does he want direct talks? Says Miller:

Israel’s interest in direct negotiations is perhaps understandable. As the stronger party, the Israelis would like to edge the Americans out and try to deal directly with the Palestinians without a babysitter. Whether or not the Netanyahu government is prepared to deal seriously with the Palestinians, this has always been the preferred Israeli approach.

A more cynical take might be: The lack of a babysitter plus direct talks means Israel can plausibly claim to be working toward a two-state solution even as its settlement freeze ends, as scheduled, in September. This cynical take might also help explain Abbas’s reluctance to agree to these talks without assurances, whether in terms of an extension of the freeze or security or border guarantees.

Hussein Ibish, also a knowledgeable (and also slightly left-wing) observer spells out the Palestinians’ predicament. On the one hand, “Anyone who gets positioned as the primary obstructionist in Middle East diplomacy is in a dreadfully unenviable position … So saying no incurs an extremely heavy price diplomatically and internationally and it’s something any sensible Palestinian would be deeply loath to do.” On the other hand, Abbas has secured nothing, and so, from a domestic perspective—where Hamas, already in power in Gaza, threatens to gain power in the West Bank too at the first sign of the leadership’s weakness—“the PLO simply doesn’t have anything it can point to politically to justify to the Palestinian people why it would feel that the proximity talks and diplomatic process in recent months produced any results or conditions that would justify upgrading to direct negotiations.”

(In an interesting twist, Israeli President Shimon Peres is rumored to be secretly trying to dissuade the Palestinians from agreeing to direct talks, on the grounds that they would just be a waste of time.)

And as for Obama—what does he gain from direct talks? In theory, peace: As Ibish points out, “outside of the context of direct negotiations, in which all parties will be forced to really put their cards on the table, Netanyahu can continue to obfuscate, postpone, dither and focus on procedural and minor matters.”

But just because Netanyahu is guaranteed the ability to keep moving the goalposts back as long as there are no direct talks doesn’t mean he can’t do it if there are direct talks. And anyway, while direct talks will hasten peace if the two sides can agree to a compromise, it is nonetheless merely a structural means for achieving a substantive ends—which still could prove elusive. As Miller puts it, “The only conceivable purpose of direct talks now would be to provide clarity. And clarity when you can’t reach a deal is not always a good thing.”

One thing is clear: Score one for Bibi. Between Obama’s Cairo speech and the Biden debacle and the flotilla and the rest of it, he has spent the past year on the diplomatic ropes. And yet, all of a sudden, he is the one in the win-win position: He is calling for something that could more quickly achieve a Palestinian state; he has the backing not only of the Americans (which for a while seemed up in the air!) but even of the other Arab states; and he has put the more moderate Palestinians in a basically impossible position. Ibish sums up best where we stand now: “The ideal scenario for Netanyahu,” he argues, “is to continue to sit there and say that he wants immediate talks without any preconditions and that he is the one who is saying yes, while the Palestinians continue to say no, even if it is for understandable and justifiable reasons.”

He continues:

Therefore, it is essential that the Palestinians find a way to say yes as soon as possible, and that the Obama administration and all parties that are serious about resolving the conflict find a means to help them do that. They need something to show for their efforts thus far, and it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. Everyone interested in peace needs the Palestinians to say yes, and the PLO leadership clearly wants to, but they do have to be given a reason that can justify that decision to their own people.

Arab League Agrees in Principle to Direct Israeli-Palestinian Talks [AP/Haaretz]
Abbas Resisting Direct Talks With Israel, Despite Obama Pressure [Haaretz]
Clinton ‘Burning Up Phone Lines’ to Middle East [Laura Rozen]
Mr. President, Don’t Pray for Anything You Don’t Really Want [Foreign Policy]
The Palestinian Conundrum on Direct Negotiations [Ibishblog]
Related: Religion of Yes [Tablet Magazine]

Life During Wartime is as full of Jewish signifiers as any film I have ever seen. Superficially, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man—bar mitzvah rehearsals in the foreground, cantorial music in the background, and, overhead, the thunder of a seriously twisted God of the Old Testament. But, while A Serious Man is a profound meditation on suffering that references Jewish philosophy from the Bible to Kafka, the Jewishness of Life During Wartime is just kind of … there. At its best, it provides the basis for cutting social satire of the provincial Jewish middle class. (Here’s Trish and Harvey on their first date: “Harvey?” “Yes?” “Have you ever been to Israel?” “No. But it’s where I want to be buried.” “Me too.”) But for a film centered around a Jewish family struggling with the concept of forgiveness, it seems there ought to be some kind of animating Jewish idea beneath the surface. Solondz—a one-time yeshiva student—seems to think so, too. “If you grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust, it’s not hard to see those limits of what one can accept, forgive, and so forth,” he told the Forward in a recent interview.

But in Life During Wartime, he frames this question of limits—through the earnest Timmy—in cringingly literal terms. Can you forgive a pedophile? If you forgive a pedophile, can you forgive a terrorist? If you can forgive a terrorist, can you forgive a terrorist who blew up your own office building on 9/11? There is something Talmudic about this attempt to outwit suffering through the creation of neat moral categories, but at a level of parody that seems almost too obvious, like calling your sad movie Happiness or opening the scene of a failed romance with the notes of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” We’ve known at least since Philip Roth left Newark that a thicket of mazel tovs and chai necklaces (Trish wears one) can’t save messed-up suburban Jews from themselves, and instead only throws their foibles into relief. After all these years, I’m still waiting for Solondz to make another masterpiece like Welcome to the Dollhouse, which shows the anatomy of cruelty and suffering in clinical detail rather than commenting on them from an ironic distance.

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee
Related: Slapping the Other Cheek [Forward]

The Quickfire Challenge features Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Illinois), the youngest member of the House and, as featured in the New York Times, possessor of a killer six-pack. (Also, he recently voted against repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Who exactly does Bravo think its viewers are again?) Congressman Schock is here to give us an ethics lesson. Wait, we’re getting an ethics lesson from a politician? You know the ethics those guys have, it’s like a notch underneath child molester! (Related: Is it ethical to lift quotes if you provide a handy hyperlink?)

The challenge requires putting the flavors of a whole meal onto a toothpick, in keeping with the relatively new law that allows lobbyists to serve legislators only toothpick food. Winner gets not only the usual immunity but, additionally, $20,000. This really is a lobbyist-themed challenge!

“I notice Amanda,” says one cheftestant. “She doesn’t seem like she really knows what she’s doing.” Yes, in more ways than one.

(By the way, if any of these chefs understood how D.C. politicians worked, they would be using some ingredient—really any ingredient—from Illinois. “That corn whose kernels are currently getting lodged in between your teeth? Why, that particular cob was grown in wholesome, family-owned soil 100 miles outside Urbana, yessiree it was!” You could just grab any old corn husk and say it was from Illinois! What do they care if you’re lying, they’re politicians.)

Amanda serves lamb kabob with heirloom tomatoes and salsa verde. Turns out lamb is one of Schock’s favorite meats. Alex Reznik, the other Jewish cheftestant, serves pan-seared scallops with crispy bacon, strawberries, and basil essence. I render surprise that he didn’t pair his usual trayf with some fruit that was cursed by a rabbi specifically to be made un-kosher. Schock puts Alex on the bottom. “It had kind of a lot of flavors going on,” he says, “and I didn’t enjoy it especially.” Dude: An Illinois farmboy just told you your bacon sucks. Mazel tov.

And the winner is … Angelo! Kenny grimaces as Schock tells Angelo that eating his food was like “fireworks in my mouth.”

For the Elimination Challenge, the chefs will serve a D.C. power lunch at, in host Padma Lakshmi’s words, “the historic Palm D.C.” Yes this one is more historic even than the literally 27 other Palms. More historic even than the one a few miles away in Tyson’s Corner! (Reality check: The Palm, on Connecticut Avenue a little south of Dupont Circle, actually is where lots of the deal-making is done, because official D.C. is classy that way.)

The chefs draw knives for proteins. Alex gets salmon, “and a million things go off in my head,” he tells us. “You can serve it raw, medium rare, poach it, grill it.” He is talking to us as though he is Dr. Seuss: One fish, two fish, rare fish, blue fish.

Amanda draws porterhouse. “I’ve never cooked a porterhouse steak before,” she says. (Um, I’m pretty sure I have.) “So I have zero intention of serving a porterhouse in that elimination challenge.” And there Amanda is, dutifully slicing the filets mignons and New York strips off the bone.

Okay, now you have to pay attention: You are about to embark upon l’affaire purée.

That night, at the Kalorama manse, Alex announces that he still doesn’t know what he is doing. He still has not decided which of the many captivating methods to use for preparing his salmon. (It is not clear what he was doing during the two hours of prep time?) Offhandedly, Kenny mentions that Ed, who is doing lobster, is preparing a pea purée. Alex processes this, as you can see below.

Hold that thought while we cut to The Palm. Kelly, the other porterhouse-er, has some thoughts on Amanda: “I think Amanda needs to go home. She’s not very experienced, and she shouldn’t be here right now.” Kelly is upset that Amanda didn’t bring salt, and is instead asking to borrow hers; Amanda is upset that Kelly is being stingy with her salt. Then, Alex asks Amanda for salt, and Amanda says she only brought enough for herself. You know, Amanda, I’m being paid to root for you, and I don’t think I can do it much longer.

Alex has finally decided how to prepare his salmon—or, more to the point, what to serve alongside it. He is going to make a pea purée. “My whole gameplan”—the one he lacked as of the night before—“depends on pea purée.” Wait, isn’t that exactly what Ed’s doing? And, hold on a minute, Ed wants to know, has anyone seen his pea purée? It seems to have gone missing … .

Seriously, Ed can’t find it, even as Alex’s lusciously green purée has suddenly materialized. Hrmm. Ed wonders whether someone took his purée. Whoa. “Alex didn’t conceptualize his dish until the day of,” someone notes suggestively. Oh my. Did Alex steal the pea purée? How can we ever know? I mean, it’s not like there were SEVERAL CAMERAMEN DOCUMENTING THESE CHEFS’ EVERY MOVE.

Meanwhile, the bigwigs file in. Oh hi John Podesta. Oh hi Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia). Oh hi conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. Oh hi Mika Brzezinski. Oh hi Luke Russert. Amanda presents “what I’m calling a duo of New York steak and filet mignon,” which is what normal people call a porterhouse shorn of its defining central bone. They are accompanied by pommes parisienne, which, as I understand it, is how they prepare potatoes in Prague. There is also some arugula, which all the Republicans are obliged to dislike because they are people of the people. But both parties can get together on the subject of Amanda’s steak: They love it. The lovely Gail Simmons compliments her sear. A good sear! See, you can screw with your ingredient, and if you put a good sear on it, it doesn’t matter. Only Scarborough, ever the contrarian, likes Kelly’s more.

Here is Amanda making nice with Sen. Warner. Forget it, Amanda: He is a married man!

Andrea serves Israeli couscous alongside her swordfish. All the politicians comment that while they do not agree with everything about this dish, it is nonetheless a strong, vital ally.

Alex serves applewood smoked salmon with black forbidden rice and, of course, English pea purée. Oh, look, everyone loves the purée!

Angelo, who is almost certainly the best chef standing, serves lobster with lobster foam. Joe Scarborough doesn’t like it. “I’m not a foam man,” he says. “Maybe the top chefs are doing it in Europe, Spain, wherever.” But this is Amuhricah. You heard it here first: Lobster foam is socialist.

After dinner, the talk of the chefs is how everyone thinks Alex took Ed’s pea purée. Naturally, Alex responds to this accusation forcefully in an aside with the camera: “Some people think I took Ed’s pea purée,” he says. “But you know what? It’s really coincidental that Ed couldn’t find his purée.” And that is the extent of Alex’s defense. In one great political book called All The President’s Men, this would have been known as a non-denial denial. You know who made non-denial denials? All the president’s men, that’s who. Haldeman and them. The ones who went to jail.

Alex continues tying his own noose: “I didn’t even know he was making a pea purée,” he insists of Ed. Here, Top Chef D.C.’s producers, bless their hearts, helpfully flash us back—in black and white and with subtitles, no less, like an America’s Most Wanted re-enactment—to Kenny telling Alex, the night before, that Ed was making pea purée. So we know that Alex is a liar. That thing you saw running out of your grasp? That was the benefit of the doubt, buddy.

Bygones may end up being bygones on this one, because of what happens next: Alex and Ed have two of the judges’ three favorite dishes. The guest judge, a local chef, praises Alex’s fish, it was cooked perfectly. Then the rough part: With Ed sitting right there, biting his tongue, the guest judge continues on about “that wonderful pea purée.” “I could’ve just eaten a whole bowl of that,” he rhapsodizes. “It was simple, yet it had great flavor.” This must be like torture for Ed! Fortunately, lots of people in Washington, D.C., are okay with torture.

And the winner is … Alex! “You gotta cook for your own heart and your own soul,” Alex says afterward. “It’s gotta be your food on the plate.” You miserable prick. That said, the chefs clearly were enamored with the way Alex cooked his salmon. And Alex did not steal Ed’s salmon. He just stole his pea purée. Ed, thoughts?

Amanda is not in the bottom three, but her arch-nemesis Kelly is. Kelly starts crying. Her steak was—wait for it, no just wait for it—too salty. Others comfort her. Amanda’s responds thusly: “Kelly didn’t share her salt. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t share.” Then she makes this face …

… and adds, “She deserves to be on the bottom.”

Not today; today, Andrea is saying sayonara. But karma’s a bitch, and the two Jewish cheftestants are severely tempting its vigilant wrath.

Earlier: Episode 6: Of Tragedy and Testicles
Episode 5: You’re Tearing Me Apart, Maryland!
Episode 4: Babies Making Baby Food
Episode 3: Booze Jokes, Not Funny Anymore
Episode 2: Giving Booze to Kids
Episode 1: Cheftestant Cooks His Mother’s Borscht

• German authorities charged the 88-year-old who was number three on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most-wanted list with aiding the murder of 430,000 Jews at Belzec as a guard and personally shooting ten himself. [NYT]

• In an op-ed, deputy foreign minister (and former ambassador) Danny Ayalon defends the blockade and calls flotilla-type activists hypocrites who don’t really care about Palestinian suffering. [WSJ]

• The 11th Commandment at Agudas Achim outside Washington, D.C., is: Thou shalt not bother Rahm about politics. [Page Six]

• 47 congresspersons are co-sponsoring a non-binding resolution that would articulate support for Israel’s right to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. [Suite 101/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A reporter catches up with New York Knick and Jew Amar’e Stoudemire dining with his girlfriend in Jerusalem. “I have been aware since my youth that I am a Hebrew through my mother, and that is something that has played a subtle but important role in my development,” he said. “I have never hid my spiritual roots. They just weren’t something that came under the spotlight.” [JPost]

These detractors missed the point of my article, which had nothing to do with the indiscernible beliefs of individuals; rather, I was instead illustrating that these pundits, their audiences, and the major media companies hosting their blogs, are complicit in the common work of mainstreaming the kind of anti-Semitic language, ideas, and discourse that were once confined to extremist hate sites on the far right.

Let’s start with a very recent example: After I contacted Foreign Policy’s Editor-in-Chief Susan Glasser for comment before publication of last week’s column, FP.com quickly excised dozens of the most egregiously anti-Semitic comments that stuck to Walt’s posts. Perhaps they should have also vetted some of the links that Walt himself embeds for the edification of his readers. Consider this recent post where Walt has inserted a link under the name Ariel Sharon, which leads to a 2002 article on the Media Monitors Network website:

The name Safire, as in William Safire of the New York Times, is a name they recognize well at the State Department. He is one of the high priests of Sulzberger’s New York Times empire which has a franchise to dictate terms to the State Department. Of course, it is Safire himself who appears to be taking in dictation work these days from his old pal, Ariel Sharon. Before you read on, note that the Boston Globe is also a publication owned by Sulzberger. Is their a civil war breaking out among the Yiddish Supremacists? Or is Sulzberger trying to deflect some of the damage that is bound to come his way as a result of transforming his media empire into just another corner of the Israeli Lobby? Who cares? Let Sulzberger explain his shadow government’s antics.

With this link Walt shows that he hangs out in the same fetid places as some of his most paranoid commenters. And yet it is true, as some of my critics, including Walt, contend, that he and his colleagues are not responsible for the views of their readers. Walt is not accountable for the rabble that hang on his every word and who feel vindicated by the fact that their dark fantasies about Jews are enhanced by a veneer of academic reasoning from a Harvard professor. Nor can Walt be blamed for the fact that David Duke lauded his work on the Israel lobby’s machinations in pushing the United States to war in Iraq. (“It is quite satisfying,” wrote the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, “to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.”) Even though a sewer follows Walt wherever he goes, he is not that sewer’s keeper.

I did not feel the need to make the case that Walt himself is an anti-Semite. There are plenty of credible voices who have pursued that line of argument. They have made a case that the book he co-authored with John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, was an anti-Semitic tract. Still others equally credible believe that Walt simply flirts with anti-Semitism. Andrew Sullivan has also been called to account, more than once, for combining his strident, conspiratorial denunciations of Israel, “Jewish neocons,” and “the Israel Lobby,” with his pronounced obsession with circumcision. Even as Glenn Greenwald and Philip Weiss have both been accused of obscuring the plain facts behind their frothing rhetoric about Israel, I never claimed that they were of the hothouse flower variety of anti-Semite known as the self-hating Jew.

Whether or not these bloggers are anti-Semitic is precisely the argument Walt and the rest want to have and precisely the one I do not. Anti-Semitism is an idea held in the mind that finally can only be confirmed—and can always be denied—by the mind holding it. I can no more discern what these bloggers really think about Jews than I can know whether they are thinking about the color blue or green. To get bogged down in this argument deflects attention from the issue that I am interested in here, which is not a mental state, but a process, an activity in which all four men openly engage: Jew-baiting.

Everyone knows that the media is reeling. For instance, New York Times staffers recently took a 5 percent pay cut after a hundred of their colleagues were laid off. And yet, compared to their colleagues at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, both of which have been gutted after sliding into bankruptcy, journalists at the Times are clearly the lucky ones. None of the big media companies has figured out how to make their Internet presence into a profit center that can sustain operations, even as they turn their hallowed brand-names over to opinion bloggers who can generate copy at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional reporting. The Israel, or rather anti-Israel, market is one of the most attractive niche markets in this trade because it taps into a passionate audience that is interested in news and can generate immediate and measurable results—page views, hits, and comments. Even on his best days, Stephen Walt can’t hold a candle to premier sports, shopping, or pornography websites traffic-wise. But he can tap into the prurient passions of a niche market.

If Walt and the others may be acquitted of responsibility for their cesspools, what blame lies with their employers? It is hard to believe that if an author had a written a book, like Walt’s, that had been similarly branded as “nasty,” “paranoid,” and “riddled with errors of fact,” and the book was about, say, African-Americans, or Latinos, or gays—and endorsed by David Duke—that the author would be embraced by the U.S. intelligentsia in the name of open debate. Only their employers know why Walt and the others were hired or remain on staff—the editor of The Atlantic, James Bennet, declined comment through the magazine’s spokesman, while Salon editor Joan Walsh and The Nation Institute’s Taya Kitman did not respond to requests for comment—but it’s not outlandish to imagine that the number of commenters and pageviews these writers’ polemics draw would be a factor. Whether Foreign Policy knew they were getting the public sewer Walt elicits, or just a public intellectual, is unclear. (Foreign Policy’s Susan Glasser did not respond to a request for comment.) What is clear is that they decided to host Walt’s blog, give it prominent billing, and tolerate its commenters.

As was the case with Walt’s blog, Weiss’ sponsor must have brought him aboard fully aware of his anti-Israel sentiments (Mondoweiss was hosted by the New York Observer before the Nation Institute), but Greenwald was already on the Salon site before he turned his baleful attention to anti-Zionist polemics, and The Atlantic bought The Daily Dish before Sullivan started ranting about circumcision and the Jews. Unlike the rest, Sullivan doesn’t allow comments, but we still know what his readers think, because he publishes examples of their work. These published emails are scarcely different from the comments published under the posts of Walt, Greenwald, and Weiss, whose arguments serve as a dog-whistle, calling out the pack of haters whose remarks make explicit what was merely hinted at in the original, (usually) more respectable post. The commenters, many of them known to each other from like-minded Internet sites, feed off of each other’s semi-literate rage, elaborating upon their colleagues’ lies, myths, and slanders and serving up anti-Semitic invective. As the Jews, and sometimes non-Jews, arrive on the site to dispute the calumnies, the cyber-sport of Jew-baiting begins, driving up comments and traffic to heretofore-unreachable heights. Even as Sullivan’s technique to summon the mob seems slightly more sophisticated, it still uses a strategy that allows him to walk away with more traffic—he is currently ranked 15th in “standing & influence” in the entire blogosphere—but a little less of the stench.

In his review of The Israel Lobby, Walter Russell Mead explained how Jew-baiting has historically functioned: “Jews are in a double bind: refrain from responding with outrage and the charge becomes accepted as a fact, express utter loathing at the charge and give anti-Semites the opportunity to pose as the victims of a slander campaign by venomous Jews.” For the purposes of driving Internet traffic, it is helpful if Jews respond, but not necessary, as anyone who has waded through the cesspool knows. In this column last week the subject alone, without the rhetorical energies of Walt and company, also brought a record number of comments for this site, thanks to the efforts of commenters migrating from their own safe havens of invective in order to shout down reasoned debate.

To advertising salesmen and advertisers, of course, the subject of any given blog post is presumably immaterial: What matters are the numbers. But is targeting Jews that much more profitable than going after African-Americans or gays and lesbians or women? The answer is simple. People know they can get away with Jew-baiting because history shows that it has been done before and no one did anything to stop it.

***

Jew-baiting is simply one way that the new old media and old new media are trying to find their collective footing in a changing press environment and a bad economy. So, in the interests of sharing my understanding of this successful recipe with my colleagues in the opinion press, these are some notes on how to increase traffic to your struggling website.

The Jew-baiter’s Lexicon

Here are some of the euphemistic catchphrases that will cover your ass with your queasier colleagues in the press corps while announcing to those in the know that your cesspool is open for business, with examples drawn from top anti-Israel blogs:

1. “The Israel lobby”

A conspiracy theory by any other name, the “Israel lobby” has long been invoked to explain unconditional U.S. support for the Jewish state. This conceit hit the mainstream in 2007 with publication of the Walt-Mearsheimer book explaining that a broadly inclusive coalition of U.S. citizens of Jewish descent ranging from the far left to the far right are subverting U.S. foreign policy on behalf of Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer deny that what sounds, looks, and smells like a conspiracy theory about Jewish power is in fact one. Why? Because conspiracies about Jewish power are for anti-Semites, and they, by contrast, are tenured professors at two of the most esteemed universities in the United States, men who are simply trying to explain the mysterious forces that have poisoned the U.S. public so much that it overwhelmingly supports the Jewish state in poll after poll, subverting rational U.S. interests in the Middle East through a uniquely irrational process that is applicable to the behavior of no other state on the planet. That’s why.

Here, for instance, Stephen Walt finds the proof vindicating his claim that it was indeed the Israel lobby that drove the United States to make war on Iraq—Tony Blair says so! The problem however is that Tony Blair said no such thing. Walt not only wrenches Blair’s quote out of context, he also wildly twists the evidence surrounding the run-up to the Iraq war to fit his theory. In Walt’s account, the fact that Israel was vocal in its opposition to the Iraq war, until it eventually fell in line behind the George W. Bush Administration’s democracy-promotion crusade like a good ally, was a feat of astonishing misdirection, which appears to have fooled even Stephen Walt himself (as well as Mearsheimer). By the end, it appears, the United States was taken to war not by the Bush Administration but by a remarkably complete list of nearly every Israeli and American Jewish politician, journalist, activist, and thinker, liberal and conservative alike, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, “Every Israeli politician who Bill Clinton knows … and he knows a lot,” Howard Kohr of AIPAC, Nathan Guttman of The Forward, Michelle Goldberg of Salon.com, John B. Judis of The New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, the Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk, the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Mortimer Zuckerman, Matthew Berger of the Jewish Telegraph Agency; Dr. Mandell Ganchrow, executive vice president of the Orthodox Religious Zionists of America; Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism; David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee; Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The Jewish Week; and Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

So how does Jew-baiting work in practice? Let’s look at the comments on this particular post.

“Bush and Cheney only had to walk down the hall to consult with Israel, considering how many in their cabinet and appointees have dual citizenships with Israel and were already actively involved with the Israeli government… All roads lead to PNAC, AIPAC, JINSA, ZOA, AEI, etc.” says one commenter, leaving out only ZOG in his paranoid alphabet soup. Another writes: “Everybody knows that many (not all) Jewish Americans care more about the security and preservation of the Israeli state than they do about the safety of American citizens.”

A commenter named Jacob, whom the other commenters appear to believe is Jewish, remarks that among other troubling issues with Walt’s argument is that his list of Jews responsible for the war seems to include virtually every public figure in the American Jewish community. Once baited, the mob zeroes in: “Calm down Jacob.” “Stop whining and make your point.” “Stick to the point and ease up on the histrionics.” “[Y]ou are, unfortunately, indicative of the sickness called Zionism that has perverted the Jewish community. It’s time to start to take RESPONSIBILITY for the actions of YOUR community. Get some help, Jacob.”

2. “Neocons”

This is a synonym often used to designate the kind of American Jew who has forced Washington officials to sacrifice U.S. interests, as well as U.S. blood and money, in order to make war on behalf of Israel’s desire to gobble up Muslim and Arab lands. First, the neocons slipped something into the well that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and other policymakers drank from before they made war on Iraq; now the neocons are eager to push the U.S. into a conflict with Iran. If Weiss is to be believed, Washington Times reporter Eli Lake and a bunch of other Jewish journalists with no evident influence on the decision-making process are in fact setting the agenda for the entire Barack Obama Administration. To the Mondoweiss audience, it appears to make perfect sense that the decision on how to deal with the Iranian nuclear program will not be shaped by administration principals like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden but rather by Sen. Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. “[W]ith the neocons and aipac’s plugs in congress/media calling openly for war,” writes one commenter, “and with zionist liberals and fake leftists/progressives demonizing Iran more subtly to pave the way, how much longer before zionism, inc. gets their way on this?”

3. “Good Jews” vs. “Bad Jews”

If you give evidence that you have a problem with all Jews, you’re identifying yourself as an anti-Semite. It’s important then to make a distinction between two kinds of Jews—the “good Jews,” who agree with your conspiratorial views, and the “bad Jews,” who are often referred to with the shorthand term “Likudnik.” John Mearsheimer makes the distinction a bit more baldly, calling the bad Jews the “New Afrikaaners” and the good ones, “righteous Jews,” a cleverly nasty twist on the Jewish concept of the righteous gentile.

“Most American Jews,” writes Andrew Sullivan, “retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities. But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing—that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran—is something else. Something much darker.” In other words, the “Krauthammer/Goldfarb wing” represents the bad Jewish thoughts of U.S. Jewry. As Leon Wieseltier put it in The New Republic, “[Sullivan’s] assumption, in his outburst about ‘the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,’ that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one.”

4. “Conflict of interest”

Stephen Walt coined this phrase himself as a substitute for “dual loyalty,” which as he concedes, “has a regrettable and sordid history, given its origins as a nasty anti-Semitic canard in old Europe.” What he means by conflict of interest is in effect the same thing, but purged of that nasty history. It is not someone’s racial or ethnic background that should exclude them from policy-making roles in the U.S. government, writes Walt, but rather when “an individual’s own activities or statements give independent evidence of strong attachment to a particular foreign country” that they should be excluded from “an influential role in shaping U.S. policy towards that country.” Who qualifies as a source of independent evidence? According to Walt, working at AIPAC, or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is sufficient proof of conflict of interest. That is to say, that the many hundreds of scholars, military officials, and policymakers who have worked at the Washington-based think-tank that reflects the bipartisan Israel-friendly position of the U.S. government should—uniquely—be disqualified from working on U.S. Middle East policy.

Walt claims that he’d have similar concerns about “key figures” “from the American Task Force on Palestine or the National Iranian-American Council.” And yet when President Obama named Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, Walt defended a man reported to have done advocacy work on behalf of Saudi Arabia and to have sat on the advisory board of a state-owned Chinese oil company. As Freeman’s nomination began to unravel, thanks in part to the revelation that a former U.S. diplomat tapped to play a central role in the intelligence community believed U.S. support for the Jewish state was responsible for 9/11, Walt likened criticism of Freeman to McCarthyism, and adduced yet more evidence for the awesome power of the Israel lobby.

5. “No one can criticize Israel without being labeled an anti-Semite.”

This slogan entitles its speaker to slander Israel in any fashion without having to worry about being called an anti-Semite. Walt often makes the claim that critics of Israel are intimidated into silence, despite the fact that The Israel Lobby, published by one of the country’s most prestigious houses and home to 22 Nobel Prize in Literature winners, was widely reviewed in the national media and even hit the New York Times best-seller list. What this statement really means is that Jews control the media.

According to Glenn Greenwald, for the Israel lobby, “The real goal, as always, was to ensure that there is no debate over America’s indescribably self-destructive, blind support for Israeli actions.” Moreover, Greenwald explains, the Israel lobby has overpowered the American legal system: “Not even our Constitution’s First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law and resources to target and punish Israel’s enemies.”

6. “Hasbara”

Here’s another new entry in the lexicon, perhaps related to the fact that given the capricious nature of its one-time allies around the world, its virtual isolation from the international community and, of course, the anti-Israel press, Israel has of late devoted more of its human and financial resources to public relations. While it is true that all states engage in a range of activities to make its case to the rest of the world—from public diplomacy to propaganda—and some Middle Eastern countries are famous for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on such efforts, the use of the Hebrew word hasbara (meaning “explanation”) indicates that the Jewish state is engaging in a dark conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in order to justify its crimes. After all, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it still isn’t kosher. Or, as Weiss notes before quoting a writer from The Guardian, “Why do they persist in trying to defend the indefensible?”

“I single out Israel in part because of the lies, because the lobby has gotten away with this since Truman’s day,” writes Weiss. And a commenter responds: “Also because they threaten the livelihoods of those who criticize them.”

7. The Awesome Power of Jewish Mind-Control

Remember that one aspect of The Israel Lobby’s central thesis is that marching orders for the war in Iraq were whispered into the ears of key Bush Administration decision-makers—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Rice—by Jews. In this view, because Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were working under Rumsfeld at the Pentagon they must have exercised their mesmeric powers of Jewish mind-control to bend the U.S. government to their will. In a separate example, Andrew Sullivan wrote—with no actual evidence to support his pretty loaded claim—that his arch-nemesis Sarah Palin was being “indoctrinated by Joe Lieberman and AIPAC as we speak.”

What happens if you don’t read the script the Jews have handed you? They’ll silence you, says Walt’s co-author John Mearsheimer. “[T]here’s no accountability for Israel on any issue,” the University of Chicago professor recently told a Washington audience. “If I went to the Middle East, and visited Israel, and I was killed, somebody shot me, do you think there would be any accountability? The Israelis can do almost anything and get away with it.”

One way to avoid the awesome power of the Jews is to link to truth-sites beyond their control, as Stephen Walt does in the example I cite at the beginning of this piece, and allegedly to even more extreme hate sites which will gladly receive readers who might have previously been a little too timid to explore the darkest parts of the web without an escort.

8. I like Jews. I just don’t like Zionists

In rationalizing the excesses of your blogger or his more voluble commenters, explain that they are simply critical of Zionism, which is different from anti-Semitism. Even as Martin Luther King explained that, “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism,” this particular trope has become so naturalized that no one will think to ask why Jewish nationalism, among all the varieties of nationalism promoted by the world’s myriad of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, is singled out for opprobrium.

In fact, there is no apparent contradiction in loathing Zionism and at the same time celebrating opposing forms of nationalism. Palestinian national aspirations remind Philip Weiss “of the life-and-death struggle for freedom our brave ancestors experienced during the Revolutionary War.” In Weiss’ view, anyone—like himself, for example—who stands against Israeli aggression and with the resistance partakes of that heroism. In this inversion of reality, it is not Hezbollah and Hamas who use Arab civilians as human shields, but Israel.

9. The uniquely evil evil that is Israel

Here we move from the merely tactical use of loaded vocabulary to the conceptual level. Israel is so extraordinarily beyond the pale that its behavior does not even merit comparison with states like China, which brutally occupies Tibet, or India, which occupies Kashmir, or Poland, which stands on parts of what used to be eastern Germany, or Sri Lanka, which recently extirpated the secessionist Tamil Tiger movement after a brutal three-decades long civil war, or the United States of America, which annihilated the Native American peoples. Indeed, the only states that resemble Israel are Nazi Germany and South Africa’s apartheid regime, neither of which exists any longer. Get it?

Watch the comments section fill to the brim at Mondoweiss when Israelis are likened to Nazis: “It’s not so much the methods but the ideology,” writes commenter “Shingo.” “The racial and ethic supremacy. The belief in maintaining bloodlike purity and opposition to mized [sic] marriages.” Another argues, in response to a different post that, “Israel threatens world peace like no other country.” That’s not quite right, as Weiss explains in the post: “I constantly compare the conflict with the battle over slavery in this country in the 1850s.”

While sweeping and unsubstantiated rhetoric has its place, it is best at times to use a more subtle approach. Consider a recent Robert Mackey post from the New York Times’ Lede Blog, which regularly appears on the front page of the Times website, concerning the story of the Arab man found guilty of rape by deception. Never mind that rape by deception statutes—however stupid they may be—are also on the books in California and Tennessee. Mackey portrays this episode as yet another instance of Jewish supremacism. Perhaps if this were in the print edition of the New York Times, the reporters or their editors might have been obliged by normal reporting standards at the very least to read to the end of the Haaretz piece they link to, which explains that two Jewish Israelis have been sentenced under the same law. But, it’s not a newspaper; it’s a blog.

When I became pregnant my brain and body were suddenly filled with static. This static was less a sound than a sense that the flickering of snow on a tv screen had been made into liquid and pumped into my veins. It was difficult to think, hard to do anything at all. After a while, I realized that it was her signal. I couldn’t hear my own ways of thinking or feeling with this other person’s atoms multiplying inside of me. It was the sound of the big bang, and my own radio brain was tuned in.

Everything gets crossed in this passage: sounds and liquids, big and small, inside and out, baby and universe, time and whatever it was that was before time. And the poet, somewhere in the middle, registers it all.

I’m not sure what the hiss of poetic static would sound like, but I guess it would require a uniformity across the bandwidth, a murmur without specific information. Weiser gives us something else, a fine jumble that signals too much, not too little information:

A person sits next to a world of almost situations
making a living as a memoir
thoroughfares fill with drizzle scrambling
progressive strangers with their ding eyes
I am sure a fugue is near
in the almost-echo of park benches—
this is not the city of the blessed worker
Americana seduction like original face paint
reflected in a gridiron puddle

The lines veer off from each other after an initial point of contact—you can reconstruct how punctuation might connect them. There is even a kind of electrical tension between then words, especially when Weiser makes her nouns act as adjectives. You get the sense that the phrases “ding eyes” and “Americana seduction” are merely momentary hookups. Momentary, but not necessarily or completely arbitrary. Weiser’s disruptions serve a clear purpose. She is trying to get at something between the senses and between sense. She is trying to get at what she in one place calls “the ocean of more everything.”

We Jews call this ocean and this plenitude God, the Big Bang’s Big Bang, and it is tempting to read Weiser’s poems as something akin to an expression of faith. She definitely nods in this direction. She articulates a very Jewish notion of revelation:

Revelation is at heart a linguistic event
and all creatures with lungs can speak

After all, God reveals Himself by voice and in writing. He talks to the Jews. And He makes sure that the Jews and that Nature talk back. The psalmist tells us that the heavens declare the glory of God and that their voice fills all speech and every language.

But these lines appear in a poem about “macguffins,” the false leads that drive the plot of thrillers and mysteries. Our Adamic acts of naming, of finding the real names of things, might be nothing more than our own “bludgeoned burgeoning of sleep’s asymmetry.” By the same token, names are all we’ve got.  In other words, while all creatures with lungs might be talking, we can never be sure what exactly it is that they’re saying. We have to pretend—for the moment at least—that we do.

So, Weiser is really much more a skeptic than a mystic. For all that, she is a cheerful improviser on infinite themes. She sees ahead of her “an endlessly opening frontier of rapid sketches/ pressed between the pages of knowing.” The vision thing can get awfully dreary unless—like William Blake or Henry David Thoreau—you can muster a sense of humor. Karen Weiser has a sense of humor. She likes to play. She mixes up her diction and lets music direct her lines:

when I imp my wing to sing
and thrice appear a melancholy thing:
I should sleep-wake in my third-best days

On her first-best days she doesn’t seem like a melancholy thing at all.

There’s no reason for sadness. The driving force behind the poems—at least as Weiser presents them—is childbirth, not death; a potential gain and not a certain loss. At bottom, her book is predicated on the possibility, almost the certainty, of being able to meet and greet at the appointed time:

It’s small, the moment of opening between us
and I will meet you here without fail

She counts on what she terms “the generosity of opening.”

This opening might be spiritual. It is also quite literal—there is nothing  as concrete as pregnancy and childbirth—and thumpingly American. At the end of Huckleberry Finn, that quintessential, boys-own dream of freedom, Huck tells us that he is going “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Weiser wants to light out for new territory as well, but she’s not a guy and the adventure is internal. At the same time it’s also out there in the ether, in the linguistic equivalent of an electromagnetic hum.



• Not all swastikas are anti-Semitic, says the Anti-Defamation League. No, really! [NY Jewish Week via JTA]

• Rabbi Andy Bachman, an FOTM, has a simple solution to Emily Henochowicz’s hospital bill: The Israeli government should pay it. [Water Over Rocks]

• A Latvian-born Jewish woman was nabbed in Dallas trying to smuggle night-vision goggles to Moscow. Surely this has been optioned already. [NY Daily News]

• We win things. [JPS]

• Ancestral voices prophesying war! Or, rather, a calm, knowledgeable voice predicting a Mideast war in the next year or two. [Falafel Mafia]

The part-Jewish band Yo La Tengo’s “Stockholm Syndrome” has been in my head for at least 24 hours.

Curb Your Enthusiam for TOMORROW Thursday

Looking for people to be a minyan minus one!

*sorry Ladies, it’s a scene of 9 looking for a 10th.

According to DirectCast, producers are seeking “Male / Caucasian, MidEastern / 25 – 70 / Seeking AFTRA Jewish man for featured work as part of a minyan for Curb tomorrow.”

So the next season of Curb will include a minyan in New York (ooh, and also a “Jewish male who is avid Red Sox fan”). They just keep topping themselves, don’t they?

If you have experience in journalism and are familiar with the landscape of American Jewish life, we’d love to hear from you. We are hiring interns to work two or three days a week at our office in New York City. Interns will assist the editorial staff with research and administrative tasks, as well as contributing blog posts and full features, and will receive paid stipends. If you’re interested in applying for the upcoming fall term, which starts August 16, please send a résumé and three writing clips to our internship coordinator, Marissa Brostoff (mbrostoff@tabletmag.com), by Monday, August 2. We look forward to hearing from you.

Recall that this is the same guy who, a few months ago, Tweeted “Shalom !!” for an unrelated reason. It seems he knew something that we didn’t. He has since announced that he has Jewish roots, and yesterday Tweeted: “On the flight to Israel. This is going to be a great trip. The holy land. Learn about it. This ze ha’halom sheli. Shalom.” (For those who lack the power forward’s Hebrew proficiency, that translates to, “this is my dream.”) According to Israeli Army Radio, Stoudemire plans to spend two months in the country learning Hebrew.

What people should understand is that Stoudemire—with due respect to Jordan Farmar—isn’t just another role player. When healthy, he is one of the best big men and generally most effective players in the NBA. This is massively cool.

Basketball Star Amar’e Soudemire Jewish? [JPost]
Earlier: Farmar Heads to Jersey
Latin Immigrants Are the Twelfth Tribe

This is not just because he is Jewish! Jacobson was a podcast guest of ours two years ago, when he discussed his previous novel, Kalooki Nights (which was also longlisted). At the time, Jacobson—who has been called the “British Philip Roth”—was explaining why he had written another Jewish-themed novel after having sworn not to.

Did he live up to his oath for The Finkler Question? Well, if this review is any indication (and if the title is any other), the theme of Jewishness does, shall we say, come up in the novel. The shortlist will be revealed in September, the winner announced in October.

Man Booker Prize Announces Long List [Arts Beat]
Related: The Solipsist

The mosque became a statewide issue when New York gubernatorial candidates started talking about it, and then a national issue when the Tea Party (which opposes the mosque) caught on, and then an even bigger national issue when Sarah Palin made her famous Tweets against it and Newt Gingrich specified exactly where he would and would not be okay with a mosque being built in New York City (a city whose Jewish mayor, and borough whose Jewish president, both support the project).

By the way: The project is invariably described as a mosque, and while that’s not technically false, it is somewhat misleading. As planned, Cordoba House will be an “Islamic center” in much the same way that a Jewish Community Center is a “Jewish center”—in fact, Cordoba House is explicitly modeled after JCCs. “There will be a mosque component, which will be a separate not-for-profit component of the project,” backer Sharif El-Gamal told The Jerusalem Post. “It’s going to be a small component in a community center, just like the 92nd Street Y has a synagogue.”

Vote Boosts G. Zero Mosque [NY Post]
Earlier: Ground Zero for a Fight
Palin ‘Refudiates’ Cordoba House
Related: ‘This Is A Way for Me To Give Back’ [Forward]

What we don’t know, and what the Jewish community seems to want to know, is: Will Chelsea convert for her Jewish husband?

I don’t know! But one clue could be to know whether the Mezvinskys—the only Jews who could at least be argued to have an actual personal stake in whether Chelsea remains Methodist—are likely to care every bit as much as we do. Here’s what we got: In 1996, the groom’s mother, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a onetime congressperson, disclosed that she was raised Reform; that her then-husband (now ex-husband), Edward Mezvinsky, was raised “very Orthodox”; and that as a compromise they chose to raise the kinder as Conservative.

That’s it. That’s all I got. There’s your speculation, as it were, for the day. Who knows, maybe we’ll have more tomorrow!

Ex-Congresswoman Laments Women’s Losses Since 1992 [J Weekly]
Earlier: Boldface Names at Chelsea’s Wedding
Flying the Friendly Skies With Clinton

• President Abbas plans to tell the Arab League to reject direct talks on the grounds that the “proximity talks” haven’t yet achieveved enough. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Emily Henochowicz, the Jewish American girl struck in the eye by a tear-gas canister at a pro-flotilla protest in Israel a few months ago, now lies at the center of a dispute over who should pay her hospital bill. [NYT]

• Commercial airline pilots worry that new Israeli security protocol, requiring a code before landing, could end up leaving planes vulnerable to actions from the Israeli Air Force. [NYT]

• Israel bulldozed 45 Bedouin homes in the Negev, the largest such razing in awhile. [LAT]

• Heirs to a Hungarian Jewish banker filed a U.S. federal lawsuit against the Hungarian government demanding it account for and return more than $100 million of their benefactor’s art it came to possess after the war. [NYT]

The main action of Imagining Madoff—playing at Stageworks Hudson in Hudson, New York—takes place during a long, scotch-soaked, pre-recession evening in the study of Solomon Galkin, a Holocaust survivor, poet, and Jewish community leader who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to a certain Nobel laureate. Madoff, as imagined by Margolin, manages the funds of the Manhattan synagogue where Galkin (Howard Green) is treasurer; now Galkin, dazzled with the results, has summoned the magician to his home, hoping Madoff will take on his personal investments as well. The men banter easily, and their business meeting becomes a rambling debate over money, morality, Judaism, the Holocaust, and sex, with Madoff playing the whip-smart cynic to Galkin’s erudite moralist. What Galkin doesn’t know is that, like the hapless mortals of religious allegory who try to out-reason the Devil (as in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) or Death (as in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), his interlocutor holds a stacked deck—and Galkin’s fate—in his hands.

In Margolin’s telling, Madoff (played wonderfully by Mark Margolis) may not literally be Satan, but like the devils of literature, he can be charming, sadistic, and profound at the same time. Sitting in his prison cell, telling his story to a biographer (the scene in Galkin’s study is actually an extended flashback), he makes what may sound like a laughably outrageous claim: “I didn’t really care that much about the money.” But perhaps it’s not so outrageous. Serial killers, we know from the movies, are motivated less by practicality than by perversity—even, like Hannibal Lecter, by refined aesthetics—so, why can’t the same be true of serial extortionists? “There was the music of it,” Madoff says wistfully. The dollars don’t just flash before his eyes; he waltzes with them. Later, he remembers a dream in which his penis is a vagina and his vagina is a wallet. The play’s third character, a former Madoff secretary whom we periodically see testifying before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, offers the deliciously creepy fact that in 10 years, she never saw her former boss get up to go to the bathroom.

Most devilishly of all, Madoff as portrayed by Margolin is a kind of unconscientious objector to the moral universe presided over by the god of Abraham, where piety and obedience are rewarded and hubris is shunned. Galkin, then, is his natural enemy: a man who has seen hell and, instead of capitulating to its amoral code, has embraced Torah, ethics, and the Jewish people. He also happens to be a bit of a sap. Prattling about God and Sandy Koufax in his plush study, he comes across as self-satisfied and somewhat soft in the head. Madoff repeatedly attempts to convince Galkin that the latter’s beloved Talmudic riddles are not paths to higher wisdom but to complacency. Galkin will have none of it: For him, the very fact that a financial sorcerer is managing his synagogue’s funds is evidence of divine favor. “A lot of people ask me: Who is this Madoff? How does he make these miracles with money?” he says. “And I tell them: No one knows! That’s what makes it a miracle!”

Galkin, in short, is Madoff’s perfect mark: His belief in providence and in the goodness of fellow Jews makes him easy to exploit, and that, in turn, means Madoff wins their philosophical debate. His ability to betray his own people reveals the limits of Galkin’s moral imagination. “I wanted to rip up the picture he had of the world,” Madoff tells us. “His picture of the world as a place where some men are purely moral. I wanted to say, ‘Wake up, asshole! Wake up!’ It’s a danger to the world, that picture, that idea of moral men. With that picture in your mind you’ll be murdered in your sleep.”

Margolin’s most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin’s credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe. “Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t any man, still follow the leader blindly without knowing where he was going?” Madoff demands. Galkin will not entertain the possibility that despite his hard-won moral insights, he too is capable of “just following orders”; Madoff, meanwhile, never seems to consider that such a consummately human failing deserves sympathy rather than contempt.

In the end, the only character willing to consider the possibility that she has erred is the one without a bone to pick about the essential moral character of the world. “I never asked many questions,” Madoff’s secretary tells the SEC guiltily at the beginning of the play. By its end, she has charged herself more harshly than a judge, earthly or celestial, ever would. “I committed a crime,” she says, “and I didn’t even know it.”

• British Prime Minister David Cameron called Gaza “a prison camp” and advocated an end to the blockade while addressing a group of Turkish businessmen. [Haaretz]

• Six Israeli and one Romanian solder died in a helicopter crash in central Romania, where they were participating in joint military drills. [JTA]

• Oliver Stone apologized for his remarks yesterday about Jewish control of the media and clarified that the Holocaust was—indeed—“an atrocity.” [NYT]

• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of Nextbook Press’ Betraying Spinoza) has a great essay on the brothers Singer (yup, there was another!). [The Book]

• Ian Buruma accuses Israel’s critics of holding it to a double standard. [Project Syndicate]

Nice song for a summer day:

But conservatives (and some others) have disagreed, saying in fact that this was a secret group of like-minded individuals in disparate, powerful institutions coordinating with each other in something very like a conspiracy to drive the course of history toward their preferred, nefarious ends. And, hey, there are a lot of interesting last names among the members of the group. Uh-oh.

Do you see where I am going with this—or, more to the point, do you see where some went with this? Take one confused post, which in one breath condemns Oliver Stone for his clearly anti-Semitic insinuation that Jews control the media, and in the next breath notes that many of the members of Journolist seem to be Jews controlling the media, except obviously these aren’t the same Jews Stone was referring to, because they’re all in the same blame-America-first camp (or something).

In fairness, though, this author is only going by the names, you see:

I don’t know if they’re actually Jewish or not. I don’t know if those who are Jewish actually practice the religion. And of those who practice the religion, I don’t know whether they practice the religion in a way that has traditional religious resonance, or is just the Jewish liberal bow to Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and the Sabbath candles. As to the latter group, assuming it existed on the Journolist, it’s easy to claim religion when you just go through the rituals. It’s a little harder when you try to align your Torah with the Democratic handbook and the Alinsky rules for living.

I could give a list of politically conservative Jews who make the same “liberal” bow to a few Jewish customs, but I don’t do things like that.

Anyway, the punch-line is that the listserv that has arisen in Journolist’s wake is called Cabalist. That title could imply that these Jewish liberals were serious about this whole conspiracy thing. Or it could be a cheeky way for these liberals (many of them indeed Jewish) to mock right-wing paranoid conspiracy-mongering. We report, you decide.

How Journolist and Oliver Stone Serve To Highlight Each Other’s Insanity [Bookworm Room]
Related: The Values of Journolist [TAPPED]

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer and activist, wrote to Maryland’s attorney general earlier this year alleging fraud and/or misrepresentation concerning Save a Torah rabbi Menachem Youlus’ contention that the Torah in question had been salvaged from Auschwitz by a Polish priest.

While Youlus had made this judgment in 2008, Rosensaft, who has taught legal classes on war crimes trials, disputed the provenances of the Auschwitz Torah and another authenticated by Save a Torah, this supposedly from Bergen-Belsen:

The original buildings at Bergen-Belsen, he said, were burned to stop a typhus epidemic and the survivors were moved to a former German military installation nearby in May 1945. Mr. Rosensaft said that he was born in that installation in 1948 and returned many times to visit.

“The brick barracks to which the survivors were moved did not have wooden floorboards,” Mr. Rosensaft said, “and they’re now a NATO base, populated by British military personnel, so there is no way Youlus could have gotten there, either.”

Deal Over Claims To Rescued Torahs’ Provenances [City Room]
Related: From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit [NYT]

Many have said that the notion of “support for Israel” should be redefined because, sometimes, the way for the United States to be Israel’s best friend is to criticize it; that, in the case of American backing of Israel, there is such a thing as loving not wisely, but too well. This is, broadly speaking, the J Street line: We are “pro-Israel,” it says, but part of that involves telling Israel that, say, continued settlement beyond the Green Line, combined with demographic trends, is actually bad for Israel.

Certainly you could find plenty of people to agree with that notion. But these Democratic talking points indicate that the alternate, tough-love definition of “pro-Israel” has not penetrated the broader domestic political consciousness. The Obama administration and national Democrats are still playing by the old “pro-Israel” rules, which almost certainly favor the other side. As far as the midterms are concerned, the government that supports Israel best supports it most.

Meanwhile, the newly formed Emergency Committee for Israel is working hard to make sure that Jews don’t again turn out in droves for the Democrats, as executive director Noah Pollak told Haaretz. Its attack on Senate candidate Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pennsylvania) is only the beginning. “We saw an effort to improve the image of the relationship,” Pollak said, referring to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s White House visit earlier this month, “but there is a big question about what happens after the midterm elections. It wasn’t long ago that the administration was openly questioning the very fundamentals of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Is Obama going to tack back to that stance?”

Shmuel Rosner has thoughts on the talking points, namely, that they show the Democrats are fine on Israel, but not necessarily as strong as the previous administration.

Ron Kampeas fisks them at length, and while he gives great credit to Obama on a couple subjects—including the administration’s funding of Israel’s “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system, which required millions of additional dollars, and taking a hard-line against Turkey’s recent official anti-Israel stance—for the most part, Kampeas notes that the administration’s touted “support” is really just stuff that any plausible administration, of whatever political stripe, would have done.

And yet, Kampeas makes this extremely valuable point: “Since some conservatives routinely accuse Obama of being ‘the worst president’ for Israel, ever, cross my heart, since before time, it’s worth yanking folks back into the reality that he is maintaining a broad pro-Israel protocol.” Truth.

As Vote Nears, Berman Stresses Dem Israel Support [JTA]
The Berman Notes—A Closer Look [Capital J]
U.S.-Israel Tensions Boost Conservatives Ahead of Midterms [Haaretz]
Earlier: How Does Kristol Do It?
Emergency Committee v. J Street

Reported Daroff, “Clinton was accompanied by her mother and a bevy of staff. She read WP, NYT, SkyMall, & the ‘Mayo Clinic Women’s Health Source.’” Plus a book: How To Be The Mother of a Bride Who Has Just Converted to Judaism. Just kidding about that last one! Anyway, Twitter: It’s what’s for dinner.

For the uninitiated, Sister Act tels the tale of Deloris Van Cartier, originally played by the EGOT-winning Whoopi Goldberg. After witnessing her lover and manager take out a snitch, the night club songstress must get herself to the nunnery via police protection. And so Sister Mary Clarence is born. Hilarity ensues as she adjusts to the habit while bringing tight beats to the church choir and inspiring the community to wake up and pay attention (oops, that’s from Sister Act 2, the one starring one Lauryn Hill.)

Mor Rossler, 27, watches Sister Act whenever it is on the tube. The Monsey, New York, native who teaches at a Ramaz first saw the film in theaters and remembers vividly watching Sister Act 2 with her friends. “My family is musical and I love Gospel music, it’s just so soulful,” she said. “They’re so nice. I feel bad singing them so I just ignore the words.”

Lyle Rothman, a fourth year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, enjoys the Isaiah imagery of “Hail Holy Queen.” Rothman got down with the movie while spending a year living in Israel as part of his ordination. “I may have sung ‘Hail Holy Queen’ with rabbinical and cantorial students on a Galil tiyul [trip] sitting around a campfire,” recalled Rothman. “But we also sang ‘Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach.’”

Whoopi Goldberg Bringing ‘Sister Act’ Musical To Broadway [Black Voices]

• West Bank settlers yesterday protested the demolition of a single home. [NYT]

• Russia, in many ways one of Iran’s prime patrons, has seen its relations with the Islamic Republic deteriorate significantly since it voted for sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. [NYT]

• Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, expresses bewilderment at why some in Israel, led by David Rotem, would push their conversion bill at a time like this. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen wonders why we haven’t heard more about the lives and deaths of the nine flotilla activists, including the one American, and wonders whether, say, a Jewish kid caught in some crossfire would receive the same non-attention. [NYT]

• Soon after the United States raised the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic status from “bureau” to “delegation,” France went a step farther, raising it from “delegation” to “mission,” which includes an ambassador. [NYT]

The novelists take their dystopian visions in radically different directions—Shteyngart has written a fast-moving love story, while Cohen’s is more stream-of-Jewish-consciousness, dense with wordplay and religious and cultural references. Tablet Magazine Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse sat down with the two of them for a sometimes bookish, other times bawdy, conversation over drinks and smoked fish, on a sweltering summer day on the boardwalk of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach.