• There’s a massive battle of the Israeli media titans right now, involving, among others, Sheldon Adelson. [LAT]

• 1980s teenage star Corey Haim, who was born to a Toronto Jewish family, died at 38. [ArtsBeat]

• As to those rumors that the ultra-Orthodox of Monsey, New York, had declared lox un-kosher? “Go ahead, eat lox,” says a report author. “It’s kosher—I just had some.” [The Journal News/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The hidden history of [ ] Jews. In this case, [ ] is Jamaican. [WSJ]

• In honor of his 47th birthday, producer Rick Rubin’s top ten tracks/albums. [Jewcy]

Below: Johnny Cash’s classic, Rubin-produced cover of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt.”

Those who applauded the Central Conference of American Rabbis task force, which among other things suggested establishing special blessings for interfaith weddings, clearly outnumbered those who condemned it. “Ketzirah” wrote: “As a Jewish woman in an interfaith marriage, I think it’s about damn time. I’ve become more religious since I met my husband and it’s because of his encouragement that I’ve deepened my own faith and practice.” “Laura Baum” agreed: “As a rabbi ordained by the Reform movement, I am thrilled that the movement is now focusing on blessing interfaith relationships. … It is time to stop thinking of intermarriage as only a challenge—it is also a reality and an opportunity.” And Jeremiah says,

It’s about time. How many Jews have been “lost” because they were discouraged from marrying the person they loved, not to mention their children? Every non-Jew is a potential Jew, and non-Jewish spouses who don’t convert are often more involved in synagogue and Jewish life than their Jewish partners. They should have been welcomed long ago.

Of course, there are also plenty who see it differently. Said “Unphased”: “Religion was never designed to be sensitive and welcoming to all without restrictions. … if so it would be nothing more than a chess club where a scarf talis is the team uniform.” And “savtaro” argued: “This is all just too pathetic! What remnants of Judaism will remain? No kippot. No kashrut. No kinship! The Reform will consistently prostitute themselves to stay in business. It’s time for them to admit that they are bankrupt and close the shop.”

There was also some fruitful discussion about how the dynamic is altered depending on which spouse is the non-Jew: the husband, in which case any children are still halakhically Jewish; or the wife, in which case they are not.

And maybe the most quietly profound comment came from “D”:

One can feel the assimilationist rejoice at the expense of tradition rabbinic Judaism. This issue is not that we have come to this point in the discussion, the issue is do we recognize what has been lost. Perhaps an understanding of the directive “maintain Jewish homes” is required.

This is likely a very good thing for our future, but I am sad for our loss.

Meanwhile, I want to thank and applaud everyone for keeping things civil. And I want to encourage further commenting, wherever you see fit—including on Facebook! (If you’re not currently a fan of ours on Facebook, please join up!)

Reform Movement Changes Intermarriage Strategy

The history of Sheikh Jarrah, and specifically of a certain compound in it, is pretty complicated. I’ll let Liel Leibovitz, who wrote about it a few weeks ago, summarize:

in the late 19th century, a small Jewish community settled in the neighborhood, believing, as some Jews do, that the 4.5-acre compound they had purchased was the burial place of Shimon Hatsadik, a great high priest of the Second Temple. Arab violence in the 1920s and 1930s forced the Jews to disperse, and by 1948 none remained in the neighborhood. In 1956, the Jordanians, then East Jerusalem’s sovereigns, settled 28 Palestinian families in the compound. When Israel took over in 1967, these families were sued by the original Jewish owners; in 1982, the Israeli court ruled that the Palestinians were “protected tenants,” but that, as they didn’t own the property, they were required to pay rent to their Jewish landlords. The Palestinians, on their end, refused to accept this premise …

A settler organization named Nahlat Shimon bought the land from its original Jewish owners and renewed the legal campaign to clear the compound of Palestinians. Incredibly, in the summer of 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in Nahlat Shimon’s favor, arguing that since the property was once owned by Jews, the original owners still held the rights to the homes they were forced to abandon decades ago.

The Palestinians were evicted, and a group of Israeli religious nationalists immediately moved in. It is now the subject of weekly, sometimes daily, protests that draw not just the Israeli left but even moderates like novelist David Grossman and intellectual Moshe Halbertal. (There may be a hint of radical chic to these protests, too: “Accessibility is another draw,” the Times notes. “Unlike the relatively remote Palestinian villages where young Israeli leftists and anarchists join local residents and foreigners in protests against Israel’s West Bank barrier, Sheikh Jarrah is a few minutes’ drive from downtown Jerusalem.”)

The more immediate and, given recent events, timely provocation concerns East Jerusalem’s final status. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem; the Palestinians want East Jerusalem (which falls on their side of the Green Line) to be the capital of their future state. Israeli settlement and construction there is seen, therefore, as an attempt to alter the “facts on the ground” in its favor in advance of final-status negotiations. This is why there was such an uproar, from none other than the U.S. vice president, over yesterday’s announcement of 1600 new Israeli homes in East Jerusalem.

(Israel’s interior minister has apologized for the announcement’s timing, saying there was “no intention of provoking anyone.” He stands by the substance of the announcement, though, which is the main provocation anyway.)

But the Sheikh Jarrah dispute involves a broader question hovering over the entire debate: the question of right of return. And the lesson of Sheikh Jarrah, particularly for Israel, might be: be careful what you wish for.

There is a very real basis for supporting the right of Jews to occupy a compound that was built and at one time owned by Jews, no matter the side of the Green Line it falls on. The problem is that if you grant that right, then the only just thing to do would be to grant the right of Palestinians to live in places built and at one time owned by Palestinians, no matter the side of the Green Line those places fall on. And make no mistake: plenty of those places are in pre-’67 Israel.

Says the Times: “Halbertal said he supported Israel’s policy against the right of return for Palestinian refugees—a position meant to ensure a Jewish majority in the Israeli state. But when it comes to Sheikh Jarrah, he added, Israel cannot have it both ways.”

Well, actually, being the far stronger power, Israel can have it both ways (if anything, Sheikh Jarrah proves that, to some extent, it currently does). But then it loses the claim to the moral high ground, which ought to be more important to Zionism than the Samarian, or East Jerusalem, high ground.

An Eviction Stirs Old Ghosts in a Contested City [NYT]
Israel Apologizes as Biden Meets Palestinians [JTA]
Related: Real Estates [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Biden Bashes Settlement Announcement

Among other things, the group noted that Venezuela did not cooperate with the report, which was published under the aegis of the Organization of American States.

The next step for the OAS is the drafting of an Inter-American Convention concerning racism. B’nai B’rith says it is working to get an explicit mention of anti-Semitism in the document.

New OAS Report Finds Anti-Semitism in Venezuela; B’nai B’rith Submits Testimony [B’nai B’rith]
Earlier: Hugo Chávez’s Uses for Anti-Semitism
Related: United by Hate [Boston Review]

Some of us have had a little trouble sleeping lately. Luckily, that wasn’t a problem last night, thanks to a Millionaire Matchmaker episode in which everyone was boring, and no one found love. Memo to Patti: if you promise a hootenanny, give us something we can sing along to!

Instead, we have Tricia and Trevor, a pair designed to create controversy. Tricia Cruz, who says she’s 38, is on the show because she recently walked in on her husband in flagrante on the desk at their office, and she would like to punish him by finding a woman to fall in love with. On national television, no less! But Tricia is no stranger to doing things on TV; as DJ Tina Turbo, she appeared last year on a reality show called Hellbent for Hollywood. Also, she has a standup show called Strip. Whatever! She’s bi-curious!

And she is going to be at a mixer with Trevor Shively, of Leesburg, Indiana, pop. 625, where the 2000 census recorded two black people, neither of whom, Trevor says, he’s ever had a whole conversation with. Trevor is also a fervent Christian, which freaks Patti out. “I am not really a fan of real religious Moral Majority types,” she starts, before getting to the point. “I don’t really get along with Midwest idiots.”

But in the event, Tricia and Trevor pretty much ignore each other. Trevor recently bought a 10,800 square foot house on Tippecanoe Lake, and he has decorated it with a ginormous television, and we can only assume that he knows from watching it that black people and bisexuals live on God’s green earth along with him. Or not! “I don’t know exactly what she was talking about,” Trevor admits after Patti breaks the news about Tricia. “I have never encountered a bi-curious woman before.” He is, apparently, not curious to learn anything further.

Instead, Tricia picks a butch woman named Tyler who has had experience “flipping” women before, but who, after an awkward date at a skating rink, reminds Tricia of what she liked about men in the first place. Which is that they ogle her. Once again, Patti’s been proven right. Which is great, because it means she can go retrieve the hot, hairless Latino dancer dude Tricia overlooked at the mixer.

As for Trevor. Unlike Mateo, last week’s excitable Christian bachelor, Trevor is just the man Chace Crawford would have become if he’d stayed down in Plano. He runs the grain farm his grandfather founded, teaches Sunday school to middle schoolers, and he doesn’t really see any reason to leave the United States of America. He also likes Pizza Hut a lot. Patti decides he’s just a product of his environment, and she will help him find love anyway. “That’s what life’s about and that’s what the United States is about!” she gushes. Yes, this is indeed a country where what Jesus would have done is go on television to ask a wise Jewess to help him find true love.

Trevor’s celebrity crush is Carrie Prejean, who spent a lot of last year lobbying against same-sex marriage legislation. Luckily, Carrie’s off the market, so instead this 26-year-old will settle for Heidi, a blond former 4H-er who wants to raise horses and ride them at her beach house. (Trevor almost chose Maile, a stunning black former pageant competitor from Hawaii who also really likes God, but foiled Patti’s coastal-liberal-elite plot at the last minute by going with his prejudices. Letdown!)

Trevor and Heidi meet at a flower farm, thanks to our friends at 1-800-FLOWERS, and it’s not clear whether what happens next is a date or a Zyrtec ad. They snip some Gerber daises for a while, and then they lunch in the middle of a field. Heidi, who despite the possibility that they may go mudding or truck racing or something, is wearing an extremely short, tight, and low-cut dress, chirps about how much money she will make by starting businesses. ‘Ah-choo!’ She does not want to date people who are judging her on her looks and her money, see. ‘Excuse me.’ Trevor is smitten. He wants to fly her to Indiana! Heidi’s mouth says “sure,” but her watery eyes say, “I am never going back to flyover country, buddy.”

Sure enough, she hasn’t. The Leesburg Times-Union talked to Trevor, who set up a Facebook page to celebrate this whole hoedown, and he says Heidi has not taken him up on his offer. Also, he reveals that he thought it would be good to use Bravo as “a platform to share my faith as a Christian.” Um, is he aware of Bravo’s target demographic?

Next week: a self-absorbed gay man and a stubborn older woman. Can. Not. Wait.

The interesting detail has to do with a New York City-based company called Payoneer, whose prepaid debit cards were reportedly used by many of the 27 (at last count) suspected assassins.

New York City-based … but heavily enmeshed in the world of the Israeli military and intelligence services. Payoneer is run by Yuval Tal, who served in an Israeli “elite combat unit.” An Israeli Air Force pilot was a first-round investor; the venture capital fund that led the following investment round did so under the hand of a military intelligence captain; a further round was led by a fund founded by a former IDF Special Forces man.

To an extent, of course, this is to be expected: when a country has universal conscription, then most entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, like most of everyone else, will have done military service. But these connections clearly tend toward the more covert, mysterious end of the spectrum.

Plus, look, it was—at least in part—the Mossad. It just was. (The Mossad, as always, will neither confirm nor deny involvement.)

New York City’s Assassination Connection [NY Observer]
Related: Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

• British PM Gordon Brown has awarded medals to 27 countrymen who saved Jews from Nazis, calling them “Heroes of the Holocaust.” [Telegraph]

• Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has accused Israeli military police of arresting Palestinian minors, who are accused of throwing stones at settlers, in violent nighttime raids. [AP]

• AIPAC has taken the unusual step of sending every Congress member a “sharply worded letter” demanding an investigation into how $107 billion in federal grants has been awarded to companies that do business in Iran. [JTA]

• Less surprisingly, a poll finds that 74 percent of Israel’s religious Jews believe they are “more moral” than the general public. [Ynet]

It’s a fantastic monument, not only because the fish—its expression resembling that of a teenager rudely awoken from an afternoon nap—looks thoroughly fake, but also because it suggests to the uninitiated traveler that beyond the terminal’s gates lies a world of wonders, strange creatures and all.

In a sense, this is precisely the feeling the Antiguan government is interested in promoting. More than 300,000 tourists, on average, descend on the island’s shores each year, a horde of salmon-hued Brits and beer-battered Germans that both sustains and overwhelms the local population, estimated at 72,000. There’s little the Antiguans can do: Tourism accounts for more than 60 percent of the island’s economy, leaving the locals with no choice but to vigorously market their tiny nation as a magical Caribbean getaway, a sort of real-life Fantasy Island. Along these lines, the fish is a monument to the impossible: St. Bart’s may have the reputation, and Mustique the celebrity appeal, but only in Antigua, the marlin suggests, may the very laws of nature be bent for your amusement.

Last week, my wife Lisa and I flew to Antigua for a weekend to attend the wedding of Mr. B., a hotelier, at his lovely Antiguan resort. Much time was spent pondering what to wear—the groom threatened to beat up and toss out any guest who dared wear a tie—and very little contemplating such minor issues as entry visas. If Israeli citizens needed a visa to visit Antigua, I told myself, Mr. B.’s son-in-law, himself Israeli and my close friend, would surely have let me known.

But no sooner had we landed and admired the oversized fish than an immigration official broke the doleful news: no visa, no entry. Meekly, I removed my baseball cap and shades and said that I had no idea I needed a visa, an idiotic statement that seemed to elicit more pity than disgust. “Well,” said the immigration official, “you do.”

There was no other choice. I invoked Mr. B.’s name. This had the desired effect: Lisa and I were removed from the line, taken to a secluded spot by the nurse’s office, and instructed to wait. Soon, another official, smiling warmly, moseyed over and told us that she’d do whatever she could to help us resolve our little problem as quickly as possible.

Veteran travelers, we refused to succumb to panic. Instead, we pulled out our phones and texted Mr. B.’s daughter, informing her of the snafu. Two minutes later, there she was, beaming, standing by our sides. There was no point in asking how she’d gotten through security, immigration, and all the other barriers that are supposed to stop you from walking right into an airport’s secure detention spot. A few words were exchanged, and it was agreed that I would be released on my own recognizance, passport unstamped, and sent to the Ministry of National Security to settle my affairs.

The Ministry of National Security is located in downtown St. John’s, across the street from a Subway sandwich shop, in a building that looks more suited to botched drug deals than to any official matter of state. The posters on the wall make clear the ministry’s main concern; most of them warn against abduction and modern-day slavery and feature a host of pink figures engaged in subservient activities, from forced intercourse to mopping floors. The ministry’s employees, however, were unperturbed: R&B ballads roared from the tinny speakers of a far-off computer, and most officials, dressed in blue-and-white uniforms, seemed as unburdened as only those entrusted with defending a thoroughly unthreatened Caribbean nation can be.

Accompanied by our friends and Larry, Mr. B.’s lawyer, we located the right official and pleaded our case. The official, a woman in her fifties, was baffled. You were already allowed into the country, she said as she looked at my unstamped passport, you may as well just stay.

Larry, a former LAPD police officer and a man with many connections on the island, asked for a moment alone with the official. A few minutes later, he came out and said quietly that he thought he figured out the entire mess. Antigua, he said, had a diplomatic relationship with Libya. After Israel assassinated a Hamas official in Dubai last month, the Libyans demanded that Israelis no longer be allowed to enter Antigua, or, at the very least, that they be required to pay a hefty fee for a special tourist visa. The Ministry of National Security, he added, was cool with letting me stay, but it was the prime minister’s call, and we needed to report to the prime minister’s office to sort everything out. Unfazed, we said our goodbyes to the lovely folks at National Security, who saw us off by making us promise to convey heartfelt congratulations to Mr. B. on his upcoming nuptials.

On our way to see the prime minister, however, my mind began racing. Here I was, I thought, in paradise, detained for a crime I didn’t commit. All I wanted was a quick vacation, and instead I was forced to account for my country’s follies. I had left Israel behind, emigrated to America, got my Green Card, opted to abandon the perpetual association with the sort of militaristic shenanigans that lose friends and alienate people.  Clichés started swirling in my head: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. You can run, but you can’t hide. You may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with you.

The car stopped. We were parked in front of a one-story office in the midst of a patch of grass, guarded by a single soldier in a green t-shirt and no gun. In front were two enormous stone lions, the sort popular both in China and in chintzy souvenir shops on Manhattan’s 59th Street. It looked, I whispered to Lisa, like a dentist’s office in a Long Island strip mall.

It smelled like one, too, with the unmistakable odor of acrylic monomer, ammonia, and quiet desperation. Magazines were strewn everywhere, mainly an oversized glossy called China Today. It was a thick hint: Chinese government contractors are in charge of most major construction projects in Antigua, as they are in so many developing countries across the globe. Hence the stone lions. A poster on a nearby wall read: “What will come to us will come to us, so quit your worrying!” I took the advice to heart.

A hospitable secretary greeted us, indicating that the Ministry of National Security had already filled her in on the details. We were asked to pay $40 and received a printed receipt. We were officially welcomed to Antigua and allowed to drive on to the resort.

There, in the shadow of palm trees and in the company of some of the island’s most influential men, scotch and talk both flowed. The Mossad, one tough old developer said with a smile, nearly assassinated our vacation plans. Another advised me to try and avoid killing anyone while on the beach. I grinned politely but stared at the umbrella floating in my cocktail; if everyone already saw me as a murderer, I brooded, I might as well enjoy it.

Gradually, however, my ire subsided, drowned in drink and merriment. The weekend was glorious. When I saw the prime minister himself at the wedding, I smiled politely and shook hands. Antigua, after all, let me in. There was no need for a diplomatic incident.

Tanned and thrilled, we flew back home to New York, where two feet of snow were still piled on the ground. The next morning, we talked about our time as personae non grata in paradise. At a distance, the entire story seemed fantastic. Would Antigua really care about the Mossad? Would a mere visa requirement constitute punishment of Israel and its policies? And would any nation, even one as relaxed about its official undertakings as Antigua, really change its rules overnight and fail to notify the rest of the world?

Anxious, I called the consulate general of Antigua in New York and asked to speak with the tourism representative. I told her everything, about my arrival and the prime minister’s office and how everybody on the island, officials and guests alike, suggested that I was the target of an international mishap involving the Libyans. The woman was silent for a few long moments. She knew nothing of the Mossad, she finally said, but was quite certain that Israelis had always required a visa to visit Antigua. But there was no way, she added, that anyone in Antigua would ever allow me in without stamping my passport, Israeli or otherwise.

I thanked her, hung up, and thought of the marlin.

Even had he been able, Bernie would not have known how to respond.

Groaning and soaked to the skin, his hands and face the consistency of wet papier-mâché, the old man endeavored to rise, only to fall back splashing into the freezer. “Dos iz efsher gan eydn?”

Again Bernie, his heart rattling the cage of his ribs, could only shake his head.

“A glomp,” said the rabbi decisively, “a chochem fun Chelm,” as he held out his scrawny arms for the boy to help him up. Bernie remained motionless with awe, but as the old man’s anticipation had an air of authority, he took an involuntary step forward. The rabbi was no more than a featherweight, but his saturated ritual garments hung on him heavily, and, in attempting to lift him, Bernie felt as if he’d become involved in a wrestling match. When he’d managed to drag the old man from his sloshing sarcophagus, his decaying garments clinging to his body like bits of eggshell to a fledgling bird, the boy and the elder tumbled together onto the hooked rug. Just then the lights came back on and the TV began blaring, its screen displaying a smug master of ceremonies making a face as contestants held their noses in order to swallow the placentas of voles. The defrosted rabbi, lying sprawled atop Bernie, who had yet to release him, squinted with interest at the show.

“Voo bin ikh?” he inquired.

At that moment Bernie’s sister, leading her escort in his Bermudas and crested blazer by the hand down the basement stairs, spied the half-naked old party in the process of extricating himself from her brother’s embrace and screamed bloody murder.

1890 – 1907.

Since progress was slow along the czar’s highway, glutted with so many displaced souls, Salo took to the less traveled back roads. This was the more hazardous course, for there was some safety in numbers, whereas alone he was more vulnerable to attacks by brigands and peasants who’d missed their chance to plunder Boibicz—or Shmedletz or Smorgon or Zhmirzh, all of which had also been emptied of Jews. But Salo, his head cowled in his filthy tallis and crowned by a peaked cap to protect him from the needles of falling sleet, preferred the risk to the ranks of his fellow refugees. He had grown impatient with the pall that overhung their caravan like the poor relation to a pillar of flame, their forced march toward some new oblivion that the Jews seemed born for. Should he feel guilty? Was he perhaps an apikoyros, a heretic, that he should experience such exhilaration on the heels of his father’s homicide and the destruction of his hometown? But having spent the past seventeen years in nearly uninterrupted mooning about, he was thrilled, God help him, at having waked up to find himself at large in history. He was Salo Frostbite, self-appointed guardian of a slumbering saint, and while he might look like a schnorrer, his holey boots wrapped in rags to keep his feet from freezing, he felt he had become overnight a man of substance and parts.

It was a status corroborated by those who might otherwise have done him harm: the mounted Cossacks in their braided cloaks and astrakhan hats, who cantered alongside his wagon and threatened Salo with conscription, which for a Jew amounted to a life (if not a death) sentence in the army. They would lift his weak chin with their swagger sticks and accuse him of the Jewish trick of concealing treasure in unlikely vessels, then demand to know what he had hidden inside the casket. During the earliest encounters Salo wondered if he ought to refuse their request on principle, even if it meant imperiling his person; for wouldn’t allowing these bullies to ogle the casket’s contents amount to a type of desecration? But as his mission of maintaining the rebbe required his staying alive, he would concede in the end to raise the lid (the soldiers would have raised it in any case)—whereupon all questions would cease. Confounded by the revelation, the Cossacks would dig spurs into the shuddering flanks of their steeds and gallop away in a spray of mud. Eventually soldiers and peasants alike began to give the youth with his strange cargo a wide berth, a state of affairs Salo attributed to the gelid rebbe’s disturbing effect on the goyim, word of which must have spread abroad in the land.

He had the conviction that so long as he took care of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the tzaddik would take care of him.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Frozen Rabbi. Or, to get each day’s installment of The Frozen Rabbi in your inbox, sign up for the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest, and tell your friends.

A few weeks ago, Israel’s education minister, Gideon Saar, instructed the country’s school teachers to devote a lesson or two to olei hagardom (literally, those who ascended to the gallows), the dozen or so Palestine Jews hanged by the British authorities for politically motivated attacks during the last decade of the Mandate.

A predictable controversy was triggered, the left charging the Likud minister with trying to beatify right-wing “terrorists”—those executed had all belonged either to the IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi—the National Military Organization, or, as the British called it, the “Irgun”) or the LHI (Lohamei Herut Yisrael—Freedom Fighters of Israel, or, as the British called it, the “Stern Gang”). The two organizations emerged from the right-wing Revisionist stream of Zionism; both sought Jewish independence and a state standing astride the Jordan River and encompassing the undivided Land of Israel/Palestine.

Most had been tried and executed for attacking or killing British servicemen. Two had shot dead Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East during World War II. One had participated in the 1938 ambush of an Arab bus (no one was killed) during the Palestine Arab Revolt against both the British Mandate and the Zionist enterprise it had fostered.

Terrorists? Freedom fighters? Some sort of mix?

My definition of terrorism would be deliberate and indiscriminate attack on civilians with the aim of terrorizing and otherwise causing harm to a rival community, society, or state in order to achieve political ends. Within that definition certainly fall the cases of Baruch Goldstein, the American-born, Jewish West Bank settler (and medical doctor) who in 1994 slaughtered a roomful of Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque (for Jews, the Tomb of the Patriarchs) in Hebron, and Jack Teitel, the recently arrested American-born West Bank settler who over the years allegedly killed at random a number of Arabs and injured with a bomb the left-wing Israeli political scientist Zeev Sternhell because he is outspokenly critical of the settlers.

I’m not sure Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Israeli-bred political scientists who work at the University of Texas at Austin and at Stony Brook University, respectively, would contest this definition, but in their new book Jewish Terrorism in Israel they broaden it in an effort to provide their subject—settler-linked Jewish terrorism since the 1980s—with pedigree and historical gravitas. In their effort to establish pattern and continuity, Pedahzur and Perliger trace the roots of the extreme right-wing Jewish terrorists of the end of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st to the Maccabees (apparently resisting the temptation to trace them back to Cain), the family of Judaean priests who led a successful nationalist-religious revolt against the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire in the mid-second century BCE.

The historical “background” Pedahzur and Perliger provide is a stretch, flimsy, and, at times, derisory. Some might find it offensive. They write: “The foremost incident of terrorism to be carried out by the Hashmonaim [Maccabees] was the murder of Apelles, a Hellenistic envoy. He had been sent to their town, Modi’in, in order to ensure” the Hellenization of the Jews. The authors somehow fail to mention that the assassination was, in effect, the triggering mechanism and clarion call for the Jewish revolt against the Greek-speaking, pagan Seleucid Empire that had oppressively ruled over Jewish-inhabited Judea for decades. But the authors write that “despite the great historical gulf between the Hashmonai revolt and contemporary Jewish terrorism, it is hard not to be impressed by the similarity of the factors responsible for the violence.” I see absolutely no connection between that revolt against foreign oppressors of yore and contemporary Jewish terrorism against Arabs (and, occasionally, left-wing Jewish Israelis).

Pedahzur and Perliger go on to berate as “terrorists” (for murdering Jews who collaborated with the Romans or opposed the rebellion) some of the Jews (the Sicarians) who rebelled against the Roman Empire from 66 to 73 CE. They suggest that the 1,000-odd Jews who held out in the Judean Desert fortress of Masada until it was vanquished in 72-73 CE did not, in the end, commit “mass suicide,” as described by Josephus, but, rather, that “the Sicarians committed mass murder among themselves.” Of course, the authors have no historical evidence for branding the Sicarians of Masada “murderers” (Josephus is the only historical source for the Masada story), and one wonders what purpose such a designation serves.

Pedahzur and Perliger reluctantly admit that during 2,000 years of Jewish life in the Diaspora the “Jews have refrained almost entirely from terrorism,” and they concede that this is ascribable to Jewish religious tenets (as well as to Jewish powerlessness). The absence of any Jewish terrorism between the second and 19th centuries forces the authors to skip to the 20th, where their real argument begins. The authors highlight the assassination by one Dmitri Bogrov, a Jew from Kiev, of the czarist Russian prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, in 1911. But is assassination of a leader of an oppressive regime tantamount to terrorism? Were the failed July 1944 German conspirators against Hitler terrorists? Pedahzur and Perliger then inform us that “many” members of the American Weather Underground were Jews and that a Jewish Labour Bund activist, Hirsh Lekert, in 1902 attempted to assassinate the Russian governor of Vilna, who had earlier ordered the flogging of 20 Jews (the authors mistakenly write that Lekert killed his man). What has any of this to do with Jewish terrorism in Israel?

Very little, but the authors’ purpose is clear: to establish that the Jews have a rich tradition of terrorism. Pedahzur and Perliger then move on to 20th-century Palestine. But they get off to a rather confusing start. They mention the first, feeble Zionist self-defense organizations—Hashomer (1909-1920) and its precursor Bar-Giora (1907-1909)—and admit that their “acts of violence” “were carried out primarily in self-defense.” But they then write: “However, despite the determination of these groups, the option of engaging in systematic terrorism was not viable.” Do Pedahzur and Perliger believe that using violence in “self-defense” is tantamount to “terrorism”? Did Bar-Giora and Hashomer seek to engage in “systematic terrorism”? The authors pose the idea but do not offer proof of any kind.

They next describe the activities of the 20th-century Jewish political right in Palestine, beginning with the IZL and the LHI. But here, too, they misinterpret, mislead, and mis-define. LHI’s “public platform,” they tell us, “gave preeminence to the aspiration of building a Third Temple.” Surely, when LHI literature referred to establishing the “Third Temple,” the meaning was metaphorical (to re-establishing Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel) not literal (to constructing a third Temple on the Mount), as Pedahzur and Perliger would have it. Much as when the LHI spoke of re-establishing Malchut Yisrael (the Kingdom of Israel), they meant re-establishing Jewish sovereignty, not a monarchy (very few LHI members, and none of its leaders, were either religious or monarchists).

Pedahzur and Perliger assume that the IZL and LHI were terrorist organizations and describe at length some of their anti-British operations. But was the killing of two British police officers, who were reputed to have been responsible for routinely torturing captured IZL suspects, an act of terrorism? Were the IZL and LHI campaigns against the British in Palestine—directed almost exclusively at military and police personnel—terrorism? They may have been immoderate, unwise, murderous—but were they “terroristic” (as, indeed, these organizations’ socialist rivals, from Mapai, Mapam, and the Haganah at the time dubbed them)?

The authors, of course, are on much firmer ground when they define the deliberate IZL and, later, LHI attacks on Arab civilians from the beginning of the Arab Revolt to the end of the civil war of 1947-1948 as “terrorism” (albeit “terrorism” enacted in response to Arab “terrorism”). In 1938, IZL operatives placed large bombs in Arab markets and bus stops in Haifa and elsewhere, indiscriminately killing dozens at a time, and in 1947-1948, IZL and LHI members deliberately targeted civilians, killing large numbers of them outside of the Old City of Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate and in Jaffa’s Saraya (governmental) building. Such operations were then emulated by Palestinian bombers, down to the first decade of the third millennium, but with the suicidal nature of the attacks adding a novel, grisly twist.

In the years immediately after 1948, some LHI and IZL veterans took part in (usually) amateur terrorist acts in the newborn state of Israel against their ideological and political opponents. In 1957, one group murdered Israel Kastner, a prominent Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who was accused of collaborating with the Nazis; in 1953, the Tsrifin Underground bombed the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv, injuring three people. The reason for the attack was the Soviet Union’s mistreatment of its Jews (which the authors compare to the current situation of sometimes radical and violent “European Muslims who identify with the suffering of Muslims in places such as Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan”). This attack occurred a few months after the group had tried to blow up the Israel Foreign Ministry in protest against Israel’s acceptance of German reparations for the Holocaust.

This brings us to the core of the book, which is a fairly straightforward, systematic description of the successive cells of terrorists who sprang up in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and their supporters in Israel proper, beginning with the Jewish Underground of the early 1980s that badly injured several PLO-supporting West Bank mayors, targeted the Islamic University in Hebron (where three Arab students were killed and dozens were injured), and made preparations, stopped by Israel’s security service, the Shin Bet, to blow up the Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount. The terrorists were driven by a desire to avenge the death of Israelis killed by Arab terrorists, to consolidate Israel’s hold on the West Bank (“Judaea and Samaria”), and, in the case of the Temple Mount, to pave the way for the coming of the Messiah.

The authors’ description of the Jewish Underground and its activities is thorough and detailed. They lay particular emphasis on the social networking that underlay its emergence and organization.

Pedahzur and Perliger then describe the activities of Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Kach movement, before and after the rabbi’s murder by a Muslim fundamentalist in New York. The Kahanist groups in Israel, composed mostly of new Jewish American immigrants, they write, “resembled, more than anything else, the global Salafi jihad cells of current times”: Both are built on immigrant groups who fail to assimilate in their new countries and are alienated from the majority culture’s values.

Pedahzur and Perliger’s thesis, laid out in the book’s preface, is that modern fundamentalist terrorism is a result of a “totalist” ideology or religion that produces a “counterculture community.” That collective, or some of its activist members, turn to terrorism when an “external” event occurs that “poses a potential threat to the community or its most cherished values” and when leaders, often clerics, emerge who frame that event as “catastrophic.” Some sort of crisis, personal or communal, then propels the activists into terroristic action. All this sounds fairly reasonable.

Not so, however, some of their extrapolation. Pedahzur and Perliger, driven it seems by political correctness, go out of their way to absolve Islam of being uniquely, internationally, responsible for contemporary terrorism, arguing that “religious terrorism is not a one-faith phenomenon”—as if the modern world has also witnessed waves of Christian and Buddhist and Hindu (and Jewish) suicide bombers and airplane hijackers. The most cursory survey of post-World War II terrorism across the globe, from the Philippines to Indonesia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Somalia, Kenya, Morocco, Madrid, London, and New York, demonstrates that Muslims are peerless and unrivaled in this realm of human enterprise. Conversely, the authors also assert that their study of Jewish terrorism is “pertinent to the study of other contemporary networks of terrorism”—again, “because of the many similarities between the processes that distinguish Jewish terrorism networks and those of the Salafi jihad networks [in] Britain, Holland, Spain.” Both are based, they write, on nonhierarchical social networks rather than on rigid, structured organizations.

However true this may be, I seriously doubt that anything one can learn from this book, primarily about the last century of small-scale Jewish terrorism in Israel and the West Bank, will prove useful in fathoming what is happening in the darkest recesses of the Islamist world.

The authors predict an unprecedented level of violence by Jewish terrorists if Israel ever decides to uproot the West Bank settlements. Should a Jewish terrorist attack against the Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount ever succeed, it “could open the doors to hell,” the authors write. This may be so. But it is worthy of note that Israel’s destruction of the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and its uprooting of 7,000 settlers and thousands of their supporters in 2005 passed without serious incident—no one killed, no one severely injured. Then again, destroying settlements in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of Judaism, may prove to be something else entirely.

Benny Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author, most recently, of the book One State, Two States.

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the biggest threat to America’s national security comes not from Iran but al-Qaida. “Most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks,” Clinton said, referring to “the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected to al-Qaida.”

What Clinton meant certainly seems straightforward enough. Transnational, nonstate Sunni jihadi networks like al-Qaida are responsible for not only 9/11 but also attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have dispatched at least one suicide attacker, the Detroit Christmas bomber Omar Faruq Abdulmuttalab, and apparently have plans to send more. While it is arguable whether a shadowy network of terrorists led by a man who may or may not be alive is more dangerous than an Iranian regime with terrorist assets throughout the Middle East and a nascent nuclear program, Clinton’s assertion is hardly ridiculous. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that we could still sit down and strike a Grand Bargain with the Islamic Republic, whereas we don’t even have a working phone number for al-Qaida.

For the interpretive community that forms itself around the products disseminated by the American media—that is, for New York Times readers, Washington Post readers, and the CNN audience—Washington’s apparent about-face is due to the desire of the current White House to do the exact opposite of its unpopular predecessor. But a Middle Easterner hears something else.

For the interpretive communities of the Middle East, who watch Al Jazeera and are acutely sensitive to sectarian language that may well affect their lives and the fate of their communities, “al-Qaida” is shorthand for Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis. So, when Hillary Clinton talks about the dangers posed by al-Qaida being greater than the dangers posed by Iran, a Middle Easterner hears that the Americans are dropping the Sunnis and siding with the Shia. That is to say, what a Middle Easterner hears is the beginning of a new chapter in the grand narrative of strategic realignment—the epic poem of today’s Middle East.

The real question in the region, as Middle Easterners understand it, isn’t on the daily agenda of Washington policy chatter about whether to engage Iran or talk to terrorists. Rather, it’s the very practical and immediate question of how the Americans will use their power to tilt the regional order. Will the United States stick with the Saudis or throw its weight behind Iran?

The Sunni-Shia split goes back 1,400 years, and the conflict pitting the Saudis against the Islamic Republic of Iran dates to the 1979 revolution. But the campaign for strategic realignment began in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. With the Americans angry at the Sunnis, and Riyadh in particular, over the attacks, the Iranians saw a window of opportunity to push their case that, despite their recent differences, they were America’s logical strategic partner in the region. U.S. policymakers who wanted rapprochement with Tehran agreed.

The State Department Policy Planning staff drafted a recommendation to the president for an opening to Iran in response to Sept. 11, says Steven Rosen, director of the Washington Program at the Middle East Forum. “Richard Haass and Flynt Leverett stayed up all night to write it on Sept. 11, and the next morning Secretary Powell walked it over to the White House. While the rest of the country was reeling from the attacks, they saw in 9/11 an opportunity for engagement with Iran. They assumed the Iranians would of necessity be opposed to a Sunni organization like al-Qaida, and here was a way for Iran to prove its bona fides with the U.S. President Bush accepted the idea of testing the Iranians’ intentions, but the White House was much less hopeful about Iran’s response than Leverett and Haass.”

A number of stories surfaced to explain why U.S.-Iranian rapprochement hit a wall. “It seems there has been a debate inside the [U.S.] government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and now an adviser to top U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, told The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh in 2007. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

While this perspective dovetails nicely with the struggle over strategic realignment narrative, it is an inaccurate appraisal of what really happened. The previous Bush administration did not view the issue in terms of Sunnis vs. Shia or Saudi vs. Iran. Rather, it believed that the most serious strategic threats to U.S. interests could be found in places where state sponsors of terror intersected with transnational terrorist groups. In theory, Tehran and Riyadh were equally problematic. In practice, however, the Iranians and their Syrian allies were fighting the United States in Iraq while their assets, like Hezbollah and Hamas, were challenging American allies in the Palestinian territories, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt. Meanwhile the Saudis, the world’s swing producer of oil, were at least nominally on our side. Indeed, in May 2003, an operation against Saudi Arabia that was planned and directed by al-Qaida leadership in Iran killed eight Americans.

If Vali Nasr was correct, Hillary Clinton’s statement is evidence of a major victory for the Iranian line—and Nasr, the Iranian-American author of The Shia Revival, seems like one of the messengers. As an advocate of U.S. realignment with Iran, he has a personal stake in such an outcome—and as a Holbrooke aide in the State Department he’s also well placed to shape the secretary of State’s message to the world. Game and set—if not yet the entire match—to Iran.

But Clinton meant nothing like that. In plain American-speak, she was simply saying that the Obama administration has accepted the inevitability of an Iranian nuclear program and is now hard at work getting American citizens and U.S. allies comfortable with that unpleasant fact. The Middle Eastern interpretation of her remarks is simply wrong.

But, in a sense, it doesn’t matter what Clinton meant to say: The meaning of a text is not up to its author alone; rather, its meaning is the product of an open-ended communal process. Reading like a Middle Easterner means believing that every story in the U.S. press about the Middle East is the fruit of a long campaign involving competing interests who operate in a conspiratorial way, whether those interests are different branches of the U.S. government, agents of foreign governments, or both. For instance, a 2007 Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times arguing that Iran’s history and culture make it a much more likely U.S. ally than obscurantist Saudi Arabia signals that Tehran is winning the case in Washington for strategic realignment. A column his colleague Maureen Dowd wrote earlier this month, praising the Saudis for their liberal reforms, shows that Riyadh is fighting back and has powerful bureaucratic allies on its side, too.

We know that columnists like Friedman and Dowd are merely private citizens whose arguments are not being crafted in the State Department or the Pentagon. However, it is precisely our certainty that U.S. journalists are working within the norms of American media that makes us vulnerable to information operations—instruments of political subterfuge employed by all Middle Eastern regimes and intended to shape perceptions, and, therefore, real events.

Reading like a Middle Easterner requires a discriminating taste for conspiracy that enables the reader to separate the real conspiracies from the false ones. A corollary of this fact is that sometimes the paranoid style of the Middle East is much more suitable than the American faith in transparency for understanding what we read.

A few weeks ago, for example, I got a call from pro-government friends in Lebanon who wanted to know when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gave his most recent interview to Seymour Hersh. The date, they believed, would indicate whether or not one of Assad’s statements in that interview was a threat to destabilize Lebanon. Clearly the Hersh interview was not the final straw that broke the will of Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement and compelled them to make amends with Damascus, but it was part of a long and successful information operations campaign waged by Syria against U.S. allies—a campaign that included Hersh’s interview with Assad, which appeared on the The New Yorker’s website.

“I love Seymour Hersh,” a friend told me one night in Beirut. “It doesn’t matter if what he writes is nonsense, I love the storytelling.” Hersh, perhaps only half consciously, has been the main chronicler of the struggle for strategic realignment, its bard, over the better part of the last decade. It’s well known in Washington that his New Yorker stories serve as an instrument for those on the losing side of the Beltway’s bureaucratic wars. What’s less obvious is that Hersh’s hostility toward the Bush administration signaled to publicists in the Middle East that he was a likely channel for a pro-Iran narrative about a dim-witted American president who was steering the United States toward disaster through his poor taste in regional allies.

As is the case with other Western journalists who write about Iran’s allies and assets in the Eastern Mediterranean, Hersh’s access to high-profile figures like Assad and Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah is controlled by Lebanon’s former minister of information, the pro-Iranian, pro-Syrian, and pro-Hezbollah apparatchik Michel Samaha. This leverage gives Samaha, as it would for any celebrity publicist, a significant role in shaping Hersh’s stories. In 2004, Samaha told Hersh that Israel had “programmed” the Kurds to do “commando operations” throughout the region. At the time, this well-placed piece of gossip was useful to Samaha’s clients. The same was true of the message that al-Qaida is equivalent to Saudi Arabia, which Hersh has also transmitted. Think of Hersh as a celebrity profile artist for Vanity Fair and Samaha as a powerful Hollywood publicist like Pat Kingsley, except one whose associates assassinate rivals.

The dark power behind Samaha’s PR operation is Jamil al-Sayyid, a former Lebanese security chief who is believed to be involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Accordingly, part of the Samaha group’s message is to suggest that Hariri’s son Saad, Lebanon’s current prime minister, funds al-Qaida affiliates, another campaign helpfully conveyed by the prize-winning reporter. Hersh has even internalized the slogans of his handlers, excitedly explaining to CNN that the Bush administration and the Saudis were backing al-Qaida via the Lebanese government. Four months after the interview on CNN, Hersh’s account was exposed as a fabrication when Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister ordered the army to take down a Sunni jihadi group in a bloody battle that was won thanks in part to generous U.S. arms shipments to the Lebanese Army.

Gullible New Yorker readers and CNN viewers were never the primary audience for the message Hersh carried. Rather, when the pro-Iran media turned and quoted Hersh on a story fed to him by the pro-Iran camp, the point of the operation was to get two of the U.S. media’s flagship organizations to whitewash a disinformation campaign intended for internal consumption in the Middle East, a operation whose goal was to convince swing states in the region to move away from the United States and its allies.

In recent weeks, the Iranian narrative of strategic realignment has hit the mainstream again, in a Washington Post op-ed by Robert Malley and a long analytical article from Stratfor’s George Friedman. Savvy American readers are likely to regard the apparent coincidence as another media trend. But if you’re a Middle Easterner seeking to make sense of the statements of American public officials and editorialists, the resurgence of the Iranian line is a clear sign that the Obama administration’s regional policy is a mess and that the grand narrative of realignment is once again in play.

• David Kimche, a longtime Mossad member who rose to Foreign Ministry Director General, and who in later life backed the two-state solution and J Street, died at 82. [Laura Rozen]

• They’re planning a major-studio, 3D version of the Book of Genesis. Title: In The Beginning. Adam and Eve will be blue (just kidding). [Jewcy]

• Three suspects in the theft of Auschwitz’s “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign pleaded to up to three years’ jail-time. [Krakow Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The Egyptian government will fund restorations of local synagogues. [AP/Haaretz]

• Elinor Burkett, the Golda Meir biographer who made a Kanye-like splash at the Oscars, took her new schtick to Letterman (go to the three-minute mark). [ArtsBeat]

I have no knowledge over whether all of that is true or not. Just as you have no knowledge whether I’m telling the truth when I say that I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge for $1.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs explicitly condemned the announcement. As did Biden:

I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.

We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them. This announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict. The United States recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians and for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world. Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues.

As George Mitchell said in announcing the proximity talks, “we encourage the parties and all concerned to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks.” (My bold.)

As I said: awkward.

There’s a very specific reason why the move—assuming its timing was intentional—is so provocative, and it has less to do with Biden and more to do with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

For months now, Abbas has said he would sit down to talks with the Israelis if certain preconditions were met; and while one may have expected him to accede to negotiations without getting everything he wanted beforehand, the precondition he was particularly insistent upon was that Israel call a temporary freeze on construction in East Jerusalem. (Israel is in the midst of a freeze in the West Bank, but it does not include East Jerusalem, which falls on the Palestinian side of the pre-1967 Green Line and which Palestinians hope will be the capital of their eventual state.)

“Proximity talks”—in which U.S. envoy George Mitchell would shuttle between the sides—are not the same as direct peace negotiations, which is probably the only way Abbas could save face without securing the East Jerusalem freeze. Even so, Abbas’s decision represented, as the Jerusalem Post reported this morning, a “significant” concession:

when Abbas said for months and months that he would not enter into negotiations with Israel unless and until there was a full settlement freeze, including east Jerusalem, it seemed this was a firm Palestinian red line—not one of those pliable Israeli ones—and that he meant what he said.

Well, now we see the Palestinians can also move red lines, which is worth noting as some kind of talks resume.

Equally important is to understand that the reason Abbas was willing to move his red line was because he came under intense pressure from the US, certain elements inside the EU, and from Arab states such as Egypt and Jordan to start talks, even though all his conditions were not met.

The valuable lesson here: The Palestinians, too, and not only Israel, are susceptible to pressure.

Enter Israel, reminding the United States how much credibility it can expect its pressure to have in the future, and reminding Abbas of what he failed to acquire. After this, if Abbas were to back out of the talks now, one could not call him crazy. And, after this, if, say, I were to suggest that certain elements within Israel’s government don’t even want those talks: well, then one could not call me crazy, either.

As Biden Visits, Israel Unveils Plans for New Settlements [NYT]
U.S. ‘Condemns’ Israeli Construction
Shifting Palestinian ‘Red Lines’ [JPost]

One of Halkin’s most interesting arguments in the book is that Halevi may be considered a proto-Zionist: arguably the first, in fact (Halevi lived in the 11th and 12th centuries). He expounds on that here:

He’s one of the first, or the first figure in the Diaspora to call for Jewish return to the land of Eretz Yisroel on a pre-messianic basis.

The rabbinical and traditional position has always been waiting for the Moshiach and it was the very dominant position in Halevi’s time. He took the position and was the first one to articulate it that Jews need not and should not wait for the messiah to return to [Israel].

It’s a Jewish obligation to return, it’s a Jewish initiative and not a divine one.

Q&A with Hillel Halkin [Jewish Star]

Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
Life of a Poet [Tablet Magazine]
The Pilgrim [Tablet Magazine]

A brief NPR story reports on another, less-discussed part of East Prussia/Kaliningrad’s history: Its village of Yantarny was the site of arguably the final event of the Holocaust. In January 1945, several days after the liberation of Auschwitz, a group of 7,000 Jews were marched to the Yantarny beach, ordered into the (unimaginably frigid) water, and shot to death.

There is a small memorial recognizing the event at the out-of-the-way beach; even it was not put in place until 2000, because, among other reasons, prevailing Soviet ideology discouraged the singling out of ethnic or religious groups that invariably takes place when you commemorate the Holocaust.

The story is excellent: Give it a listen.

Russian Village Haunted By A Hidden Holocaust Past [NPR]

The panel did not advocate changing Reform Judaism’s current rules, which leave the question of whether or not to officiate at interfaith weddings up to individual rabbis. (Conservative and Orthodox Judaism bar their rabbis from doing this; Reconstructionists also delegate that decision to each rabbi.) Rather, the panel suggests that the movement establish special blessings to codify and recognize these unions.

What do you guys think?

U.S. Reform Rabbis Suggest Welcoming Interfaith Couples [AP/Haaretz]

Kramer spent most of his brief remarks establishing that violent radicalism is more or less inevitable in populations with a disproportionately high number of young-adult males. In the case of Gaza and its extremely high number of just such people—the consequence of an extremely high birth rate—Kramer proposes that aid agencies end pro-natal subsidies (which essentially guarantee care to future newborns) in order to lower that birthrate, lower the pool of violent young men, and bring peace:

eventually, this will happen among the Palestinians too, but it will happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status. Those subsidies are one reason why, in the ten years from 1997 to 2007, Gaza’s population grew by an astonishing 40 percent. At that rate, Gaza’s population will double by 2030, to three million. Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim—undermine the Hamas regime—but if they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth—and there is some evidence that they have—that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men. That is rising to the real challenge of radical indoctrination, and treating it at its root.

The uproar to this has been predictable—indeed, one criticism you could make of Kramer is that he should have predicted it, and have taken better care at least to clarify his remarks. (I also think Kramer may have brought the academic’s correct love of experimental, extreme, half-held opinions into the unwelcome realm of politics.) Notable opponents include M.J. Rosenberg, who questioned whether Kramer wasn’t advocating genocide, and Stephen Walt, who rejects the genocide accusation but nonetheless called Kramer’s views “so offensive to any decent person that you don’t need to worry much about getting the right label for them,” as well as “barbaric and racist.”

The Harvard center supporting Kramer’s visitor-ship dismissed calls for it to disassociate from him. Kramer has also posted a self-defense, noting that all he proposes is removing the encouragement to procreation, not actively discouraging it.

There is no individual sentence in Kramer’s remarks that is incorrect, and the internal logic is consistent: the high birth rate does lead to increased terrorist violence; aid groups are encouraging that high birth rate; and so on.

But Kramer’s critics are, at least on the big question, correct. If the only solution to Hamas is to limit the Gaza Palestinian population, then there is no solution to Hamas. (And Kramer’s argument that it’s not limiting the population, only bringing it down to what it would be without those subsidies, is logically facile—no matter the reason, the birth rate is what it currently is—and morally insensitive, at the very least.) If the problem is too many young men with not enough to do, then the morally responsible solution has to be giving them something to do, not decreasing the number of young men.

Superfluous Young Men [Sandbox]
Is Harvard Prof Advocating Genocide? [HuffPo]
Should Harvard Dump Martin Kramer? [Stephen Walt]
Smear Intifada [Sandbox]
Related: Herzliya Diary [Tablet Magazine]

• A Reform Judaism task force proposed the establishment of separate blessings for major life events, including marriages, involving non-Jewish spouses. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• With U.S. support, Israel plans to build over 100 new homes in a West Bank settlement, saying they were planned before the construction freeze was in effect. [BBC]

• Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Israel had accepted his country as a Syrian mediator; Israel quickly denied this. [JPost]

• Both Israel and Syria disclosed yesterday, at an energy conference in France, that they wish to begin using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. [Haaretz]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell, who would lead those Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks,” departed Israel for a time right as Biden arrived. A profile describes him as a man of “legendary patience.” [Politico]

Israel’s left-wing parties, primarily Labor (but also the farther-left Meretz), were dealt a mortal blow by Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the two-state compromises successively offered by Ehud Barak, then Israel’s prime minister, and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in July and December 2000, and by the Palestinians’ violent follow-up, the launching of the Second Intifada. If there is no Palestinian Arab peace partner, then what’s the point in voting for peace-mongering parties? All Israel’s left-wing parties are selling is pie in the sky.

Clinton settled into a comfortable retirement, but the Israeli left failed to recover from the events of 2000. The Labor Party, which since 1948 has traditionally received between one-third and one-quarter of the votes in each general election and often formed and led Israel’s coalition governments (1949-1977, 1984-1986, 1992-1996, 1999-2001), emerged from the February 2009 general elections with about 11 percent of the vote (13 seats in the 120-seat Knesset or parliament) and is currently a junior partner (though Barak is defense minister, a key portfolio) in the very right-wing coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Even the ultra-right-wing Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, enjoys a stronger parliamentary base (15 seats). Meretz has three.

But there is one major respect in which the current political map inaccurately reflects Israeli public opinion and its ideological and political underpinnings. Most Israelis, to judge by nearly every opinion poll, want peace with the Arabs based on a “territorial compromise,” meaning granting Palestinian sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and the bulk of the West Bank (the desired fate of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its sacred sites, is more problematic); most Israelis have tired of ruling the Palestinians. These positions have been prompted by historical events and demographic realities. But also, in some measure, by the drumbeat of peace movement activities over the decades since Israel’s conquest of the territories in 1967.

Spokesmen for Gush Emunim, the nationalist-religious movement that has driven the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, used to portray themselves as the “patriotic” response to the “extremists” of Peace Now, the leading Israeli peace organization founded at the end of the 1970s. Nothing riled Peace Now activists more. They saw themselves as law-abiding, reasonable, even mainstream figures, whereas Gush Emunim—which often operated outside the law, serially ignored, circumvented, and defied government orders, and, during the 1980s, spawned a terrorist underground—was deliberately confrontational in tone and Messianic in purpose.

And here, according to Tamar Hermann, a professor of political science at Israel’s Open University and the author of the new book The Israeli Peace Movement: A Shattered Dream, lies one of the key reasons for the peace movement’s ultimate ineffectuality. The peaceniks and the left “talked” a lot and persuasively—logical and sane to a fault. But they had little effect on government policy or on facts on the ground. They failed dismally to block or even limit the settlement enterprise or to successfully pressure successive Israeli governments to make peace with the Palestinians on the basis of territorial compromise.

The hard settler right, on the other hand, “acted,” ultimately pulling along often-reluctant politicians to do their bidding. Gush Emunim succeeded in establishing a series of faits accomplis. Jerusalem today is ringed by massive Jewish neighborhoods and settlements. Territorial compromise, and peace, seem as far off as ever.

But there are two things wrong with Hermann’s picture. First, Israel’s peace movements, which she describes in great detail and with perspicacity and insight (her book nicely complements Mordechai Bar-On’s history of the Israeli peace movement, In Pursuit of Peace), have had a substantial, if sporadic, impact on Israeli policy and Middle Eastern realities. Peace Now helped push the first Begin government to make peace with Egypt in 1978-1979; the movement’s founding document—the so-called “Officers’ Letter” of 1978 (some of whose 348 signatories were actually privates and non-commissioned officers)—and its first, massive demonstrations influenced the government and had a part in preventing the peace talks from collapsing. More recently, the relentless agitation of Arba Imahot (Four Mothers) and other groups affected public opinion and helped persuade Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government to withdraw from southern Lebanon in May 2000.

But perhaps more importantly, the peace camp’s central message, that Israel could not forever lord it over another people and that the right’s dream of Greater Israel was dead, eventually was accepted by the majority of Israelis, including most Likudniks. Of course, historical episodes, primarily the First and Second Intifadas (1987-1991 and 2000-2004 respectively) and demographic realities (higher Arab birth rates) played an even more significant part in affecting this sea-change in Israeli public opinion. But the constant patter of the peaceniks’ message, that Israel had to withdraw from the territories to save itself, morally and physically, also had a role.

Second, it was not the shortcomings or failures of these dozens of peace organizations, as Hermann implies, that resulted in the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This result was mainly due to Palestinian rejectionism and intractability. There was never, as there still is not, a credible, serious Palestinian partner for peace with Israel, not before 1948, and not since. In the years 1920-1948 no Palestinian leader would contemplate either a bi-national, one-state arrangement with the Jews based on political parity or the partition of Palestine into two states, one for the Jews, the other for the Arabs. Indeed, in 1937, the Arab leadership flatly rejected the two-state solution, proposed by the British Peel Commission, which would have given the Zionists only 17 percent of Palestine. The pre-eminent Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and ’40s (and arguably in the 1920s as well), Haj Amin al Husseini, rejected all talk of compromise and consistently advocated substantially reducing the number of Jews already in the country (i.e., by mass deportation, or worse).

Nothing has changed since. The 1950s were a hiatus, while the Palestinians licked their wounds from 1948. But when they re-emerged politically under Yasser Arafat and Fatah/the PLO in the 1960s, and during the following two decades they flatly rejected all talk of a two-state solution, preferring the replacement of Israel either in one fell swoop or in stages by a Palestinian Arab state, possibly to include a small Jewish minority.

During the 1990s, the PLO played a devious, two-faced game of extracting concessions while pretending it had an interest in an eventual two-state solution, which, when offered by Barak (July 2000) and Clinton (December 2000), it promptly rejected. Since then, the ascendancy of Hamas, a fundamentalist organization dedicated openly to anti-Semitic principles and to the destruction of Israel and empowered formally by the general election of 2006 as the leading political force in the Palestinian territories, has assured the rejectionist trajectory of Palestinian political ambitions.

In other words, the Israeli peaceniks and their ragtag collection of parties and associations (Hermann usefully lists more than 100 of them in Appendix 1—but Peace Now is the only large one among them) were essentially in the business of shadow-boxing: from HaOlam Hazeh editor Uri Avnery in the 1950s on, they would issue manifestos and meet in European hotel lobbies with dissident Palestinian officials (who were later invariably gunned down by less peace- or at least dialogue-minded fellow Palestinians), sign on for this or that conciliatory initiative—and all for nothing. There was no real partner with a solid constituency across the divide, not the mendacious Arafat, who sought Israel’s destruction with all his heart and soul, not the Marxist George Habash of airplane-hijacking notoriety, and not the fundamentalists, who sought nothing more than to cast out the infidels and impose Sharia law over all of Palestine.

Given this reality, Israel’s peace movement—and Israel’s peace-minded political leaders, from Rabin and Peres, through Barak, Sharon (who evacuated the Gaza Strip), and Olmert (who, in negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, reportedly offered the Palestinians more than Clinton had, and, of course, was turned down flat)—cannot be held to account for the failure to achieve peace with the Palestinians (or, indeed, Syria, which, in 1994-1996 and again in 1999-2000, even when offered the Golan Heights, refused to sign on the dotted line). Hermann’s book—a work of otherwise fine political analysis and synthesis—never really makes this clear, which is its great failing.

Benny Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author, most recently, of the book One State, Two States.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [a relative]
Date: Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 10:01 AM
Subject: RE: Let’s have a Real Anti-Apartheid Week

Dershowitz, the guy who voted for Obama, has my thousand dollars and those of many others in his pocket to represent Pollard and get him a fair sentence (going back 25 years ago), and the poor bastard is still in jail and will die in jail.

Anti-Semitism on the college campuses is a result of not enough Jews ready to slug it out with the Jew haters. Read the book “Nazis in Newark” and understand that when the Jews fought the Nazi brown shirts during the 30’s in Newark, the Jews won and the Nazis lost and the Nazi scum ran away from Newark like rats in the night because the Jews beat the crap out of them.

———- Forwarded message ———-

From: [recipient]
Sent: Sat, Mar 6, 2010 9:48 pm
Subject: Fwd: Dersh: Let’s have an Apartheid Week focusing on a real apartheid regime: Hamas.

Excellent article

—–Original Message—–
From: [sender]
Sent: Fri, Mar 5, 2010 11:53 am
Subject: Dersh: Let’s have an Apartheid Week focusing on a real apartheid regime: Hamas.

Let’s Have a Real Apartheid Education Week

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/05/let%e2%80%99s-have-a-real-apartheid-education-week-2/

Alan M. Dershowitz

Every year at about this time, radical Islamic students—aided by radical anti-Israel professors—hold an event they call “Israel Apartheid Week.” During this week, they try to persuade students on campuses around the world to demonize Israel as an apartheid regime. Most students seem to ignore the rantings of these extremists, but some naïve students seem to take them seriously. Some pro-Israel and Jewish students claim that they are intimidated when they try to respond to these untruths. As one who strongly opposes any censorship, my solution is to fight bad speech with good speech, lies with truth and educational malpractice with real education.

Accordingly, I support a “Middle East Apartheid Education Week” to be held at universities throughout the world. It would be based on the universally accepted human rights principle of “the worst first.” In other words, the worst forms of apartheid being practiced by Middle East nations and entities would be studied and exposed first. Then the apartheid practices of other countries would be studied in order of their seriousness and impact on vulnerable minorities.

Under this principle, the first country studied would be Saudi Arabia. That tyrannical kingdom practices gender apartheid to an extreme, relegating women to an extremely low status. Indeed, a prominent Saudi Imam recently issued a fatwa declaring that anyone who advocates women working alongside men or otherwise compromises with absolute gender apartheid is subject to execution. The Saudis also practice apartheid based on sexual orientation, executing and imprisoning gay and lesbian Saudis. Finally, Saudi Arabia openly practices religious apartheid. It has special roads for “Muslims only.” It discriminates against Christians, refusing them the right to practice their religion openly. And needless to say, it doesn’t allow Jews the right to live in Saudi Arabia, to own property or even (with limited exceptions) to enter the country. Now that’s apartheid with a vengeance.

The second entity on any apartheid list would be Hamas, which is the de facto government of the Gaza Strip. Hamas too discriminates openly against women, gays, Christians. It permits no dissent, no free speech, and no freedom of religion.

Every single Middle East country practices these forms of apartheid to one degree or another. Consider the most “liberal” and pro-American nation in the area, namely Jordan. The Kingdom of Jordan, which the King himself admits is not a democracy, has a law on its books forbidding Jews from becoming citizens or owning land. Despite the efforts of its progressive Queen, women are still de facto subordinate in virtually all aspects of Jordanian life.

Iran, of course, practices no discrimination against gays, because its President has assured us that there are no gays in Iran. In Pakistan, Sikhs have been executed for refusing to convert to Islam, and throughout the Middle East, honor killings of women are practiced, often with a wink and a nod from the religious and secular authorities.

Every Muslim country in the Middle East has a single, established religion, namely Islam, and makes no pretense of affording religious equality to members of other faiths. That is a brief review of some, but certainly not all, apartheid practices in the Middle East.

Now let’s turn to Israel. The secular Jewish state of Israel recognizes fully the rights of Christians and Muslims and prohibits any discrimination based on religion (except against Conservative and Reform Jews, but that’s another story!) Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel (of which there are more than a million) have the right to vote and have elected members of the Knesset, some of whom even oppose Israel’s right to exist. There is an Arab member of the Supreme Court, an Arab member of the Cabinet and numerous Israeli Arabs in important positions in businesses, universities and the cultural life of the nation. A couple of years ago I attended a concert at the Jerusalem YMCA at which Daniel Barenboim conducted a mixed orchestra of Israeli and Palestinian musicians. There was a mixed audience of Israelis and Palestinians, and the man sitting next to me was an Israeli Arab, who is the culture minister of the State of Israel. Can anyone imagine that kind of concert having taking place in apartheid South Africa, or in apartheid Saudi Arabia?

There is complete freedom of dissent in Israel and it is practiced vigorously by Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. And Israel is a vibrant democracy.

What is true of Israel proper, including Israeli Arab areas, is not true of the occupied territories. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza several years ago, only to be attacked by Hamas rockets. Israel maintains its occupation of the West Bank only because the Palestinians walked away from a generous offer of statehood on 97% of the West Bank, with its capital in Jerusalem and with a $35 billion compensation package for refugees. Had it accepted that offer by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, there would be a Palestinian state in the West Bank. There would be no separation barrier. There would be no roads restricted to Israeli citizens (Jews, Arabs and Christians.) And there would be no civilian settlements. I have long opposed civilian settlements in the West Bank, as many, perhaps most Israelis, do. But to call an occupation, which continues because of the refusal of the Palestinians to accept the two-state solution, “Apartheid” is to misuse that word. As those of us who fought in the actual struggle of apartheid well understand, there is no comparison between what happened in South Africa and what is now taking place on the West Bank. As Congressman John Conyers, who helped found the congressional Black caucus, well put it:

“[Applying the word “Apartheid” to Israel] does not serve the cause of peace, and the use of it against the Jewish people in particular, who have been victims of the worst kind of discrimination, discrimination resulting in death, is offensive and wrong.”

The current “Israel Apartheid Week” on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East’s sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions in Israel) and dissenters, (virtually all Israelis dissent about something). Israel has the best environmental record in the Middle East, it exports more life saving medical technology than any country in the region and it has sacrificed more for peace than any country in the Middle East. Yet on many college campuses democratic, egalitarian Israel is a pariah, while sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, terrorist Hamas is a champion. There is something very wrong with this picture.

1999.

Finding an old Jew in the deep freeze did not at first alter Bernie Karp’s routine in any measurable way. Overweight and unadventurous, he had no special friends to tell the story to even if he’d wanted, which he didn’t: It was nobody’s business. But even Bernie had to admit to himself that something had changed. It was still late summer and he continued, as was his custom, to spend most of each day in front of the TV, munching malted milk balls and digging at himself. Images passed before his eyes without leaving distinct impressions: In a comic sketch a failed suicide bomber was comforted by his veiled mother to gales of canned laughter; in another a little girl kept God in her closet; a heart-warming Hallmark drama portrayed a Navy SEAL romancing a mermaid; and a reality-based program dispatched a disabled couple on a blind date to Disney World. There were elections, massacres, celebrity breakups, corporate meltdowns—all of which tended to evaporate like snow on a hothouse window upon entering Bernie’s brain. Still, he remained a passive captive of the flickering screen in the faux-paneled basement, which was largely his private domain. The only new wrinkle in the fabric of his days was that, while surfing the myriad channels, Bernie would also fan the pages of the ledger book in which the grandfather he’d never known had chronicled the history of the frozen rabbi in an alien tongue. He riffled the pages the way you might finger worry beads, and periodically he would rise and shuffle over to the freezer, where he rolled aside the game hens and packaged ground round to make certain that the old man was still there.

Then came the weekend his parents went to Las Vegas, all expenses paid, for a home appliance convention. They naturally had no problem with leaving the adolescent Bernie alone, since the boy had never demonstrated the least propensity for mischief, and at 19 the headstrong Madeline, on vacation from college, would do as she pleased. It was Friday night around eight in the evening when the storm hit, one of those semitropical electrical storms with typhoon-force winds that often swept through Bernie’s southern city in August. The television reported that funnel clouds had been spotted about the perimeter of the city, their tails corkscrewing the muddy ground like augers, sundering mobile homes. Lightning crackled and thunder rumbled like kettledrums, rain hammered the roof of the two-story colonial house, while Bernie sat more or less oblivious in the recessed cushions of the rumpus-room sofa. It wasn’t that he was devoid of fear; it was rather that primary events had little more impact on him than events—save the odd Playtex commercial or his father’s prime-time pitches for discounted appliances—on TV.

There was a violent sound like a fracturing of the firmament, after which the lights went out and the image on the TV shrank to a blip, then disappeared. Bernie continued sitting alone in the windowless dark, clutching the ledger, as what else was he supposed to do? His sister was out with one of her boyfriends, not that her company would have been much consolation; so there was nothing for it but to sit there listening patiently to the propeller-like drone of the wind and waiting for the floodwaters to rise above the eaves. When after some time had passed the storm began to abate, the boy was almost disappointed. The power, however, had still not come back on, and in the wake of the squall he could hear the sound of a hollow knocking nearby. Bernie listened awhile as if the faint but persistent rapping were an attempt to communicate by code; then he lifted himself from the depths of the sofa and groped his way to the shelves that housed the overflow of his father’s framed civic citations and loving cups. Perspiring freely due to the shutdown of the central air, he stooped to open a cabinet beneath the shelves, foraging blindly among dusty wine bottles and photograph albums until he’d located the ribbed handle of a plastic flashlight. He switched it on and aimed its beam toward the source of the thumping….

Standing over the freezer cabinet, Bernie slowly lifted the chromium handle that released the lid. Instantly the lid flew open, soggy steaks and tenderloins sliding onto the floor, as up sat a sodden old man like an antiquated jack-in-the-box, his fur hat stinking like roadkill. There was a moment when the old man and the boy with his hanging jaw were transfixed by one an-other; then the old man’s scarlet eye grew narrow and gimlet sharp, and shaking himself, he asked in a rusty voice, “Iz dos mayn aroyn?”

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Frozen Rabbi. Or, to get each day’s installment of The Frozen Rabbi in your inbox, sign up for the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest, and tell your friends.

What Montefiore witnessed on that birthday, which would turn out to be his last, was the emergence of what Green calls “the international Jewish public.” This was something different from the Jewish people, which had lived in many parts of the world ever since the days of the Roman Empire. Until the 19th century, however, it was impossible for these widely scattered Jewish communities to become actively aware of one another’s fortunes, or to speak with one voice on the world stage. It took modern technologies—the steamship, railroad, newspaper, and telegraph—to bring the Jewish world together, just as they were bringing the world itself closer together. No less important, it took imperialism—especially the liberal imperialism of Britain and France—to make the problems of Jews in Palestine or Morocco into a matter of concern for the whole “civilized world,” as Western Europe could still contentedly think of itself.

It is no coincidence, then, that the man who emerged as the leader and living symbol of the international Jewish public was an Englishman. Victorian England, like the United States today, was a society that prided itself on being the custodian of liberal democratic values around the world, even though neither its domestic nor its foreign policy quite lived up to that ideal. No other European government was so willing to intrude in the affairs of other countries, or enjoyed so much influence in places like Turkey, Morocco, and Palestine, with their large Jewish populations. Throughout his life, Moses Montefiore would travel through Europe and the Middle East, secure in the knowledge that his Englishness was a source of protection, power, and prestige.

It helped, of course, that he was extremely rich. Green does not devote much space to Montefiore’s business career—by the third chapter, he is already in his late thirties and looking for “a world beyond business.” But without the money he made in finance, he would never have been able to devote the rest of his life to philanthropy and politics. And he might never have been so successful in the marketplace, Green shows, without his family connections. When Montefiore married Judith Barent-Cohen, in 1812, he not only received a dowry, he became the brother-in-law of Nathan Rothschild, who was married to Judith’s sister Hannah. Montefiore was soon making huge profits as Rothschild’s agent and partner, and together they started the insurance giant Alliance Assurance, which is still in business today (though under a different name).

“Marriage in such circles was always about money and connections,” Green observes, just as it was for the English gentry (see any novel by Jane Austen). But Moses and Judith also became a very close and loving pair—despite his frequent infidelities and their inability to have any children. In fact, their childlessness may be what made Montefiore’s adventures possible. With a family to raise and heirs to provide for, he might never have risked his money and health so freely, or started to think of himself as a kind of father-figure to the whole Jewish people.

Both the great achievements and the significant limitations of Montefiore’s career can be traced to that paternalism. In early 19th century England, a businessman like Montefiore was naturally drawn to the company of intellectuals and social reformers, many of them Quakers and Dissenters who were, like the Jews, excluded from England’s political system. (One of his close friends was Thomas Hodgkin, the Quaker doctor who discovered Hodgkin’s lymphoma.) But for Montefiore, liberal politics were not at odds with religious orthodoxy. Unlike many English Jews of his class, Montefiore remained strictly observant. He kept kosher even when traveling, and when he bought a country estate, he built a synagogue on the premises so he could pray three times a day.

Montefiore’s task would be to unite these two impulses—to bring the liberalizing tendencies of the age to bear on the condition of the Jews, in England and around the world. On his first visit to Palestine in 1827—undertaken, he later said, according to a command given him in a dream by the Prophet Elijah—Montefiore was inspired to devote his future to Jewish observance and philanthropy: “This day I begin a new era,” he wrote on his 43rd birthday. On the way from London to Jerusalem, Moses and Judith contended with storms, plagues, pirates, and the threat of a war between Egypt and Turkey; they might well have seen their safe arrival as a kind of divine providence.

Montefiore would return to the Holy Land six more times—the last at the age of 91—and while he was not a Zionist in the modern, political sense, his benefactions in Palestine helped to move it to the center of European Jewish consciousness. On his centenary, the Hovevei Zion of Odessa—one of the earliest Zionist organizations—declared, “You were … the first that put your heart to build the ruins of Zion the land of our fathers, and your actions were the light beneath the foot of our people.”

Back home in England, Montefiore became the leader of the Jewish community’s representative body, the Board of Deputies, and earned a series of public honors. He was the first Jew to be appointed to the largely ceremonial position of Sheriff of London (the inaugural dinner, usually held on September 30, was postponed because the date fell on Rosh Hashanah). He was only the second Jew in British history to be granted a knighthood.

But it is not on these kinds of official milestones that Montefiore’s reputation rests. More important is that, starting in the 1830s, he began to concern himself with the problems of the Jews abroad. In 1840, the so-called Damascus Affair erupted, when Syrian Jews were accused of having ritually murdered a Catholic priest. This blood libel, which seemed so incredible to assimilated Western Jews, galvanized Jewish opinion in England and France. Indeed, it marked what Green calls “the beginning of a new Jewish politics, one that combined the influence that Jewish financiers wielded behind the scenes with a vocal campaign for Jewish rights.”

At the head of that campaign were Montefiore and the French Jewish leader Adolphe Crémieux, who set out together for Cairo to confront the pasha Mehmed Ali. Their mission, Green reveals, was fraught with tension—Crémieux found Montefiore arrogant and thought he wanted to take all the credit—but in the end it succeeded. Mehmed Ali freed the Damascus Jews, thanks less to Montefiore’s persuasive powers than to the diplomatic backing of England and France. Montefiore traveled on to Constantinople, where he secured from the sultan a decree, or firman, guaranteeing legal equality to the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.

This was a spectacular triumph, and it made Montefiore a hero to Jews everywhere. But as Green goes on to show, it set a pattern for Montefiore’s activism that would prove problematic. Over the next 40 years, he would undertake similar missions to the Czar in Russia, the Sultan of Morocco, and the King of Romania, each time asking for decrees of protection for the Jews, and sometimes even getting them. The problem was that such decrees could not always be enforced, and that Montefiore placed too much trust in figures, like Czar Nicholas I, whose deep anti-Semitism he did not fathom. Nor did he understand the dynamics of popular anti-Semitism, which by the end of his life had become a potent political force in Russia, Romania, and even Germany.

At home, too, Montefiore’s leadership had its critics. As the head of the Board of Deputies, he set his face uncompromisingly against the Reform movement that was winning the allegiance of many English Jews. When members of Bevis Marks left to set up their own congregation, the West London Synagogue, Montefiore encouraged the rabbi to excommunicate them. His own younger brother was one of the seceders, and Montefiore didn’t speak to him for the rest of his life.

All this helps to explain why Montefiore’s style of leadership—personal, cautious, and to a large degree unaccountable—alienated many younger, more progressive Jews. In a sense, he was a victim of his own success: He was a catalyst for the emergence of an “international Jewish public” that was too large and contentious for any one man to dominate. Yet Green never allows the reader to lose sight of Montefiore’s truly pioneering achievements, or of his courage, generosity, and farsightedness. In writing about this incomparable life, Green has produced an incomparable book. More than a biography, Moses Montefiore takes its place as one of the essential works on modern Jewish history.

• A small group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis declared lox to be unkosher due to a certain parasite that salmon can host. Most rabbis disagree, though, so stick that on your bagel and eat it. [Grub Street]

• Prominent Palestinian lawyer Elias Khoury was moved by his son’s murder by a Palestinian terrorist to pay for the translation of top Israeli writer Amos Oz into Arabic. [NYT]

• Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy and a one-time J Street board member, said that anti-Semitism’s foes need more non-Jews on their side. [JTA]

• Eight Republican senators expressed worry over appointing a U.S. ambassador to Syria for the first time in five years. [Laura Rozen]

• Los Angeles Laker star, skilled defender, and crazy person Ron Artest had the word “Defense” dyed into his (dyed-yellow) hair in several languages, including Hebrew. [Deadspin]

Below, the making of the haircut:

The idea: U.S. envoy George Mitchell will shuttle between the Israelis and Palestinians, with the ultimate goal of getting the two sides in the same room. Both the Arab League and the Palestine Liberation Organization okayed the talks despite the fact that Israel has not agreed to a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—something Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has previously insisted were a precondition to negotiations. (Ah, but these are only indirect peace negotiations, so he hasn’t technically backed down from that! Now perhaps you see the appeal of these “proximity talks.”)

Meanwhile, a good deal of the purpose behind Biden’s trip is to reassure Israel’s leadership and people that the United States is still fundamentally behind them—this after a year during which Israel has felt President Barack Obama has been unsympathetic to its point of view; and this after a leaked Foreign Ministry report predicting the administration will take the Palestinian side in the talks and will be too focused on November’s midterm elections to devote too many resources to the Mideast anyway.

Biden seems perfect for this mission: unlike Obama, he’s been on the political scene for almost four decades, and for the more prominent part of his career has been a powerful figure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; through all that time, he has been seen as a friend to Israel.

There is real urgency behind these talks. The Palestinians’ West Bank leadership may be unwilling to give a bilateral, two-state deal another chance should this latest attempt fall apart. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat was pretty explicit with Israeli radio, announcing that after this, they would revert to calls for a single, bi-national state (more encouragingly, he said Palestinians were ready to give up parts of the West Bank as long as what they end up with is West Bank-sized).

Looming, also, are the plans of revered Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad: currently engaged in an ambitious and, so far, not unsuccessful campaign of state-building in the West Bank, Fayyad’s eventual hope is to build enough of a functioning government and society that, in a year or two’s time, the West Bank leadership is ready to declare independence and dare the world not to recognize it.

Palestinian insistence on a one-state solution, and a unilateral declaration of nationhood without border issues (to say nothing of Gaza) resolved: I just named two things Israel emphatically does not wish to see happen. It’s becoming clear whom the stakes of these nascent talks might be higher for.

Biden Visits Israel to Restart Peace Talks [NYT]
As Biden Heads to Israel, Plans for Proximity Talks Advancing [Laura Rozen]
Secret Israeli Report: U.S. Cozying Up to Palestinians [Haaretz]
Salam Fayyad: The Palestinian With a Plan for Statehood [JTA]

Turns out the incident had to do with some bad blood between the director, Roger Ross Williams, and the producer, Elinor Burkett.

Gal Beckerman, writing on the Forward’s Sisterhood blog, notes the “Jewish connection”: Burkett is the author of a Golda Meir biography.

I can’t put it better than Beckerman does: “Forget Kanye. Williams should have known better than to mess with anyone familiar in the ways of Golda.”

At The Oscars, Golda’s Biographer Pulls a Kanye West [The Sisterhood]

“I am a little caught between satisfaction at my newly increased reach and mild irritation at the reason for it,” he says. “I understand the sense in which it seems as though I am in a hurry. But as you’ll see when you read the book, I am quite convinced that the urgency lies in the external world and all I am doing is drawing attention to it.”

Read the whole thing.

The Liveliest Mind in New York [New York]
Earlier: In and Out of Love With Zionism

It’s not that there aren’t some on the Israeli side who see, say, the West Bank as rightfully Israel’s. But this is the government putting this stuff out. Maybe educating children that part of the land between the river and the sea belongs to Israel should be one thing that emerges out of the new indirect peace talks?

P.A. Incitement Targets Arab-Israeli Children [Arutz Sheva]
Earlier: Stewart Mocks Hamas TV

Started by law-school dropout Noah Bermanoff, Mile End, a small, tightly packed storefront with a few picnic-style tables, a counter, and an open kitchen, aims to bring to New York the experience of eating in that eponymous Montreal neighborhood—long the center of the Canadian city’s Jewish population—and specifically to provide “smoked meat,” which is pastrami-but-not-quite, to the good people living south of the border.

Mile End’s bagels are actually shipped in from Montreal’s St.-Viateur, but everything else is local: like many of the other popular restaurants in the leafy, stroller-heavy Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill, the meat is sustainable and the vegetables house-pickled (it even serves cups of coffee from hip bean purveyor Stumptown). I headed there during prime Sunday brunching hours to see what all the fuss was about. A half-hour wait, an hour meal, and an appallingly full stomach later, I emerged with a much, much better idea.

• The smoked meat hash (below) had charred potatos and onions, with bits of smoked meat strewn about that I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time scraping for, like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box. It came topped with a fried egg, perhaps under the theory that there is nothing that a fried egg won’t make better (a theory for which this dish could serve as useful evidence). Delish.

• The Mont Royal was a large, stuffed latke that—unlike some—didn’t attempt to disguise the potato taste. It was topped with be-chived crème fraiche (more things should use crème fraiche!), perhaps intended to resemble the snow that frequently caps this high hill of Montreal (which abuts Mile End). Plus lox. It was Sunday morning, after all.

• It was the first meal of the day, but how can you not get a smoked meat sandwich! I had remembered smoked meat at Schwartz’s—which practically invented the thing!—as really quite similar to pastrami, maybe only a little thicker. But Mile End’s smoked meat is much more halfway between pastrami, with the tongue-shocking electricity (you’ll find yourself crunching whole peppercorns) and peppery aftertaste, and BBQ brisket, thick and stringy and so rich as almost to be sweet. The sandwich comes on rye and with house-made mustard, very conservatively applied; you can put more on, but you shouldn’t.

• Ah yes, the poutine (top picture). The smoked meat poutine. Poutine is fries, thick gravy, and cheese curds (read Calvin Trillin’s recent New Yorker article for more). All of that, plus smoked meat. This is can’t-miss. Just make sure you exercise a lot afterward—once you can move again.

And, finally, the special Montreal bagels? You think I ate one of those? This is New York!

Mile End

Related: Best of New York [New York]
My Son the Meat Smoker [New York]
Bageled: No Thanks to Montreal Version of New York’s Favorite Hole in One [NY Daily News]

Earlier: Bagel Wars

In other news, the big winner last night, taking Original Screenplay, Director, and Picture, was The Hurt Locker (which you all really should go see: it’s excellent, and thriling). However, other than the single Oscar Inglourious Basterds’s Christoph Waltz won for Supporting Actor, all six of the films I identified as the most Jewish contenders were shut out, including Israel’s third consecutive Foreign Language Film nominee, Ajami, and the Coen Brothers’ fantastic A Serious Man.

But having a friend of the magazine succeed more than makes up for that. Here’s The New Tenants trailer:

David Rakoff [Tablet Magazine]
The New Tenant [Oscars]

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee
Your Oscar Cheat Sheet

• Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Israel today, ostensibly to kick-start those talks, but perhaps most of all to signal to Israeli leaders that America continues to back them. [LAT]

• A leaked Israeli Foreign Ministry report argues that U.S. positions in the talks will hew closer to the Palestinian side, and anyway that in the coming months the Obama administration will be more focused on November’s midterm elections. [Haaretz]

• In a sign of tensions over Russia’s willingness to support harsher sanctions over its nuclear program, Iran expelled all Russian commercial pilots. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Companies that do business with Iran despite U.S. discouragement have nonetheless won over $100 billion in U.S. contracts in the past 10 years. [NYT]

• Many in Lebanon believe they will have a new conflict with Israel, like that in 2006, in the near future. [LAT]

He emerged from the cottage just as Casimir, a sooty-eyed Polish porter with hair like thatch, was tugging along Yosl’s pussle-gutted mare by a frayed piece of rope; and though he knew the beast to be next to useless, Salo straightaway turned over his inheritance (minus the postcard and thimble) to the porter in exchange for redeeming the skewbald nag. Then, as the roof shingles of his former home began to curl upward, tugged at by threads of smoke, Salo took up the reins of the mare, whose name was Bathsheba.

He was aware, of course, that Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, if he belonged to anyone, belonged to his worshipful followers. But the Frozen Chasidim and their families were packing up their belongings as was everyone else, and nowhere amid that doleful exodus of clattering barrows and carts heaped high with candlesticks and featherbeds did Salo spy any monumental block of ice. Ingenuity had never been his strong suit; indeed, Salo had never had a strong suit, but drawing from a fund of proficiency that he decided then and there was his father’s legacy to his son, he undertook to replace the metal-rimmed wheel on Yosl’s delivery wagon. When he’d managed over the course of an hour to unhobble the wagon, he hitched it to Bathsheba, whose sluggish forward propulsion seemed entirely owing to a chronic flatulence. Salo stopped at the old log prayer house long enough to appropriate the cedar casket that leaned against an interior wall beneath the half-collapsed roof. This was the single battered casket that the village had recycled for the funerals of the past hundred years. Loading it onto the wagon, the youth continued to lead the horse up the hill to the icehouse, where he studiously addressed the heavy mechanism of a block and tackle coiled at the threshold. He proceeded to snake the pulleyed device through the hatch and down into the stygian grotto, then lowered himself after it for the purpose of attaching the cables to the ice. Back outside again, awakening muscles that had slumbered for the greater part of his 17 years, Salo hauled the rebbe by main force from his catacomb up the wooden ramp into the failing light of day. Then, sweating profusely despite the bitter cold, he slid the block of ice up a second, makeshift ramp of sagging planks onto the bed of the wagon. There he began to chip at the edges with his father’s axe until he could shove the block, wrapped in burlap for further insulation, over a final improvised slope into the casket. Since Bathsheba’s slack belly dragged the ground as if she were fed on cannonballs, there was no question of mounting the wagon; so Salo tugged at her reins and set off walking without further delay (as who was there left to say goodbye to?) in the general direction of the city of Lodz, which lay some leagues beyond the Russian Pale.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Frozen Rabbi. Or, to get each day’s installment of The Frozen Rabbi in your inbox, sign up for the Tablet Magazine Daily Digest, and tell your friends.

Some historical personalities lived so long and ranged so widely that they pose unusual challenges to biographers. Take Moses Montefiore, who lived from 1784 to 1885 and was among the most prominent men, let alone Jews, of his era. An Italian-born British banker, he made a fortune working with the Rothschilds, was knighted by Queen Victoria, and extended his philanthropic and humanitarian activities from Damascus, Morocco, Romania, and Russia to Jerusalem, where he founded the neighborhood of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. For the first scholarly biography of this towering figure—Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Harvard, March)—Oxford historian Abigail Green chased down sources in nine languages, housed in archives in 11 countries.

* * *

The subject of Tom De Haven’s new book started out from humble Jewish beginnings but has had adventures and wielded influence in even more countries than Montefiore did—and, unlike Montefiore, this guy can leap buildings in a single bound. Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Yale, February) surveys the vast legacy of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s mythic creation not just in comic books but also on television, radio, film, and a hodgepodge of marketing tie-ins (Superman sliced bread, anyone?). Those who interpret the Man of Steel’s Kryptonian name, “Kal-El,” as a nod to Hebrew tradition should note that, as De Haven explains, it was not Siegel and Shuster, but George Lowther—announcer for the Superman radio program, and author of the first Superman novel written in plain old prose—who changed Supes’s birth name from “Kal-L” to “Kal-El.”

* * *

At least as iconic a 20th-century coupling as that of Superman and Lois Lane, the improbable marriage of Marilyn Monroe to the playwright Arthur Miller captivated the world in the mid-1950s—and marked, at least according to some readings, the entrance of Jews into the American mainstream. In The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (Illinois, March), serial biographer Jeffrey Meyers retells the tale of the playwright and the starlet, focusing on why they got together, what they managed to create together, and why they fell apart.

Troubled and brief as the Miller-Monroe marriage was, a few years cohabiting with Marilyn has sounded a lot like heaven to a surprising number of male Jewish intellectuals. But then everyone has his own vision of paradise, as Newsweek’s religion editor, Lisa Miller, explains in Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife (Harper, March), her ecumenical survey of the idea of an afterlife through history and across religious traditions.

* * *

American Jewish writers fascinated by Monroe included Norman Rosten, Alvah Bessie, and most notoriously Norman Mailer, who published Marilyn: A Novel Biography in 1973. A couple of years later, Mailer met Barbara Davis Norris, a woman half his age who had been raised as a Free Will Baptist in Arkansas and had previously dated another womanizer by the name of William Jefferson Clinton who was destined for national celebrity. In 1980, she married Mailer in his Brooklyn Heights home, taking on the name Norris Church Mailer and becoming his sixth wife. She describes their tumultuous lives together in A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir (Random House, April).

While his weddings kept him plenty busy, Mailer pursued interests in more than just matrimony: In fact, the greater and more universal the icon, the further he pushed himself to capture it with his prose. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of his Of a Fire on the Moon (1970)—not to mention the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that the book lovingly describes—an enterprising art publisher has packaged Mailer’s text with high quality photographs to produce a volume titled Norman Mailer, MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11 (Taschen, April). The 1969 limited-edition copies retail for the appropriately astronomical price of $1,500.

* * *

During the past year, two very different men who represent Jewry at its best and worst, respectively—Maimonides and Madoff—have been the subjects of an astonishing number of books. This month sees the publication of yet another volume about each of them, by a single publisher; the pleasant surprise is that both constitute worthwhile additions to their respective crowded bookshelves. T. M. Rudavsky, an expert in medieval Jewish thought at Ohio State, offers up Maimonides (Wiley, March), a brief, philosophically inclined introduction to Rambam’s life and works. Harry Markopolos, meanwhile, describes his attempts to alert authorities to Madoff’s fraud over eight years  and the SEC’s uselessness in No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Wiley, March). According to this persistent whistleblower, Madoff wasn’t just a financial fraudster, but a gangster—his scheme was, as Markopolos says, “a remake of the Jewish mafia of the ’30s and ’40s, with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Only instead of using a Tommy gun, Madoff used a pen, a computer, and a set of golf clubs to lure in his victims.” Yes, it’s an overblown and clumsy metaphor, and one wonders if Markopolos might strain his arm a little, patting himself on the back so much. But being on the record against Madoff nearly a decade before the story broke surely earns him the right to some self-righteous rhetorical excess.

That’s where the fairy tale ends, of course. Ulrich was a Jew in Germany in 1938. After Hitler took power, the idyll gave way to dispassionate ledger-keeping and list-making that categorized that time in history. According to a 1938 inventory of the contents of Ulrich’s apartment, this family had two Persian rugs, 20 neckties, seven purses, two oil paintings, 19 small silver ritual objects, one accordion, one set of skis, 48 linen napkins, 18 hand towels, 42 handkerchiefs, even an ice-cream maker. All markers of middle-class privilege. All markers of a family’s life.

What must Ulrich and Edith—the grandparents of my husband, Jonathan—have thought as Heidelberg changed around them? Starting in 1933, Germany’s Jews lost their government-service and editorial positions. Then they were expelled from the army, saw their citizenship revoked, were prohibited from marrying non-Jews, were banned from public school teaching. Yet relatively few Jews left Germany between 1933 and 1938. They were German. This was their home. The bad times would pass.

One day in 1938, Ulrich’s landlady whispered to him that he had to leave, fast. She’d seen a list on her son’s desk; Ulrich’s name was on it. The landlady’s son was in the SS. Her words convinced Ulrich that it was time to leave the country his family had called home for generations. He procured an invitation to lead High Holiday services at Temple Beth Sholom, a new synagogue in Fredericksburg, Virginia. If he could deliver a sermon in good-enough English, the congregation would hire him as its full-time rabbi. Ulrich’s English was iffy; he studied frantically as Edith packed. They left their home in early September 1938. As a farewell, the shul’s organist played Handel’s “Largo,” as it had at their wedding two years earlier:

Never has there been a shade

of a plant

more dear and lovely,

or more gentle.

Germany confiscated the 42 handkerchiefs, the baby’s chair and potty, the ice cabinet, the fruit plate, the five pans, the four platters, the six metal trays. The inventory notes that the family “acquired for emigration” a fur coat and a gramophone. Those they took with them. Such things, they thought, were needed in America.

A few weeks later, November 9, 1938, was the night of broken glass, Kristallnacht. The city’s synagogues burned. The members of Ulrich’s congregation were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

But not Ulrich and Edith. They lived in Virginia for many years. Ulrich’s English was good enough. It got better. But he didn’t use it to tell his grandchildren any stories of life back in Heidelberg. Ulrich and Edith were always full of secrets, always full of their own kind of brokenness.

Like so many American Jews, they retired to Florida. Jonathan remembers visiting them in their hushed apartment complex when he was a small boy. He self-importantly pushed the elevator button and ran his fingers through their plush carpeting, leaving tracks.

Ulrich and Edith both died in 1973. The baby with whom they left Germany, Jonathan’s uncle, died in 2000. And now Jonathan is reclaiming a sliver of their past: He has decided to become a German citizen. He is working with The German Citizenship Project, which specializes in helping Jewish victims of Nazism and their descendants become re-naturalized in Germany.

It can be tricky to prove that you’re the spawn of a German citizen, what with the unfortunate combination of Germany’s longtime passion for paperwork and the Nazis’ penchant for burning everything in the waning days of the war. And since Germany follows the principle of jus sanguinis, blood law, not every Jew born in Germany actually was a German citizen. The German Citizenship Project is helping Jonathan move the process along—the organization helped around 150 Jews get German citizenship since 2006. (Other Jews, from Israel, the former Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, and the United States have completed the process independently.)

But Jonathan’s not applying alone; he’s applying for our daughters, too. And to my surprise, I am distressed. Not in that old-school, I-would-never-buy-a-Mercedes way: I think today’s Germans have done their fair share of self-examination and breast-beating, and they themselves weren’t the ones wearing the shiny scary boots. My feelings are more ambivalent and sorrowful.

Jonathan wanted our kids to be able to study and work in Europe as European Union passport-holders. I’m happy about that part. No, really. But still, I’m troubled. Maybe the thing that bothers me most is the notion of being the family member left behind. I’m the one apart, the one who’s not in the dominant group. Maybe the thought of them having this identity I won’t have is painful for its symbolism: Children grow up and inevitably go away. It’s hard to imagine when the younger one is still in kindergarten, but I know it’s inevitable.

Another part of my pain has to do not so much with them being German, but with me being an American. This was supposed to be the new Promised Land; American Jews have typically felt about America the way German Jews once felt about Germany. But nowadays, I’m growing increasingly concerned with the state of things. I’m not saying I see barbed wire and stone soap in our own futures; I’m not that kind of hyperbolic drama queen. But I haven’t felt this kind of despair about our country’s direction before. The joy I felt at Barack Obama’s election makes the anxiety I feel now that much more bitter. We have a government seemingly unable to reform health care (I can’t even talk to my friend in England about her adoptive country’s amazing prenatal, midwifery, and newborn care); we have Tea Partiers offering terrifying invective and Republican officials proposing laws that could have chilling effects on civil liberties. We deny science and our role in global warming. It’s not the president I’m freaked out about; it’s everyone else.

Despite the anxiety in the air, at least we can still take pleasure in the small things. Like reality TV: recently, my seven-year-old, Josie, became obsessed with Project Runway, busily sketching dresses and mimicking Heidi Klum’s double-cheek-kiss-punctuated Teutonic sign-off to the evicted designers: “Auf wiedersehen.”

At least if Josie has to leave her country, she’ll be prepared.

A thousand thanks to Michael Fadus for his generous German translation services.

• U.S. Senators on both sides of the aisle had harsh words for Israeli policy on Gaza and the peace process, with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) raising the prospect of lowered aid. [JPost]

• The first “Rabba”—a female Orthodox rabbi—will have her ordination revoked at the insistence of the Rabbinical Council of America. [The Jewish Star]

• Orthodox Jews in the northeast United States faced problems last month as record snowfalls toppled eruvim denoting the boundaries of where you can walk during Shabbat. [NYT]

• Walter Russell Mead weighs in on that Gallup poll. [American Interest]

• Don’t forget to watch the Oscars Sunday night (and don’t forget to use our cheat sheet while you do so). A Serious Man could become the most notably Jewish Best Picture winner ever. The current holder of that honor?

UPDATE: This list should have included An Education (see comments). Your guide follows:

An Education
• What: Nick Hornby adopted this film from a memoir about a young girl in early-’60s England who falls for an older Jewish man, played here by Peter Sarsgaard.

• Up for: Best Picture; Leading Actress (Carey Mulligan); Adapted Screenplay (Hornby).

• Will win: Its best chance is in Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 5. While the older man’s Jewishness isn’t the film’s dominant theme, or even necessarily his dominant characteristic, it’s certainly in there.

And now, the list.

5: Up in the Air
• What: This flick, adopted from Walter Kirn’s novel, stars George Clooney as professional fire-er. Fans say it’s very now; detractors say it’s very mediocre.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Jason Reitman); Adapted Screenplay (Reitman and Sheldon Turner); Actor (George Clooney); Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga); Supporting Acress (Anna Kendrick).

• Will win: Very long shot at Picture, Director, and Supporting Actress; slightly less long shot at Actor; favorite at Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 2. Largely on the strength of Jewy (and kind of insufferable) director/co-writer Reitman.

4: The White Ribbon
• What: German auteur Michael Haneke’s extremely dark film about a village in Germany immediately before World War I.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film; Cinematography.

• Will win: It’s the Foreign Language Film prohibitive favorite.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 3. Not really explicitly Jewish, but it is dark and German. Plus a prominent Jewish writer called it fantastic in a certain magazine of Jewish life and culture.

3: Inglourious Basterds
• What: Quentin Tarantino’s crazy, violent, hilarious, awesome World War II movie about a group of American Jews whose mission is to brutally kill as many Nazis as possible and then assassinate Hitler, as well as a French-Jewish movie theater owner who secretly plots, also, to assassinate Hitler. Spoiler alert: They succeed.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Tarantino); Original Screenplay (Tarantino); Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz); Cinematography; Film Editing; Sound Editing; Sound Mixing.

• Will win: Waltz is all but a lock, and Tarantino is the Original Screenplay (though not Director) favorite. Also a threat in the technical categories.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 7. Except for Waltz’s SS agent and Brad Pitt’s commando leader, the major characters are Jews; the French-Jewish theater owner is even played by a young French-Jewish actress named Mélanie Laurent. On the other hand, at its heart, the movie isn’t about Jews, Nazis, or really anything besides other World War II movies. Also, Liel hated it (though Germans liked it!).

2: Ajami
• What: Israel’s third consecutive Best Foreign Language nominee, and the first in Arabic, its gangster plot depicts Palestinian-Jewish relations in the titular Jaffa neighborhood.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film.

• Will win: It’s a long shot.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 8. I mean, it’s Israeli!

1: A Serious Man
• What: The Coen Brothers’s quiet, comic, and in the end deeply serious tale of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor in late-1960s Minnesota who wonders why his life has gone totally to hell.

• Up for: Picture; Original Screenplay.

• Will win: In a just world, both of them (and Michael Stuhlbarg would have an Actor nomination). In this world, probably nothing.

•Jew rating (out of 10): 10. If it were just that all the characters were Jews, and that the comic climax took place at a bar mitzvah, then it would be an 8, maybe a 9. But this movie wrestles with what it is to be Jewish on the most profound level; short of Yom Kippur services, nothing will make you reflect on your Jewishness like sitting through it. The day after A Serious Man gets no love, go see it, even if it’s your fifth time.

Nominations [The Oscars]

Related: Painfully Good [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee

Specifically, Ellenson predicted that in the next decade, the number of Israeli Reform rabbis will increase from 60 to 130 or more. “What an Israeli expression is going to require is Israelis who are alive to the culture of what Israeli society is,” Ellenson said: a future brand of Israeli Progressive Judaism will not “progress very far at all” if the movement consists solely of Americans. However, he acknowledged that many of the Israelis studying at HUC’s campus in Israel were influenced by a trip to the Diaspora, where they gain “a broader sense of what the possibilities are.”

As for how Progressive Judaism will grow within an Israeli political and economic system that doesn’t support it, Ellenson argued that it will be able to move outside of the existing structures; he cited two thriving congregations in Tel Aviv that receive funding from the municipality.

Ellenson made it clear that Reform Judaism’s Israeli future is about Israel’s future, too. “You cannot have a country where 20 percent of the people… cannot have a union sanctified,” he argued, adding, “this type of monopoly is seen as pernicious. … I don’t want to be overly Pollyanna-ish about it, but I do believe you can begin to see certain chinks in the formerly monolithic armor.”

The central question of the evening was “Engagement or Regime Change?” In one corner: Michael Ledeen, a proponent for regime change in Tehran ever since the current regime came to power, 30 years ago. In the other: Flynt Leverett, just back from his trip to Iran, who believes we should deal with the Iranian regime there is, not the one we wish we had. I’ve written extensively (and critically) of Leverett and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett.

You should listen to or read the whole thing, as they say. Leverett maintains that Washington should engage Tehran to advance U.S. strategic interests, but it appears that the concessions must come entirely out of our account. Why have six presidents—from Carter to Obama—failed to reach a deal with the Islamic Republic? Because we haven’t bent over far enough.

“I believe that the Iranian leadership has wanted that kind of fundamental realignment,” Leverett said, “and that they would respond positively to it.” No doubt.

Iran: Engagement or Regime Change? [Atlantic Council]

Related: Grand Bargainers [Tablet Magazine]
The Immigrant [Tablet Magazine]
Iran’s Man in Washington [Tablet Magazine]

So we learn in a forthcoming book by that aide, Yehuda Avner. Rabin was extremely skeptical about Arafat’s desire and ability to make lasting peace, but, according to Avner, Rabin also felt that the alternative—the rise of Hamas and other jihadist groups, and the subsequent transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a political one to a religious one—was far, far less promising. “While a political conflict is possible to solve through negotiation and compromise,” Rabin argued, “there are no solutions to a theological conflict. Then it is jihad— religious war: their God against our God. Were they to win, our conflict would go from war to war, and from stalemate to stalemate.”

17 years after the signing of the Oslo Accords (and 15 years after Rabin’s death), that sounds nauseatingly familiar. The conflict is more religious than it was—on both sides—and peace remains elusive. Which does not prove that Rabin chose the worse or worst of his options: he very well may have had no good ones. However, it does mean that the path he took, from the perspective of the present anyway, failed.

Where Rabin was indisputably prescient was in his theory (anticipating that of Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg in this piece) that Israel could actually find common cause with its Arab neighbors over shared enmity with Iran. He apparently told Avner that “Iranian-inspired Islamic fundamentalism” threatens Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia as much as it does Israel. He continued:

Iran is the banker, pouring millions into the West Bank and Gaza in the form of social welfare and health and education programs, so that it can win the hearts of the population and feed religious fanaticism.

Thus, a confluence of interest has arisen between Israel and the inner circle, whose long-term strategic interest is the same as ours: to lessen the destabilizing consequences from the outer circle. At the end of the day, the inner circle recognizes they have less to fear from Israel than from their Muslim neighbors, not least from radicalized Islamic powers going nuclear.

So if you see any “radicalized Islamic powers going nuclear,” do speak up.

Rabin Thought Peace With Arafat Was Only A ‘Long Shot’ [JPost]
Related: How Iran Could Save The Middle East [The Atlantic]

That path is the Communist —> anti-Communist —> hawkish —> outright conservative trajectory that broadly defines a certain generation of what we call neoconservatives. The recently departed Irving Kristol and the very much still alive and vigorous Norman Podhoretz both did this (though Podhoretz was never so far left); Kristol, who made his rightward turn in response to the New Left of the late 1960s, might be consider the archetypal neocon.

Beichman, though, was anti-Communist by the ‘40s, and on the right not long after: in other words, well before Kristol, Podhoretz, and the rest. (Others turned away from Communism around the time that Beichman did, but stayed liberal, not continuing over to the right-wing side of the ideological spectrum.) In that sense, Kristol, Podhoretz, and the many who came after them owe Beichman a good chunk of their paychecks.

What’s left are the stories. Here are two.

First, from David Brooks, is a glimpse into the milieu of the New York Intellectuals:

One afternoon, Beichman was walking home when his wife Carroll came rushing out onto the street saying that Diana Trilling had just called, and Arnold should hurry over to Commentary editor Eliot Cohen’s apartment, for something terrible had happened. Beichman arrived to find that Cohen had committed suicide by placing a plastic bag over his head. His body was lying in the kitchen. Soon word spread, and people started pouring into the apartment. Shocked by the sight of the body, they started drinking. The body could not be moved until the coroner arrived, but friends kept arriving, pouring themselves cocktails, and even bringing in roast beef sandwiches. At first, the conversation was about Cohen, but then it drifted to so and so’s review of such and such, and so and so’s essay about this and that. “It became like an unusual cocktail party,” Beichman remembers, with Cohen’s body there in the kitchen.

Those were the days!

And, from the magazine of Beichman’s alma mater, Columbia College, in an excellent profile by Margaret Hunt Gram, we get this tale of what life was like for the editor-in-chief of the campus daily at a party in, I can’t resist mentioning, my own freshman dorm:

With Hitler in power in Germany and tensions running high, Columbia’s Jewish Students’ Society held a dance that year in John Jay Hall to celebrate Purim. As soon as the lights went low, a group of fraternity members crept onto the balcony over the dance floor and threw down handfuls of Swastikas, shouting ‘Down with the Jews.’ After the offending students fled the scene, the adviser of the Jewish Students’ Society found Beichman and asked him to keep Spectator from publishing the story, saying it would be damaging to Jewish students on campus.

Beichman recalls responding, “How can we not publish the story, which was seen by hundreds of people at a dance?” The story ran.

Arnold Beichman, Political Activist, Dies at 96 [NYT]
The Happy Cold Warrior [The Weekly Standard]
Arnold Beichman ’34: Anti-Communist Warrior [Columbia College Today]

• Syria accused Israel of planting uranium traces at the suspicious compound that IDF planes bombed two years ago. [AP/JPost]

• The IDF is readying crucial, exculpatory information regarding a strike in last year’s Gaza conflict that the Goldstone Report called illegal. [Haaretz]

• The Obama administration wishes to exempt China from new Congressional sanctions aimed primarily at Iran in order to coax its support at the United Nations; this, in turn, is angering Japan and South Korea. [WP]

• With Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) stepping down from the post, the new chair of the super-powerful Ways and Means Committee is Jewish Congressman Sander Levin (D-Michigan). [NYT]

• The i’s are dotted, the t’s are crossed, and it’s official: on June 5, Orthodox rabbi-in-training and middleweight champion Yuri Foreman will face Puerto Rican sensation Miguel Cotto at Yankee Stadium. The House That Ruth Built hasn’t seen a bout since 1976, when, in a controversial decision, Ken Norton lost to Muhammad Ali. [AP/ESPN]

Haneke—whose earlier films include Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and Caché—has always been interested in the mechanics of brutality, the way in which aggressive impulses are funneled through and acted upon by the culture at large. Described as “Europe’s philosopher of violence,” he has never been one to concern himself with the sheer entertainment value of his work, with cajoling an audience into forgetting that it is watching a cautionary tale disguised as a cinematic venture. In The White Ribbon, he presents an idyllic rural setting in northern Germany and its God-fearing populace on the eve of World War I and, scene by laconic scene, gradually reveals the twisted passions and hostile impulses that seethe beneath the community’s sunlit fields, neat homes, and pious pedagogy. Haneke wants us to take note: This is how cruelty is learned, passed down from generation to generation in a casually escalating pattern, until the collective itself becomes infected and the tormented become, in their turn, the tormentors.

Shot in a silvery black-and white—the cinematographer, Christian Berger, originally shot the film in color and then drained it away—and at a deliberately unhurried pace, The White Ribbon describes the strange, seemingly meaningless crimes that take place during 1913 in the near-feudal village of Eichwald as recalled by the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) who is still trying to make sense of things many years later. Could they, he wonders aloud in his shaky voice, “perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country?” These events include an accidental death and a suicide, the burning down of a barn, the seemingly random torture of two children, and the sudden disappearance of the local physician (Rainer Bock) and the midwife (Susan Lothar) who was his lover before being mercilessly cast aside. (She is saddled with a child with Down syndrome, who may or may not be the doctor’s offspring.) Things begin to go awry immediately when the doctor is seriously injured after his horse stumbles over a tripwire that is found to have been deliberately stretched between two trees. Police are called in, and various people are questioned but the mystery of who set the trap goes unsolved; resolution interests this filmmaker far less than the creation of ambiguities.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to various members of the hamlet, most of whom are complicit in the stiflingly repressive order that marks the treatment of children, women, and underlings. These include the village pastor (Burghart Klaussner), an ardent disciplinarian and moral bully in true Protestant German tradition who canes two of his terrified children as punishment for some small infraction and ties his oldest son’s arms to  his bed to keep him from the dire crime of masturbation. There is also the Baron and Baronness, who view the townspeople with a mixture of dread and contempt and view each other with equal animus; the Baron’s steward, who lusts after the young nurse who has been hired to look after the Baroness’s twins and beats one of his sons within an inch of his life for stealing a wooden flute; and the doctor himself, who sexually abuses his daughter on the sly when he isn’t busy tending to the sick or indulging in gratuitously cruel remarks to the cringing midwife he no longer desires.

The White Ribbon is heart-stoppingly beautiful to watch, which makes the events that take place all the more disturbing. There are poignant moments and affecting subplots, often involving exchanges between children and adults—as when the pastor’s youngest son, not yet ground into submission, offers him his pet bird to cheer him up, or when a little boy insists on having the mystery of death explained to him by his older sister. But on the whole, Haneke traffics—as he has done in earlier films—in the inexplicably sinister and the openly unwholesome. The film’s title refers to the white ribbons the pastor’s two oldest children—a boy and a girl—are humiliatingly forced to wear until they have proved to their father that they are cleansed of wrongdoing. It’s impossible not to think of the Jewish yellow star or perhaps even the Nazi armband—victim and victimizer, the disempowered and the all-powerful.

It’s impossible, as well, not to think of the whole phenomenon of “soul murder”—of destroying a child’s will—that has been written about at length by Alice Miller, who, in her 1980 book For Your Own Good, directly relates Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism to his brutal upbringing. Or of the German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber’s 1903 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which details an extravagant madness brought on in part by the cruel regimen he was brought up under in keeping with his father’s theories about fitness and morality, and which was the subject of a short study by Freud. Still, even if one isn’t inclined to a view of Nazism or fascism that posits its roots in child abuse instead of political considerations, Haneke’s austere yet curiously undogmatic indictment of what turns out to be a village of the damned makes a convincing case that cruelty, like charity, begins at home—and spreads outward from there.

As I left the movie theater, I saw the two yeshiva bochurs engaged in intense conversation as they walked quickly ahead of me, their black coats flapping, along Columbus Avenue. What, I wondered, had they taken from the film? Had they identified with the oppressors or the oppressed? And then I remembered a comment my older brother, who attended Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh in Israel, had once repeated to me, told to him by the spiritual guide of the yeshiva, based on his observation of students from different backgrounds: “Germans break their children’s legs before they learn to walk.”

Daphne Merkin is a Tablet Magazine contributing editor and is writing a book for Nextbook Press.

Remember you promised to come on the holiday
One hour after dark.
For my part, I won’t keep count of wraths
Or wrongs till you come.
And you: Don’t believe a word I say
Even when it’s wondrous or perverse.

I lie down to sleep like ordinary mortals
And I don’t practice magic.
I forgo the honors in advance,
I bear no resemblance to the daughter of the gods.
And you: Remember when and where.

The common comparison of Ravikovitch with American poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton is not really apt: Ravikovitch writes about herself more ironically than those confessional poets, and is more hardheadedly engaged with the world around her. Still, it is easy to see why the comparison gets made. Ravikovitch’s poem “Clockwork Doll,” from her first collection, published when she was 23, caused a sensation with its cold, ironic, feminist anger:

I was a clockwork doll, but then
That night I turned round and round
And fell on my face, cracked on the ground,
And they tried to piece me together again.

Then once more I was a proper doll
And all my manner was nice and polite.
But I became damaged goods that night,
A fractured twig poised for a fall.

If you compare this poem with, say, Plath’s brilliant “The Applicant” (“A living doll, everywhere you look./It can sew, it can cook,/It can talk, talk, talk./It works, there is nothing wrong with it”), it is hard to feel that Ravikovitch’s poem has the same kind of power. Much of Ravikovitch’s early work, in fact, comes across in Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation as swaddled in literariness—it is too “poetic,” in the bad sense. This is not because the translation is inadequate, though I cannot know for sure; but I suspect it is because the translation faithfully attempts to preserve a quality that made Ravikovitch so exciting to Hebrew speakers—her continuous engagement with the vocabulary and conventions of the Bible and the modern Hebrew classics.

In “Clockwork Doll,” for instance, the translators note that Ravikovitch’s metaphor of the fractured twig, which is rather banal in English, would be clear to the Israeli reader as an allusion to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “A Twig Fell.” In that poem, Bialik compares himself to a tree that cannot bear fruit, an image of disconnection and despair that Ravikovitch cleverly recast for her own purposes. This kind of allusion is, to continue the metaphor, the root system of any poetry, and the element that most resists transplantation into a new language. Nor does it necessarily help matters when Bloch and Kronfeld introduce what sound like allusions to well-known English-language poems into their translation. “Even for a Thousand Years” begins “I cannot bring a world quite round/and there’s no sense in trying”; but was Ravikovitch actually alluding quite so explicitly to Wallace Stevens’s “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (“I cannot bring a world quite round,/Although I patch it as I can”)?

But the allusion most important to Ravikovitch’s early work is Biblical, and here Bloch and Kronfeld offer indispensable guidance. Words that sound ordinary, or at best slightly formal, in English are often shown to be meaningfully peculiar in Hebrew. Ravikovitch makes excellent use of hapax legomena, words that appear only once in the Bible, and thus carry a very particular charge for the Hebrew reader. The first poem in her first book, “The Love of an Orange,” perhaps her most famous poem, is passionately carnal, in a way that would become Ravikovitch’s hallmark:

An orange did love
The man who ate it,
To its flayer it brought
Flesh for the teeth.

But the carnality takes on a whole new meaning when we learn, from the translators’ note, that the word here rendered as “flesh” is not the standard Hebrew basar, but barot. This word appears only once in the Bible, in Lamentations 4:10, a description of the siege of Jerusalem: “With their own hands, tenderhearted women have cooked their own children; such became their fare (barot), in the disaster of my poor people.” It is an open question how many of Ravikovitch’s original readers would have known their Bible well enough to understand this shocking allusion, but the translators make the poet’s intention clear, in this and many similar cases.

The allusiveness and the formality of Ravikovitch’s early poetry are largely cast off starting with her third collection, titled with meaningful plainness The Third Book. This appeared in 1969, at a time when poets across the world were in search of a more relaxed and plainspoken style. There is a new tone, sardonic and self-aware, in poems such as “Portrait”:

She sits in the house for days on end.
She reads the paper.
(Come on, don’t you?)
She doesn’t do what she’d like to do,
she’s got inhibitions….
In winter she’s cold, really cold,
colder than other people.
She bundles up but she’s still cold.

This informality does not mean, however, that Ravikovitch has given up her large subjects. When she writes about love in her own voice—rather than as “Tirzah” or “Shunra,” personae from her earlier poems—she is bitterly impressive:

I ask
with a quizzical look:
What else can happen to me
that hasn’t happened to me yet?
I dangle from a cloud
without wings, without a beak
but I don’t fall.
Once when I was in love
I could no longer feel
the cold or the heat.

As she gets older, we come to know Ravikovitch differently, and better. We see her loneliness and sadness, her worries about money and reputation, and—in a series of deeply moving poems—her troubled love for her son, Ido:

A tiny lizard on the wall of your house, Ido,
that’s what I want to be….
With no purpose,
enclosed in a space
where you inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale
oxygen.
We’re not talking about love, Ido.

Starting with the Lebanon War of 1982, Ravikovitch became an outspoken critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestianians. Though not all her protest poems transcend the subjects that provoked them, the provocations themselves—the burning alive of an Arab worker by Jewish arsonists, the killing of a pregnant woman’s fetus “under circumstances relating to state security”—are sufficiently terrible to make the verses powerful. And yet the Ravikovitch who lives on in the memory is less often the public conscience than the private sufferer, the poet who speaks in “The Window”:

So what did I manage to do?
Me—for years I did nothing.
Just looked out the window.
Raindrops soaked into the lawn,
year in, year out….
Winter and summer revolved among blades of grass.
I slept as much as possible.
That window was as big as it needed to be.
Whatever was needed
I saw in that window.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series. This piece originally appeared in The New Republic.

No need to thank me, however. I was just doing my bit. Or rather, Kratos was: He is the protagonist of the God of War video game franchise, the third installment of which, to be released next week, is easily the most eagerly anticipated game of the year.

The premise is simple: As the first game begins, Kratos, a Spartan warrior with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s midriff and Naomi Campbell’s temper, is on a mission to subdue Ares, the God of War. Through a series of frightening flashbacks, we learn that Kratos had once served Ares, an association that led to an abundance of mutilated old ladies as well as to the gruesome deaths of Kratos’s own family members. Haunted by his bloodied past, Kratos seeks revenge on his former boss; eventually, he becomes a god, to the chagrin of many on Mount Olympus who find his scarred face not pretty enough for the pantheon. Deserted and betrayed, poor Kratos must fight the entirety of Greek mythology to clear his conscience and calm his soul.

Both the original title and its sequel have been deservedly celebrated for their elegant gameplay, and guiding Kratos through a bacchanalia of hacking, slashing, severing, and stabbing provides gamers with hours of glorious fun. But the series’ success, I believe, owes more to morality than it does to mayhem.

Consider this: At the end of the first game, Kratos, having finally defeated the evil Ares, begs Athena to honor her word and free him of his nightmares. No can do, says the goddess. Your past sins, she tells Kratos, may be forgiven but they will never be forgotten. Distraught, he leaps off the highest cliff, preferring a crushing death to a life spent in the company of the ghosts of his past. Athena saves Kratos from his fall and crowns him the new God of War. Even as a deity, his demons taunt him still.

It’s a stunning spell of complexity for a medium commonly believed to be all about mindless fun. As we blistered-thumbed devotees know all too well, video games present perhaps the most fascinating arena in current popular culture for the serious contemplation of weighty moral questions.

I realize this is an audacious claim, but a few hours with a controller at hand will convince even the most stony skeptic that there’s real thinking inside the video game box. Sometimes, players get their morality fix indirectly; playing as Kratos, we’re led to believe that if only we kill enough people we’ll forever be rid of our burdens, a belief shattered with each pixilated prowler we slay. Other games demand that we make direct choices that influence the outcome of the game and reveal more than a little about our own dispositions. In Fallout 3, for example, a dystopic action game released in 2008, one particularly brilliant sequence introduces the player to a laboratory controlled by a mad scientist, in which people sleeping securely in special pods dream up virtual scenarios they perceive as real. The scientist in charge, a distorted sadist, demands that the player commit a series of increasingly evil deeds, from breaking up a happy marriage to killing an innocent woman, acts perpetrated in the virtual environment alone that have no real consequences. The player may obey, or he may trigger a certain sequence and bring about the real death of everybody in the laboratory. In the context of the game, the latter option is presented as a mercy killing; no fate is worse than a dormant life of false consciousness dictated by a deranged doctor. And yet people will die. Which is nobler? Which more moral? How we choose makes a world of a difference.

With my knuckles numb from exhaustive play, I turned off the Playstation and picked up the Bible to read this week’s haftorah. In it, the prophet Ezekiel delivers God’s speech to the errant Israelites, promising the Chosen People that even though they had sinned, the Lord will nonetheless redeem them.

“And I will sprinkle clean water upon you,” God promises, “and you will be clean; from all your impurities and from all your abominations will I cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.”

I have no idea if God is much of a gamer, but if He is, He’s certainly familiar with the natural progression of video games: You play, you die, you try again. Game over? Press continue, and play until you win.

In a sense, this is the biggest difference between video games and real life, that unhappy parade of days that never allows us the opportunity to relive our grimmest moments until we manage to set everything straight. But video games and life are more similar than we imagine. Ezekiel knows it: This week’s haftorah is meant as an accompaniment to the story of the Golden Calf, and the prophet is reassuring his people that no matter how badly they mess up their covenant with God, the Almighty will always give them another chance at the game, another shot at getting it right.

It must be so: Unless we’re allowed to play and play some more, we could never reach perfection, and in life, just like in video games, the only way to get it right is to keep on trying. Just ask Kratos.

So it was that, on the morning of the pogrom, Salo was seated on a cabbage crate, gazing at Rabbi Eliezer’s slightly distorted features, their beatific peacefulness having invaded his timorous heart. All about him the stacked slabs of ice were carved into shelves and niches, which contained fish, fowl, and barrels of kvass. In one recess Leybl the hatmaker’s poker-stiff dog Ashmodai awaited the spring thaw for its burial. Rime coated each jar and jeroboam until it resembled a vessel made of spun sugar; ice stalactites hung from the vault of the ceiling like fangs. But the warmth Salo felt in the rebbe’s presence (enhanced by his sheepskin parka, whose collar he pulled over his ears) practically deposed the arctic chill of the grotto in its subaqueous light, a light that seemed to emanate from the ice itself. “The Chasids sit shivah while you sit and shiver,” Salo’s father had complained, but in the rebbe’s presence all the fearful chimeras of the boy’s imagination were dispelled, and the world seemed almost an idyll, a winter pastorale. As a consequence, Salo never heard the cries of the tortured and defiled, the keening women and the breaking glass, nor did he smell the smoke from the burning synagogue. It was only when the sexton, Itche Beilah Peyse’s, who’d lost his mind, began to howl like a hyena in the street that Salo’s own peace was finally disturbed.

Bestirring his broad behind to go and see what was happening, he crawled up the slippery ramp and wriggled out of the hatch through which the large rectangular ice cakes were slid into the grotto. He stumbled down the hill into the village, past the Shabbos boundary markers where the snow was stained in patches with what appeared to be plum preserves. Outside the door of the smoldering timber synagogue a mother tried to revive her fallen son by pumping air into his lungs with a pair of bellows; a violated daughter begged her father on her knees in the ruts of the market platz not to disown her. The procession of wagons hauling bodies, already becoming rigid, to the cemetery vied with the jauntier parade of peasants carrying off samovars, chamber pots, a trumpet-speakered phonograph, a cuckoo clock. Plodding forward in his klunky topboots, Salo accidentally toppled the cantor Shikl Bendover, who had died of fright still standing, like Lot’s wife. He paused to reerect the dead man, then realized what he was doing, and understood that the scene he had entered eclipsed any active fancies his mind might entertain. It put to rest forever his habit of ghoulish invention, for which Salo, who began then and there to grow up, was grateful.

He stepped into the smoky, slat-shingled dwelling that he and his father called home, where he discovered to his head-swimming sorrow that he’d been made an orphan like his father before him. Yosl King of Cholera lay on the raked clay floor in the stiff leather apron he’d donned for work, his head pincered by his own ice tongs. The handles of the iron tongs branched above his crimped skull like a giant wishbone, the blood streaming in crimson ribbons from his ears. Salo retched down his front and fell to his knees, leaning forward to touch those of his father’s features that were still recognizable: a blue knuckle swollen from arthritis, a pooched lower lip like a water leech. For an indefinite time he lay prostrate without the least inclination ever to rise again, until he remembered that he now had a higher calling. Wiping his mouth and dabbing at his eyes, Salo crawled forward to wrench apart the ice tongs. He got to his feet and began to rummage in the debris of the ransacked hovel, eventually locating a pair of candles which he lit with a sulfur-tipped match and placed at either end of the murdered man’s outstretched form. All the while murmuring Kaddish, he threw a cloth over the ancient mirror, its surface clouded with floes of mercury; then he squeezed himself behind the tile stove, scalding his tush in the process, and pried loose a wallboard in back of which Yosl had hidden his meager treasures—a handful of groschen and some ducats as worthless as slugs, an unsigned postcard with a sepia view of Lodz, a dented thimble that had belonged to his wife. Salo thrust it all into a capacious pants pocket along with the crust of black bread with dried herring that his father had laid aside on the table for his lunch. Stooping to right a toppled chair, he found himself gripping it tightly, swinging it into the stovepipe, which burst apart, releasing a naked tongue of flame that tickled the ceiling.

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