Seattle Takes Down Those Despicable Anti-Israel Bus Ads: In Fairness, Credit Goes to Pamela Geller and David Horowitz

For the record, it should be noted that Seattle made the bus-ads decision today only after Pamela Geller’s “American Freedom Defense Initiative” bought 25 bus ads (twice as many as the anti-Israel ones) with an equally confrontational message showing bloody victims from Hamas terror bus-bombings with the header: “Hamas Terror: Your Tax Dollars at Work,” and then David Horowitz entered to buy yet another several-thousand-dollars-worth of confrontational bus ads titled: “Palestinian War Crimes: Your Tax Dollars at Work.”

Today, Pam Geller’s advertising representative first got a phone call that the Kings Metro system had decided to refuse her ads, then received a letter from Sharon Shinbo, in Seattle Metro’s Sales and Customer Services department, advising her that the Geller ads were being denied under rules pertaining to running ads that are “so objectionable under contemporary community standards as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of, or interference with the transportation system” and that are “so insulting, degrading or offensive as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will incite or produce imminent lawless action in the form of retaliation, vandalism or other breach of public safety, peace and order.” Therefore: “The content of the advertisements and the unprecedented response that the County has received to another recently proposed ad of a similar nature show that the American Freedom Defense Initiative ads do not meet the standards set forth in these sections, including among other things, that they pose an unacceptable risk of harm, disruption and interference with the transportation system and other breaches of the public safety, peace and order.”

It is my humble opinion that the efforts of the Jewish community of Seattle were virtually nugatory in obtaining the satisfactory result that all the ads are being rejected. Nonetheless, Seattle residents may anticipate that the community leaders will race to the mails to rustle up a last surge of tax-deductible donations from the locals before the tax-year ends next week.

Truth is an important weapon. It is important for us to know and to acknowledge that the real turning point came when Geller and Horowitz each used their respective organizations to buy a large number of equally confrontational ads. Those ad-buys guaranteed that the real goal would be obtained: not that Geller’s and Horowitz’s ads would run, but instead that no ads on the subject would run.

Geller and Horowitz deserve the thanks that few will give them, while the local Jewish groups will take the credit next week.

That’s how these liberals work. Free Speech for everyone. Free Speech for everyone. Bash Israel on the city buses. We can’t stop the ads even if we disapprove of the views because we protect all people’s right to speech.

Until the target is not Israel or Dead White Protestant Males. Then they suddenly find the Supreme Court language from Chaplinsky (1942) and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). They know that Jews will not vandalize the twelve buses with anti-Israel ads. And they know what they are going to face if there are 30 buses with anti-Palestinian ads depicting . . . blown-up buses.

The Flotilla of the Damned:

Who in the world runs private “supply ships” through naval blockades?

When mass murder was rampant in Rwanda, did the “International Solidarity Movement” run supply flotillas? What would Kamal Ataturk have done if a civilian flotilla were sent to Armenia while the Turks were committing genocide there? When President John F. Kennedy blockaded Cuba, would anyone have tried running a flotilla through to Havana? If they had, what would the U.S. Navy have done if they refused to stop? Has anyone tried running a parade of boats to Guantanamo Bay to assure that America’s Gitmo prisoners are well provided for? If America ultimately maximizes sanctions against Iran, blockading Ahmadinejad’s ports, how will we respond to flotillas seeking to ram through?

Israel seems positioned as the target of every bully or wannabe-tough-guy who wishes to dabble in social justice. She is perceived as the kid with thick-framed glasses whose lunch money is easiest to steal. For left-anarchist groups like the International Solidarity Movement, Israel is the target for a radical-chic war game, perhaps to alleviate students’ residual stress from just-completed final exams. Many of them may have been unaware that the International Solidarity Movement is a front group created by Palestinian Arabs, funded by Palestinian Arabs, with direct ties to Arab terrorists. Even so, a hint of the flotilla’s unilaterally hostile agenda against Israel should have been apparent when ISM leaders refused a plea from the parents of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006, to transmit a letter and package to him if they arrived in Gaza.

Israel disappointed the naifs who were lured by ISM as window dressing for the flotilla confrontation. Israel is a real country with real people who have real hopes for happiness and real aspirations for peace. Her borders are open to tourists. Her cafes and night clubs are vibrant and safe. People in her land – even outsiders – can think what they want, say what they want, even politically mobilize as they want. They have protests running all over the country. Try that in Iran.

When three youngsters inadvertently hike into Iranian territory, they end up in prison – and they remain incarcerated there for a year and more. Two American journalists journey into North Korea, and promptly are locked up in jail, unable to leave until an American President personally flies in to beg the country’s dictator personally to free them. An American journalist travels into Pakistan to conduct an interview and is butchered by Moslem fanatics. An American innocent goes into Iraq and gets himself beheaded by Islamofascists.

As juxtaposed against the real murderous oppressors of the world, Israel seems a safe place to bring one’s Berkeley activism onto the world scene for a week on the high seas after final exams. No one tells the American activists that those “freedom songs” the ringleaders are singing in Arabic actually are lyrics about massacring Jews. Unknown to the volunteers, the “peace activists” already have armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, slingshots and marbles, and firebombs for the real action they are planning for the cruise. Instead, the naïve board the flotilla, cheerfully thinking: “Let’s run through a naval blockade today – won’t that be fun?”

Well, no, that won’t be fun. Israel’s neighbors have forced her to learn to survive amid a sea of hostility, surrounded by more than twenty countries that want to destroy her. Her border problems are not illegal immigrants trying to run a porous fence from one side, while people on the other side bring in all these dimes that jam up vending machines. Rather, she is bordered by the worst gang of murderous cutthroats to have run a polity since, perhaps, Attila the Hun. For Hamas, death is an industry.

Hamas runs Gaza. They are so murderous that terrorists from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah gang have fled. The nominal “President” of the “Palestine Authority,” Mahmoud Abbas stays out of Gaza because he expects he will get butchered there if he shows up. In Gaza, the internationally outlawed Hamas terror organization rules the streets, arbitrarily tortures and takes Arab Moslem opponents off to their deaths, and rules a veritable Gangland.

Hamas came into power because Israel, in one of its idyllic moments, opted unilaterally to “take a risk for peace” and abandoned all Israeli assets and properties in Gaza, forcibly uprooted and removed all Israeli citizens resident there, even dug up deceased Jews for reburial outside Gaza, and handed Gaza to Mahmoud Abbas. He lost it soon after to the Hamas thugs, as they seized power and killed Abbas’s own terrorists. Hamas then converted the Gaza region into an armed camp.

Hamas receives international funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars and euros – and the money goes disproportionately for weapons like the rockets that Hamas incessantly shoots into Israel. To get even more weapons, Hamas has constructed a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels beneath its border with Egypt and even taxes weapons smugglers for the privilege. They need those tunnels because even Egypt has to blockade Gaza.

Israel is compelled to blockade Gaza at this time. Countries like Syria and Iran already supply deadly military weaponry to Nasrallah’s Hezbollah, along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Having shot at Israel everything they had in 2006, Hezbollah finally sued for a truce when she ran out of weapons. Israel was assured that an emergency United Nations peacekeeping force would enter the terrain, and Hezbollah would not be re-supplied. Yet, today, Hezbollah has restocked so completely, with the aid of Iran and Syria, that she is more heavily armed than she was in 2006.

Israel cannot control the borders throughout Lebanon and therefore is stymied in relying on the United Nations to do what the UN never could achieve. By contrast, Israel can prevent Gaza from being stockpiled similarly, and she is obligated to protect her citizens.. In January 2002, a cargo ship the Karin-A, sailed for Gaza, ostensibly loaded with civilian supplies – food, flowers, children’s books. When Israel’s navy boarded the ship in the Red Sea, they instead found the vessel loaded chock-full with rockets, grenades, and anti-tank missiles. That is why Israel blockades and needs to blockade Gaza.

Even so, despite nonsensical slanders against Israel, ample food supplies are evident throughout Gaza. Medical supplies get through. So do fancy restaurants and Olympic-sized swimming pools.

When college youngsters decide that it would be romantic to get out their Ché Guevara t-shirts and play “freedom fighter” – maybe even get some great cell phone photos for friends, some great tweets, and even a “How-I-Spent-My-Summer” experience to “ace” a college termpaper back home for their class in “The Politics of Liberation” – they need to understand that Israel is not on summer break.

Next time, try Darfur.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S GREAT PYRAMID SCHEME: The Two-State Solution as Final Solution

The Obama Administration has endeavored to move American Mideast policy away from a traditional understanding of Israel's security concerns and historic rights, towards a view that renders undue currency towards Mideast political theories that have not served America well, aimed more at appeasing terrorism than at assuring justice.

My extensive commentary on the subject may be found at: http://rabbidov.com/twostate.htm

After you have read it, you may circulate it as you wish, even reprinting the text rather than merely forwarding the link, but you are limited only by these two caveats: (i) you may not edit the text; (ii) the link must appear with any forwarding you do.

Why I Love Israel and Am Proud to Be Judged by Her Standards

Because I am Jewish, of course, I love Israel. It is my cultural patrimony, even as America, the land of my birth and that of my parents, is the country I love and to which I owe my allegiance. In fact, after I lived in Israel for two years during my 30s, I came back to America more appreciative than ever for the unique things and values that America has given me. The English language and the puns within it. The kinds of opportunities that are unique to this great land. Broad-based free enterprise.

The Yankees. The Mets. The Giants. The Jets.

The Lakers.

But, as a Jew, I am inevitably bound culturally with Israel. And – like it or not – I am judged by my fellow Americans, to one degree or another, by what Israel does. And that, too, is why I am so proud of Israel. I am so proud that people judge me – an American – by what Israel does. By what she is. And by what she does not do. And by what she is not.

In the middle of the Middle East – where modern-day terror has its birthplace and its breadbasket – Israel is an island of freedom, free speech, democracy. Anyone can say whatever he or she wants. The one country in the entire Middle East where there is freedom -- and safety in freedom.

The Jewish religion is protected there, and so are all other religions. Can you imagine a Jew being free and safe in Saudi Arabia? Heck, Jews and Christians are not even allowed to set foot in Mecca. No Mecca for us there.

In all of world history, which has seen so many countries pull free people out of Africa to enslave them, only one country ever risked its citizens’ lives in covert operations aimed at extricating African slaves from Africa to set them free as full citizens in their land: Israel. When Vietnamese “boat people” risked their very lives in rickety crafts on the high seas in a desperate effort to escape Communism and totalitarianism, Israel opened its doors and rescued survivors, who today are third generation Vietnamese Israelis.

In Israel there is hope, even though all the surrounding populations aim their weapons at her. Her northern border is not Canada but the terrorist Hezbollah who rain rockets on her. Her southern border is not Mexico but the terrorist Hamas who swear to destroy Israel. And yet, somehow, Israelis keep believing in peace. No one in her region is willing to negotiate a sincere peace with her, yet she remains a nation ever-optimistic that the terrorists someday will change course. From the Palestine Authority to Hamas to Hezbollah, the leaders of those polities manipulate their children, through corrupted kids’ television shows and summer camps and hateful school texts, to hate the Jews next door. And yet Israel teaches peace and mutual acceptance, preparing its children for the day when the others stop hating.

I am so proud to be judged by the standards that Israel has set.

Parsha - D'varim

I primarily do two kinds of teaching: teaching Torah classes in a wide range of areas within my extended congregational community and teaching California Civil Procedure and Advanced Torts at law school. As the terms winds down, my law students often ask whether I would mind devoting time in our last class of the term to reviewing material we have studied. And that is the way of teaching. One begins by explaining where she is going with her message or class, one teaches or writes accordingly, and one concludes by reviewing for her students or readers what she has taught.

In Parshat D’varim we begin a new book, Deuteronomy, the fifth and final volume of the “Five Books of Moses” or the Pentateuch. In Hebrew, we call it the Chumash or the Torah. Christians call it the Old Testament. Each of these names implicitly perceives the Book of D’varim as part-and-parcel of an integrated package.

Primarily in the late19th century – only a bit more than a century ago – Julius Wellhausen, a German scholar who undertook to analyze the Pentatuech, emerged with his “Documentary Hypothesis,” arguing that the Torah was not the revealed word of the Creator to the Jewish People but instead had been authored individually by several different contributors. One of those authors, he submitted, was the Deuteronomist, the supposed human author of the Book of D’varim. Wellhausen posited that the presence within Deuteronomy of so much text that recounts and repeats the substance of earlier Chumash volumes proves a separate human author.

Interestingly, many non-observant Jewish historians and theologians see in Wellhausen’s writings an unmistakable reflection of the intense anti-Semitism that pervaded German academia in the late 19th century. It was incomprehensible for so many Germans, including intellectuals, to fathom that the Master of the Universe would have chosen the Jewish People, as among all nations on earth, to have received the Torah in their millions amid thunder and lightning, dramatic Shofar sounding and the glory of the Divine revelation at Mount Sinai. It was easier to posit that a bunch of individuals had written book parts. The school of literary provided an angle.

For those of us who believe with absolute intellectual certitude that the entire Chumash is the exact Word of the Creator, down to each letter – Divinely revealed in Ten Pronouncements to the Nation at Mount Sinai and further Divinely revealed in 613 laws orally taught to Moses atop the mountain and thereafter in text that Moses transcribed by direct dictation from Hashem’s “mouth” during the peregrinations through Sinai – the repetition in D’varim is not redundancy but review. If Moses was anything, he was Moshe Rabbeinu – Moses our Teacher. And, just as a trial attorney sums up for a jury in an elegantly woven fabric everything they have heard and experienced in bits and pieces during days or weeks of a trial, so Moses begins his summation before dying, reminding the nation what they have seen and experienced in bits and pieces, heard and learned over forty years and two generations, weaving the strands into a coherent fabric.

They will not be preparing to take a written final or to sit for a bar exam, as the teacher weaves together a term’s lectures. But they will, as we all ultimately will, encounter a final test. In preparing for that test, there is no better starting point than to study carefully the words of the Book of D’varim that will be read at your temple this year in nine weekly installments between August 9 and October 4. Our greatest teacher is summing up the lessons of a lifetime. Get out your notebooks and pens, your laptops. Start writing and typing notes right after Shabbat each week.

And share the Word.

The Arch Holocaust Denier -- and the Encouragement He Offers

In this 6-minute snippet, K’vod HaBishop Richard Williamson speaks of his perception that (i) no Jews died in gas chambers, and (ii) “only” 200-300,000 Jews died in concentration camps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AezZLdBqXhg (The Youtube clip changes hyperlinks every so often, as Youtube pulls down one version, and then someone else posts it again. Just search for "Williamson and Holocaust" and variations thereon.) I publicize and share it for two reasons:

1. I have read any number of accounts and articles about the Institute for Historical Review, but I never before actually have heard someone discuss this thinking. I do not shiver or quake or get shocked by most anything, so my default reaction to this kind of thing is pure fascination. I am struck with fascination by the interview because the guy is so well spoken, so ostensibly knowledgeable. A very nice accent, sounds and lookms a bit like Commissioner Gordon on the old "Batman" TV series. Gotta trust Commissioner Gordon. I also am fascinated by the image that I never before have seen quite like this: I imagine this is what Jews in Spain saw in the 14th and 15th centuries and what Jews throughout Western Europe saw between the 12th and 15th centuries. Fascinating.

2. More importantly for me, his words give me incredible encouragement in a way he would not intend. I think of Rabi Akiva reacting to the tragic sight of the Temple Mount in ruins. While his colleagues are crying, he sees reason for rejoicing – because he looks at what they see, but from a different perspective. For thirty years, going back to my college days, in combating rabbis and Jewish Studies professors who deny the Torah’s truth, who deny that there was a Ma’amad Har Sinai because mathematical measurements make it "impossible" to validate that three million could have fit in the area, who deny that there was a Y’tzi’at Mitzrayim because "archaeological findings do not support the claim," who deny that there even was a massive Jewish presence in Egypt (only some nomadic Habiru tribe) – I have found few more compelling responses to them than this interview with K’vod HaBishop Richard Williamson.

I once wrote about this: http://www.rabbidov.com/Major%20Sermons/denyingpassoverandholocaust.htm My thesis is that I believe it more anti-Semitic – more an act of Jew-hatred – to deny Y’tzi’at Mitzrayim and Ma’amad Har Sinai than to deny that six million died or that Jews died in gas chambers. When you take away from me Y’tzi’at Mitzrayim and Ma’amad Har Sinai, you are taking away from me everything that Jews ever had to live for: the Torah, our unique relationship with HaKadosh Barukh Hu, our role as a Mamlechet Kohanim and an Am S’gulah, our essence.

The Holocaust is not our essence. Ma’amad Har Sinai is our essence. Even when it is done soft-spoken, in scholarly tones, with mathematical charts and permutations, and maps of the Sinai Desert, and sand samples, it is the ultimate Jew-hatred. It is a scholarly amplification on Ezra Pound’s ditty: How odd/ Of God/ To choose/ The Jews. K’vod HaBishop Williamson, in these six minutes, demonstrates that anything can be denied by an intelligent, pensive, contemplative intellectual, who is well read, well studied, soft spoken, and well degreed. But, whether it is Bishop Williamson discussing gas chambers or a rabbi discounting Y’tzi’at Mitzrayim, it is ironically one-and-the-same, in terms of using secular tools of scholarship to deny the Essence. And how fitting it is that academic scholarship already is being wielded today in this way.

If Moshiach tarries, we may be assured that, in a few hundred years, the majority of the world will deny the scope of the Shoah. They will cite their math and their archaeology, their rationales and their logic. Whether coming from an Ivory Castle of Judaic Denial or from a Bishop, we need not be their pawns.

On Bernie who Madoff with the Loot -- Fifty Billion

It was said of Lev Bronstein, a revolutionary in post-Czarist Russia, who -- to dissociate himself from his Jewish roots -- changed his name to Leon Trotsky: “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins who pay the bill.”

We are 5 million Jews in America, and ten percent of us are Orthodox. So: 500,000 Orthodox Jews . . . 5 million American Jews. There are one or two of these crook situations each and every year. One or two out of 500,000 . . . one or two out of 5,000,000. The large-yarmulka’d rabbi of the 1970s nursing home scandal. The Brooklyn yeshiva condemned by United States Senator Sam Nunn for drawing federal Pell Grant funds for students who do not exist in a yeshiva that does not exist to eat meals that do not exist. The junk bond dealer. The Washington lobbyist. The fellow who fled America for Switzerland, then got pardoned by a departing President who said the pardon was requested by Israel’s Prime Minister. The New Square Chassidic community that bullet-voted for Hillary for U.S. Senate after Bill did not pardon but commuted sentences of three of their chassidim. The East Coast Chassidim, West Coast Orthodox Union lay leader, and Israeli bankers involved in a federally indicted money-laundering scheme. And of course Postville. Some are “Orthodox.” Some are otherwise denominated.

We Jews are such a profoundly ethical and honest community. How many prisoners in the federal prisons really ask for kosher meals? Five? Eight? Nine?

Yet, there comes a point where it no longer seems or feels like only three out of 500,000 -- because this is the area of stereotype. It plays and feeds into stereotype. And therein lies the profound sensitivity.

Stereotypes are foolish, built on apocryphal presumptions. Do Jews really know more about money than do others? Clearly, anti-Semites throughout history have thought so, always keeping a Jew around to head the Treasury or the Exchequer. Even Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, when they expelled all Jews from Spain, asked one individual Jew, Don Isaac Abravanel, to stay behind to do the books. Insane! If Jews know so much about managing money and turning a profit, why is Israel unable to manage without American largesse? How did Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke help preside over the American fiscal fiasco? And was it Mayor Abe Beame who took New York City into bankruptcy? And Robert Citron in Orange County?

Who got the idea that Jews know so much more than anyone else about how to manage money? Yet several Presidents seem to have brought in some Jewish monetary advisors. FDR had Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. Nixon had Herbert Stein as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors. Carter had W. Michael Blumenthal. (Shhhhh! He was not really Jewish despite being named Blumenthal.) Clinton had Robert Rubin. Certainly, to employ a double negative, there is no reason that a Jew should not be welcomed as an economic advisor if she is best for the job. And certainly Jewish deep thinkers populate the entire spectrum of economic thought from a range of liberals including Paul Samuelson to conservatives like Milton Friedman and even objectivist-libertarians like Ayn Rand (Shhhhh! She was Jewish despite changing her name to Rand . . . from Alice Rosenbaum.)

It is impossible to avoid noting that this latest crook, Bernard Madoff, was prominently positioned in the Yeshiva University lay hierarchy. (He personally is not Orthodox, nor is he nominally so or thus quasi-denominated.) He also invested hundreds of millions of charitable dollars in his Ponzi schemes. We need to do something as a community akin to what Jews in America did 100 years ago to separate ourselves in the popular imagination from the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Bugsy Siegel and Legs Diamond and Meyer Lansky. And we did.

Whether it means refusing to count these characters in minyans, to give them aliyas, to permit them to attend banquet dinners, taking their names off synagogue walls and out of siddur/chumash inside-covers, or the like, it seems necessary to do something to separate our community from them.

There should always be a chance for teshuvah -- sincere, heartfelt repentance. Absolutely -- that is a core Jewish value and belief. And someday in the future, maybe after therapy, after restitution, after complete repentance (teshuvah g’murah), new books can be dedicated, and new minyanim can be formed with their inclusion. They can be given new honors. But there needs to be a separation, a havdalah g’murah, pending teshuvah.

Similarly, we must give real thought to changing the way we do business as an organized theological and spiritual community. Are we too material-focused? Do we respect money more than good deeds? To paraphrase Rav Michael Broyde's quote of Rav Emanuel Rackman's observation: Do we teach that it is more important to do good in this world -- or that it is more important to do well? Do we honor people who are monied more than people who exude righteousness? (Yes, a monied person simultaneously can exude righteousness. I have known some such people, like Jack Nagel of Los Angeles, and they have touched my life by their example without really donating my way.)

What a moment of opportunity we have before us to teach our community and our young people real Jewish values! Or to capture some of these thoughts in a public statement promoting reconsidered public policy. We have before us -- right now -- an opportunity to propose or suggest standards that limit or regulate the vulgar excesses of Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah parties. (How many meals can a Jew eat in three hours? Does every thirteen-year-old merit a life-sized ice sculpture of his luminescence and deserve to have 300 adults compelled to watch a fifteen minute retrospective of his life-and-times as though compiled by Ken Burns?)

What a moment of opportunity to reinforce condemnations that rabbinic organizations repeatedly have published against those who conduct synagogue-centered poker games and casino-like gambling. To teach people that the great names that have lived in Jewish history are those of rabbis who taught Torah, scholars and teachers, pioneers who built Israel, other pioneers who built and defended Jewish communities throughout the world -- and monied people who distributed their wealth generously. The greatness of Baron Rothschild, Moses Montefiore, Baron de Hirsch, Haym Salomon, Jacob Schiff, and others was not their riches but their philanthropy. They did not sit on their money and hoard it. They worked hard for it, took real risks in the world of industry, and then shared generously with those less fortunate.

What an opportunity we have! To require that every public event/banquet include at least one major award to be conferred on a humble less-prominent person purely for his or her profound leadership in Torah and ethics, regardless of money. To teach about honesty. To invite to schools the person who returns a lost bag of cash that he finds left behind in a taxi. This is the moment to turn this shame into a moment of pride.

And, even as we truly have a remarkably proud record throughout the world as a law-abiding community – can you think of a safer place to walk alone in the middle of the night than in a frum neighborhood that is not plagued by midnight interlopers from outside? -- we need to teach our yeshiva kids again and again, nukh a-mol un takeh nukh a-mol, that financial crimes are cardinal sins because they implicate the name and honor of HaKadosh Barukh Hu.

And now a final exposition: “Why is the religion of these isolated perpetrators relevant?”

In Torah terms, the problem is Chilul Hashem. Their actions desecrate the Holy Name of the G-d of Israel Who took us out of Egypt and brought us to Mount Sinai to receive His Word and to transmit its glory to the Nations around us.

And in secular terms, the problem is in the stereotype. If David Berkowitz, the non-Jewish “Son of Sam,” went around murdering blonde women in their cars with his .44-caliber gun, it still did not feed a stereotype. Jews are not stereotyped as killers/murderers.

But this Madoff thing fits a stereotype. For some prejudiced non-observant Jews, it fits one intra-Jewish stereotype: “Oh, those Orthodox! They are so strict about their supposedly high standards. They think they are so much better than we are. Why, one of their rabbis would not even drink wine that I poured for him! They won’t eat my food – even though they will eat the food of people who hire illegal aliens and employ child labor. So they are oh-so-holy, but when it comes to being honest, they take a back seat, those Orthodox. I’m a better Jew than they are, any day of the week. We may eat pork on Yom Kippur, but we are better Jews than they are. Because we have Jewish hearts.”

Cardiac Jews.

That is why Madoff -- who is not Orthodox in the first place -- is a problem of Chilul Hashem of one sort, when dealing with one sub-group of non-observant Jews. And it is not an answer to respond that the Reform Community Day school in Los Angeles is named for a junk-bond dealer who perpetrated crimes of financial shame. How can that be an answer? What kind of response is that? Rather, that is the road of falling into the same silly trap when, in fact, we all should be working together as Jews of all stripes and spots, denominations, genders, and politics, to eradicate financial malfeasance and defalcations.

Again the question, then: Why is the religion of the perpetrator relevant? I would say, because the real concern is the way that we -- all Jews -- appear in the eyes of those bigots among the non-Jewish world who may bear prejudices and stereotypes that feed off these aberrations.

There are plenty of non-Jewish crooks, frauds, and defalcators. The present Illinois Governor (still in office as of this second) was elected to shake up Springfield but instead shook down Illinois. How Jewish is a guy whose name is pronounced Bla-goy-avich? And Martha Stewart is not Jewish. And, during my high-stakes litigation career, I represented and defended powerful clients, including a solid cross-section of non-Jews who were accused of financial malfeasance.

Yet it is not a sufficient answer to say that Enron were non-Jews and that Global Crossing were non-Jews and that Charles Keating was a non-Jew who used his fraudulent gains to support Mother Theresa – indeed, she even wrote a letter to the judge in his support during the legal proceedings against him. Because, at day’s end, there are stereotypes. Stereotypes are so hard to squelch and so easy to reinforce. People truly believe that Polish people are stupid, even though they have produced a Pope of the Catholic Church, a brilliant (if disastrous) foreign policy advisor to a past American president, my favorite / sharpest / most brilliant morning talk show hostess, and at least two Prime Ministers of Israel. If an Irish person gets involved in something arising from inebriation, well, it is as though the only alcoholic beverages ever concocted were Jameson's, Powell's, and Bailey's. When an Italian person is associated even obliquely with something arising from organized crime, it feeds stereotypes, even though Italians like Rudy Giulliani led vigorous struggles against organized crime.

People of color particularly are subjects of stereotypes.

The stuff of Madoff feeds our stereotype. The vulgar use of the word “Jew” as a verb is shamefully tied with financial vulgarism. We may fight the Oxford Dictionary, but this is what it is. The stereotype is Shylock the Moneylender. It is hook-nosed Fagin who corrupts and sends urchins to steal for him. Both were fictional creations of literary minds and pens that could have designated them Anglicans, but didn't. During the Civil War, the stereotype prompted Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to issue General Order No. 11. When William Jennings Bryant railed at the 1896 Chicago Democrat National Convention against Wall Street financiers, saying “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor a crown of thorns; [y]ou shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” everyone understood what he was saying. He was not stereotyping the Romans on Wall Street.

This is the viciously unfair stereotype of us. In the streets of the rustic Midwest, even where no Jews live, arson-for-insurance (as contrasted from pyromaniacally setting wildfires in California) is called “Jewish lightning.” The term is so defined on Wikipedia's Wiktionary website: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jewish_lightning I heard it for the first time while traveling in the Bible Belt. The person was a non-Jewish colleague of mine, a friend, who did not even realize that the term was offensive. (It is like absent-mindedly criticizing a Native American as an “Indian giver.”) It is Marc Rich getting pardoned by an American President who pens dishonestly in the New York Times that he did so at the urgent behest of the Prime Minister of Israel. And every single time that an outlier, isolated Jew emerges in one of these things, it builds, and it builds on itself. It builds on stereotypes. It poses the single greatest calumny against Jewish people.

That’s why the religion of the perpetrator matters to me. I wish we could figure out a way to separate ourselves in the public mind from these guys, but it is easier said than done. As long as we allow such defalcators and crooks to be honorees at our events, to have their names on our institutions' buildings and in the inside covers of our holy books, to hold positions of lay leadership in temple and synagogue boards of directors or trustees, we inadvertently become ignorant accessories, teaching children for the next generation that we accord our highest honors based not only on how deeply within his denomination he bears his bond and trust in G-d . . . but on how consummately he is deeply pocketed in bearer bonds denominated “In Gd We Trust.”

We have to aim higher. We absolutely must.

The Mumbai (Bombay) Massacre of Jews

Not all Jews, even the Torah-observant Jews among us, even Chassidic Jews, count themselves as Chabad Jews. There are doctrinal differences, sometimes very significant, that individuate Chabad from the larger normative Orthodox community. Particularly, there are real issues of profound halakhic significance concerning the place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the constellation of great Torah leaders of the past generation. For an overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jews, particularly in communities where yeshivas proliferate and Torah learning dominates Orthodoxy, the roles of late Torah giants like HaRav Aharon Kotler, HaRav Moshe Feinstein, HaRav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, and HaRav Eliezer Shach – and, yibadel l’chaim, HaRav HaChacham Ovadia Yosef – overshadow the role of Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Likewise, in the Chassidic world.

Nevertheless, virtually each and every one of us has been at some end-of-the-earth place where even MasterCard/Visa is not accepted, but where a Chabad House exists to provide a kosher meal, a local Jewish resting place, an address for Shabbat. No matter where in the world you are, there is a decent chance that you can catch a Mincha or a Torah reading on Shabbat morning at a local Chabad House, where one or another darling rabbinical couple will be there. When traveling through Oklahoma, my family knew it could stop for Shabbat in Oklahoma City because the local Chabad couple was hosting Shabbat meals. Others have told me their stories, from Hong Kong to Thailand. And for so many people who today are members of shuls like Young Israel of Orange County, their first step into normative Torah practice took place at a Chabad House or at a campus Chabad.

Rabbi and Rebbetzin Holtzberg and their Mumbai Chabad House were just the quintessence of that image we have. Just looking at the photos, these were such beautiful young people who had just begun their life’s journey together, contributing so powerfully at a time when more Westerners are traveling to India as participants in the burgeoning global economy. Americans, Israelis, and others travel to India when their jobs compel them to do so, and – as with those compelled by the need to earn a living by traveling occasionally to Hong Kong or other such places – there is the Chabad presence to assure that Shabbat can be celebrated, that kosher food can be found, and even (thanks to Rav Holtzberg, who also slaughtered kosher meat) that kosher meat could be had.

It is the paradox of the Jewish experience in history that we so uniquely among peoples get caught in others’ cross-fires. The Christian Crusaders, en route to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel Moslem Saracens – it had nothing to do with Jews – stopped along watering holes throughout Europe to massacre whole Jewish bystander communities. Three centuries later, as a bubonic plague took hold throughout Europe – it had nothing to do with Jews – insane justification somehow was found to murder one-third of our people there. Three centuries later, Bogdan Chmielnitzki and the Cossack Massacres reflected Cossack poverty in Eastern Europe – it had nothing to do with Jews. Three centuries later, Hitler, the Nazis, and their European confederates perpetrated the Holocaust in the aftermath of Germany’s financial collapse post-WWI. That collapse really had nothing to do with Jews; it was the result of brutally punitive terms of surrender foolishly and cruelly imposed against Germany by the victorious and imperial-colonialist British and the French.

Not to mention medieval expulsions from lands as gentle as France (1182, 1306, 1394) and England (1290), the persecutions of Mashad, the mellahs of Morocco and the ghettoes of Italy, the June 1941 Iraqi Shavuot Pogrom after the fall of the Golden Square. In all these insane outbursts of anti-Jewish hate and murder, we were pedestrians, bystanders. We had nothing to do with the issues. We were just standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change.

And now it is a dispute between Pakistani Moslems and Indian Hindus regarding suzerainty over Kashmir. It is an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with Jews. (Ask the average Jew his thoughts about Kashmir, and he will tell you that he cannot afford it and buys sweaters made from Shetland wool instead. We do not know what it is, where it is, and -- maybe the ultimate indicator -- it is so far off our radar and alien to our world that there is not even a Chabad in Kashmir.) So these horrible IslamoNazi thugs and goons perpetrated these terrible murders in Mumbai targeting Jews in general, and this wonderful young couple in particular.

From these things come many tears, but great responses come, too. We may be certain that a much bigger, much stronger, far more widely visited-and-utilized Chabad House will rise in Mumbai. We may be certain that plenty of Chabad young Rav-and-Rebbetzin couples will step forward to serve there. And we may be certain that every Jew will feel, for years to come, that she must make a pilgrimage at least once to that Chabad House, even if she has never been to Jerusalem or to Oklahoma City.

Things happen for reasons. Bad things sometimes happen for the purpose of laying foundations for great things. As Rav Avigdor Miller brings out, all of our Patriarch Yaakov’s setbacks in his relationship with Esav were necessary for the expansive formation of a Jewish People. Had Yaakov emerged from the womb first, there would have been no animus when he duly received a first-born’s bracha. Had his father, Yitzchak, had better eyesight, there would have been no animus. Had there been no animus, Yaakov would not have been compelled to flee home for Charan. If Yaakov had not fled home, then his parents presumably would have done for him as Avraham did for Yitzchak: sending out a messenger to Charan to find him a wife. The messenger would have come back with one wife, not two.

If the messenger had come back with Leah, there would have been no Rachel and no children born to Rachel: no Yosef, no sale to Egypt, no subsequent relocation of the Jewish People to Egypt for the slavery, the Aseret HaMakot (the Ten Plagues), the Y’tzi’at Mitzrayim (the Exodus), and the receiving of the Torah at Har Sinai. There also would have been no Benjamin born – so no King Saul, no Mordechai to save the Jews in Persia, no component alongside the tribes of Yehudah and Levi to comprise the Jewish People during our long Second Exile.

And if, instead, the messenger had come back with Rachel rather than Leah, there would have been no Leah-as-Wife, so no children born to Leah. Thus, no Levi, so no Moshe and no Aharon, no tribe to stand alone for G-d at the time of the Golden Calf, no Pinchas and no Eliyahu, no Chashmona’im and no Maccabees. And there would have been no Yehudah, so no Nachshon ben Aminadav to jump in first and begin Hashem’s process of splitting the Sea, no Elisheva to marry Aharon, no Calev ben Y’funeh to stand with Yehoshua for G-d’s word at the time of the m’raglim (the spies), no David HaMelekh, so no Moshiach.

But history is fact beyond "what-if." So there, in fact, was animus and hate. Yaakov came out second, and Yitzchak’s eyesight was impaired. Rivkah knew the plan because Hashem had revealed to her, but not to Yitzchak, Yaakov’s superior destiny. And, as a result, Yaakov ultimately had to flee for his life, and he ended up with two wives rather than one, along with children from Bilhah and Zilpah.

That is how setbacks work for Jews. One must wait twenty years (as during Yaakov’s sojourn with Lavan), and sometimes 200 years or even 2,000 years, to know how it all will play out. And this tragedy in Mumbai that has no words for its pain is not the final word on how the result of this incident will play out. May it be for a blessing, and may the memories of the holy martyrs, Rav and Rebbetzin Holtzberg, be for a blessing and inspiration to all of us.

On Obama, Democrats, Republicans, Israel, and the Futility of Knowing Who Are Friends

I did not vote for Obama, instead choosing to vote as the exit polls told us that most Jews in Orthodox circles did. Still, I view Obama's election with fascination and a touch of wonder.

Clearly, Hashem has a plan that we do not yet see or understand regarding Obama. By the natural course of events, Obama should never have been elected or, frankly, even nominated. Historians will not understand it. Nevertheless, he now is the President-elect, and we will recite the same blessing in Shul for his welfare and that of his Government as we have recited for his predecessors.

As Geraldine Ferraro said -- and she got canned for telling the truth -- rather than being victim for not looking like all those guys on the dollar bills (whose skin presumably was green?), Obama actually was the beneficiary of being quasi-African-American. Any other guy who would have sought the Presidency with his skimpy public record, youthful inexperience, and circle of corrupt acquaintances and associations, never would have gotten past Iowa and New Hampshire.

A State Senator who voted "present" 130 times, or whatever? A guy with no known record of accomplishment but with a coterie of personal associations ranging from Tony Rezko and Bill Ayres to Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and Father Phleger?

Gimme a break.

A law school professor, former president of the Harvard Law Review, who never published an article in a legal journal? Who among us in the legal field -- among those who practice, among those who focus in the halls of scholarship -- ever has heard of such a thing?

He has lived what-some-might-see as a charmed life. Hashem has a plan. This all is too aberrant to be natural life. There is a plan. G-d apparently has a plan in which Obama factors particularly.

So many of us -- half the country -- voted against Obama (not really for McCain, who was not the right choice of the moment) because we do not know what Obama stands for, do not trust him an iota, believe that he stands mostly for himself, has no record of meaningful achievement, shifted 180 degrees on Jerusalem in hours, surrounds himself with the same Clinton crowd that forced Oslo down Israel's throat and that made Arafat the most frequent foreign visitor to the White House.

All that said -- and one can go on -- I have to put my faith in Hashem and know that He has an ultimate plan, and His plan will go forth. Hubert Humphrey was a great friend of Israel, but it was Nixon-the-anti-Semite who acted rapidly and forcefully as Hashem's tool to assist Israel meaningfully during the 1973 War. Gerald Ford had a record of friendship for Israel through decades in the House, and he had Kissinger in Foggy Bottom, but they surprisingly combined to subject Israel to a searing "reassessment" of the traditional American friendship.

So many of us voted for Jimmy Carter the first time he ran. Many thought that Evangelicals --given the pro-Israel leadership models of Reverend Jerry Falwell, Reverend John Hagee, etc. -- are among Israel's biggest backers, inspired by the mandate of Genesis 12:3. Go figure -- it turned out that Carter was not evangelical on that verse, while his sister was missionizing to Jews and his brother was in bed with Kaddafi.

When Reagan came, so many of us expected George Shultz of Bechtel Corporation, which makes so much money from Arabs, to be a disastrous Secretary of State for Israel -- and, yet, Shultz probably was the best friend Israel ever had in the State Department. We thought the First Bush would follow Reagan's pro-Israel policies, and yet his Secretary of State seems to have been the worst anti-Semite in State since Cordell Hull and WWII. We figured the Second Bush would be as bad as the First, particularly after James Baker played so active a role in the legal fight over ballot-chads, and instead Bush II proved a great friend of Israel when Sharon invaded Jenin.

Thus, when Bush II was reelected, we thought we now have a proven friend in the White House and, with Sharon in Jerusalem, we now have some good strong leadership; in place. Instead, Bush turned his Mideast Policy on its head and made a point of his second term to press Sharon for a "Palestinian State" -- i.e., not really a "state" but a country called by that phony name -- and the Great Sharon unexpectedly went along with it, starting with Gush Katif and then the Gaza.

What stopped the momentum of Bush and Sharon, after the Gaza retreat, to move the retreat-pressure kadimah (forward, eastward to Judea and Samaria)? Only the combination of Sharon being felled by a stroke, then another, and Olmert thereafter being felled by a Hezbollah War and then a debilitating financial scandal and another, and Bush being felled by an incomprehensible economic collapse that started unfolding with mortgage problems just as Condoleezza was flying to the Middle East to start the pressure against Israel for new retreat.

Only that extraordinary confluence of incredible events stopped the Gush-Katification of Yehudah-Shomron.

So, I am long past predicting who among the princes of flesh-and-blood is good for Israel and who bad. I vote based on commonsense natural analyses, but I know I can be wrong because good politicians can fool you, and so can bad ones. I know that all we can do is vote based on what we reasonably expect. But, in the end, it is all in Hashem's hands. Politicians often surprise.

For the many of us who voted against Obama during this recent round, a man who entered the national stage as Tisha B'Av was ending in 2004, we could vote only based on what we thought is best. In the end, what do we know? We don't know. We absolutely do not know.

Our parents' generation bullet-voted for FDR, whom they regarded as the best American friend that Jews ever had in the White House. Turns out he and his State Department were not our best friends. Rather, they hated us and in some real measure were accessories to the mass murder of six million of us.

Democrats-Republicans. We don't know. Nixon rushed weapons to Israel in an full-blast urgent airlift. Bill Clinton gave us Oslo and Arafat.

Shalom Chaver.

We're Right and The Whole World Is Wrong

We're Right, the Whole World's Wrong
From The Forward (April 19, 2002)

"The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don't think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong."
— Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary General, speaking in Madrid, Spain

At this moment in time, many Jews who love and support Israel hear the soft voice within, asking the question to which Kofi Annan recently alluded in Madrid: Can we alone be right, while the whole world around is wrong?

The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.

We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration?

After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us?
Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?

The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?

The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan.
Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.

We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs.
Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?

Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.

We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.

Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what.

We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria.

Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.

Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.

Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney, is a board member of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council's Jewish Community Relations Committee and national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is the author of "General Sharon's War Against Time Magazine."

Hollywood Isn't Fair to Jews Either

Counterpunch: Hollywood Isn't Fair to Jews Either
From the Los Angeles Times (August 6, 1990)

When African American filmmakers are upset about perceived inequities in Hollywood, they can blame the Jews. When a Christian (Nikos Kazantzakis) writes a sacrilegious novel about Jesus and a second Christian (Martin Scorsese) converts the book into a film, fundamentalists on the periphery still find an angle to blame the Jews.

They are lucky.

Whom shall the Jews blame for Hollywood's decades-long denigration of Jewish women and mockery of Jewish tradition? The Christians? The Japanese? The Mongolians?

Consider Hollywood's unique mistreatment of Jewish women. Michael Steadman of "thirtysomething" would not marry one. Stuart Markowitz of "L.A. Law" did not. Marty Gold, for all his Yiddish mumblings on "Anything but Love," will romance anyone but Jewish women. Even the pajama salesman portrayed by Jackie Mason, the man who wears his religion on his tongue, steered away from his TV mother's urgings to date one. (When he finally gave in, once, the Jewish woman was characterized as snorting like a pig whenever she laughed.) "Bridget Loves Bernie" was tame by comparison.

The big screen is the same. In "Exodus," Paul Newman's Ari Ben Canaan liberated Israel while romancing Eva Marie Saint's British shiksa on the side. Charles Grodin at least gives a Jewish woman a chance, marrying her in "The Heartbreak Kid," but she proves to be such a slob (she can't even eat an egg salad sandwich neatly) that he spends the rest of the film pursuing Cybill Shepherd's version of Nordic shiksa.

Robert Redford's Hubbel fares no better in "The Way We Were," suffocated by Barbra Streisand, his loud, pushy Jewish wife (who is a radical leftist to boot), struggling and finally succeeding in regaining his freedom from her clutches. Elliott Gould's story is the same in "Over the Brooklyn Bridge," as he battles off Carol Kane's sex-starved Jewish woman in favor of Margaux Hemingway's version of shiksa.

Even such sobering miniseries blockbusters as Gerald Green's "Holocaust" and Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance" bear the Hollywood message. In both stories, the central Jewish family suffers annihilation in the Nazi death camps -- except for the one kin with the non-Jewish spouse.

Woody Allen's "New York Stories" vignette, to be sure, actually sees a Jewish male take a liking to a Jewish woman. But only after the canard of "The Jewish Mother" has been dragged through the mud and plastered across the sky, as she badgers her son to "make her happy" and give up the shiksa he prefers. Is Allen re-packaging "Annie Hall" -- or "Portnoy's Complaint"?

Yes, there are a few good Jewish women in the movies, so good that Jewish men deign to marry them: the women of "Fiddler on the Roof," "Hester Street," "Yentl" and "The Frisco Kid," for example. But all those films share in common an omnipresent romanticizing of an era long past, a nostalgic glimpse back to a different time and epoch. In the old days, we infer, there were such women. In the old days, tradition was, well, tradition.

But today's rabbi might just as well be the pervert in Allen's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask)" or the Rabbi Huckelman of "Anything but Love" who plays offensive practical jokes on party-goers. When "L.A. Law" presents a man who performs ritual circumcisions, he is the butt of humor, being sued for slipping during the procedure -- a horrifying matter which neither I nor any of my rabbinic colleagues have ever encountered in our respective careers.

There has never been, not in the movies and not on television, so much as a single subplot focusing on a traditionally observant, yet culturally contemporary, Jewish family engaging modern American society, synthesizing their ancient traditions with the challenges of today. When the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of Americans who respect Jewish tradition watch "The Cosby Show" or "Amen," "A Different World" or "227," we are truly envious of our African American neighbors.

Not only do they get better treatment from Hollywood than do we. They even have a scapegoat. Whom shall we blame?