Even his one visit before an explicitly Jewish audience—an hour-long talk last night at the Plaza Hotel organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations—was crafted to play to a wider audience. The 200-person crowd included members of New York’s congressional delegation, both Jewish and not—Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Yvette Clark—along with former New York City Mayor Ed Koch and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. Bibi was introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who recounted the trauma of her visits to Sderot, and by New York Gov. David Paterson, who called him “a visionary” on terrorism.

Here, in a nutshell, is Bibi’s substantive message: He wants to sit down for face-to-face peace negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as soon as possible; he’s really happy about the new Iran sanctions passed by Congress and the new sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council, but if they don’t prove effective at averting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, he reserves Israel’s right to “defend itself,” whatever that may entail; and finally, he really, really likes Barack Obama, and doesn’t know why anyone would possibly have thought otherwise. Meanwhile, he firmly bats away various television interlocutors’ efforts to pin him down on thornier issues like settlements, pre-emptive strikes against Iran, and the nasty words traded all spring between Jerusalem and Washington.

The intended effect of all this is to present Netanyahu—an American-educated speaker of faultless English—and, by extension, Israel, as friendly, reasonable, and familiar. Which necessarily raises the question: What took so long?

Israeli Prime Minister Offers Palestinians Talks on Settlements [Reuters]
Related: Obama and Bibi Tag-Team for Friendship [Tablet]

It was the first joint appearance by the two men in months, and a departure from their recent pattern of press blackouts and leaked reports of snubs. But with Israeli-Turkish relations maybe on the (slow) mend and both the Israelis and the Palestinians making refreshingly positive noises about the prospects for moving from proximity talks to direct peace negotiations, whatever topics Netanyahu and Obama needed to discuss, in “robust” fashion, in private—settlements, Iran, nuclear non-proliferation, the World Cup—were evidently overshadowed by the importance, for both, of giving off the impression of being copacetic.

So, in front of an audience limited to the American and Israeli press pool, they sat side by side, Bibi in a black-and-white striped tie and Obama in a red one, tag-teaming to give sunny responses. Is Netanyahu a partner for peace? “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu wants peace. I think he’s willing to take risks for peace,” Obama assured. How quickly will things move now that we’re heading into the last few months of the settlement-construction freeze? “When I say the next few weeks, that’s what I mean. The president means that, too,” Netanyahu insisted.

Netanyahu will meet later this afternoon with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who got on the phone earlier today with Netanyahu’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, and with envoy George Mitchell, before joining Netanyahu and Obama for lunch. Tomorrow, Bibi will be in New York to address Jewish leaders at the Plaza Hotel; we’ll have more for you as the week goes on.

Obama, Netanyahu Promise To Work toward Direct Mideast Peace Talks [WaPo]
Obama-Bibi Reset [Politico]

Related: Personal History [Tablet Magazine]

Wexler, who arrived late, stood by himself through the hourlong presentation, leaning against a wall near the back of the room with his soft black leather Dell briefcase between his feet. At 49, he was at least a decade younger than most of the other men in attendance, though he sports similarly silvered hair, and he kept his hand pensively over his chin for much of the talk. Dayan expressed his opposition to the current U.S. effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations using 1967 borders as the basis for a future Palestinian state. During the question-and-answer session, Wexler raised his hand and asked, pointedly, “General Dayan, how could it be in any respect a smart strategy to treat in this fashion your most important ally?” Dayan looked surprised. “Rabbi Wexler,” he began, before someone at the front corrected him. “I’m not challenging the White House or the so-important friendship with the United States,” Dayan said. “I’m challenging how important borders are.”

Wexler may have been unfamiliar to the general, but others in the room knew exactly who he was. In his six months as president of Abraham’s Center for Middle East Peace, Wexler has adopted an unofficial role as ambassador to the organized American Jewish community. As a congressman, he managed to retain support from both J Street, the dovish two-year-old Israel lobby, and the more conservative AIPAC, which commended him earlier this year as “one of the stalwart leaders of the American-Israel alliance in Congress.” After last week’s luncheon, hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Wexler stayed behind for a quiet tête-à-tête with the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first premiership a decade ago, and who addressed the lunch gathering along with Dayan.

In March 2007, Wexler endorsed Barack Obama, breaking not just with other Jewish Democrats in South Florida but with his own long history as an early and fervent supporter of the Clintons, starting in 1992. Today, he is frequently mentioned as a potential ambassador to Israel—a position currently filled by James Cunningham, a career diplomat who went to Tel Aviv in the waning days of the George W. Bush Administration. “It’s a position he could have at the snap of his fingers,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who served under President Bill Clinton as a special envoy for Holocaust-era claims and is a special State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton on Holocaust issues. “He could do a world of good for the administration, because at the end of the day [the Israelis] have to have trust in the American administration, and there is no one better placed than Bob to make that argument.”

The visit to New York followed a high-profile dinner Wexler and Abraham hosted at Washington’s Newseum for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to Washington in early June. The guest list included the billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman and Lee Rosenberg, an Obama supporter who is currently the president of AIPAC, along with political heavyweights like Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, and Stephen Hadley, who held the job under George W. Bush, and his former deputy, Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle Eastern affairs under Bush. The center Wexler runs is “a meeting spot where people from all segments of the community can come together and hear reasonable points of view,” said J Street President Jeremy Ben Ami, who was also at the event.

Publicly, Wexler is probably best known for his 2006 appearance on Comedy Central’s satire show The Colbert Report, on which Stephen Colbert coaxed him into repeating the sentence: “I enjoy cocaine because it’s fun to do.” Wexler spent a dozen years representing Boca Raton, one of the most Jewish and most reliably Democratic districts in the House of Representatives. As a member of the influential Foreign Affairs committee, he was particularly active in establishing a congressional caucus on U.S.-Turkish relations and went out of his way to travel to places like Saudi Arabia and Syria, where, according to an account in Wexler’s autobiography, Fire-Breathing Liberal, President Bashar al-Assad gave him messages to carry to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Serving in government is an extraordinary honor, whether it’s in Congress or in any other capacity, but there are other ways to participate in a meaningful way as well,” Wexler said in an interview in late June. We were in his Washington office, on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the colonnaded Navy Memorial plaza along Pennsylvania Ave., where he keeps the bronze plaque from the entrance to his old House office leaning against the windowsill. Framed photographs of him posing with various leaders—Netanyahu, Sharon, Obama, King Abdullah—compete for space with framed newspaper clippings from his Florida political career.

Wexler, who was in shirtsleeves, favors blue ties that match his eyes and tends to rap his fingertips on tabletops when he is particularly emphatic about a point he’s making. He refused to say whether he had been offered the ambassadorship, formally or informally. (The White House declined to comment for this story.) But Wexler has publicly, and repeatedly, said his decision to leave Congress was motivated in part by financial concerns—he has three teenage children—and acquaintances speculate that his hesitance about returning to government service, even as an ambassador, stems from the same pressures. (Members of Congress are paid $174,000 annually; Wexler declined to disclose his current salary, which is not reflected in the Center’s most recent financial filings.) Over the years, Wexler explained, “Danny would joke with me and ask when I was going to leave Congress and get a real job.” The jibe turned into a real prospect after Obama’s election invigorated Abraham about the prospects for reaching a peace agreement—an irony, he added, since Abraham, a longtime supporter of the Clintons, had initially been sharply critical of his decision to back Obama. Now he shuttles around on extra-diplomatic excursions—Israel and the West Bank, Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan—aboard Abraham’s private jet.

Abraham, an 85-year-old World War II veteran, founded the Center for Middle East Peace in 1989, with Wayne Owens, a Democratic congressman from Utah who had served on the foreign affairs and intelligence committees, at its helm. Together, the pair met with Yasser Arafat in 1989, in Tunisia, then an extraordinary step, and went on to cultivate relationships with leaders across the Middle East. “They would come see us and the national security adviser and occasionally the president to brief us on meetings they’d had with various Israeli and Arab leaders and give us ideas,” said Robert Malley, who served on the staff of the National Security Council and as a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton Administration. He recalled that Abraham had called the White House from Israel with both Ehud Barak and Arafat on the line after the failure of negotiations at Camp David. Of Abraham’s center, Malley said, “It’s not going to change history, but in his position you can’t hope to do more than that—he has access and he can bring people together.”

Owens died unexpectedly in December 2002 after having a heart attack on the beach in Tel Aviv during a trip with Abraham, who subsequently wound down the center’s $14 million operation. Owens was deeply beloved in official Washington, but as a Mormon, he never had Wexler’s entree into the official world of American Jewry. Wexler, a Queens native who grew up in South Florida, where his father owned a deli, made his first trip to Israel on his honeymoon, after his wife, Laurie, said she didn’t like the idea of marrying someone who hadn’t been to the Jewish state. He was elected to Congress in 1996 after six years in the Florida State Senate and was drafted onto the Foreign Affairs committee by Lee Hamilton, a veteran Democratic congressman from Indiana who subsequently served on the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. “He was a natural,” says Hamilton, who is currently president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “He’s always been very close to the Jewish community and a very strong advocate for the Democratic Party, and I think he’s played a hugely important role in bridging the gaps that sometimes arise between the two.”

Now Wexler’s task is not just to maintain open channels among the Americans, Israelis, and Arabs—it’s to continue applying additional glue to the relationship between the Obama Administration and the American Jewish community. “My understanding with Danny was that I had only one red line, or only one rule, and that is that we would work in coordination and consistent with the Obama Administration,” Wexler said. “I believe the course that President Obama is pursuing is compelling in terms of what is in the best interests of the state of Israel.” He echoed recent administration talking points about the closeness of the U.S.-Israeli military and intelligence relationships and added another example to counter claims of anything like a rift between Washington and Jerusalem: phone calls made by George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, to voting countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this spring encouraging them to accept Israel as a member.

None of that, though, speaks to the fundamental anxiety increasingly pervasive in some Jewish quarters about where the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is heading. Last week, Wexler met with Ehud Barak during the Israeli defense minister’s visit to Washington; he has extended an invitation to host a gathering for Netanyahu when the prime minister is scheduled to be in town next week. But, like everyone, Wexler is looking ahead to the expiration of the settlement-construction freeze in September, and like everyone, he can’t predict whether or not the current proximity talks will lead to a resumption of direct, Camp David-style negotiations. “The plan is to create the dynamic in which the Israelis and the Palestinians can engage in direct negotiations. That’s the plan. It’s tedious, it’s painful, and for every two steps forward there’s one step back, but that’s the plan,” Wexler told me. He deflected the question of whether he anticipated a grand proposal from the Obama Administration, in the event that the proximity talks fail to progress. “I don’t think it makes any sense to foreshadow what might happen four months from now, or five months from now, should there not be direct negotiations,” he said. “Because I am confident and hopeful there will be.”

That optimism is a hallmark of the style Abraham and Owens established two decades ago, during the hopeful era of the Oslo accords. “They had more fire and determination than anyone else on the block,” Malley said. “And Wexler shares this attitude of, ‘We have a vision, it makes sense.’ ” Obama’s election revived Abraham’s resolve to fight for the establishment of a two-state deal, Wexler said. “I think he felt that coming off the eight years of the Bush Administration, because of the Intifada and because of the two wars, the opportunity for negotiating a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and an end to conflict was so remote, that the next two or three years were the best last opportunity for a two-state solution.”

Wexler said that Abbas, at the Newseum dinner, warned about the increasingly vocal campaign among Palestinians against continuing to pursue the two-state model. “People need to understand that while the two-state solution may seem difficult to attain—it’s riddled with uncertainty, it’s riddled with risks and painful compromises—but the alternative is not paradise. It’s not some golden status quo,” Wexler went on. “The alternative is the one-state solution, and the one-state solution will amount to a state that is no longer Jewish. And I for one am not for that.”

The university has emphatically advertised the religious diversity of faculty heading to the Gulf—Branch Campus President Alfred Bloom, formerly head of Swarthmore College, is Jewish, as is Amir Minsky, who will be teaching a course in the development of German ideologies of the 19th century. But as far as the students go, not so much: Spokesman Josh Taylor told us that the university, despite saying that it expects religious as well as national, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity at the new campus, hasn’t polled students about their sectarian affiliation. Taylor checked, and it turns out that neither Hebrew nor Yiddish are among the languages students reported being able to speak. So: If you’re Jewish, and you’re among the lucky group joining Erin Meekhof of Woodbridge, Va., in September, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!

N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi Scours Globe for Its First Students [NYT]

The delegation from Ankara included Murat Mercan, the head of the Turkish parliament’s foreign relations committee and a senior figure in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP Party. As it happens, he also took part in the Gaza-bound Viva Palestina aid convoy earlier this year; since the Memorial Day flotilla raid, he’s been sharply critical of Israel and its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

But last night, he said his problems with Israel had nothing to do with his feelings toward Jews. “Criticizing what the current government is doing does not mean criticizing the Jews,” Mercan told Tablet Magazine. “Jews are an essential part of the Turkish community, and relations between Turkey and the Jews will not be hampered in any way by the actions of the Israeli government.”

Mercan was in town for a few days on a diplomatic mission to address any negative impact on Turkish-American relations arising from the flotilla; his itinerary, he said, included meetings with White House officials, the State Department, and Rep. Howard Berman (D-California), one of the authors of pending economic sanctions legislation against Iran. His appearance at the Chabad dinner, he said, came at the invitation of a Lubavitch rabbi he met in Turkey a few years back. In other words, Mercan quipped, “It was God’s will that I be here!”

With that, Mercan hustled out the porticoed doors and into the muggy night. A pair of Chabad rabbis, curious, asked what he had said, and seemed pleased with the result. “So he listens to what we tell him,” one remarked, and then turned back into the colonnaded ballroom to see what was for dessert.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman arrived at JFK on a red-eye Monday morning and went straight to briefings with his ambassadors and consuls. On Tuesday, he spoke to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations about Israel’s concerns that it is being de-legitimized, and to religious leaders about pending Israeli legislation on conversions, which would expand the Israeli rabbinate’s power to decide who can be called a Jew.

But Lieberman’s official schedule failed to mention what was perhaps his most important mission: Outreach to America’s Russian Jews. On Monday, Lieberman met with more than two dozen leaders of that community at the Intercontinental to discuss the flotilla and the current threats to the Jewish state. “Our mentality and our ideas and our problems can be different from the mainstream American Jewish community, and I can give you one explanation,” Michael Nemirovsky, who directs Russian outreach for New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, told Tablet Magazine. “About 83 percent of the Russian Jewish community has relatives in Israel, so if something happens in Israel, it’s my own family. It’s a physical relationship, not just a moral relationship.”

On Tuesday, Lieberman attended a gala thrown by Russian media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, who lives in Connecticut, in celebration of the 62nd anniversary of Israel’s independence. The 300-person dinner at the Harold Pratt House, on Park Avenue, was also attended by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, who came up from Washington, and by diplomats from Moldova and the Ukraine, according to Nemirovsky; the chief rabbi of Moscow was also there.

Nemirovsky, as it happens, knew Lieberman when they were both young men in Soviet Chisinau, now the capital of Moldova; one of Nemirovsky’s cousins was a classmate of the minister’s. “New York is the capital of the Russian Jewish diaspora, and what he is looking for from the Russian community, he is looking for public support,” Nemirovsky said. “Because the Russians can bring to events like rallies thousands of people. It’s not about the money.” Nemirovsky said he asked Lieberman why he hadn’t gone to Washington. “He told me, ‘I have Ambassador Oren and he will provide all our ideas to the government.’” Added Nemirovsky, “He waits for the right time.” And when is that? “When the emotions will go down, and reality comes back to the table.”

Earlier: Tablet Magazine Talks to Vice PM Shalom

Do you think Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, intentionally deceived Israel about the nature of the Free Gaza flotilla, as part of a regional power play?
Unfortunately, the Turks, in some way it looks like they’re trying to revive the Ottoman Empire that ruled the Middle East for 500 years until 1917. Before the English arrived they were ruling the whole territory. So unfortunately it doesn’t go in the right direction, but I don’t think we have to give up. Maybe there is still an option to make it better with the Turks, but it takes two to tango as you know.

I met the president Abdullah Gul, who was my colleague as foreign minister, many, many times, and we are still sharing good relations, personal relations.

Have you talked to him this week?
No, I didn’t. I let the Foreign Ministry and the prime minister [Netanyahu] and his minister of defense [Ehud Barak] deal with that but it might be that if I would be asked, I would do it. Because he is, I think, a good guy, and he was very positive during our meetings. Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize the State of Israel after the resolution that was taken in the UN, and since then we are having strategic relations, economically and militarily. So it’s very important for both countries.

I can’t tell you that they see that. There is a debate now within Turkey about the future of Turkey. They are facing an election in the near future and only after that will we be able to understand which direction Turkey’s moving.

Do you think the Obama administration was caught off-guard by Turkey’s actions on the flotilla?
I really don’t know. You have to ask them. What we know is that Turkey was close to the United States, as well as to Israel, for many, many years. And unfortunately it doesn’t look the same these days. I believe, personally, that it is still not a loss. I still would like to believe that there is still, let’s say, a glimmer of hope. But if not, we’ll have to face the new reality and get prepared for the future.

Do you think Turkey is trying to ally with Tehran, or trying to one-up them?
It looks a little bit funny, because Tehran is trying to revive the Persian empire, and they are trying, maybe—what I have said about Turkey, it is mentioned in the book of the foreign minister of Turkey that it is the time to revive the Ottoman Empire. Maybe he didn’t say it that way, but the meaning is that they have to be more involved in the region.

We are looking on the relations with Turkey as relations that are strategically very important for both sides, and we would like to believe that they will be as good as they have been before. But to help the Hamas these days means to stab Abu Mazen and his colleagues in their back. Because for the Palestinian Authority, to help the Hamas it means to really endanger their safety and their needs in the region.

Do you think the Turks are trying to establish a direct allegiance with Hamas?
I really don’t know. But the fact is that when you help the Hamas you weaken the Palestinian Authority. While we have a political debate or conflict with the Palestinian Authority, with Hamas it is a religious one, because they are saying in their covenant, in their charter, very clearly that first Israel has no right to exist and they should destroy the state of Israel. They say the territory of Israel does not belong to the Palestinians, nor to the Arabs, it belongs to every Muslim around the world, and that is why there is no Muslim, whether he is a king or a president or a prime minister, who has a right to give up an inch of the territory. And there is no way to deal with them because for them we are not allowed to stay there. And we have to go back, like Helen from the White House said, to go to Poland and Germany and other countries that we came from.

Could Netanyahu have done more over the past few months to knit things together with Washington?
It always takes two to tango. And of course for us the United States is the best ally. It might be the only ally in the world. Our partnership is based on common values, human rights, the rule of law, democracy, the same culture. And of course strategically I have told the Americans more than once that while all the others have the option to move in one day from the United States to the others, for Israel there is no option. You can rely only on Israel as your ally in the Middle East. So it’s very good that you develop good relations with the others but one day they can be here and the next they can be there. And we know from the past, they were very hostile some of them to the United States for years. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union some of them maybe felt more free to become good friends of the United States. The Middle East is very important strategically and economically and I think it’s very important for both of us to keep good relations with each other. And the support for Israel is based on bipartisan support. And I would like to admit that the dispute that we have about the settlements is with both administrations. I met President Obama, I met Hillary Clinton, many times, and their record during their tenure as senators was 100 percent in favor of Israel. So it might be that they don’t see eye to eye with Israel, it might be that it takes time because engagement is not working, but still.

What about the question of whether Israel will become a strategic liability to the US, which was recently mooted by Anthony Cordesman and raised in the New York Times? Does Israel have a responsibility to make sure it’s an asset to the US?
Some believe that Israel is a burden. But there are those like Helen [Thomas], who don’t back Israel no matter Israel does. But the majority of the American people, the majority of the American politicians, and I think all administrations were always in favor of Israel because they believe the only real ally that the United States has in the Middle East is Israel. And I would like to believe that it will continue.

Peter Beinart’s recent article has prompted a lot of critical discussion among American Jews about Israel. Do you feel Israel needs to figure out how to speak to American Jews more clearly, or that people like Beinart are mistaken about Israel and Zionism?
I would be more happy to find out that some Palestinians or Muslims were trying to criticize the Palestinian government, the Hamas or even the Palestinian Authority, about what they are doing. I never found those, and we have been waiting now for decades to find some Arabs or some Muslims or some Palestinians who would criticize them and say that Israel is right, that you can justify what Israel is doing for self-defense because they are under a huge threat that is imposed by so many countries. And it’s maybe the only country in the world that still doesn’t have final borders, and where there are still countries in the UN trying to wipe it off the map. I never found them, but you always find Jews that I’m sure have very good intentions [criticizing Israel. But they are coming with their approach that I think is not really helping to empower or to strengthen the State of Israel, even if their intentions are good. They are coming from a very good place. But we find unfortunately that in our region that if you are weak you can get lost. If you are strong, you can survive.

So what do you say to them? Does Israel have a response?
What I say to them is, we would like of course to have the support of the whole American Jewry, no matter what government is in power. The Israeli people of course have the right to elect the chosen government that it would like to see in power--but while Israel is facing so many troubles and problems, and so many countries that are opposing Israel, and even the idea that Israel has the right to exist, and some who want to send us back to Germany and Poland and North Africa, and unfortunately it is not only Ahmadinejad recently—[we hope] that they would stand with us. But of course I am not, let’s say, not realistic. I am realistic, and I know it would never happen.

Is it the government’s responsibility to reach out to American Jews who are critical of Israeli policies?
I am in favor of talking to everyone. I am not in favor to ban someone, or to boycott them. But still, I think they are wrong. I met many of them, not members of J Street but those with the same liberal opinions and I tried many times to explain what it means and how Arabs look at that. But of course they have the right to their own opinions. I cannot disagree with their rights as human beings to have their own opinions.

Is there another election on the horizon?
Who knows? In Israel we always have to get prepared for another election.

Let’s start with the big news: The Soviet Jewish “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz will not be the Golden State’s Secretary of State. She lost decisively to former NFL player Damon Dunn despite the fact that he refused to dignify his opponent with an actual campaign. Of course, as the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel pointed out, the news may be that 368,316 people voted for a woman with fewer than two dozen donors who claims that Barack Obama’s presidency is procedurally illegitimate. Thank you, California.

Now, the Senate races. On the Democratic side, incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer cruised to an easy victory over Slate blogger and descendant-of-Jewish-Gold-Rushers Mickey Kaus; he picked up just five percent of the vote share, although he does now have the right to say that 93,599 voters really, really like him. (Thank you, California.) Among the Republicans, Carly Fiorina, who made Israel an issue early in the race, earned a decisive win, polling 56 percent over moderate Tom Campbell (22 percent) and Tea Party conservative Chuck DeVore (19 percent). Was Israel the deciding factor, in the end? Almost certainly not: The venerable Field Poll indicated that Republican voters were angling not so much for their favorite choice as for the best setup for a slam-dunk win over Boxer in the fall. So, stay tuned!

Meantime, we learned exactly how much Israel is worth in the Los Angeles congressional district represented by Jane Harman, the Blue Dog Democrat who has been a longtime AIPAC supporter. Harman’s opponent, peace activist Marcy Winograd, tried to make the Gaza flotilla raid into a wedge issue in the last week of the race, and managed to net 41 percent against Harman’s 59 percent. That’s not bad for an underfunded upstart against a wealthy longtime incumbent, but when you note that she was starting from a base of 38 percent in the 2006 primary, well, it looks like Israel is worth approximately 3.7 points in said district.

See you in November!

Earlier: Israel Hits the West Coast
Related: In Doubt’s Shadow [Tablet Magazine]

First, the Senate race. On the Democratic side, Slate blogger Mickey Kaus—who proudly traces his California heritage back to Jews who moved West with the Gold Rush—is mounting a longshot (to say the least) challenge against seasoned incumbent Barbara Boxer (née Barbara Levy, of Brooklyn), mainly because he can. “Democrats deserve a choice, too,” Kaus writes on his campaign Website. Fair enough!

Over on the Republican side, former Hewlett-Packard chief and McCain-Palin adviser Carly Fiorina is fighting for the party’s nomination against Tom Campbell, a former congressman and Stanford Law professor, and Chuck DeVore, a state assemblyman. The race has largely followed the now-standard California pattern: Tea Party-favorite DeVore threatens to siphon conservative votes from Fiorina’s base, creating a window of opportunity for Campbell, the social moderate.

Israel came into play early in the race, when both Fiorina and DeVore pounced on Campbell for voting against increasing foreign aid to Israel, in 1990, and for taking campaign funds from a University of South Florida professor who subsequently pleaded guilty to helping the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Campbell apologized in March, at the state Republican convention, saying, “I did not know, but I could have known.” (Not the most scintillating campaign motto, you’ll agree!) In last week’s New Yorker, Connie Bruck wrote that Fiorina was thinking of running TV ads highlighting her support for Israel, but that appears not to have happened; nonetheless, while Campbell spent Sunday calling supporters from his home in Northern California, DeVore spent the afternoon rallying for Israel before joining Fiorina at a Republican Jewish Coalition gala in Beverly Hills alongside former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and Karl Rove.

As it happens, the Gala guest list also included one of Tablet Magazine’s favorite California pols, the “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz. A Soviet Jew who wound up in Orange County by way of Israel, she was seen last summer asking California’s secretary of state, Debra Bowen, to prove that she had verified President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Now, Taitz is a dark horse candidate for Bowen’s job, over former NFL player Damon Dunn. Taitz either declined to accept state spending limits or didn’t want to pay per-word fees to submit a candidate statement, and her Website doesn’t appear to be working. But political observers say she’s still got a chance, because Dunn has chosen not to run a primary campaign. “For professional Republicans right now, the main tactic in regards to Orly Taitz is prayer,” Claremont McKenna political science professor Jack Pitney told Politico.

One more! Rep. Jane Harman, an eight-term Democratic incumbent from Los Angeles’ South Bay, is being challenged by a peace activist named Marcy Winograd, who wrote in The Hill this week that she was invited to join the May 31 Free Gaza flotilla. “Had I not been in the middle of a congressional campaign, challenging Jane Harman—a hostess of AIPAC dinners in her home in Venice—I might have gone,” Winograd added. Instead, she sent some ‘Winograd for Congress’ t-shirts to the flotilla participants; now she’s calling for Congress to pass a resolution demanding an international investigation into the raid.

Harman, a longtime member of the conservative Blue Dog Democrats, responded with a statement echoing the Obama administration’s “deep sorrow at the loss of life,” and asking Israel to pass humanitarian supplies through the blockade to Gaza. Bill Boyarsky, one of the most astute observers of L.A. politics, described the back and forth as a “disagreement between these two Jewish women over the future of Israel itself”—which just so happens to be playing out in a district where the Jewish vote can tip the balance.

Right Fight [The New Yorker]
Related: In Doubt’s Shadow [Tablet Magazine]

Thomas’s rant was occasioned by an encounter with Rabbi David Nesenoff, who waved down Thomas outside the White House briefing room before last month’s Jewish Heritage reception for what he expected to be a polite, smiling quip about Israel for his camera. “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” Thomas told Nesenoff, with a flippant laugh. “Any better comments?” Nesenoff replied, still jovial. “Remember these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not Germany, it’s not Poland,” Thomas continued. “So what should they do?” Nesenoff asked. “They can go home!” Where, exactly, was that? “Poland. Germany,” Thomas explained. “And America, and everywhere else.”

Footage of the rant was posted late last Thursday on YouTube, where it attracted more than a million views, and unleashed a tempest in Washington, with former Clinton counsel Lanny Davis and former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer publicly criticizing her remarks as hateful and anti-Semitic. Thomas posted a brief apology on her Web site Friday, conveying regrets and expressing her “heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.” This morning, Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz reported that she had told him she was “very sorry” for her remarks. “I think I crossed the line,” Kurtz quoted Thomas as telling him. “I made a mistake.” In a public statement today, the White House Correspondents association called Thomas’s comments “indefensible.”

It remains unclear whether Thomas thinks that her mistake was in suggesting that Jews should vacate Israel, or in saying so to a videographer. Her views on the Middle East conflict, indeed, are no secret: just last week, she tore into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs after Israeli commandos killed nine people in the raid on Turkish ships bound for Gaza, calling the episode “a deliberate massacre, an international crime.” Last year, after Obama stopped by the press room with cupcakes to celebrate Thomas’s 89th birthday—the same day as his 48th—she told a reporter for Haaretz that she thought “the average Israeli is very fine, very fair, and straightforward, but I think their treatment of Palestinians in Jerusalem, where they continue to take their land, is wrong.” And, she added, “American Zionists certainly expect us to back up anything Israel does.”

Thomas’s tough questioning of the Bush administration over the Iraq war won her a new generation of fans, including many American Jews, and her legendary bluntness was recently captured in a 2008 HBO documentary, Thank You, Mr. President, that celebrated her journalistic credo, “If we don’t ask the tough questions, then they won’t get asked.” But Rabbi Nesenoff is hardly an important American public official, and her uninflected rant against Israel’s Jewish inhabitants seemed not a question, but rather a statement of deeply held beliefs that puts her in the company of racists like former Virginia Governor George Allen, of the infamous macaca joke, or radio shock jock Don Imus, who referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s.” After MSNBC suspended Imus, then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama said he’d have gone further: “I would also say there’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.”

Lanny Davis, the former White House counsel during the Clinton years who now blogs for the Huffington Post, turned the lens on Thomas’s colleagues, some of whom initially shrugged off Thomas’s comments. “Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot,” Davis wrote in a widely disseminated statement. While he insisted that Thomas “has a right to criticize Israel and that is not the same as being an anti-Semite,” Davis pointed out that Thomas’s comments went beyond criticism to statements that echoed  old anti-Semitic tropes about Jews being aliens in the land of Israel and which would clearly be unacceptable if uttered about any other ethnic group. “If she had asked all Blacks to go back to Africa, what would White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials,” Davis wondered, “much less a privileged honorary seat?”

The initial public response from other White House correspondents was to suggest that Thomas is simply a harmless old coot. “Do you have an older relative who says crazy things?” MSNBC host Chuck Todd asked on Twitter. The association’s president, Bloomberg’s Edwin Chen, told Politico yesterday that he thought “policing the views of opinion columnists can start us all down a path that history suggests is best avoided.” Yet, while there is no shortage of opinion columnists and radio commentators who have been fired for airing racist views, history records no other example of someone airing similar views while retaining a front-row seat at White House press conferences.

Taking Thomas’s comments as evidence of senility also seems unfair, given her long history of outspoken support for the Palestinian national cause, and attacks on Israel. As the daughter of Lebanese Christian immigrants, she has never been shy about broadcasting her sympathies for the Arab world, which she once described to a Lebanese-American monthly as “the cradle of all religions.” Thomas does have some supporters among elements of the American Jewish community. After Obama gave a prime-time press conference about the economy, the commentator M.J. Rosenberg thanked Thomas for prodding the president to publicly acknowledge Israel’s nuclear capabilities. “I salute Helen Thomas,” Rosenberg wrote.

Chen’s predecessor as President of the White House Correspondent’s Association, ABC News’ Ann Compton, had said that any punishment of Thomas would be up to Hearst, not the Association—which presumably implied that Thomas would continue to occupy her traditional front-row seat at the White House , with all the uncomfortable symbolism that her presence would have entailed. Hearst, in turn, suggested that it was satisfied by Thomas’s ambiguous apology—if that’s what it was. “We deeply regret Helen Thomas’ remarks, which in no way reflect the views of Hearst Newspapers or its employees,” a company spokeswoman said in an email. “Helen has expressed her own profound regret over the incident.” By Monday morning, the toughest public consequences had come from a Bethesda high school, which rescinded its invitation for Thomas to appear as a commencement speaker. She was also dropped by her agent, Diane Nine, and the co-author of her most recent book, Craig Crawford, said he won’t work with her again.

Surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League—which remained silent on the issue until late Sunday—did not call for Thomas to be fired. “We believe Thomas needs to make a more forceful and sincere apology for the pain her remarks have caused,” the group’s director, Abraham Foxman, said in a statement. Thomas absented herself from this morning’s press briefing, where White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called Thomas’ remarks “offensive and reprehensible”—and added that he didn’t believe they reflected the views of “most of the people in here, and certainly not of the Administration.”

In a meeting on Monday morning, the White House Correspondents Association board condemned Thomas’s remarks as “indefensible” despite earlier statements from its president, Chen, and some of its more prominent members, who initially said Thomas alone was responsible for what came out of her mouth. While noting that the Association does not police the speech of its members, it also said that Thomas’ offensive remarks did raise the question of “whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front row seat in the WH briefing room.” Thomas announced her retirement moments later in a statement issued by Hearst.

As for Nesenoff, the rabbi whose question precipitated Thomas’s public implosion, the correspondent’s behavior still seems unforgivable. “Can someone be rehabilitated, can someone do teshuva? Yes, but not overnight,” Nesenoff told Tablet. “It’s not just saying I’m sorry. One has to return what was stolen.” He stopped and explained that his teenage son Adam had accompanied him to Washington, and been present for the video interview. “He’s been in every state except five,” Nesenoff said, “but he’d never heard such anti-Semitism until he got to the White House lawn.”

Maybe it’s the Beinart effect, but we haven’t heard anyone publicly call Henochowicz a self-hating Jew, or any of the nastier names that have been used over the years. It’s a long way from 2002, when New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser declared one Adam Shapiro the “Jewish Taliban” after he spent the night with Yasser Arafat in Ramallah at the height of the Second Intifada. Shapiro’s parents, both schoolteachers, were subsequently harassed at their Brooklyn home and targeted by fliers denouncing their son as a traitor to America and the Jews.

As it happens, Shapiro was among the flotilla’s organizers, along with his wife, Huwaida Arraf, the American-born daughter of an Arab Israeli Christian. (Shapiro stayed in Washington, where he made TV appearances, while Arraf, who was aboard the largest ship, was featured by telephone on CNN.) Shapiro told Tablet Magazine yesterday that while he grew up celebrating Seders, he hasn’t considered himself Jewish since he was a teenager. “I consider Judaism to be a religion and not an ethnic identity,” Shapiro, now 38, explained. He hasn’t yet read Beinart’s much-discussed essay about American Zionism, but was glad to hear of American Jews wrestling with the occupation. “It seems like it’s shaking things up, and that’s good,” Shapiro told Tablet Magazine. “Obviously the American Jewish community has a role to play—if you want to engage as Jews, think about what it means to be Jewish, to follow the traditions of the Jewish people.”

However, he added, he was less concerned about the response of American Jews than of the American government, which he felt hasn’t been firm enough in condemning Israel for jeopardizing the safety of its citizens. “I identify as an American citizen, and that’s where my concern is,” he said. So was the flotilla a victory for the Free Gaza movement, at great cost to Israel’s image, as analysts across the board have declared? “I wouldn’t call this a success,” Shapiro told us, “because it’s a huge tragedy.”

Israel Begins Deportation of Activists Seized on Gaza Flotilla [Haaretz]

You know the old saw about how it’s always really hot on Jewish holidays? Apparently it applies to secular celebrations, too: A late-spring heat wave blanketed Washington, D.C., and while a few lucky guests bypassed the sidewalk security queue—Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols, we’re looking at you—for most of the 200 or so honorees, the weather turned out to be a great equalizer that left everyone just as damp as everyone else. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman panted his way down 15th Street, jacket slung over his shoulder, trailed by J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami. Chabad emissary Chaim Bruk, in from Montana, sweated it out with former Dallas Cowboys lineman Alan Veingrad. A lucky few clustered beneath the shade of umbrellas, which were originally packed for the predicted thunderstorms.

But never mind. There was air-conditioning in the grand hall behind the north Portico, and the Marine Band played a selection of Gershwin and Irving Berlin favorites from the (Jewish) American Songbook. There was a bar serving everything from club soda to Kedem, and waiters circulating with trays of kosher goodies. Press wasn’t allowed in to this portion of the day, but food writer (and Tablet Magazine contributor) Joan Nathan told The Scroll that the crew from Dahan Caterers put out an Israeli-inflected hors d’oeuvres smorgasbord that included eggplant salad, sweet couscous, and fresh tomatoes. Still, some people skipped it. “I stuff myself on my own time,” Gary Rosenbaum, a Democratic donor who is also the chairman and CEO of Empire Kosher Poultry, told us. “I like to talk to people at things like this.”

What people? Well, there was American-born Israeli ambassador Michael Oren and Solicitor General (oh, and U.S. Supreme Court nominee) Elena Kagan; author Judy Blume, and the Olympic swimmer Dara Torres; actor Theodore Bikel and a delegation from Hawaii, decked out in cheerful floral leis. “I really wanted to make sure it wasn’t only Jews at the event,” explained Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Florida congresswoman. Along with forcibly outgoing Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania), Wasserman Schultz spearheaded the legislation that in 2006 got May declared Jewish American Heritage Month. She said she’s been pestering to get an event at the White House ever since. “The point was to celebrate our culture and contribution with people who aren’t Jewish so they can learn about our community,” she explained.

There were notably few leaders of established Jewish communal organizations, though Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations chair Alan Solow (whom I have profiled) and Jewish Federations of North America head Jerry Silverman did show. The White House made an effort, according to several people familiar with the planning, to invite people who weren’t at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s Hanukkah party in December, including younger Jewish innovators like Shawn Landres, of JumpStart, Rabbi Sharon Brous of Los Angeles’s Ikar religious community, and Aaron Bisman, of JDub Records, who is a noted FOTM (Friend of Tablet Magazine).

After an hour or so, the assembly was ushered into the ornate East Room, where two rows were reserved for attending members of Congress—a group that included Minnesota Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota). Specter sat in the front row, alongside Vice President Joe Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama, who floated in wearing a navy-and-white polka-dot dress and navy patent-leather pumps; joining them were Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had on a ladylike pair of black lace gloves with her black-and-white outfit.

Justices Ginsburg and Breyer; the Vice President; the First Lady.

Obama discussed the 350-year history of Jews in America, and repeated his promise that the bond between the United States and Israel is “unbreakable.” People clapped. As he stepped down to take his seat, a little boy—who turned out to be 8-year-old Logan Schayes, grandson of NBA Hall of Famer Dolph Schayes and son of former Orlando Magic center Danny Schayes and Olympic diver Wendy Lucero—ran up to present the president with a rolled-up photograph of the NBA’s 50 greatest players. “He’s such a basketball fan, I thought he’d enjoy it,” the eldest Schayes, now 82, said when Tablet Magazine caught up with him later in the afternoon.

Then Alysa Stanton, the first female African-American rabbi, stood and read Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” (did we mention Nextbook Press has published a Lazarus biography by Esther Schor?) and singer/songwriter Regina Spektor nervously worked her way through her hits “Us” and “The Sword and the Pen.” More than a few people held up cell phones and video cameras, but not everyone was so thrilled. “I left the room because she was a woman singer—because of my faith,” explained Veingrad, the former Cowboy, who has become observant since his retirement from football. But his friend, Dmitry “Star of David” Salita, the Ukrainian-born, Brooklyn-trained boxer, seemed unfazed. “Here in the United States of America,” he said, “I can wear my yarmulke in the White House.”

Yoffie talked to Tablet Magazine today about his diagnosis, and how he hopes the left will respond.

What prompted you to write this now?
As I said in the essay, the conservative response was the motivating factor. The common sense notion is that you need American support for dealing with Iran, and the anti-government rhetoric seems so counterintuitive and counter-productive. I have heard it, and having that experience in several instances had me shaking my head, and saying I need to write about it. On the one hand it indicates concern for Iran, but on the other hand it seems to be so counterproductive and not focused on Iran at all, but focused on all kinds of other agendas. Do we care about Iran, or is it a pro-settlement agenda, or an anti-Obama agenda? And is Iran getting lost in the fog?

You wrote that you were puzzled about the relative silence from left and center of the Jewish community on Iran. Why do you think that’s been the case?
On the liberal, centrist side of the equation, I don’t think people feel as passionately about it as they should. So much of the rhetoric on the right strongly suggests, implies, or directly acknowledges that what we’re really pushing for is military action, and that really makes the left and center uncomfortable. My view is that, as the Obama administration has said, we’re not taking anything off the table, but that while it’s getting late, crippling sanctions can still make a difference. I think that’s the way to go. Liberals and centrists are scared off by the implication of military action and that’s a factor in their thinking. But that can’t be a reason for staying silent.

You invoke 1967 to indicate how urgent the threat is.
This is the critical time. It’s not something we can wait six months to talk about. We have to talk about it right now. I think we’re running out of time on the ability of economic sanctions to be effective. So there is real urgency now. And the Obama people have ratcheted up the rhetoric. But if it’s between that and delivering results, results have not been delivered yet.

If you believe the Obama administration is engaging with the Iran issue, and endorse the approach they’re taking, why is there a need for people who support that to mobilize now?
It’s a question of getting everybody on board. We need to push the administration. They’re moving in the right direction, they’ve said some of the right things, but at this time are we confident that Iran is going to be blocked from getting nuclear weapons? No.

Do you think you should have written this essay six months ago? Were you waiting for your constituents to mobilize themselves on this?
I would have liked to see more grassroots activity than I’ve seen. And it’s not like I’m not happy with what we have said—we have resolutions, and if I wanted to build a paper trail, I could. But the community is very split right now on a lot of the Israel questions, and Iran shouldn’t be an issue on which we are split. So I think it’s very important for the Administration to hear from everybody on this, across the spectrum. We don’t want the government to perceive this as a right-wing issue alone. The overriding issue is that this is a terrible threat that we all have to be concerned about, and the government is less likely to move if it’s perceived as an issue of the right.

You were booed at J Street last fall over your defense of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, in 2009. Have you had pushback from the left since the essay was published?
Well, if you think about what the response is going to be, you’d never write anything. I don’t rule anything out but I worry more about indifference or silence that amounts to indifference than a negative reaction. Someone did share with me some blog on the right where the author was laudatory, especially since in those circles I’m the crazy leftist. But all the talkbacks were attacks, people who were saying this is simply an apology for the Obama administration. That’s the narrow partisan perspective I’m trying to avoid here. What will the response be on the left? I just don’t know. But in a certain sense I don’t care. This is an overriding issue.

What kind of action do you want to see from your rabbis and congregants?
I’m going to sit with some of our folks and talk about what the best strategy is for pursuing this. Again, it’s not that we haven’t done things, and there are a lot of people out there who feel very strongly about this in the centrist or liberal camp. So the issue is working with those folks to give this greater urgency and higher priority, and to have more organization on the local level. Do I have a whole plan worked out? I do not. But I do have ideas and we will begin to move on them very soon.

Do you want to see them engage with AIPAC, for example?
My view is that we should work with everyone in the community. But we should be prepared to speak up on our own.

Getting Serious About Iran [Forward]
Earlier: Reining in Iran

Moreover, you’re probably about to know even more about him: He plans to launch a site called Big Jerusalem, focused on Israel, sometime this year. As he told Mediaite last winter: “If you think it’s bad to be a conservative in the mainstream media or Hollywood, think what it must be like to be a small democracy in the Middle East and challenge the postcolonial approach.” Yes, that probably is worse, although in one case you are a person and in another you are a country.

But who is Breitbart? The New Yorker sent Rebecca Mead to find out, and it turns out that Breitbart, who was adopted, is a Jewish boy from L.A.’s Westside, specifically in Brentwood. There he attended the exclusive Brentwood School, which is the kind of place that turns out the people who run Hollywood’s machinery—the Ari Golds and the producers and the lawyers and the managers. But Breitbart tells Mead he was, even as a high-schooler, turned off by “the industry” and instead fascinated by the theatrics of Washington, D.C. His politics, he reports, emerged from his exasperation with the “deconstructive semiotic bullshit” first introduced to the American cultural scene by emigré members of the Frankfurt School—radicals, almost all of them Jews, exiled by the Nazis in the 1930s.

But what we begin to suspect, as we witness Breitbart making plans for a Vegas road trip from New York with Ann Coulter, and addressing a Tea Party rally in Washington, is that Breitbart is inspired less by a desire to overturn one political legacy or trumpet another than to engage an audience: He is a born emcee. “I love judgmentalism—it’s a sport,” he tells one fan in New Orleans. “I like judging! Let me judge.”

Rage Machine [New Yorker]
Earlier:The Real Michael Savage Stands Up

Jacobson, who held Hadassah’s presidency from 1964 to 1968, also chaired the American section of the World Zionist Organization from 1971 to 1982 and in 1981 was the first woman elected president of the Jewish National Fund. Her first trip to Israel was in 1951; she wasted no time making herself known to the leadership of the fledgling Jewish state. On a trip in the late 1950s, she was part of a delegation that met with David Ben-Gurion. “He was laying out the problems he was facing, and most of us just listened—but Charlotte interrupted the prime minister to say, ‘I’m not so sure I agree with you,’ ” recalled Bernice Tannenbaum, another former Hadassah head who was with Jacobson on the trip. “It didn’t matter that it was the prime minister of Israel. She just asked her questions.”

Jacobson was born Charlotte Stone in 1914 in the Bronx, where she was raised in an Orthodox family. In a 1967 interview with Morris Kurtzer, she recalled that she and her two sisters had been known in their youth not as the Stones, but as “the three pebbles.”

Jacobson was active in the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1970s, but within Hadassah she is famous for moving to reclaim the group’s hospital on Mount Scopus, in East Jerusalem, following the 1967 war. “She was a smart lady,” Falchuk said. “She knew that taking back the hospital put a claim on that part of Jerusalem.”

This morning, during commencement at JTS’s Upper Manhattan campus, I witnessed Eisen confirm that he is on a mission to reverse the prevailing view that the Conservative movement is on the wane. “This moment offers not only unprecedented challenge but unprecedented opportunity,” he said in his address. He pledged to position his school not just as a hub for people who identify as Conservatives, but for “the religious center.”

Who’s that, we wonder? Well, Eisen wasn’t quite clear about his definitions, but it apparently includes anyone in New York who’s interested in Judaism: Full-time students and part-time students “eager for Jewish learning and Jewish wisdom” will learn together at newly developed continuing education classes. And he was clear that JTS’s umbrella will now extend not just to Jews but to people of other faiths, particularly Christians and Muslims, whose clerics are going to be welcomed not just into public policy debates at JTS but into training in things like providing pastoral care.

These are general principles; what about specifics? Last week, Eisen outlined six core principles that will guide the school’s mission going forward. He elaborated, a bit, this morning on what that will mean: more interdisciplinary classes, more practical training for future clergy, and more continuing education, especially for professional staff at Jewish organizations. It will also mean more targeted focus on shaping how day schools and summer camps teach Jewish principles, and—you knew it was coming—“the revitalization of synagogue worship.” For more, I guess we’ll have to wait for the prospectus.

An interesting thing to note, especially in light of Peter Beinart’s powerful new essay about the future of American Zionism: Eisen was clear that he was speaking to American Jews, as Americans. Israel came up twice, once in a mention of the need for “creative thinking” about the Israel-Diaspora relationship (especially, we imagine, in light of the new conversion bill making its way through Israel’s Knesset), and once in explicit reference to the “inescapable tension between our focus on North American Jewry and significant involvement in the State and society of Israel.”

But to the new graduates, American Jews or otherwise, he said this: “You will no longer be enacting the hyphen in your identity by walking up and down Broadway” and exhorted them to go out into the wider world and do good.

Full speech after the jump.

Commencement Address 2010
Arnold Eisen
Two aspects of the Sinai covenant that Jews celebrate and reaffirm at Shavu’ot strike me with special force: the fact that the covenant binds Jews to one another and to the world at the very same moment that it binds us to God; and the fact that now, as much as ever, the covenant needs each one of us to bring it to fulfillment. The Creator requires the diverse knowledge, skills, experience, and wisdom of human partners to carry on the work of creation. Our world is still not just or compassionate enough, the Torah insists. You and I can make it better. The responsibility that this Shavu’ot message imposes, the work to which the covenant calls Jews, the meaning it bestows on every one of us, confer more than enough blessing for a lifetime.

That lesson is particularly relevant on this occasion, as we send forth another set of dedicated and well-trained men and women into the world, armed with the ability and the resolve to treasure the knowledge they have acquired here for its own sake and to use that knowledge for the good. The age-old covenant of Judaism is also especially relevant today because The Jewish Theological Seminary has just completed a reassessment of its mission and role in the world, the details of which I want to share publicly for the first time with this gathering of the JTS community.

We began the process of institutional examination and renewal fully aware that this is a time of rapid change and massive challenge: change in the worth and significance of books; change in the meaning of knowledge and its transmission; challenge to major institutions and assumptions that have structured the Jewish community in North America for many decades; and challenge to the ability of Judaism and its covenant to speak in any sense to the great majority of contemporary Jews. We knew that it would not be simple to plot the next chapter in JTS’s future at a time of economic constraint and widespread uncertainty inside and outside the Jewish community. But we also knew that it was essential that we do so because we believe that JTS remains essential to the future of Jews and Judaism in North America and beyond.

JTS stakes the new direction that I shall describe to you today on the conviction that this moment offers not only unprecedented challenge but unprecedented opportunity. It is true, of course, that the Jewish community in North America must deal with anxiety and alienation so widespread they threaten the vitality and even the survival of numerous Jewish organizations and institutions. It is also true, however—and, we believe, of decisive importance—that recent decades have seen substantial achievement in a number of areas: day schools and camps, revitalized synagogues and congregational schools, programs in adult Jewish study, social justice, spirituality, and the arts. We should not forget as we contemplate present opportunities that the Jewish community, despite recent losses in financial and social capital, possesses material and human resources of which our parents and grandparents could only dream. The possibilities for growth and renewal today may be less readily discerned and less frequently noted than the obstacles that confront Jews, but they are truly remarkable. The question is how we can best take full advantage of them.

The administration and trustees of JTS believe that now, as at every previous turning point in the life of North American Jewry over the past century, the keys to success in meeting challenge and seizing hold of opportunity are learning, leadership, and vision. An in-depth, clear, and nuanced understanding of the Jewish past, combined with a firm grasp of present-day dilemmas and complexities, can equip Jewish leaders to shape a future for Jews and Judaism that is both vital and authentic. We must chart a way of learning and living Torah in our generation that is at once deeply grounded in the experience and wisdom of our ancestors and thoroughly responsive to contemporary needs and sensibilities.

Solomon Schechter made the link between learning, leadership, and vision the theme of his address at the seventh JTS commencement ceremony exactly one hundred years ago. Leaders of the Jewish community, Schechter stated, had to declare in all that they said and did, as courageously as the martyrs of old, “A Jew I am and a Jew I shall remain.” Great learning was required for this task. Jewish leaders needed to know from first-hand study what Judaism had meant in the past in all its variety and complexity. They also required an unambiguous understanding of the change required to conserve Judaism, as opposed to the kind of change—alarming to Schechter as to us—that turns Jews and Judaism into something else entirely.

Charting and transmitting authentic ways of learning and living Torah in greatly altered circumstances, and educating leaders able to preserve Judaism faithfully by changing it faithfully: this is the mission to which JTS rededicates itself this Shavu’ot. For almost 125 years, JTS has provided the Jewish community—and the world—with a distinct vision of what Judaism has been and can be, and has educated leaders imbued with that vision and capable of directing its realization. The role this institution has played in nourishing the religious and intellectual life of North American Jewry through our world-class library and outstanding faculty is widely appreciated. JTS’s track record of groundbreaking innovation in the service of Jewish community and tradition is no less impressive. Think of Camp Ramah, The Jewish Museum, The Eternal Light series that JTS produced for radio and television, foundational interfaith dialogues, the conception and development of numerous Conservative and community day schools, and the formative contribution made by JTS to the growth of academic Jewish studies. In 2010, The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary remains among the very finest Jewish collections in the world; the JTS faculty continues to be distinguished and world-renowned; the student body is just as excellent and eager as ever; and the record of innovation goes on unabated. In recent years, JTS graduates have founded and led an array of dynamic new institutions, revitalized existing synagogues and schools, and stood at the forefront of organizations dedicated to reenergized worship, renewed pursuit of social justice, creative thinking about the Israel-Diaspora relationship, and high-quality adult Jewish learning.

Our alumni have exercised this leadership at a critical time when Jewish identity can no longer be taken for granted and Jewishness of all sorts is up for grabs. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in North America, however, do make and retain strong connections to Jewish tradition and Jewish community. Many others are searching for meaning and purpose for themselves and their families. They are powerfully attracted to experiences of tangible, face-to-face community that supply what they most need and want in life: ethical lives of purpose, ritual observance that offers profundity and joy, guidance at key junctures of the life cycle, and celebration that fills their homes and hearts with spirituality and transcendence. Many seek inspiring faith that brings them to encounter with God and impels them to work for a better world.

The successes and failures of the Jewish community in recent decades show that leadership and vision make all the difference—particularly when these are grounded in unquestionable authenticity born of learning and commitment. The Jews who lead us into an uncertain future by building new sorts of community and supplying new interpretations of our tradition must be so confident in their knowledge of the past that they are able to adapt Judaism to new circumstances without fear that such change will destroy what is most precious in our inheritance. They must understand how previous leaders have conserved Judaism by teaching, living, and changing it: carefully but boldly, and always with great learning and profound love.

In 2010, many institutions of higher education seek this balance. Louis Menand, in his perceptive reflection on what he calls “the marketplace of ideas,” suggests that knowledge changes faster than “the system.” Americans insist “that the production of knowledge should be uninhibited and access to it should be universal,” and the Internet would seem to represent and advance both goals decisively. But the system of higher education in this country dates in almost every aspect from the late nineteenth century, and as a result, the academy and its disciplines are faced with urgent and challenging questions: What do students gain by sitting in a classroom now that knowledge is instantly available on countless ubiquitous devices? Do books still matter? How can we hope to order knowledge—or careers—in late-nineteenth-century categories when Internet searches break down all categories, fuse past and present, and threaten every order with randomness and disorder?

It is clear that all institutions of higher education require a willingness to be flexible and to adapt inherited paths to new realities. In the face of overwhelming uncertainty, we will also need the wisdom to stand fast in the convictions and covenant that define us. A society, tradition, or community can cope with change of this rapidity and degree, I would suggest, only by providing tomorrow’s leaders with the learning and vision they need to carry their traditions and communities forward, not least the knowledge of how their traditions have grown through change in the past.
That balance of history and possibility, now as ever, is difficult to find. From the very outset, JTS has taught and demonstrated that there is no necessary contradiction between scholarship and belief, no unavoidable conflict between faith and reason, no inescapable tension between our focus on North American Jewry and significant involvement in the State and society of Israel, just as there is no incompatibility between rootedness in the Jewish community and pluralist respect for individuals and communities of other faiths. JTS has long sought to shape Jewish leaders who are fully open to the contemporary worlds of science and the arts, society and politics, and at the same time fully committed to Jewish history, teachings, and practices in all their complexity and variety.

I promise today that JTS will seek to articulate and communicate this vision of Judaism with renewed effort in the coming years and to imbue it in a new generation of scholars and religious, educational, and lay leaders.
Because learning is essential to the task of covenant, JTS will remain a preeminent institution of Jewish higher education that integrates rigorous academic scholarship and teaching with a commitment to strengthening Jewish tradition, Jewish lives, and Jewish communities. We cannot rightfully seek to steer Jews and Judaism into the future without ever-new and always first-rate scholarship about the Jewish past. In response to the changing conditions in which Judaism must be lived and taught, JTS will work to better focus both teaching and learning, and to maximize synergy among JTS’s various offerings and schools. We will stress interdisciplinary study in every area and develop core curricula in every field. We will provide future rabbis and cantors, scholars and educators, lay leaders and professional leaders, not only with rigorous textual and contextual learning, as always, but with the new skills and training demanded by their changing roles—as in pastoral care and arts education or in education in Jewish leadership as JTS uniquely understands that particular set of roles and responsibilities. In addition, we will offer our future leaders greater exposure to other faith traditions and broader understanding of the diverse Jewish community. There will also be heightened emphasis on how to teach the texts and history that are studied here, and how to inspire others with what has been learned.

Secondly: JTS will renew its efforts to bring the unique resources of teaching and learning gathered at 3080 Broadway to bear in a host of new ways for the benefit of Judaism and the Jewish community in North America and beyond. The continuing education of Jewish professionals at work in the field will become a core mission of the institution. The degree awarded to you today is only the beginning of lifelong learning with JTS. It will also be part of JTS’s core mission, starting this fall, to reach adults in the New York metropolitan area with high-level, in-depth, cutting-edge, and open-minded Jewish learning. The Library will seek to live up to its potential as a major cultural resource to this city, and especially to the Jewish community of this region. Just as the walls separating schools and disciplines inside JTS will come down, so will the walls dividing full-time students on campus from part-time students in the surrounding areas who are eager for Jewish learning and Jewish wisdom.

Last but not least, JTS will redouble its efforts to provide intellectual and spiritual leadership for Conservative Judaism and the vibrant religious center of North American Jewry. Indeed, we shall return to the promise of Schechter and Finkelstein that this Jewish theological seminary truly be of and for America, by broadcasting the message of Judaism as we know and teach it to the broadest possible audience. We shall serve Conservative Judaism and the religious center by continuing to provide professional and lay leaders to communities that seek to live in accordance with the vision of Torah that JTS articulates, as well as by communicating that vision with new energy to a variety of audiences through a variety of media. In cooperation with other institutions and organizations, we shall use the resources of the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education to make a greater impact than ever before on day and congregational schools. We shall strengthen JTS’s close connection to Camp Ramah and seek to bring the methods and insights of Ramah to bear on synagogues and schools. We shall direct the resources of our rabbinic and cantorial schools to the revitalization of synagogue worship. We shall engage students, faculty, and others in rethinking the paths of learning and living Torah that define Conservative Judaism and the broader religious center. Finally, we shall bring Judaism into more frequent encounter with the areas of health and medicine, weigh the impact of Jewish principles and teachings upon key matters of public policy, and seek new sorts of honest dialogue between Judaism and other faiths, particularly Christianity and Islam.

That is JTS’s agenda for the years to come, our covenant with graduates and supporters, our tradition, and our community. For many of us, myself included, the way we practice scholarship at JTS for its own sake and seek to use it for the good is also part and parcel of our people’s covenant with God. The Jewish community has wisely invested heavily in new programs and talent in recent decades. I hope that it will join us in investing in you, our newest alumni, and in this established but ever-innovative institution that is uniquely committed to the learning, leadership, and vision needed to ensure the Jewish future. You, our graduates, hold the key to that future. I speak for the trustees, the faculty, and the administration in saying that I believe firmly in your ability and in that of the institution that has trained you. I am convinced that you are well-prepared for the work ahead. So is JTS. The gifts and responsibilities of covenant summon us, now as always. We dare not fail to respond with all the boldness and experience at our command. Let’s get to it.

Earlier: JTS Is on a Mission

As Toomey’s press secretary, Soloveichik, who is 29, wants to be at the party the campaign has booked at a hotel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but as an observant Jew, she’s not sure how she’ll get back to her home in Allentown, nine miles west, without violating the restrictions on driving or working on the holiday. “If I were in Manhattan and had to walk from Washington Heights to Wall Street, I could do it, but the problem is that here there aren’t sidewalks,” Soloveichik told me, when we met last week at a Starbucks near Toomey’s campaign headquarters. “But I don’t want to be stranded in my apartment wondering who won the Democratic primary.”

Soloveichik is hardly the first, or the most prominent, Orthodox Jew to get into American retail politics. But she has made her career working outside of traditional Jewish circles, first in Rhode Island and now in Pennsylvania. She also carries the weight of membership in one of the most prominent of the rabbinic families that transplanted themselves from Eastern Europe to the United States in the early part of the last century. Her great-uncle, Joseph Soloveitchik, who taught at Yeshiva University (and spelled his name with a “T”), is considered the founder of Modern Orthodoxy and, along with her grandfather, the rabbi Aaron Soloveichik, was responsible for educating a large proportion of today’s American Orthodox rabbis. Her father, Eliyahu, is also a well-known rabbi, and her older brother, Meir, has also joined the family business, as an associate rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The latest Soloveichik to make a mark on American life is currently ensconced at Toomey campaign headquarters, which take up the corner of a low-slung office building in Allentown that used to house a pediatrician’s office. Her desk is cluttered with three monitors: a desktop PC, a Mac, and a Dell laptop that’s prone to breaking down. She says that, as a woman, she never considered it an option to become a rabbi. (Her mother, Esther, is a technology consultant.) “I never felt like I wanted to be a rabbi, but couldn’t,” she told me. “But I always had high expectations for myself.” Instead of parsing Talmud, she tracks polls—and has the security of knowing that even on Saturdays, when her BlackBerry stays off, she can always sneak out and check the latest numbers in the Allentown Morning Call.

Soloveichik’s personal style owes more to her youth at Hanna Sacks Bais Yaakov in Chicago than to the stars of her political cohort, like Alexandra Kerry or Meghan McCain. She wears long skirts—the day we met, it was a flowing peasant one with a graphic floral design, paired with gray Ugg boots and a short-sleeved shirt under a loose cardigan. She kept her shoulder-length auburn curls held back with a black plastic headband. The most troublesome inconvenience of being religious on a campaign, she explained, is having to carry kosher food with her and not being able to order at restaurants. At a recent staff barbeque, someone grilled a bacon cheeseburger and dubbed it “the Nachama burger.” “I was like, ‘Thanks, guys!’ and had some more fruit,” Soloveichik said, rolling her bright blue eyes. Her family, she said, is supportive of her work—and while they might like to see her settle down, she’s not eager to give up the Soloveichik name. “I’m pretty independent,” she told me. “And I could never not take a job because I was afraid I wouldn’t get married—I’d never forgive myself.”

Her diet and dress aside, Soloveichik is, in most ways, an exemplar of today’s rising young political operative: She gobbles up every item of Washington gossip that Politico publishes, delights in writing vicious press releases attacking opposing campaigns, and reads tracking polls obsessively. She likes to write her press statements with the television on for white noise—preferably to episodes of Gossip Girl or, failing that, the ABC Family Channel, rather than C-Span. “I’m 29 going on 15,” she said, with a laughing shrug. She is eager to fight a general election campaign against an incumbent, something many political consultants shy away from because it’s harder—and, she said, it hardly bothers her that Specter is Jewish. “In 2000, people were like, ‘You’re not supporting Joe Lieberman?’ and I said I didn’t see why I would,” said Soloveichik. “It’s not like they’re writing the Bible in Congress.”

As a yeshiva girl in Chicago, Soloveichik, who is the second-eldest of seven siblings, avoided politics; it was, she said, something her brothers were into. She applied to Northwestern for their undergraduate journalism program but wound up heading instead to Stern, Yeshiva’s women’s college, where she felt marked by her last name. “I really didn’t realize there were people who knew more about my family than I do until I got to New York,” Soloveichik said. Aaron Soloveichik was known, in his day, as an outspoken opponent of the death penalty and of the Vietnam War—he called it “organized murder” and advised his students to claim conscientious objector status—but his granddaughter chose to carve out an identity for herself as a vocal proponent of conservative political positions. She read up on the opinions of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and spent evenings writing letters to the Chicago Tribune decrying partial-birth abortions and to the New York Times about Al Gore’s campaign financing. Her hard-right views set her apart from her classmates, one of whom labeled her “Jerry Falwell in a skirt,” Soloveichik told me, adding that she saw it as a badge of honor. “She had an ironhard determination to be her own person,” said Marc Stern, a student of Joseph Soloveitchik’s who taught Soloveichik in an undergraduate constitutional law class and later hired her as an assistant at the American Jewish Congress after she finished a master’s at the University of Chicago, in 2004.

Soloveichik’s first campaign was a 2006 Senate primary in Rhode Island, where she signed on with a Republican candidate, Stephen Laffey, who was hoping to dislodge Lincoln Chafee, an incumbent moderate Republican. “I interviewed her, and after we’d gotten into the Orthodox stuff and her family history, I said to her that all the people on the campaign at that point were men, they tended toward being young and single, and asked if that would be a problem,” said Jon Lerner, the Republican political consultant who hired her at the Laffey campaign. “Her answer was, ‘You know, it would not be any problem, and in fact, they should be afraid of me’—which really came to capture her personality.” Laffey failed, but Lerner sent Soloveichik to Washington to work for Toomey, who had taken over the Club for Growth, a powerful anti-tax lobby, in the wake of his failed attempt to unseat Specter in 2004. Last April, Toomey announced that he was going to make a second run at Specter’s seat; a week later, Specter made the surprise announcement that he was defecting to the Democratic Party. “When Specter switched, it was crazy,” Soloveichik said. “I said to Pat, ‘I want to come with you’—I really wanted to work on another campaign, and there just aren’t a lot of candidates I believe in. I’m pretty picky.”

As a religious Catholic, Toomey’s views overlap with Soloveichik’s own uncompromising positions on issues like abortion (pro-life) and school funding (for public funding of parochial schools). And the Toomey campaign is fairly observant, across the board—Soloveichik said the campaign manager, Mark Harris, goes to Mass more regularly than she goes to synagogue. She is comfortable working with religious Christian Republicans and in many ways has more in common with them than with Jewish Democrats—a group that includes her boyfriend, David, who she said is an ardent Obama fan—though her positions might have put her at odds with her elders. “I have too much respect to hypothesize what her great-uncle might have made of his great-niece working for an arch-conservative,” Stern told me. But, he noted, the Soloveichik legacy also includes an imperative for religious Jews to work in the secular realm, toward the betterment of the world. If Orthodox Jews are drifting rightward, Soloveichik may come to represent not just the legacy of the past, but the face of the future.

By day, Hoenlein is known as the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations—an unrevealing title that endows him with responsibility for daily management of the umbrella group that serves as the de facto central council of American Jewry. At 66, he has the thinning hair and rimless glasses of a technocrat, which seems appropriate for his identity as the relatively anonymous functionary who supports the heads of the various organizations he represents. Aside from occasional comments to the press, usually in his capacity as a spokesman for the Conference, Hoenlein maintains a low public profile; he is virtually unknown to the millions of Jews on whose behalf he works.

But behind the scenes in Washington, in Jerusalem, and in the power circles of the organized Jewish world in New York, Hoenlein—usually referred to simply as “Malcolm”—is the face of American Jewry. Prime ministers call him. So do, from time to time, presidents. Ambassadors wait, patiently, to meet with him. Hillary Clinton, as a U.S. senator, attended at his daughter’s wedding; so did Rush Limbaugh. Billionaires like Ronald Lauder and Mortimer Zuckerman rely on him as an adviser on Jewish affairs. In more than 40 years of quasi-public Jewish service, starting in the Soviet Jewry movement, Hoenlein has built “the greatest Rolodex in the world,” according to Shoshana Cardin, a former chairwoman of the Conference. “The value of Malcolm is not that he opens doors,” explained one senior official at a Jewish organization, who first encountered Hoenlein in the 1970s. “It’s that he’s the clearinghouse. The perception is that he knows everything that is going on in American Jewish life.”

Unlike the vast majority of his colleagues and their constituents, Hoenlein is a strictly observant Jew. He wears a black knit kippah every day and has lived for decades in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, a hub of American Orthodoxy; he is as fluent in the language of rabbinic politics as he is in Washington lingo. Most Fridays, unless he is traveling, he leaves the world of the Conference behind and traverses the gap separating mainstream, secular American Jewry, and the religious environment in which he was raised. His Conference colleagues don’t visit his house for Shabbat dinners, because they’d have to break the Sabbath to drive back to their homes in Manhattan, New Jersey, or Westchester; he infrequently spends Shabbat with them, for the same reason.

Nearly everyone who has worked with Hoenlein—fans and detractors alike—unhesitatingly described his politics to me as “conservative” or “right-wing” when it comes to Israel, and no one I spoke with thought it likely that Hoenlein was among the 78 percent of American Jews who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. In our talks, Hoenlein would only say that he has “strong convictions when it comes to the security of the Jewish people.” Beyond that, he refused to discuss his personal politics. He defied anyone to guess how he votes, though he wouldn’t tell me when I asked him point blank. “I have certain views, certain principles, I adhere to,” he said when I asked why he thinks people assume they know what he thinks. His name does not appear on political-donor lookup lists.

“I am quite sure Malcolm is a principled, pro-settlement right-winger,” said Jonathan Jacoby, a former official with the progressive Israel Policy Forum. “I don’t think he’s ever pretended to be anything other than what he is ideologically.” But Jacoby, like almost all of the dozens of people I interviewed, gave Hoenlein and the Conference’s lay leadership credit for holding together a 52-member coalition that encompasses the political breadth of the Jewish community, from the left-wing Americans for Peace Now to the right-wing Zionist Organization of America—a unified front that, for the last half-century, has been one of the cornerstones of the American Jewish community’s political power.

Lately, though, the Conference’s position as the sole voice on behalf of American Jewry has been challenged by the rise of J Street—the two-year-old lobbying group that casts itself as a progressive alternative to established Jewish groups and that has become the chief venue for Jews who wish to indicate full-throated support of the approach the Obama White House has taken in the Middle East. The fledgling group’s political loyalty was rewarded last summer with an invitation to join a small group of Jewish communal representatives invited to the White House for a meeting with the president—a move that also telegraphed the administration’s disregard for the established hierarchies. While still tiny compared to the powerhouse organizations that are represented by the Conference—among them AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, and the major religious branches—J Street’s evident ability to thrive outside of Hoenlein’s orbit strikes at the notion of a single unified “Jewish” voice. “You can’t speak for everyone—nothing gets a hundred percent vote,” Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street’s executive director, told me. “I’m not saying this to invalidate either Malcolm Hoenlein or the Conference, but to speak for an entire community is presumptuous.”

Today, nearly a hundred members of the Conference will convene in Manhattan for a daylong retreat to refine their positions three key topics: the Iranian nuclear threat, the anti-Israel boycott and sanctions movement, and the state of the U.S.-Israel relationship. But with the American Jewish community perhaps more deeply—and publicly—at odds over its relationship with Israel than almost at any time since the Jewish state’s creation, J Street is almost the one subject guaranteed to produce consensus. Increasingly, there is a sense of disquiet within the established Jewish world from those who feel the Conference has been slow to counter J Street’s publicity machine with its own public campaign.

This is, in part, the result of the unique structure of the Conference, which every two years rotates its chairmanship—well-known public figures like Mort Zuckerman have filled the position—to keep peace among its various constituent groups. But it is also due to the personal style of Hoenlein, who understands the value of flying under the radar. Several times in the course of a series of interviews we conducted over more than two months, he paused to tell me that his reputation for keeping quiet about sensitive, backchannel negotiations—over, say, the fate of Jonathan Pollard, the American convicted of spying for Israel—helped him cement his access. Yet what to him seems like appropriate circumspection contributes to the widespread suspicion, particularly on the left, that he uses his position to pursue his own private agenda when it comes to Israel and the wellbeing of the Jewish people. Indeed, it has become something of an open joke even among his own friends. In March, I ran into Hoenlein at a conference in lower Manhattan; he was chatting by the buffet table with one of his longtime backers, an attorney and former Conference chair named Kenneth Bialkin. Hoenlein introduced me as “his biographer.” “Get rid of him, he’s a pernicious guy!” quipped Bialkin, giving Hoenlein a jovial slap on the back.

Hoenlein’s insistence on obscuring his own work habits also helps him maintain an almost magical aura of top-secret insiderdom. In March, I attended an off-the-record breakfast briefing the Conference hosted for Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, in a plush meeting room at the Weizmann Institute of Science offices in a midtown Manhattan, one floor below the modest suite the Conference sublets from the Jewish Agency. After the breakfast wrapped up, Hoenlein invited me to accompany him back upstairs for an impromptu interview. When we arrived, he pointed me toward a colleague’s darkened office, rather than into his, apologizing that his office was too messy. I asked if I could at least take a peek inside the inner sanctum, since our earlier interviews had taken place in a bare meeting room. He shook his head, and gestured at the teetering towers of cardboard file boxes visible through the doorway. “You’d get scared,” he said, deflecting me with a smile, and guided me across the hall.

Over the course of our interviews, I discovered that Hoenlein’s desire for privacy extended not just to journalists but to dignitaries: In April, as we were wrapping up a conversation in a Jewish Agency meeting room overlooking Third Avenue, he directed his next visitor, American diplomat James Cunningham—the current U.S. ambassador to Israel—into a cramped, windowless space nearby and kept him waiting for a few minutes after their 5 p.m. appointment so that I could finish my questions.

So, really, that’s it until next season. But if you’re jonesing for a fix, check out this little red-carpet interview, in which Patti reveals her plans to go after the Arab-royalty market, where multiple wives mean multiple commissions.

Click here for previous coverage of this season’s Millionaire Matchmaker.

The time has come to meet the last two millionaires of the season, and, frankly, The Scroll is less than impressed. Matchmaker Patti seems a little distracted by her own upcoming nuptials and in a rush to get the whole thing over with—so much so that, instead of hosting her usual meat-market meet-up, she goes ahead and picks out two girls for each of this week’s bachelors. “Like a Fiddler on the Roof deal,” gushes Bachelor No. 1, Greg. She doesn’t call herself matchmaker for nothing!

Greg turns out to be Greg Knoll, a 47-year-old mortgage lender from Manhattan Beach, Calif. He is, we’re quite sure, the same Greg Knoll who advertises himself on YouTube (must-watch) as “the most interesting mortgage man in the world.” He skis and he surfs, and keeps properties in Mammoth and San Diego to prove it. And he’s ready to find a partner, despite the fact that he’s broken two previous engagements. “He’s the Runaway Groom,” Patti announces. There’s that Julia Roberts theme again.

Patti sets Greg up with Livia Milano, a cute occasional actress. Things don’t go well. The first thing he asks is whether Livia is a “spinner”—a Patti term for a petite girl who can, you know, spin in the bedroom. “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be flattered or offended,” Livia tells him. Greg decides to patch up the awkward silence with an off-color joke about rabbits having sex. Livia is no less impressed.

Greg decides he is instead going to go on a real date with Melissa Hunter, a blonde spokesmodel who is also a veteran of a dating event known as “Financially Hung”. She goes by the nickname Mojo and says she is a vegan during the week but eats steak on weekends. Idiosyncratic!

Well, they go up to Mammoth for the day, and it turns out that Mojo doesn’t have any of it on the slopes. “I don’t have time to keep teaching women how to ski,” Greg pouts, and disappears down the mountain in a huff. He has plenty of time to cool off while Mojo is making her way down, and afterward they go for crudites at the lodge. Aside from guessing she’s a few years older than she is, Greg does okay, and he gets a little kiss as a reward. Despite his earlier complaints, the millionaire declares himself pleased.

But not as pleased as this week’s number two! Zagros Bigvand is a returnee from an earlier season, when he was kicked off the show for bedding his date on the first outing. Now he’s 31, and he promises he can control himself. Patti, unconvinced, calls his mother in Dallas to see if it’s true. “He’s a trusty guy!” confirms Mama Bigvand, and we’re off to the races. Bigvand is an Iranian Kurd who lives in Dallas, where he invests in real estate and does yoga in his living room. “I’ve got to find someone for him who is beautiful, grounded, has a great job, and keeps his schmeckel in his pants,” Patti announces.

That person turns out to be Susan Hirtreiter, the busty nurse who so bored oil heir Jason Davis earlier this season. Zagros, at a loss for what to do if he’s not allowed to touch this woman, breaks the ice by wheeling out his worst Al Pacino impressions, which, Susan declares, sound more like Joe Pesci. But she thinks it’s adorable! Then Zagros asks if he can lick her eye. Susan recoils. He recants and tells her about his bad back. Just the thing to get a girl hooked! But Susan actually is intrigued, and agrees to go on a date. Patti is nervous. “Susan has the S factor, as in sex,” La Matchmaker explains.

The pair meet at Trinity Boxing for a workout, and instead of just saying hello, Susan jumps up and greets Zagros by wrapping her legs around his waist. They do some jump rope warm-ups—or rather, Susan does jump rope, while Zagros watches, open-mouthed. “Can I get a sports bra here?” Susan jokes. By the end of the session they’re making out by the punching bags. “Kissing in the ring is something I’ve never seen before, and I hope to never see again,” says the hardened trainer, in the night’s only moment of true pathos.

Confoundingly, Patti has allowed Zagros to invite Susan to a private penthouse, where a chef is going to cook them dinner. Haven’t we seen this trick before? Whatever. Zagros tells the chef that he’s not hungry, because Susie’s kisses are so sweet. The chef is unamused. “I can’t compete with that,” he says woodenly, and promptly exits stage left. The lovebirds head out to the balcony to watch the sunset. “After boxing on the first date, I don’t know what you’re going to pull out of your shorts next!” Susan exclaims. We have some guesses! But Zagros honors his no-sex-on-the-first-date deal with Patti. The next da,y he turns up at Matchmaker HQ with a bottle of Veuve for the staff. “Mazel tov!” he shouts, and pops the cork. Patti toasts to a fruitful relationship.

That’s it, folks! Next year in Manhattan!

Levine, 51, is a veteran of the celebrity-scandal news business who directed the Enquirer’s Edwards coverage from the paper’s New York offices, on Park Avenue. He will be as surprised as anyone if he hears his reporters’ names when the Pulitzer Prize board announces this year’s recipients later today. Despite winning a much-publicized fight to gain eligibility for the Edwards stories, he told me last week, “We’re not holding our breath.” He went on, “Whether we win or not, we received a huge amount of recognition from the mainstream media.” And he doesn’t just mean Carl Bernstein.

The Edwards stories were hardly the first serious scoop the Enquirer has scored—there was the picture of Donna Rice sitting on wayward presidential candidate Gary Hart’s lap, in 1988, and the proof that Jesse Jackson was supporting an illegitimate child, in 2001—but it’s the first time the paper has provoked a grand jury investigation into once-viable presidential candidate’s alleged wrongdoing. The paper’s staff has earned itself a place in the pantheon of American muckraking, the long, illustrious history of which stretches from Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair to I.F. Stone, Jimmy Breslin, and Bernstein—scrappy, often ethnic journalists who never let go of their outsider perspective.

The Enquirer isn’t usually associated with Jews. Its founder was Generoso Pope Jr., a Bronx-born, MIT-educated former spy whose father published an Italian-language paper in New York. Its reporting DNA primarily reflects the Fleet Street veterans whom Rupert Murdoch imported into its onetime rival (and now sister paper) the Star in the early 1990s. But the three top guns who oversaw the Edwards story happen to be Jewish—Levine, former editor-in-chief David Perel (who now runs Radar Online, part-owned by Enquirer owner American Media Inc.), and AMI chief David J. Pecker, the Bronx-born son of a bricklayer who bought the paper in 1999 with the goal of competing with celebrity glossies like People and Us Weekly.

And they’ll keep running their band of muckraking outsiders, whatever the establishment in Morningside Heights announces this afternoon.

Timeline: How the Enquirer Uncovered the Edwards Scandal [National Enquirer]

There comes a time in every young boy’s life when he finds himself at the threshold of becoming a man. Symbolically, that happens for Jewish boys when they turn 13. But in reality, it comes later. Much, much later. Sometimes, never. But that’s where Patti Stanger, the Maharat of Matchmakers, comes in.

So, let’s meet this week’s overgrown children! First we have Dylan Smith, the 24-year-old CFO of Box.net, a cloud-computing service he started with a friend while he was an undergrad at Duke and now runs from offices in Palo Alto, California, where everyone else is, like, 30 and married. Dylan has many things going for him: Along with being a venture capital-backed paper millionaire—the next Mark Zuckerberg, maybe!—he is an avid half-marathoner and a Wiffleball champ and also a committed member of a Rock Band. (As in, the video game.) In fact, Dylan has so much promise that a companion wondered why the kid couldn’t just wait a few years for the hot Russian women to start throwing themselves at him in nightclubs. But, see, the problem is that he’s not getting laid at the moment, and that is what he wants Patti to fix.

Next to angelic Dylan, 28-year-old Hillel Presser looks, frankly, over the hill. But he comes from “the land of Florida,” as Patti puts it, and he’s had to work for his money: He’s an attorney in Boca who specializes in “asset protection,” which is to say, in hiding money from angry exes and jilted business partners. A noble cause! In his spare time, he invests in a company called 1-800-Muffins, which appears to be absolutely exactly what it sounds like. Hillel, who has short, gelled hair and a bit of a gut, volunteers that there is nothing in life that he wants but does not have, except, of course, a girl who looks just like Sloan from Entourage. “I just want a nice girl who likes me for me,” he tells Patti earnestly. “And I wanna be attracted to that girl.” That old chestnut!

“Just because these guys aren’t major assholes doesn’t mean this week’s gonna be easy,” Patti confides. But she’s got some tricks up her sleeve! One of them is a blonde named Michelle, a Hooters waitress looking to upgrade to porn. “I think it would be an honor to be a Playmate,” she tells Hillel, who responds with a blank nod. There is also Farah, a retread from a prior episode who works in marketing for “a beer client.” Perfect! For Dylan, meanwhile, there is Arielle, a brunette who looks a little tired for 24 but who says she’d like to run with him every day of her life.

The trouble with Arielle is that she turns out to be a little … judgey. See, Dylan is the kind of guy who shows up for a reality TV dance class wearing moose-printed pajama pants. He gets tongue-tied in his confession moments, and he talks about his childhood hamsters—who were majorly in his life until, like, not that long ago—and he can’t help himself from saying things like, “I didn’t have any specific algorithm in mind to compare Farah and Arielle.” It’s kind of endearing! But Arielle is not so impressed. Dylan tells her he graduated from Duke late because he took time off from school. “To become a shmillionaire?” she interjects, apparently forgetting the entire reason she is on this date in the first place. Tragedy! Although Patti has given Dylan special permission to kiss Arielle, he spends the whole date—at an emptied Hollywood club called Cafe Was—angling for a chance to execute that strategy instead of just being himself. “I did kiss her! I did not ask!” Dylan reports back, when he goes for his debrief with Patti. Baby steps, young grasshopper!

While all that’s happening, Hillel is up in the air with his date Farah. In a weird continuation of last week’s Pretty Woman theme, he flies her to San Francisco in a private jet for dinner. On the way, he hands her some muffins. “She just shoved that muffin in her mouth!” Hillel exclaims, clearly wondering what else might follow. But Farah seems more excited about the accoutrements than about her putative Prince Charming. “I got to ride on a plane!” she exults once they land. (“Not ‘I got to ride with you on a plane,’ ” noted a friend of Scroll). And poor Hillel, who told the cameras he thought Farah was the kind of girl he could see himself marrying, starts to lose his footing. Thankfully, he’s got a crutch: booze! Yes, he tells a waiter at the Mandarin Oriental, please keep the drinks coming. “The more she drinks, the better I look,” he theorizes. Eventually they go up to the roof to admire the city lights, and he decides that he, too, will go in for a kiss. But all he gets back is a quick peck, as Farah recoils. Hillel, it seems, will return to Boca as the same boy.

Except then something weird happens: When he goes to see Patti, he tells her that he and Farah had dinner in L.A. the night before … “And then I had lunch with her again today.” Interesting! “It turns out Farah was not looking for Brad Pitt, but was looking for Hillel Presser,” Patti says, optimistically. We’re not quite sure, but it’s a nice thought.

Next week: the season finale, featuring Zagros, the guy who was last seen paired with Uri, the Israeli obsessed with “spinners.” Can’t wait!

Others just like the excuse for a big communal meal. Chris Billing, a 48-year-old journalist and documentary filmmaker, hosts a weekly Bible study group at his Washington, D.C., condo, and held a seder on Monday night with 10 friends, only one of whom was Jewish. He talked to Tablet Magazine about why.

Why did you decide to start holding a seder?

This is the second year we’ve had a seder among this group in D.C. The impetus for the first one wasn’t anything spiritual or ecumenical at all—a friend of mine came across a recipe for matzo ball soup on Epicurious.com, and she was looking for an occasion to make it. She’s Chinese and hadn’t made it before so we figured a seder would be a good time to make it.

When was your first seder?

My first exposure to the seder was in Israel. As far as I know there was really only one Jewish family in the town where I grew up, in upstate New York, so I didn’t really know anything about Jewish holidays when I was younger. As long as I can remember, we would be at our family’s Baptist church every Sunday, and I majored in religious studies in college at a small school that was then called the Philadelphia College of Bible (now Philadelphia Biblical University), with a thought of going into the ministry. As an undergraduate I spent two years living in Israel studying Hebrew, along with archaeology and Middle Eastern history at the Institute of Holy Land Studies, and I took Hebrew classes at Hebrew University. My parents had gone to Israel through Christian organizations they were involved with, and they always wanted me to go—they were just amazed by the place—so I went for my junior year abroad, and got infatuated with living there. I was in Jerusalem, and had a nice community with Jewish friends who would invite me for Passover. I was certainly the only Christian there.

Did you keep up the tradition after you left Israel?

I wound up going to Harvard Divinity School, majoring in world religion, but between college and divinity school, I got a call completely out of the blue from someone affiliated with Beijing University asking if I was interested in teaching Hebrew in China. This was in 1986. At that time China and Israel did not have diplomatic relations, and China had strong relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Arab countries, though they were moving toward establishing relations with Israel. They wanted to have some students who were familiar with the language, but they didn’t want to hire anyone who was Israeli and didn’t even really want anyone who was Jewish because they didn’t want any political or religious overtones to the course.

Because I was the Hebrew teacher I became a focal point for the Jewish community among foreign students studying in Beijing, even though I’m not Jewish. It was mostly American Jews. And about 10 of us got together and had a seder. There was one supermarket affiliated with a hotel that had matzo, but I think people had relatives in the States send it over. We got a live chicken and had one of the other students slaughter it, and we included a few of my students from the Hebrew class. They were Chinese and not Jewish, and it was definitely their first seder.

How was it organizing the seder yourself, with so many people who weren’t familiar with the traditions?

I think a lot of Christians think of this idea of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and the Judeo-Christian society, but they don’t know much about the Judeo part. Having a seder really brings that home. Once we came up with the idea based on the matzo ball soup, my thought was that if we were going to do it, we’d better do it right. So we took it very seriously. A friend of mine who isn’t Jewish was commissioned with the task of getting the shank bone, and she went to a butcher in her neighborhood and said, “You’ll think I’m crazy but do you have a shank bone?” Of course he said, “You need it for a seder?” And she was shocked that he had them wrapped and ready.

I got a haggadah from the JCC, one with a picture of matzo on the cover. We went all the way through it. Or most of it. The truth is we do an abridged version—the parts about the rabbis getting into the minutiae, we skip that. But we open the door for Elijah, and we flick the wine drops for the plagues, and we hide the afikoman. And we sing. Seders are like the Jewish Top 40 in terms of songs, but they’re all tongue-twisters, which is hard because by the time you get to them, you’ve had several glasses of wine. Last year a friend of mine, Liz, came, and she’s half-Jewish, so she’d been raised with seders at home, which was helpful because, well—everyone loves singing Dayenu but I’m the only one who can sing the verse.

At certain points we threw it open for questions—there were a fair number of journalists there, and they’re not shy about asking questions. Some people weren’t familiar with the whole story, so we went through that, and talked about the plagues, and the things the items of the seder plate represent. We used the haggadah and Wikipedia as our sources—I had printed it out, just to make sure I had the seder plate arranged properly. This year we had an exchange student from China, who read the Four Questions, and she had a lot of questions about what it all meant.

How did your guests feel about the experience?

One of the people there this year was Jewish, and he brought his girlfriend, who isn’t Jewish, and he called me and said she told him that in addition to it being educational and a good ecumenical experience, it really makes you feel connected with humanity, and makes you realize who God is, and how he works in the nation of Israel. And I think all of us felt that it’s sort of uplifting and encouraging to be the keeper of a tradition like that.

When The Scroll embarked on the project of recapping every week’s Millionaire Matchmaker, it wasn’t just because the lady herself, Patti Stanger, is a bona fide yenta who reliably dispenses wisdom in the Yiddish she learned from her grandmother in New Jersey. Since the show mostly involves rich young men in Los Angeles, it regularly features rich Jewish bachelors, from that Israeli real-estate developer who wanted a “spinner”—it’s a bedroom move, folks—to Jason Davis, the oil heir who introduced his date, and all of us, to his pet monkey (not a euphemism!). Lately we’ve had a bit of a dry run on that front, but this week, appropriately enough, brings deliverance from that desert into the land of milk and outrage. Or, as Patti groans: “Ugh, God, the Jews are back.”

And how! Ladies, his name is Justin Levine, and he’s “four-zero.” (Or “30 plus 10.”) He comes from Toronto, where his family owns lots of real estate, and where he spends part of the year shooting the movies he underwrites with their money. What kinds of movies, you ask? Well, movies like Boy Toy, and Natural Born Komics, and Wing Man. Pauly Shore appears to have directed Natural Born Komics. Levine has $10 million that his dad gave him and a condo somewhere in a neighborhood decidedly not the Hollywood Hills. But poor Justin can’t meet any appropriate women at his own Oscar party. What is he looking for? A girl with 34-23-33 measurements. “Are you fucking high?” Patti exclaims. “You want tits on a stick, basically!” “No!” Justin says, using his best “but, MO-OM” voice. “I want a nice girl who I like.”

Lucky for Justin, the other guy in the episode is way, way more repulsive. Kevin Strom, 41, is also a movie producer: His biggest success to date was last year’s Tom Berenger vehicle Breaking Point (so a vehicle the same way the Pinto was). He lives in a loft in downtown L.A., he has $4 million, and he believes in traditional gender roles. “While I’m watching football, the woman should be in the kitchen cooking something for me,” he explains. The actress he would most like to “do”? Well that would be Cameron Diaz. “Men are only as faithful as their options, and I blame women for me not being faithful,” he argues. “It’s not my fault they’re sexy!” Oh, and he keeps a spreadsheet of all the women he goes out with, so he can collate personal details about them and look like he’s sincerely interested. All this, despite the fact that he wears purple shirts printed with flowers!

Patti decides she’s going to educate these two buffoons, in hopes not so much of helping them find love but of making them a little less terrible for the women who will inevitably agree to go out with them. The girls Patti lines up for her teachable moment don’t look so thrilled to be stripped of their various sparkly accoutrements and squeezed into identical blue tank tops and jeans. “No makeup, hair pulled back,” Patti says. “This way the modelizers must infiltrate the heart and get to know the girls from the inside out.”

A nice idea, but no. Justin looks deflated, while Kevin cheerfully eyes the scrubbed-looking horde and says it reminds him of his days in Catholic school. They both wind up picking the same girl, a pert 21-year-old brunette named Jennifer who, between her high-volume hair and smart mouth, is well on her way to becoming a Real Housewife of some unfortunate town. “Jennifer’s got the drive and the chutzpah to get the job done,” Patti says, confidently. Sadly, the two Peters Pan can’t both go on dates with her, and Patti says it’s up to Jennifer to choose which bachelor she wants to see. But she hesitates for a moment! Disaster! Both men decide they want nothing more to do with her. Patti sees it’s all going downhill from here, and yet we have another 15 minutes of airtime to get through.

Justin proceeds to devise a clever, evil plan that goes like this: He’s going to go on his stupid date with stupid Jennifer, but he’s secretly going to invite Kate, the naïve blonde life-insurance broker he passed over, to join them. “Patti is not the boss of me!” he tells the camera crew, who surely go right back and inform Patti. He and Jennifer go to Madison Kelly NYC, a store in Beverly Hills, where Jennifer’s supposed to pick out an outfit and jewelry, Pretty Woman-style. Not my allusion! While Jennifer’s modeling dresses, Justin actually refers to the movie, in which, we’ll recall, Richard Gere bought Julia Roberts the clothes, Julia Roberts being a hooker. “No guy has ever pampered me like that,” Jennifer says. (She may, in fairness, be too young to have seen the movie.)

But all this changes when clueless Katie walks in! Because even Jennifer knows there can only be one princess at the top of the fire escape. “This like a menage á freakin trois,” Jennifer bursts out. Justin responds by saying he’s going to bring some candy over. “Candy’s a girl?” Jennifer deadpans. “This is offensive, this is rude, this is so … not cool,” she continues. But, as a friend of The Scroll pointed out, Jennifer stuck around to drain her bottle of wine. Well, who can blame the girl for wanting a little more face time, right? Justin gets called into Principal Patti’s office for a talking-to, and she gives him the verdict straight up: “You’re a douchebag.” Sayonara, Semite!

Kevin, meantime, winds up looking surprisingly good. He takes his ladyfriend, Jamie, for a spa day at the St. Regis, a luxury resort in Dana Point. Which might have been OK, except that she seems to think he has something more severe than cooties. Here they are in a bathtub together drinking champagne, and she’s all, “I don’t know this man at all. I am not Julia Roberts!” (There’s that movie again!) Then Kevin awkwardly compliments her “skinny perfect body,” which comes out sounding like code for, “Where are your breasts? I specifically asked for breasts.” Next they move on to dinner, which Kevin has coyly ordered in the suite, right next to a bed decorated with white rose petals. Happily, the chef has sent up some sautéed liver, which they both find equally gross. “That is so sick,” Kevin says, washing it down with fizz. “Maybe that’s a gall bladder, I don’t know.” And now they’re both laughing! And making faces! They’re having … fun!

But the magic doesn’t last long. Kevin, wearing another appalling embroidered shirt, loses his self-control and invites Jamie to bed with him. She turns on him. “I want class,” she says, pouting. “I’m not a little hoochie.” “That’s OK!” Kevin reassures her. He’s just gonna wait until “a future time” to have sex with her, he informs the viewers at home. #EPICFAIL.

Next week is the season finale! Someone dances funny, someone takes a private jet to San Francisco, and a guy named Hillel gets a girl to break Patti’s rules. Moses, can’t the days go any faster?

As we recently noted, Patti Stanger—La Matchmaker herself—is moving the show to New York. After watching last night’s episode, we think we know why: She’s worked her way to the top of L.A.’s douchebag totem pole, and now it’s time to go.

This week’s d-bag is Will Ratner, a reasonably good-looking 27-year-old who is spinning his wheels—Mercedes rims, if you must know—while he waits to inherit $40 million from the family business. (Is he related to the San Diego Ratners, Jewish garmentos who a made a fortune manufacturing Navy uniforms during World War II? Or maybe the Cleveland Ratners? Or none of the above?) Unlike Patti’s last dauphin, oil heir Jason Davis, Ratner comes across as more or less functional—he neither has a monkey nor talks about farting, for example. Will had a girlfriend, whom he really loved, and who stood by him while he explored the full range of L.A. careers: sports agent, investment adviser, restaurateur. But, you know, as he grew more successful, hotter women started hitting on him, and eventually, well, he had to start sleeping with them. But now he tells Patti he does not want to be at 35 the man he is at 27. Though it is hard. “Women want to get with me all the time, but I usually turn them down,” he says. “I can sacrifice a 10 bimbo for an 8 with a brain.” “Does the term a-hole mean anything to you?” Patti inquires.

Patti goes out and finds him a lovely, engaging date: Nequisha Risser, a sensible travel and meeting coordinator for an aerospace company. A little Googling reveals that, like all the other girls so far this season, Nequisha harbors model/actress/whatever aspirations. So, in her spare time, she appears on custom car calendars, works fights as a ring girl, and also models for something called Hollywood Poker Girls. This despite the fact that, as Will helpfully informs her, she isn’t as hot as some of the other girls Patti introduced him to.

Off they go to Vegas—accompanied, awkwardly, by Will’s personal assistant, a sneering girl named Ariel. Nequisha is smart enough to know what’s what, which is that Will and Ariel are having some kind of a thing. “Why would he come to me for help if he’s sleeping with his assistant?” Patti wails when she finds out. “I have got to get to the bottom of this!” Alas, all that lives at the bottom of that well is slime. Bye-bye, Will!

It would all be just terrible if Patti hadn’t managed to unearth Ayinde Alakoye, a man with a smile like Tiger Woods’s and, apparently, none of the baggage. At 37, Alakoye is a confirmed commitment-phobe—something to do with his parents’ divorce and his father’s subsequent murder, so for once we can cut someone on this show some slack—and desperately wants to find happiness. He’s normal, because he grew up in Washington, D.C., and after a false start as a professional beach volleyball player he got into advertising sales, and now has some kind of radio start-up. Also, he volunteered for Obama! So, basically, if Patti can’t help this one, she doesn’t deserve to call herself a shadchan!

Patti introduces Ayinde to Joslyn Pennywell, a nice girl who hails from Lucky, Louisiana. (Look it up! Yes, on Wikipedia!) Joslyn also wants to model—she made it to the seventh round on America’s Next Top Model a couple of years ago—but we can forgive that, because, like Ayinde, she just seems so nice! They go on a helicopter ride over downtown L.A. together, holding hands the whole time. Afterward, they go to a Moroccan restaurant in Hollywood and watch a belly dancer shake her booty. Now they are officially dating! So, that’s it: The last nice guy in L.A. is taken. Eastward, ho!

AIPAC’s machine is, of course, legendary. And its traditional wheelhouse is the two legislative chambers. Despite the fact that the group’s new president, Lee Rosenberg, was among Obama’s most active supporters, he pointedly told delegates the other night that, given the state of affairs between the administration and Israel, “It is Congress, the bedrock of American support for Israel, which must act.”

Act on what? On Iran sanctions, for starters. That’s the issue that tops a set of talking points staffers handed out to delegates yesterday afternoon in training sessions. What else? Obama requested $3 billion of assistance in the new foreign aid bill: given the economy, it could use some shoring from the pressure it will inevitably receive from all sides.

The delegates—most of whom have lobbied their members of Congress before, on these exact issues—seemed most anxious about how to respond if members asked about “the situation.” (The diplomatic one, not the Jersey Shore one.) One longtime legislative lobbyist for a left-leaning Jewish group told me that, at the end of the day, “This Congress isn’t going to move without the administration.” (Want evidence of that? Look no further than the fight to get the health-care legislation passed.) Accordingly, AIPAC staffers advised their charges to reassure members of Congress that the episode was “regrettable” but that they, at least, were not in conflict with the administration.

And Netanyahu? He’s also heading to the Hill for his own meetings this morning, before he goes to see Obama privately at 5:30 this afternoon.

Earlier: The Jews and their City. And Their Umbrellas.

“Jerusalem is not a settlement,” Netanyahu said, earning roaring applause for a line that was tested by other speakers earlier in the day. “It’s our capital.” To drive the point home, Netanyahu trotted out a story that he is, judging by the fact that he has told it before, pretty fond of: it’s the tale of the 2,800-year-old signet ring, which the prime minister keeps in his office, that has the name “Netanyahu” etched into it. This time, he embellished the story with a reference to Israeli President Shimon Peres, whose namesake was a brother of the first Benjamin, and roamed around Biblical Judea too. “The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel cannot be denied,” Netanyahu reasoned. “The connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem cannot be denied.”

The AIPAC delegates clapped, and gave regular standing ovations; with help from alert staff cheerleaders, they clapped loud enough to drown out two protesters who tried to interrupt the speech. (Hey, protesters! Were you the same people who interrupted Netanyahu in November? We wonder.)

After the talk, though, people cleared out of the main ballroom especially fast. Here’s the thing: it rained yesterday, off and on, in Washington, and people had their umbrellas with them. But the Secret Service, which was brought in to handle security, confiscated the potentially dangerous (I guess?) implements. (This did not make the Obama administration any more popular with the crowd, including the one Minyan-level donor—someone who gave at least $100,000 to AIPAC last year—who warned a guard he’d send the Secret Service a $15 bill if the brolly wasn’t returned.)

After dinner, these righteous umbrella-owners emerged to find only chaos. Thousands of umbrellas, most of them identical black folding models, had been unceremoniously dumped on the floor by the front door. Which naturally didn’t stop the crowd from skipping dessert to dive in; nor did it stop others—this being a conference of active, civic-minded Jews—from immediately considering the ethics of taking an umbrella that was almost like the one you brought. Judging from the triumphant cries of those who persevered (including me), the connection between these Jewish people and their own umbrellas couldn’t be denied, either.

Earlier: Netanyahu’s Brief Homecoming

But Bibi will have his public turn tonight in front of the AIPAC crowd. He’s expected to declare that Jerusalem is “not a settlement”—hence his refusal to back down on the government’s plan to build 1600 new homes in a Jewish area of East Jerusalem. (The same line went over very well with the crowd this morning when AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, tested it out.) Perhaps even as you read this, he is meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who earlier today told the AIPAC audience that the problem was never the apartments themselves, but rather the exposure of that infamous daylight between the Americans and the Israelis. “It undermines America’s unique ability to play an essential role in the peace process,” she told the crowd. “This is not about wounded pride. This is about getting everyone to the table and creating and protecting an atmosphere of trust around it.”

One person who didn’t seem at all fussed about the fuss was Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, who visited her friend, White House National Security Advisor James Jones—the same Jones who said last fall, at the J Street conference, that peace was Obama’s top foreign-policy priority —and then, looking almost Grace Kelly-esque in a smooth blonde ponytail and black boatneck dress, swanned over to a luncheon at the Renaissance Hotel across the street from the AIPAC convention headquarters. There, she told the capacity crowd that she, for one, had nothing to publicly say about her political rival Netanyahu, or the recent “disagreement.” “There are places and times to have these discussions,” she said, giving a sly shrug. “This is not the time and the place to do it.”

PM To Tell AIPAC Jerusalem Is Not a Settlement [Ynet]
Earlier: Obama, Netanyahu Meet, Stay Silent
Obama Adviser to J Street: Peace Deal Should Be Priority

“The political situation inside Israel is stable,” declared Solow, who spoke comfortably in his pronounced Chicago accent for about 15 minutes, from scribbled notes. “There is a better relationship between Obama and Netanyahu—it’s improved from the early days of both the Obama and the Netanyahu Administrations. What we’re seeing is the benefit of the passage of time.” As for Biden, with whom he had met the week before in Washington, Solow added, “I’m not surprised his visit to Israel has been a positive one.”

By the time Solow got back to his office, on the 19th floor of a tower up the street from City Hall, his blue-jacketed BlackBerry was buzzing with news to the contrary, provoking a cluck of exasperation. The vice president had just released a harshly worded statement: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,” Biden said. “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.”

“The screw-up,” as it came to be known—in polite company, at least—threatened to undo a year’s worth of political work by Solow to bring the Obama team closer to the Israelis. Biden was the highest-ranking of the American officials who have traveled to Jerusalem this year in hopes of jump-starting the peace process; the incident virtually guaranteed that Obama would not soon follow. In the short term, it gave the Administration—not to mention the Palestinians—grounds to argue that the Israelis were being either childish, or politically unreliable, or both, in advance of the newly agreed upon “proximity talks,” a modern variant of shuttle diplomacy.

It might have remained one in a series of passing diplomatic contretemps between the Americans and the Israelis—except that, on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu to deliver a further 45-minute scolding. On Sunday, White House senior adviser David Axelrod went on ABC’s This Week and said he thought the announcement had been calculated to undermine progress toward peace talks. People who had lived through the 1991 fight with the elder President Bush over loan guarantees to Israel started making the analogy. Although both Obama and Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren have since deflected talk of a “crisis,” the situation was widely seen as the thorniest interaction between the two allies in decades.

It was, as it happens, just the kind of incident the Conference specializes in addressing. The organization was established in 1954, at the request of Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, whose office had been inundated with calls from various Jewish groups purporting to speak in the best interests of the fledgling Israeli state. The idea was that the Conference would act as a forum where the consensus view of American Jewish groups on issues relating to Israel could be worked out internally and then presented to the Administration; over time, it also came to act as an extra-diplomatic conduit between the American and the Israeli governments. It presently represents the spectrum of the American Jewish establishment “from A to Z”—a pun insiders like to wheel out in which “A” is the left-leaning Americans for Peace Now and “Z” is the firmly right-wing Zionist Organization of America. But its alphabet doesn’t include the new progressive lobbying group J Street—which drew ire from some Conference members by rushing to side with the Administration in issuing a stern condemnation.

The 52 members of the Conference—some of whom had been aggressively, though privately, telegraphing their displeasure to Jerusalem all week for failing to prevent the situation in the first place—quickly sprang into action, now firmly on the side of defending Israel from diplomatic overreaction by the Obama team. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee—which opens its annual conference this weekend, and whose incoming president, Lee Rosenberg, is a personal friend of Solow’s who was also deeply involved in the Obama campaign—issued a statement criticizing the Administration for airing the dispute in public and reminding the White House that Biden had, after all, just reaffirmed that there was “no space” between the two countries on security. The American Jewish Committee, which engages in foreign affairs around the world, noted acidly that “it is not beneficial to pummel Israel with language that has rarely been used in U.S. foreign policy.”

As the nominal head of American Jewry, Solow found himself in the position of being responsible, on behalf of his members, for figuring out how and when to openly criticize the decisions of a president he sincerely believes has the best interests of Israel, and of Jews, at heart—and the apparently calculated strategy of Administration members to whom he is personally very close. During the campaign, Solow went on tandem road-shows with Dennis Ross, the National Security Council adviser who handles Iran policy; he is also close to Daniel Shapiro, the NSC’s Middle East expert. George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy for peace talks, helped recruit Solow last year from the Chicago law firm where he worked for 25 years into the international powerhouse DLA Piper, where Mitchell was chairman of the board before joining the Administration.

On Tuesday, after three days of almost constant internal negotiations over what to say, Solow released a statement on behalf of the conference encouraging everyone to, essentially, get over it: “The interests of all concerned would best be served by a prompt commencement of the proximity talks that had been previously agreed to by all parties, and all parties should act in a manner that does not undercut such talks.” But the statement also criticized the Palestinian Authority for exploiting the spat and called attention to the Administration’s silence on the Fatah leadership’s decision to go ahead with the dedication of a square near Ramallah to a woman who led a 1978 bus hijacking that resulted in the deaths of 37 Israelis and an American photographer—a carefully calibrated effort to hit a sweet-spot of consensus by pointing out the responsibilities of many parties. “He banked on the fact that he could square Jeremiah Wright and AIPAC,” quipped David Twersky, the former editor of the New Jersey Jewish News. “That’s the nature of the dilemma.”

***

At 55, Solow is a generation younger than most of the other organization presidents he represents as Conference chair—a position that throughout its history has sometimes, and not entirely facetiously, been referred to as “King of the Jews.” Most of Solow’s putative subjects, of course, have no idea who he is, or what the Conference does. Indeed, Solow freely admits that, despite his elevation in status, he remains “this Jew no one’s ever heard of from Chicago.”

But they should, since, in many ways, it is often he who speaks for the Jews of America—though it takes a specific form. Like his former comrades who are now in the Administration, Solow has a constituency to which he is accountable: his colleagues on the Conference, who as a whole tend to be more conservative on Israel than most of the 78 percent of American Jews who supported Obama. That group includes the group’s longtime executive vice chair, Malcolm Hoenlein, with whom Solow says he’s developed a good working relationship, despite his being less conservative than Hoenlein. “The fair question is whether we are an effective team working on behalf of the major American Jewish organizations that we represent. I like to think that we are,” Solow said. Hoenlein returned the compliment: “He’s great—very unique and very articulate,” Hoenlein said. “His whole heart and his neshama [soul] are there.” The Conference rarely, if ever, takes votes or even straw polls on contentious issues; to do so would be to illuminate the fissures everyone knows are there. But the Conference can’t always look the other way; it exists in part to delineate the fault lines when ruptures do take place.

Some of his predecessors have been powerhouses in their own right: Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire publisher of U.S. News & World Report who recently floated running for New York’s Senate seat as a Republican, held the post a decade ago, as did cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder. Solow is neither old enough to retire, nor rich enough to stop working, but he is ambitious and canny enough to admit that his connections with the incoming Administration gave him an edge when he was approached about the Conference position in late 2008, during the transition period after Obama’s election. “My capacity to lead was not based on my relationship with the Administration, though that relationship was no secret,” Solow said when we met in Washington late one evening earlier this month.

Solow is universally praised as a quick study and a talented leader; as a bankruptcy attorney, he is practiced at finding common ground among people who sometimes bitterly disagree. He says he didn’t angle for the Conference appointment; in fact, it was only a fluke that he was even eligible. In 2005, he made a play for the chair of board of Chicago’s Jewish federation, one of the largest and most Israel-focused in the country. He didn’t get the job, but at the same time he was offered the presidency of the JCC Association, a group that represents Jewish community centers around the country but that is not one of the powerhouse political organizations that typically supplies chairmen to the Conference. “If I’d gotten the Federation job, everything would have turned out differently,” Solow told me. “I couldn’t have worked for the Obama campaign”—it would have been considered too partisan—“and I wouldn’t have been eligible for the Conference. So, who knew, right?”

We were sitting in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental—a plush five-star hotel on the relatively out-of-the-way south side of the Mall that Solow began patronizing after paying Netanyahu a visit there in November, following the prime minister’s last terse summit with Obama at the White House. Solow, a meaty guy who wears angular gunmetal-rimmed glasses and keeps his graying curls brushed back, settled deep into a red-upholstered wing chair, wearing a pin-stripe suit with a French-cuffed shirt fastened with large silver links. He ordered a Coke and periodically leaned forward to stab at a tiny plate of olives with a knotted green bamboo toothpick as he talked over the din of a Chinese New Year celebration from the main bar area.

He was in the capital to attend a briefing with Biden in preparation for the upcoming trip to Israel, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. He was unsure about how long the vice president would spend with the group, which was to include representatives not just from the Conference but former Florida congressman Robert Wexler, heavyweight Democratic donors like entertainment mogul Haim Saban, and personal friends like Michael Adler, a former chair of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “They may want to test their message on us, because they know this trip will get heavy coverage,” Solow said. In his 15 months on the job, he said, he’s perfected his grueling travel routine: fly out from Chicago after work the night before, get up, stop into the DLA Piper office to get some work done, and then head to whatever meetings are scheduled in Washington, where he goes about once a month, or New York, where he visits every other week or so. “I get back home to Chicago before I’d usually go to bed, so it’s just like a long commute,” he said, laying it out like George Clooney in Up in the Air.

Solow is only the second chair from Chicago and one of only a handful not to come from New York, where most of the national Jewish organizations are headquartered. The other Chicagoan was Philip Klutznick, a developer who, as the president of B’nai B’rith, was the founding chairman of the Conference; his son, Jim Klutznick, said his father knew Truman from his days working for the Federal Housing Administration in Washington during the Depression and was also close to Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador, who was deeply involved in bringing the group to life. As it happens, Solow grew up in Park Forest, a development in Chicago’s southern suburbs built by Klutznick. “I learned to play basketball on their driveway,” Solow told me. “They had a very large house with a very large driveway and a garage that was not attached, unlike most of the garages in the neighborhood, so you could go play basketball and no one would know.”

But Klutznick never enjoyed the close relationship with the president that Eddie Jacobson did. Jacobson was the Jewish businessman who, after befriending Truman in basic training at Fort Sill during World War I, later enjoyed open access to the Oval Office and helped convince Truman to welcome Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, to the White House and to recognize Israel in 1948. (Indeed, it may have been the absence of a Jacobson figure in the Eisenhower Administration that necessitated the founding of the Conference in the first place.)

Solow is also no Eddie Jacobson. He first heard of Obama in the early 1990s, when the future president took over the Law Review at Harvard Law School, Solow’s alma mater. “He was the first person of color to edit the Law Review, and that was a big story for everyone who went there,” Solow explained. “So, I knew when he moved back to Chicago.” But Solow’s wife, Andrea, was the first of the two to meet the Obama family. She worked in the admissions office of the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother, sent his children. By the time the Obamas turned up with Malia and Sasha, “they were really just Craig’s sister and brother-in-law, not the state senator,” Solow explained. (Andrea Solow declined to be interviewed for this article.)

As a young lawyer, Solow decided to get involved in Chicago’s Jewish affairs—in part, he said, to satisfy his wife, an ardent Zionist who had planned on making aliyah until she met him. “But I was always a joiner,” he admits. One of his earliest mentors, he said, was Lee Rosenberg’s father, Lester, a pillar of the city’s Federation community. Solow, who served on the Jewish Council on Youth Services and in the city’s JCC, eventually worked his way back into politics via the Government Affairs committee at Federation—but the real link was through his older son, David, a political junkie who interned, as a college student, for the first campaign of Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. In 2001, David Solow went to work for Lisa Madigan, the scion of a promient Illinois political family who was running for state attorney general; her seatmate in the Illinois state senate was Barack Obama. “My son came to me and said, ‘Dad, Barack Obama is thinking of running for the U.S. Senate, and I know he’s not registering in the polls, but you should go sit down with him,’ ” Solow recalled.

In early 2003, they met for an hourlong discussion about domestic and foreign policy, particularly about Israel, which was in the midst of the Second Intifada, or, as Solow refers to it, using the term popular in the Israeli press, the matzav, Hebrew for situation; Solow said he asked Obama to consider what it would be like to wonder whether his own girls would make it back home from school safely each day. “I said, ‘Parents in Israel don’t have that kind of luxury, and if this is what it takes to make parents in Israel feel safe, so be it,’ and he got that,” Solow recalled. Solow said he didn’t have a messianic moment with Obama, the way others describe meeting him and knowing he would one day be the nation’s first black president; he just liked the guy and thought he was serious about running a real campaign. “I’m a person who is center-left, and so was he,” Solow said. They were on opposite sides of the Iraq war—Solow supported the American invasion—but he liked the fact that Obama could sit and have a reasonable discussion. “I said, ‘You’ve thought this through, and that’s important,’ ” Solow explained. “ ‘I can support you, because of the fact that we could not see eye-to-eye on some things and still have a dialogue on other subjects.’ ”

During the campaigns, Solow began writing memos to Obama explaining why he felt so strongly about Israel and Zionism. “I believe that without a strong Israel, the Diaspora will fade away,” explained Solow, who grew up in a Reform household (“but a serious one,” he added). His father, he said, stopped at services on his way home from his Dodge dealership every Friday. As an adult, Solow joined a Conservative synagogue but is now a member of an independent, traditional-egalitarian synagogue in Highland Park called Aitz Hayim, which he joined in 2001 after meeting members through a Wexner Foundation heritage seminar—a program devoted to preparing participants for participation in public life. The synagogue, he said, offered the sense of joy and community he experienced in Israel but felt was too often missing in America.

It was through his work on Obama’s campaigns—first the 2005 Senate campaign and then the presidential run—that Solow first intersected with members of Chicago’s powerful Jewish Democratic circles, many of whom, like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, are not actively involved in the relatively insular politics of the city’s Jewish Federation. Penny Pritzker, who chaired Obama’s finance committee, recalled in an e-mail message that she first met Solow in 2006, at the beginning of the presidential campaign. “He attended every meeting and event,” Pritzker, who chairs TransUnion, the credit rating company, wrote.

Solow first traveled with Obama in Israel on a visit the then-senator made in January 2006, after a congressional trip to Iraq, but he really lights up talking about his time campaigning domestically, remembering every time the candidate cast his special light on him, whether at the Super Tuesday returns party or on Election Night. “We were in Grant Park, and there were these three tents, one for family, one for donors, and one for campaign staff,” recalled Solow, who stayed, at his son’s encouragement, until well after the victory speech was over. “Well, finally Obama comes back, and he’s dog tired, but there’s a rope line, and I’m a few people back, and I’m thinking, ‘He’s not going to see me.’ I’m five-nine, not the tallest guy. But I raised my hand”—Solow lifted his hands in a thumbs-up—“and he saw me, and shouted, ‘Hey, Alan, how am I doing tonight?’ I thought, ‘This is great—this is the president of the United States talking to me!’ ”

Solow has an enormous amount of respect for offices. When Obama finally got to the White House—where Solow has only visited him privately a handful of times, including before the president’s July meeting with Jewish community leaders—the effect was the same. “I’m sitting in the Oval Office, and there’s the picture Dolly Madison saved from the War of 1812, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to the president of the United States, but, well, there’s Reggie Love, and I can’t believe he’s the guy who says the president’s ready to see me,’ ” Solow recounted. The same is true when he speaks of Israeli officials; when he traveled to Israel during the Gaza war, shortly before assuming his role as Conference chair, he said he went back to his hotel room every night and sent his wife e-mails saying, “Hey, you’re not going to believe this, but we just went to the Defense Ministry and Ehud Barak gave us an hour, during a war!” “It’s just an out-of-body experience,” Solow said. “I’m thinking, how am I going to convey this to my wife and kids? Did this just happen to me?”

In Washington and in Jerusalem, Solow is widely seen as one of Obama’s confidantes. Jan Schakowsky, the Illinois congresswoman, described the relationship in glowing terms, telling me, “It’s not just a professional relationship, it’s a personal relationship”—though she acknowledged that Solow is not part of the tight group of friends who visit the Obamas on weekends. Solow, who is personally close with members of Obama’s inner circle, particularly Dennis Ross and Daniel Shapiro, is careful not to overplay his closeness to the president. “Obama has a wide circle of acquaintances, and not a wide circle of friends,” Solow said. “So, there’s the inner circle—the Nesbitts, the Whitakers, Valerie Jarrett—and then there’s the outer circle. How close is my relationship? When I wanted to speak to him during the campaign, I could. But I didn’t want to abuse it. I didn’t want to waste his time.”

Nonetheless, when he was approached about the Conference job in November 2008, the first thing Solow did was e-mail the president-elect. “I don’t have his e-mail now, but I had it then,” Solow noted. He had been encouraged by several people to apply for Administration posts but hadn’t been urged to hope for anything specific. The Conference post—which typically lasts for two consecutive one-year terms—was the perfect way to marry his political work with his Jewish involvement. Plus, he added, “I’m a competitive person, and it’s a little like the Academy Awards. You want to say it’s an honor just to be nominated, but you know, they ask you for a résumé and the supporting material, and by the time they interviewed me, I really wanted it.”

He wrote Obama that he was being considered for the job, which would require him to be a spokesman for the American Jewish community to the Administration—a reversal of his role in the campaign as a spokesman for candidate Obama to the Jewish electorate. “So, I said, ‘If you’re uncomfortable with that, I won’t take the job,’ ” Solow explained. “The Conference needs access to the White House, and I didn’t want the Conference to lose access because of a circumstance when I’d been critical of the White House, because they expected some kind of loyalty.” And, he added, the reverse was also true. “The other part of it is that I wanted the president, and the other members of the Administration, to understand that my loyalty would be to the Conference,” Solow said. “I didn’t want them to think they’d get a pass from the Conference.”

Ten days went by, and then Solow’s son David called to say he’d seen Obama at a thank-you event for campaign workers, and the president-elect had told him to relay a simple message to his father: Go for it. A week or two later, Obama himself called to give his blessing. “I’m sitting in my office, and my BlackBerry starts buzzing, and it took me a minute to realize it was a phone call and not e-mail, and I missed this call,” Solow said. “So, I had this voicemail—‘Hi, Alan! It’s Barack!’ And of course I played it for everyone in the office.”

***

At the Mandarin, Solow stayed up until after 1 a.m. talking; he doesn’t sleep much, he said. The next morning, I got an e-mail from him at 6:45 elaborating on some of the points he’d made the night before. “So much for sleep!” he added. That afternoon, after stopping into his law office, he went over to the Eisenhower building, where Biden spent an hour listening to the 20 invitees present their top priorities for his trip.

Solow did not speak to Biden while the vice president was in Israel, or after he returned. In Chicago, before the “screw-up” had metastasized into a genuine incident, he told me he had not been in touch with either Ross or Shapiro; he acknowledged that he reaches out to them more than they reach out to him. He would not specify who in the Administration he’d spoken with in the days since but said he has not talked to either the president, who has publicly kept aloof from the diplomatic dust-up, or to George Mitchell, who on Tuesday decided to postpone his next trip to the Middle East. “Look, my impression, having known Barack Obama for a long time, is that is that he solicits opinions from a lot of people. He likes to hear ideas, and I think he’s pretty good at sorting them out,” Solow told me after that March 9 luncheon in his Chicago office, where he sat facing me in an armchair beneath a Leroy Neiman portrait of Lincoln. “And I personally don’t lose sleep over the fact that his Administration solicits opinion from lots of different sources, and I do not worry about whether the door is open to the Conference. I know that when I have something important to communicate on behalf of the Conference that I will be able to communicate it to the appropriate person and that it will be taken seriously. I have absolute 100 percent confidence in that.”

Behind his desk, Solow keeps a 6-inch-tall action figure of Obama standing next to a wooden tzedaka box. “An action figure we can believe in,” Solow explains, quoting the marketing line on the doll’s packaging. He says the current crisis has actually not been the most uncomfortable of his tenure. That distinction goes to his decision, in December, to publicly castigate Hannah Rosenthal, Obama’s special envoy on anti-Semitism and a personal friend of both Solow and his wife, who supported the Chicago Foundation for Women, the organization Rosenthal headed before joining the Administration. On a trip to Israel, Rosenthal—a former executive director of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, which is in the Conference—made comments to the Israeli press critical of Michael Oren for his own comments about J Street. “As an official of the United States government, it is inappropriate for the anti-Semitism envoy to be expressing her personal views on the positions Ambassador Oren has taken as well as on the subject of who needs to be heard from in the Jewish community,” Solow said in a statement.

In his Chicago office, Solow told me that these kinds of difficult moments came with the job. “I wasn’t going to shy away from it because she was my friend,” Solow said. “So, that gave me a little heartburn—that was unpleasant.” But, he argued, his criticism was motivated by a desire to help the Administration. “I did not think her taking a position on that issue was helpful to her being successful,” he said. “I thought it was bad for her, and for the Jewish community, and for the Administration.”

That was a case where Solow was clearly speaking on his own behalf, and the situation did not require, as the aftermath of the housing announcement did, navigating the tangle of egos and agendas required to reach consensus within the Conference. When I asked, Solow refused to articulate what he, personally, thinks of how both the American and the Israeli governments have handled themselves. “I won’t tell you,” he said on the phone from Chicago earlier this week, just after the Conference statement was released. “It’s not useful for me to be evaluative of the Administration because the result is either that I would get defensive or that it would influence the positions I take at the Conference,” he went on. “And either of those is not useful.” When it came to the president, Solow said, his primary value to the Conference was less as a go-between than as a translator. “The way that I hear the president is the product of my experience with him—I am more of a student of how this president communicates than lots of other people,” Solow said. “What you don’t want is to have an argument that’s driven by a misunderstanding.”

In other words, this King of the Jews is simply doing what he knows best: being a negotiator. “Look, I’m a lawyer,” he said. “My job in life is to represent the positions of people other than myself and to be as persuasive and effective as I can at doing that.”

Last Friday—not long before the start of Shabbat, when Conference business typically winds down—news broke of Clinton’s angry phone call with Netanyahu. Solow found himself under pressure from the more conservative members of the Conference to look for a consensus in favor of getting the Administration to lay off. According to people who were on this week’s calls, some members pushed hard for a statement that would not only chide the Obama Administration for blowing the diplomatic snub out of proportion, but for choosing to come down so hard on the Netanyahu government on the issue of where Jews could and could not build in Jerusalem.

Solow told me he walked into the job knowing there would be flashpoints of disagreement and hasn’t been surprised he can’t predict them. “Look, I just thought they would be inevitable, because there are always some,” he told me. “It’s been no great surprise to me because I didn’t have any set of expectations except that I just knew that there would be moments there would be different points of view.” What isn’t clear is what happens if the differences of opinion on how to respond to these little tremors continues or if the tremors become an earthquake.

“I think our statement has been received,” Solow said, with characteristic lawyerly caution this week. “Whether it’s accepted will only be told over time.”

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.

Remember after-school specials? Do they even have them anymore? Who knows! But this week, The Millionaire Matchmaker brought viewers two very important lessons: one, interfaith relationships are tricky! Two: Jews aren’t so much into Jesus!

But before we get to that, let’s review the story of Jimmy d’Ambrosio, a bachelor from Season Two who returned last night for a second go-round with la Matchmaker herself, Patti Stanger. When we last saw d’Ambrosio, he was referring to himself in the third person as Jimmy D and chasing tail at his Chicago nightclubs. Well, now he’s 32, still single, and wants to grow up. He’s even left Chitown for Las Vegas, which Stanger’s deputy, Chelsea, says is evidence that Jimmy is looking to settle down. Patti, not so easily convinced, takes Jimmy to Dr. Pat Allen. A truly remarkable specimen, Allen looks like she’s about eight million years old, and she’s got a mouth on her. too. “You’re a fox loose in the henhouse, but the trouble is, when the fox gorges on chicken, he loses his taste for chicken,” Allen explains. Except chicken is sex, which may or may not taste like chicken.

At the mixer, Jimmy passes over the lovely Whitney, another Season Two returnee—a brunette so hot a Jewish guy tried to date her, even though she’s not Jewish—and instead picks a blonde bimbo called Angel, who proceeds to get drunk, win $100,000 in a poker game, and disappear upstairs to vomit. (America’s Playground!)

Now, on to the main course. Mateo Stasior is a 42-year-old Harvard grad who worked at Microsoft before moving to L.A., where he is now an asset manager for a billion-dollar hedge fund. (“Just a billion dollars?” scoffed a friend of The Scroll.) Anyway, Mateo, who looks a lot like Herc from The Wire, says he thinks it’s time for him to find his mate, settle down, and get on with ‘that part’ of his life. We think maybe it’s time for him to ditch the terrible ties he keeps wearing. But maybe all of these things are related. Anyway, he seems like a nice enough guy, and it turns out his ex cheated on him, which is kind of sad. Patti reassures him that she’s not going to let him pick his next girlfriend with his penis, and says she will find someone who likes him for his personality.

The rub is that Mateo is a committed Christian, seeking same. “Religion is a deal-breaker, and I understand this completely,” Patti tells the camera in a bit of ecumenical sympathy. Luckily, she has just the girl for Mateo: Amber, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who has the face of St. Mary and absolutely enormous breasts. What about God? She’s cool with that! Except, we learn on the date, she actually thinks that religion is the opiate of the masses, to paraphrase from one of the Jersey Shore kids.

Luckily, Mateo has spotted someone else at the mixer: Andrea, a flight attendant. Andrea—not one of Patti’s handpicked girls—comes with a little catch: her last name is Kaplan. That’s right, kids!

Patti takes her aside. “From one Jew to another—you’re Jewish, right?” Patti asks. Well, of course she is. “In God’s world, there is no religion, but in the real world, it doesn’t always work,” Patti warns. But Mateo decides to explore a little further, and invites Andrea for a little couch time. “So, you believe in God?” he asks. Yes, Andrea tells Mateo, Jews believe in God also. The very same God, in fact! Awesome! So Mateo picks the busty Jewess over the cheerleader. We like him more and more by the minute.

That is, until we see where this is going. Mateo seems to be under the impression that if he and Andrea are meant to be, she’ll see the light and find Jesus. “It’s in God’s hands!” he says, cheerfully. Patti, meanwhile, is freaking out. “He picked the wrong girl! Oy vey!” Andrea shows up for their date in a va-va-voom dress and with her hair gorgeously blown out. They get in a limo and go to the Los Alamitos racetrack to drink champagne and bet the ponies, which is what Christians do on dates, apparently? And they have so much fun Mateo doesn’t even notice Andrea’s Fran Drescher laugh.

A least, he doesn’t until they sit down to eat, which is when the trouble starts. Would she become a Christian, Mateo wants to know? “Both sides of my family are Jewish,” Andrea replies. “It’s important to me because it’s my heritage—I would never want to convert. I don’t think it’s an option for me.” Mateo looks stunned. Well, what about the kids? Can they be Christian? “I’m a woman,” she tells Mateo. “My children will be Jewish.”

Harvard grad Mateo is confused by the concept of halakhic matrilineal descent, and by the fact that Jesus is letting this happen to him. “Here she is, laying down the law about how she wants her children raised,” he sputters to the camera. Shocking, right? Patti reappears, more in sorrow than in anger at having been proven right. “It’s so sad religion is a deal-breaker for most people,” she reflects. “But it’s true.”

Next week: Bisexuals!!! It’ll be a hootenanny, promises Patti. We’ll see!

When the movie premiered, in the fall of 1940, 20 million Germans packed cinemas to see it. Audiences jeered lustily at scenes of bedraggled Jews—actual residents of the Prague ghetto compelled to serve as extras—carting their possessions away after they are banished in response to Oppenheimer’s perfidy. Goebbels, who wrote in his diaries that Jew Süss was “the anti-Semitic film,” ordered screenings for all SS units during the winter lull in fighting. But after the war, the victorious Allied forces proved less impressed. Harlan found himself charged with being an accessory to crimes against humanity. In court, Harlan claimed he had no choice but to do Goebbels’s bidding. He was acquitted, but, as he wrote in a draft of his autobiography, the “the shadow of Jew Süss will not vanish.” But the film did; it was removed from public circulation under postwar de-nazification laws. Harlan returned to filmmaking in the 1950s, but, as a New York Times correspondent wrote in 1951, “the reek of the gas ovens is inseparably associated with his name.”

Harlan died in Capri in 1964 without ever acknowledging the impact of his work—despite the fact that he was once married to a Jewish actress, Dora Gershon, who was killed at Auschwitz. The task of grappling with Veit Harlan’s legacy has now fallen to his childen, their children, and their close relatives, the subjects of Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, a documentary by the German filmmaker Felix Moeller opening today at the Film Forum in New York.

Harlan’s heirs represent an astoundingly broad range of opinion: from borderline revisionism to a full embrace of Jews and Judaism. Not surprisingly, they disagree about whether their father was motivated by a commitment to Nazism or by simple opportunism. “War games and films are now sponsored by the American military,” argues Kristian Harlan, one of the director’s two sons with Söderbaum. “Not much has changed.” And while his brother Caspar describes Veit as a “despotic” husband to their mother, he nonetheless insists that his father was coerced to make Jew Süss and didn’t believe in Nazi principles. But for Moeller, what Veit Harlan actually believed doesn’t much matter: The point is, Harlan made a film, and its consequences have been real.

Only Harlan’s eldest son, Thomas, is old enough to carry any real personal guilt. Born in 1929 to Harlan and his first wife, Hilde Körber, Thomas joined the Hitler Youth as a teenager. As an adult, though, he publicly repudiated his father and worked for a time researching Nazi war crimes in Poland. But his inability to convince his father to recant continues to haunt him. “I was prepared to take responsibility,” he says. “It was self-evident to me that I was answerable along with him … but I don’t know how he saw it. I think he really took me as an enemy.”

Thomas’s two younger sisters, Maria and Susanne, were only old enough to know they needed to look smart when their father’s Nazi patrons came to visit. Yet both, for different reasons, chose to marry men with Jewish blood. Maria, who at one point in the film angrily recounts how her father and stepmother were asked to leave a theater after the war because the leading lady refused to perform for them, nonetheless says she felt impelled to get involved with a man whose Jewish father had been killed by the Nazis because she felt sorry for him. “I said, ‘He has suffered, and we have to help him,’ ” she explains. “I thought I was doing a good deed.”

Her sister Susanne, who committed suicide in 1989, had other motives. “My mother wanted away, away, away from this history, from her father, from everything it meant to her,” Susanne’s daughter, Jessica Jacoby, says in the film. Susanne threw herself headlong into Judaism after meeting Claude Jacoby, who managed to flee from Germany to New Orleans in 1938 but returned to his native country as a journalist with the American Army after the war. Claude Jacoby died in 1964, of a heart attack; in 1967, Susanne left for Israel but ultimately returned to Berlin, where Jessica Jacoby is now a writer for the city’s Jewish newspaper, the Jüdische Allgemeine.

“I belong to a family that the Nazi period divided into perpetrators and victims,” Jacoby says in the film. “You could say that insofar as Jew Süss was a call to persecute and annihilate not just the Jews of Germany but of Europe, it cost my other grandfather and grandmother their lives.”

Good news! Bravo reran the season premiere of Millionaire Matchmaker last night—presumably in an effort to get us all to watch the twirling Olympic sprites on parent network NBC—which gives us the chance to fill in a little blank in the recap archive. So, sit back and listen to the ballad of Nick and Omar.

Nick Friedman (yes, he’s Jewish) and Omar Soliman are definitely pretty-lookin’ people; so pretty-lookin’, in fact, that their multimillion-dollar business is called College Hunks Hauling Junk. They’re high-school buddies who, at 27, have blossomed into entrepreneurs, though it probably didn’t hurt that their high school was Sidwell Friends, one of the most prestigious prep schools in Washington, D.C., where their classmates included Chelsea Clinton and Al Gore III. But they’ve clearly worked hard to build the brand, and now deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Enter Patti Stanger, the titular Matchmaker, who knows from fruit: she’s getting nachas in heaven, and nachas in life. In this case, “nachas” means a sparkly new four-carat diamond ring her fiancé, Andy Friedman (no relation to Nick, we think), picked up for her in Israel. (“It’s a non-conflict stone,” Patti told People).

But the true do-gooder—as profiled by the Daily Beast—needs no rest; she’s got work to do, too. See, Omar is a freak about women wanting him for his money, and Nick is a little immature. Also, they live in Tampa. Ick!

Luckily, Omar’s uncle has a house in L.A., and the boys have flown in. First up, Omar: he’s half-Egyptian and half-Italian, he’s clean-cut, and he has a Maserati. W00t! But, not so fast. See, his idea of a dream date is “Take Your Girl to Work Day.” Like, he wants her to haul junk with him. Like, actual trash. “If you’re testing girls that way, this is the reason you’re single,” Patti tells him. She suggests he take his girl on a hot-air balloon ride, because of some crackpot theory about how thin air gets the love pheromones pumping.

Next, Nick. This boy, who grew up in leafy northwest D.C. and went to Pomona College in California, shows up in his audition video speaking fluent faux-thug. Patti is appalled. “You’re JEWISH,” she shouts. Nick didn’t want to be on the show—he’s just supporting his boy Omar, who needs serious help. Although, he says, some of his friends have gotten engaged recently. And, he admits, his mom does harass him about his dating “Barbie dolls” who aren’t smart enough for him. Patti decides to break him of his bimbo addiction. No sex before monogamy, she intones. Nick’s eyes bulge out of his head. See, he’s got franchises all over the country, and monogamy isn’t part of that business model.

Patti skitters off to find these two some girls. For Omar, she picks Rachel, a pretty brunette who “radiates exotic sensuality.” For Nick, there’s Dakota, a German-Puerto Rican choreographer who’s a few years older. On to the mixer! Everyone’s cleaned up nicely, but—oh, no. Nick didn’t get his hair cut! “This is my Greek-god, Julius Caesar hair,” he insists. “It’s a Jewfro, man!” Patti retorts. Thankfully, you can get lots of things delivered in L.A. these days, including haircuts; stylist Tiffany shows up and solves the problem.

Newly shorn, Nick flourishes, like a reverse Samson. There he is, rollin’ in a bright-red Bentley! Now he’s taking his girl to the Hollywood sign! Here they are at Kress! And, what? Dakota isn’t in a relationship because she’s always traveling for work? “Well, to be honest, that’s probably better for me, because that’s how my life is,” Nick says. And then he promptly sticks his tongue down her throat.

Meanwhile, Omar. Silly Omar ignored Patti and picked up exotic, sensual Rachel in a garbage truck. “You’re the hottest hunk I’ve ever seen,” Omar says. “Tha-anks,” replies Rachel, slipping a bright green suit on over her cocktail dress. And off they go to work. There’s something winning about Omar’s relentless naïveté. “It’s been a while since I’ve been out in the field,” he admits. “I kind of forgot how bad it can be.” How bad can it be? Well, he shatters a big-screen TV, and he admits that that was wrong of him. “This freakin’ sucks,” he observes. But Rachel proves she is a good sport, and she is rewarded with dinner at Il Cielo in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, she does not return the favor: it is an early night for the two. “Going to dinner with Omar felt like a guy friend,” Rachel tells the camera. And Omar starts asking the right questions: “Am I just an idiot?” he wonders. Well, Omar, yes.

Balkany, who was released last night on $250,000 bond, told Tablet Magazine in a phone call this morning that he’s sure he’ll be exonerated:

I’m pretty high-profile, and the government has always been after me in one way or another. They threw a bucket of mud at me seven or eight years ago and in the end there wasn’t even a trial. It’s just lots of hoo-ha and sensationalism. There was absolutely nothing there and there is nothing here.

Balkany claimed that he approached the hedge fund—whose name he refused to disclose (though the chatter up in Connecticut is that it’s Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors)—after being contacted by the inmate, who was concerned about selling out fellow Jews in exchange for a reduced sentence. “He doesn’t want to hurt another Jew,” Balkany explained.

How did the subject of charitable contributions come up? Well, Balkany said, after the hedge fund’s lawyers started talking about how generous the firm had been, he mentioned his school and a related yeshiva that were in need of a loan. “I said, ‘This is not a holdup, this is not an armed robbery, this is a request for charity and it had nothing to do with our other issue,’” he said. “Then they went and knifed me by going to the government.”

The government’s criminal investigator alleged that Balkany approached him at the same time, offering the insider information in exchange not just for reducing the sentence of the informant, but also for leniency in the case of an unnamed relative. Balkany confirmed that the additional person for whom he sought leniency is his brother-in-law, Sholom Rubashkin, who is currently in an Iowa jail pending his sentencing on 86 counts of fraud at Agriprocessors, the kosher meat empire. “The whole purpose was to get this first man out of jail,” Balkany said. “Rubashkin was thrown in later.”

Balkany, a white-bearded 63-year-old who heads the Bais Yaakov girls’ school in Midwood, is known in political circles as “the Brooklyn Bundler”—a name bestowed on him over 20 years ago because of his prowess as a fundraiser for political candidates, particularly those who proved willing to contribute to his pet causes. His wife, Sarah, is the daughter of Aaron Rubashkin, the founder of Agriprocessors; though Balkany never worked for the company, at the height of the Agriprocessors scandal, which involved allegations of both financial fraud and immigrant labor violations, he interceded on his in-laws’ behalf against a planned boycott.

It’s been a rough few years for the rabbi. In 2003, not long after he was invited onto the floor of the House of Representatives as guest chaplain, Balkany was charged with misappropriating $700,000 in federal grants to his school. (The government ultimately withdrew the charges.) He now faces charges of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and making false statements, carrying a potential sentence of up to 20 years.

Brooklyn Rabbi Charged in $3M Extortion Plot [NY Post]

Earlier: Rubashkin Found Guilty of 86 Fraud Charges

Then Patti’s tireless aide-de-camp Destin presented us with the night’s two bachelors, a pair of classic L.A. specimens: Prince Valiant and the Douchebag.

The prince, we are expected to assume, is David Sheltraw, a 51-year-old fitness fanatic and former actor who splits his time between L.A. and South Beach. His Bravo tagline tells us he’s a financier; Google tells us he played Eros in the 1995 Ally Sheedy thriller One Night Stand and, apparently, spent some time working as a mortgage broker for Countrywide. Never mind! He looks like Michael Douglas. What could be the matter?

Actually, as Patti knows, a good-looking single man signals danger: “There’s something really wrong with him,” she announces. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be here.” Well, what’s wrong with him is that he says he wants to find true love, but in actuality is looking for a young, uncomplicated chickadee to have his child. “He’s looking for the bells and whistles and the violins and the Red Sea parting,” Patti says. (Yes! More Moses references!) It’s possible he just wanted to be on TV again, but sadly David’s other problem is that he’s boring, even though he has a motorcycle, and in the end he winds up behaving like a douche to the perfectly normal-seeming ex-model and mother-of-three he takes to Neptune’s Net in Malibu for beer and fried fish.

So that leaves the aforementioned douchebag to play the part of the prince. And, my, what a douche! As Page Six informed us yesterday morning, the second “millionaire” was Jason Davis, the 25-year-old grandson of the late tycoon Marvin Davis, who at various points owned 20th Century Fox and the Beverly Hills Hotel. The current Davis is a Perez Hilton lookalike who is regularly ridiculed in the gossip blogs as “Gummy Bear,” because he is fat, while his brother Brandon—who was responsible for starting the whole Lindsay Lohan “firecrotch” thing (if you don’t know, maintain your blissful ignorance)—is known as “Greasy Bear.”

Well, we get a gauzy montage of Jason as a young pudgy boy, hugging his grandpa at his bar mitzvah (for which the elder Davises converted their estate into a faux-casino), and then we get the real thing: a lardy guy in a gold late-Elvis tracksuit and sunglasses. All the time with the sunglasses!

But the Davis heirs’ finances are a little murky, plus Jason may or may not have been evicted from his apartment for failing to pay his $3,600 monthly rent, so it’s a little sad to hear him reminiscing about his childhood escapades on private planes. (He also brags about painting Tori Spelling, another dispossessed child of Hollywood royalty, on a Malibu beach when they were kids.) And slowly, and against all odds, Jason turns out to be kind of winning! He calls out one bimbo at the mixer for being totally boring. He also has a mommy thing going for Patti, which is actually endearing (and classic: “Wow, I kind of want to sleep with her!” he announces right after she reams him out for having dirty fingernails).

Patti treats Jason to a manicure and spray-tan at the Four Seasons, and finds him a not-too-ditzy blonde named Stephanie whose sole task is to puncture Jason’s attitude and prove that he can be honest without getting hurt. He picks Stephanie up in a limo and takes her to his house, where there is a violinist and a pet monkey, and they talk companionably about farting. Then they make out wrapped in a blanket. So far, so good!

By the time Jason shows up at Patti’s office for his debrief, she’s replaced Gummy Bear with Huggy Bear. Is the frog secretly a prince? We’ll never know. Sadly, it seems that Stephanie actually just wanted to get on TV (maybe you sense a pattern?), because she tells Jason she can’t see him again due to an “it’s complicated” situation with some other guy. And just like that, Patti turns all Mama Bear. She calls Stephanie to interrogate her about the date. Stephanie denies the make-out session. “You did not suck face?” Patti yells into her BlackBerry. “Tongues did not touch?” She gives the phone to Jason so he can deliver the final blow; he hangs up on the girl.

“I’m really sad Jason opened up and Stephanie lied to him,” Patti says afterward. But it’s okay! Jason found at least one woman he can trust: his hectoring Jewish mama-figure. And he still has his monkey to play with.

Next week: some guy says he’s looking for a Christian woman, but hesitates when asked how committed he is, exactly, to abstinence.

Earlier: Fellas: Heed the Millionaire Matchmaker

For those of you who haven’t seen her Bravo show, Stanger’s an L.A. transplant who’s taken the trade-craft her mother and grandmother practiced as shadchans at their New Jersey shul and applied it to the very rich and, frequently, very shallow people who pass through her office every week. But she’s no platitudinous fairy godmother, offering up worthy Cinderellas to lovelorn Prince Charmings; she’s Sophie Portnoy for hire. “Patti’s mom is quieter—she was that Jewish mom on the street who wanted to see the nice little Jewish girl get together with the nice Jewish boy and be happy,” Stanger’s right-hand man, Destin Pfaff, told Tablet Magazine the other day. “But Patti takes that nice Jewish boy who wants to be set up and says, ‘There must be something wrong with you, because otherwise you wouldn’t be single.’”

This is, by the way, the show’s secret genius: it’s not about watching people find love, it’s about watching millionaires discover that money doesn’t make them any less insecure than the rest of us. (Exhibit A: Justin Shenkarow, whom Stanger dubbed her “angry Hobbit” and who threw a thoroughly recognizable tantrum when Stanger visited his home with a wardrobe consultant: “You come into my fucking room and you tell me you have to open my closets? Who are you?” he snapped.)

Stanger gets away with eviscerating these guys because she exudes ethnic authenticity—which is to say, she talks back—and because everyone knows that, deep down, she really just wants them to be capable of finding happiness. “There are people who come in with this challenge attitude, like, ‘I challenge you to find someone for me,’” Pfaff said. “But these people just need a mirror in front of them to help untie some of those knots.”

Starting next Wednesday, we’ll be distilling Stanger’s wisdom weekly on The Scroll. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with an example of how not to behave this weekend: do not be like last season’s favorite, Dave Levine, a sex-toy mogul who told Stanger he was looking for a bisexual swinger who also had her own career and would be a good mother to his children; you know, someone he could take home to his Conservative family in Boston. Stanger’s analysis: “Ugh, Charlie Sheen.”

Except she isn’t. Jeanne isn’t empowered by the heroism of Jewish survivors; she decides she wants to be a victim. She goes into her bathroom one morning, draws some swastikas on her taut belly, and cuts her pretty face with a knife. Then she goes to the police and files a report claiming that she’s been attacked on a train by a gang of Arab youths who mistook her for a Jew. Voila, sympathy! News anchors detail her plight and bemoan the latest example of anti-Semitism, and the president’s office calls to offer support. It’s just what she thought she wanted: to become a victim, deserving of sorrow.

Usually, when non-Jews talk about their desire to access some of what being Jewish has to offer, they talk about spirituality, or lox, or Bar Rafaeli. But Jeanne is after something else: a kind of public martyrdom. “At the heart of Jeanne’s lie is the desire to become Jewish in the mode of persecution,” the film’s director, André Téchiné, explained in press notes for the film, which opens today in New York. “It’s an identification.”

In other words, it’s anti-Semitism turned inside out. Instead of fearing Jews, Jeanne envies some imagined special quality; what’s strange is that she expresses her philo-Semitism by claiming to be the target of anti-Jewish hate.

Jeanne’s story, as it happens, is based on real events. In July 2004, a 23-year-old woman, Marie Leblanc, went to the police and reported that she and her 13-month-old baby were violently assaulted on a suburban light-rail train by six young Muslim men who thought she was Jewish. France was already on alert; the previous fall, the president, Jacques Chirac, had announced a crackdown on anti-Semitic incidents. “When a Jew is attacked in France,” he’d said, “it is an attack on the whole of France.” He also called on French citizens to be vigilant against anti-Jewish outbursts. Perhaps as a result, the Parisian paper Le Figaro was quick to compare Leblanc, who claimed 20 fellow passengers watched the attack in silence, to Kitty Genovese, the New York woman whose neighbors famously failed to respond to her cries for help as she was brutally stabbed to death in 1964.

Within days, Leblanc’s tale was revealed as a hoax. Chirac, who had publicly called for the alleged perpetrators to be hunted down and held to account, apologized and instead demanded that Leblanc be punished for her “manipulation” of the racial tensions roiling the nation. (Leblanc was quickly sentenced to probation and ordered by French courts to seek psychiatric care.)

Leblanc wasn’t the only one that summer to fabricate an anti-Semitic attack for attention. According to the New York Times, police took a “mentally unstable” Jewish man into custody on suspicion of setting a fire at a Jewish community center in Paris where he worked as a security guard, and another man in Lyon admitted scrawling swastikas on Jewish tombstones after the press failed to notice that he had assaulted a Muslim man with a hatchet. But Leblanc was the only one who seemed to actually want to tap into something about being Jewish, without any particular interest in stoking the inevitable public scapegoating of Muslim immigrants that followed.

And the film—which Téchiné adapted from Jean-Marie Besset’s 2005 play about the Leblanc case, RER, named for the Parisian regional train network on which the attack supposedly took place—adds another wrinkle to the story. Téchiné introduces a prominent Jewish civil-rights attorney who appears, early on, as a talking head on television condemning anti-Semitism. Though he is an avowed atheist, he is also in the midst of refereeing a family debate about whether or not his 12-year-old grandson should have a bar mitzvah. It sets up a neat parallel: Jeanne, so preoccupied with claiming her share of the noble victimhood she believes constitutes the Jewish legacy, is utterly shocked to discover that actual Jews have a relationship with their heritage that is far more complicated, and far more interesting.

While offers of Ayurvedic massages and luxury accommodation may seem at odds with the somber, discouraging face that ultra-Orthodoxy has traditionally turned to prospective converts, Tropper, by most accounts, did not seem particularly interested in relaxing halachic codes to accommodate the modern world. A biblical literalist, he played an active role in an effort by a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis to ban the books of another rabbi, Nosson Slifkin, who believed that the world is older than the Jewish calendar—that is, 5,770 years. In 2006, among his other duties, he took it upon himself to retroactively invalidate the conversion of a woman who subsequently dared to violate ultra-Orthodox codes of modesty by wearing pants.

As a newcomer to the fraught business of conversions—and, according to people who dealt with him, someone who could at times be an abrasive individual—Tropper appears to have been willing to augment his personal power at the expense of his conversion candidates, a vulnerable group whose well-being is supposed to be protected from oppressive behavior by millennia of explicit rabbinical teaching and practice. To his students, he presented himself as a learned teacher who could help them reach the God they yearned for. In the billionaire Thomas Kaplan and his multimillionaire nephew Guma Aguiar, Tropper found a pair of patrons who, in exchange for access to the leading halachic authorities in New York and Jerusalem, would help the rabbi reinforce his newfound influence over the conversion process with lavish spectacles in American cities like Phoenix and Boston as well as at the luxurious David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem. In addition to paying for food, drink, and hotel rooms at five-star hotels, Tropper also used Kaplan and Aguiar’s millions to curry favor with some of the most elevated rabbinic authorities in the world—including Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, one of the ultra-Orthodox world’s pre-eminent scholars, and Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar.

The world of spa vacations at the Biltmore was a long way from Tropper’s home base in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, where the rabbi ran a small yeshiva, Kol Yaakov, that specialized in “returning” non-observant adult Jews to Judaism. For more than two decades, Tropper—who was born into a rabbinic family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and educated in Jerusalem—instructed returnees to Judaism, called ba’alei teshuva, on the laws of Torah in a modest brick-and-stucco house outfitted with a basketball hoop in the narrow parking lot out back. He got his start at Ohr Somayach, one of Monsey’s largest adult yeshivas, but splintered off to start Kol Yaakov in 1981 with help from a late New York couple, Louis J. Septimus and his wife, Edythe, for whom the school’s building is named.

The backing provided by Kaplan and Aguiar, Kaplan’s now-estranged nephew, was on an entirely different scale. The largesse provided by the two men over the years—at least $8 million, according to financial documents filed with the IRS—gave the rabbi entree into the insular world of the Israeli rabbinate—a cloistered group of men who, with the approval of the Israeli government, determine who can and cannot be considered a Jew, whatever their level of religious observance. By the time Tropper got to Phoenix, he could offer their imprimatur to reassure nervous hopefuls that he was the one conduit to becoming “a real Jew.” “If we ever make aliyah, there isn’t going to be any question of my Jewishness,” one Tropper graduate, Lucia Schnitzer, told the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix before the 2007 Biltmore weekend. “If my daughter wants to marry a Kohen, there isn’t going to be any question.”

In the past month, Tropper has been undone by the emergence of audio and video recordings that seem to indicate he tried to use his position to coerce a student, Shannon Orand, into having sex with other men in exchange not just for her conversion to Judaism but for cash. According to a student who answered the door at Kol Yaakov on Sunday, he remains in charge of the yeshiva, but Dovid Jacobs, Tropper’s former right-hand man, told Tablet Magazine the rabbi has been removed from his positions at both Eternal Jewish Family and its parent organization, Horizons Bais Achiezer, which have separate offices a few miles away from the yeshiva, in the neighboring town of Suffern. Tropper did not respond to requests for comment.

In the weeks since Tropper’s downfall, none of the rabbis who facilitated his meteoric rise in the Jewish world—men whose lives are devoted to the pious observance of God’s word—have stepped forward to publicly condemn Tropper for his violations of ultra-Orthodox codes on modesty and extramarital sex, let alone for his apparent willingness to use his position of religious authority to exploit the single mother of two young children for sex. The deafening silence parallels the response from the Roman Catholic Church after allegations of widespread child abuse surfaced in 2002; in diocese after diocese, bishops chose to protect the abusers, and settle generously with the victims, rather than forthrightly condemn what any parishioner would rightly see as an abomination in the eyes of God. “A community is measured by how it responds to something like this,” said one ultra-Orthodox rabbi. “The right-wing yeshivishe world is in damage control.”

As recently as November, when Tropper’s son got married, the list of rabbis who either attended or sent blessings included Elyashiv, and Reuven Feinstein, the son of the Rav Moshe Feinstein, who died in 1986, the most respected ultra-Orthodox halachic authority of his time. In addition to his impressive lineage, Reuven Feinstein is a widely respected figure in his own right and the head of the Yeshiva of Staten Island—which received a $3 million gift from Kaplan and Aguiar’s family foundation in 2008. Tropper gushed on his blog after the celebration, “The chuppah looked like a who’s who of the Torah world!”

In the wake of Tropper’s resignation from EJF, in mid-December, Feinstein declined to condemn Tropper’s activities or distance himself from EJF. Indeed, Feinstein issued a statement indicating he would increase his work with Eternal Jewish Family, to ensure that the organization would “continue to be guided by the highest halachic standards.”

To some, Feinstein’s circumspect response to the Tropper scandal was reminiscent of his silence on two other recent scandals involving sex and the abuse of rabbinic authority, both of which involved members of Feinstein’s family, the sons of his sister, Shifra, and her husband, Rabbi Moshe Tendler. One, Mordecai Tendler, was dismissed in 2006 from his post at a synagogue in Spring Valley, near Monsey, after a congregant accused him of seducing her into an affair with threats the she’d never find a husband unless she slept with him. A few weeks later, Tendler’s brother, Aron, resigned as principal of an Orthodox day school in Los Angeles amid allegations that he had “inappropriate” relations with female students.

Feinstein, of course, wasn’t involved in either of those incidents. But Feinstein’s willingness to take strong public stands on abstract questions of morality—including some as minute as whether or not men can return handshakes proffered by women (they can, to avoid embarrassing the other person)—only underscored, to some, his unwillingness to say even a single word about much more obvious abuses of Jewish law and halachic authority by eminent rabbis within his professional and family circle. (Feinstein did not return a message from Tablet seeking comment.)

It remains unclear what the future of Eternal Jewish Family will be. Kaplan has served as the organization’s chairman; his attorneys told Tablet last week they don’t know whether he will remain in that role. The group currently has a caretaker leader, after the rabbi initially announced as Tropper’s replacement—Elya Wachtfogel, head of a yeshiva in the Catskills hamlet of South Fallsburg, New York—subsequently released a letter saying he had not, in fact, taken the position. “The rumors which were spread of late regarding the EJF organization, alleging it is under my direction, are in error and baseless,” Wachtfogel said, in a handwritten declaration. Nothing further about Tropper, or his transgressions, was said.

If the silence of the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate is meant to keep members of their community in the dark, and shield the authority of the rabbinate from shame, it has been countered by outraged discussion on ultra-Orthodox blogs, whose commenters have been following the money that passed through Tropper’s organization—and venting their anger at the ongoing silence from the halachic establishment. One anonymously written blog, The Unorthodox Jew, called on Feinstein to shut down “this house of prostitution.” A commenter on the blog called for a letter-writing campaign to “as many Orthodox-affiliated Jews as possible, alerting them to the unworthiness of our so-called ‘gedolim’”—a Hebrew term used by ultra-Orthodox Jews to refer to their leaders. “King Lear should be obligatory reading in the ultra-Orthodox world, along with All the King’s Men,” wrote another person. At another highly critical blog, Daas Torah, a commenter wrote: “The chillul hashem”—insult to God—“of Tropper’s scandals is only getting worse with time like a festering untreated cancer.”

One of the few religious authorities to speak out publicly on the Tropper case has been Aba Dunner, the executive director of the Conference of European Rabbis, a group that publicly opposed Tropper’s incursion onto its turf even before the scandal; last week, Dunner published an op-ed in the Five Towns Jewish Times, a New York-area paper catering to Orthodox readers, in which he accused Eternal Jewish Family of conducting a “bounty hunt” for new Jews, by allegedly paying local rabbis to funnel intermarried couples into its fledgling conversion courts. “Tropper is a fraud,” Dunner wrote. “The organization he created is in his image and is therefore a fraud too. The creators of that image are fraudsters and hucksters who are trying desperately to keep the line to Mr. Kaplan’s millions open.”

CORRECTION, April 19: An earlier version of this article inaccurately described Rabbi Moshe Tendler as the uncle of Rabbi. In fact, Tendler is Feinstein’s brother-in-law.

MORE: Allison Hoffman outlined the entire Tropper scandal here.
MORE: Allison Hoffman profiled Guma Aguiar here.
MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff profiled Shannon Orand here.
MORE: Read transcripts of the phone calls, plus hear some audio clips, here.

Aguiar’s interview is just the latest—albeit the most public—example of increasingly erratic outbursts from the native Floridian and former evangelical Christian, who made aliyah to Israel in November 2007 with his wife and three young children. Last April, Aguiar has acknowledged in television interviews, he physically confronted Tropper in a Jerusalem hotel room; the rabbi claimed in an Israeli court that Aguiar, an athletic 6-foot-2-inch man, threatened to throw him off a ninth-floor balcony. In June, Aguiar was arrested in Florida on drug possession charges, after a cop pulled him over and found marijuana in his Bentley. Aguiar pleaded no contest and paid a $536 fine, but only after accusing the sheriff’s deputies of anti-Semitism and brutality. According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Aguiar tried to head-butt an officer and told a guard, “I could buy you, Mr. Deputy.”

Yesterday, Aguiar’s family, in the statement released to the press, blamed Aguiar’s mental breakdown on a single factor: the stress caused by the web of civil lawsuits between him and Kaplan, from whom he is now estranged, over the $2.55 billion payout from the 2007 sale of their joint natural-gas exploration venture, Leor Energy. “Mr. Aguiar fell victim to a campaign of invasive surveillance and false accusations that amounted to psychological terrorism,” Aguiar’s family said in the statement. Aguiar’s U.S. attorneys did not return a phone call from Tablet seeking comment. Kaplan’s attorneys declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

Earlier this week, in a phone interview with Tablet before his commitment to the Abarbanel mental hospital in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, Aguiar charged that his uncle—who is currently president of the board of the 92nd Street Y, one of New York’s pre-eminent Jewish cultural institutions—was, among other things, paying off the U.S. military and tracking Aguiar and his family with GPS devices. “I’ve been under surveillance for a long time,” Aguiar insisted. Aguiar also made repeated references to death, claiming that both Kaplan and Tropper are on suicide watch because of the recent sex-tape scandal. He also claimed he had filed for custody of Kaplan’s two young children in both the United States and Israel. Then he bragged about the powerful people he knows who would stop him from doing “anything stupid.” “You know who would call me?” Aguiar asked. “People like Bibi, people like Tzachi Hanegbi”—Israel’s former minister of justice, currently chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee—“maybe Tzipi Livni, maybe Shimon Peres, maybe Alan Dershowitz.” The Harvard law professor recently signed on to Aguiar’s legal team; he declined to comment on his client’s circumstances to Tablet, citing the ongoing litigation.

Documents filed by Kaplan in U.S. federal court suggest that Aguiar has been regularly leaving threatening voicemails for Kaplan and others as the Tropper scandal has unfolded. Their content, which has not previously been reported, demonstrates the degree to which Tropper’s organization has become enmeshed in the increasingly vicious family feud between Kaplan, who remains Eternal Jewish Family’s chairman, and Aguiar—both wealthy, ambitious men who have come to play increasingly prominent roles in the secular Jewish world, even as they sought, via Tropper, to increase the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold over the process of conversion to Judaism backed by the legal authority of the State of Israel.

“I demand that you resign as Chairman of EJF,” Aguiar allegedly said in a December 15 voicemail message, threatening to sexually violate Kaplan if he didn’t comply, according to court documents. “You can call me when the fucking pain is bad enough,” he said in another message, filed in support of Kaplan’s motion to hold his nephew in contempt of court. (The presiding judge has not yet ruled on the request.) Additional filings contain more such messages: on December 20, the same day the New York Post published the seamy details of Tropper’s alleged sexcapades with Shannon Orand, the conversion candidate from Houston, Aguiar allegedly left the following message: “It’s the eighth night of Hanukkah and the flames are burning loud. I just sent over some candles for you guys and some pizza and some other items and gifts today so that you would have them as a token of our appreciation from our family to our family of just how much we love you ‘cause we love you so much that we decided to let you know that we’re praying for you in the event that you finally decide to commit suicide.” In court filings, Aguiar’s attorneys have not disputed their client left the voicemails, but argue that their content does not constitute harassment.

As president of the 92nd Steet Y, Kaplan, 47, regularly hobnobs with some of the most powerful Jewish philanthropists in New York. He and his wife, Daphna Recanati, a member of one of Israel’s wealthiest and best-known families, also support major scholarship programs for arts education at the Y and have given millions to other charitable causes in Israel and the United States. Separately, Kaplan—who wrote a 788-page Oxford dissertation on Malaysia’s geopolitical positioning during the Cold War before, in 1994, opening a firm that prospected silver mines with financial backing from George and Paul Soros—has established a nonprofit organization called Panthera, devoted to wildcat preservation and research, which has created vast reserves of land in Brazil for big cats to roam free. (A recent admiring profile of Kaplan in the New York Times revealed that he also harvests honey from his jaguar preserves.) A serial entrepreneur, Kaplan moved on from oil wells to gold mining, through a new company based in London, which has hired Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, as an adviser, according to British press reports.

Aguiar, 15 years Kaplan’s junior, is the son of the billionaire’s older sister, Ellen Kaplan, who left Judaism to become an evangelical Christian. He was born in Brazil, but grew up in Fort Lauderdale, where he was a tennis star for his Christian prep school, Westminster Academy. Even after “returning” to Judaism, Aguiar continued to support the school, which is also his wife’s alma mater, giving it a $50,000 grant in 2007. After graduating from Westminster, he attended Clemson University, in South Carolina, but dropped out and moved to New York, where he became a clerk on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In 2001, Kaplan offered to bring Aguiar into his new business venture: oil and gas exploration. In court documents, Aguiar recounts getting into a car and driving to Texas, where he and a geologist, John Amoruso, made one of the largest onshore natural-gas finds in the past decade; as gas prices skyrocketed in the middle part of the decade, Aguiar and Kaplan’s company, Leor, attracted Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch as investors before selling to oil giant EnCana in 2007.

In addition to discovering large deposits of untapped natural gas, Aguiar was also rediscovering his ancestral heritage. In interviews, he likes to recount the tale of calling Tovia Singer, a Monsey-based rabbi who specializes in outreach to Jews who have become evangelical Christians, to demand the rabbi stop trying to take Jews away from Jesus. Instead, Aguiar continues, he fell in love with the Torah. In 2003, Kaplan introduced his peripatetic nephew to Tropper, who bestowed upon him the name Yehuda Dovid and took him on as a pupil in his yeshiva. Eventually, Aguiar convinced Jamie Black, his onetime high-school girlfriend, to convert to Judaism. “I thought about Jerusalem since I was a child,” Aguiar told a documentary film crew last year. “I had these amazing visions of Samson, this big strong guy, and David with the slingshot—these visions of heroes in my mind.”

Until their falling out two years ago, Kaplan and Aguiar shared both a thriving energy business—Leor was named after Kaplan’s children, Leonardo and Orianna—and a charitable organization, the Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation, named for Kaplan’s mother and established after her death in 2002 to support Thomas Kaplan’s “philanthropic and religious goals.” From the outset, Kaplan was the principal donor to the foundation, contributing more than $1 million annually. Aguiar ran the foundation, which was registered to his home on a cul-de-sac in Fort Lauderdale, and which gave to an array of causes, including medical research and Jewish groups ranging from Hadassah, Magen David Adom, and the Jewish National Fund to ultra-Orthodox education and outreach groups, including Tropper’s yeshiva, Kol Yaakov, in Monsey.

It remains unclear why Kaplan and Aguiar, having cemented their very profitable relationship in the oil fields of Texas, decided to get so deeply involved with Tropper, a moonfaced ultra-Orthodox rabbi who first came to public prominence in his community in 2005, when he joined a group of halachic authorities who had ostracized a fellow ultra-Orthodox rabbi who had the temerity to claim that the universe might be more than 5,700 years old. No rabbi who believed that the universe predated the Jewish calendar, Tropper insisted, could be a valid judge for a conversion to Judaism—a claim that carried with it the implication that no one who believed otherwise should be allowed to become a Jew. (Tropper subsequently invalidated a woman’s conversion to Judaism on the grounds that she had later been seen wearing pants, a sartorial decision that in his binding opinion proved that she was never actually Jewish.)

Between 2003 and 2008, the last year for which documents are available, the Kaplan foundation paid out more than $8 million to Tropper’s various enterprises, helping the rabbi establish adherence to his personal brand of biblical literalism as the gold standard for Jewish belief and practice, and for conversion to Judaism. But it’s not clear how warm their relationship ever was; emails filed in one of the court cases indicate that, as early as 2004, Kaplan was losing patience with his rabbinic ally, who was demanding more money. “Your method of recognizing my generosity is to threaten withholding of your contacts, a form of spiritual scorched earth,” Kaplan wrote. “You’ve acted like a child and jeopardized the greatest project with which you could ever be associated. Quite frankly you should be ashamed of yourself.”

In 2007, after the sale of Leor closed, Kaplan and his wife, Daphne, contributed $36 million to the foundation; Aguiar, in his first contribution, added another $25 million. By the middle of 2008, as the relationship between Kaplan and Aguiar began to deteriorate, Kaplan attempted to remove his nephew—who had been drawing six-figure management fees—from the foundation. In a lawsuit pending in Florida state court, Kaplan accuses Aguiar of hijacking the foundation and distributing $7 million to certain rabbis “to further his claim he is the Jewish Messiah.”

By then, Aguiar had already moved to Israel, where he has used his $200 million from the Leor sale to become something less than the Messiah—instead, he’s a bona-fide Jerusalem celebrity, instantly recognizable to Israelis as the owner of Beitar Jerusalem, the country’s most famous soccer club, whose bright yellow jerseys and caps he frequently wears. He is also known for high-profile charitable donations to major organizations, including an $8 million gift a year ago to Nefesh b’Nefesh, a group that promotes aliyah among North American Jews. In October, he appeared onstage with Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, at the annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, which Aguiar and his wife co-chaired. Earlier in the year, he chaired a similar conference there, and he bestowed a “Defender of Jerusalem” award on Texas Gov. Rick Perry during the politician’s August visit to the Holy Land.

In September, Israel’s Channel 10 aired a documentary about the country’s newest hero, in which Aguiar offered a guided tour of an unoccupied apartment he owns in Jerusalem’s Old City, overlooking the Western Wall. “What did you think, I was going to be in Row 56 or something?” Aguiar asked. “This is like VIP seats here—in case something happens”—he seems to be referring to the arrival of the Messiah—“I wanted VIP seats. If it never happens in our lifetime, then we have something to look forward to.”

The show also captured Aguiar—who explained in his interview with Tablet that he is relieved to have moved his allegiance from Tropper’s strict form of ultra-Orthodoxy to the more relaxed, welcoming Judaism of Chabad—stopping to buy cigarettes at a corner shop. “Jerusalem like you, love you,” exclaims one of the shopkeepers. “You been to selichot”—Jewish prayers of atonement—“at the Kotel?” asks he other. Aguiar responds that he has not, and pauses before asking: “What is selichot?”

MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Allison Hoffman outlined the entire Tropper scandal here.
MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff profiled Shannon Orand here.
MORE: Read transcripts of the phone calls, plus hear some audio clips, here.

December was a very bad month for Rabbi Leib Tropper, a powerful ultra-Orthodox rabbi who has been seeking to determine the standards for conversion in Israel and throughout the world through his little-known yet influential organization, Eternal Jewish Family. First, black-and-white posters appeared on walls in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities threatening public disgrace if the rabbi refused to “cease his filth.” While the definition of “filth” was left up to readers’ imaginations, photos and video were prominently mentioned in the text, which demanded that Tropper suspend his involvement in performing religious conversions.

On December 14, Eternal Jewish Family—which is based in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, and backed by the billionaire board president of New York’s 92nd Street Y, and his nephew, who owns one of Israel’s most famous soccer clubs—suddenly announced that its founder was resigning his post to “pursue a variety of other interests,” the details of which were again left to readers’ imaginations.

Two days later, the filth appeared online: audio tapes, allegedly of the rabbi, trying to coerce a single mother from Houston into having sex with other men for money—and as the price of her conversion to Judaism.

“Would you have a problem with just talking about sex to a guy, or only actually doing it?” the man asks on one of the tapes. In another, he reassures her, “I could roleplay a rape with you, but I couldn’t actually rape you.” A third featured explicit phone sex between the two. Shortly after the tapes surfaced, the hopeful convert, a minister’s daughter named Shannon Orand, told the blogger Shmarya Rosenberg—who has covered the story on his blog, Failed Messiah—that the rabbi had said, “If you fulfill my needs, I’ll fulfill yours—and you need a conversion.” Through an attorney, Tropper released a statement that admitted no wrongdoing but expressed regret for “what has appeared to be conduct not within our significant laws of modesty.” (When Tablet Magazine reached Tropper by phone at his home in Monsey to request comment, he simply said, “No, no,” and hung up.)

The sex tapes appeared to support the allegations of misconduct against Tropper, and they briefly elevated what started out as internecine rumor-mongering among ultra-Orthodox factions into legitimate tabloid fodder. (“Tal-Mood for Love,” read the headline above a brief item in the New York Post.) To more sensitive listeners, the tapes exhibited not just the particular sexual perversions of a rabbi from Monsey, but also the moral horror of a religious figure exploiting the trust of a woman who was hoping to join the Jewish religion and who was dependent on his authority. (Orand completed her conversion in Jerusalem last week under the auspices of a different Orthodox rabbi.)

Other than the mention in the Post, mainstream American newspapers ignored what is surely one of the weirdest, most embarrassing, and most consequential scandals in recent Jewish history. Mainstream rabbinical and Jewish communal organizations in the United States also chose to be silent. Yet the rise and fall of Leib Tropper raises fundamental questions about the abuse of a closed process in which a small group of ultra-Orthodox authorities are allowed to set their own binding terms for conversion to Judaism using the authority of the State of Israel and without any meaningful oversight. It is also the story of how an almost unknown rabbi managed to become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion, fueled not by a superior knowledge of the Talmud but by access to something that appears to be even dearer to the hearts of the modern rabbinical establishment: money.

Tropper is a rare figure in the Jewish world: a creature of the insular ultra-Orthodox community whose relationships tie him to Texas oil fields, professional sports teams in Israel, and mainstream secular Jewish organizations—specifically, the 92nd Street Y, one of New York’s best-known Jewish community institutions, and home to one of the city’s most exclusive preschools. After spending more than two decades toiling in relative obscurity in Monsey, Tropper catapulted four years ago into the milieu of Israel’s powerful ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, propelled by his two powerful and wealthy patrons: Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire oil and mining wildcatter, and his nephew, Guma Aguiar.

Now 32 years old, Aguiar was born to a Jewish mother but raised as an evangelical Christian. Kaplan—the younger brother of Aguiar’s mother, Ellen—introduced Aguiar to Tropper in 2003, after Aguiar had already begun exploring Judaism. Under the rabbi’s tutelage, Aguiar adopted a Hebrew name—Yehuda Dovid—and, in 2007, made aliyah to Israel, where he has become a celebrity, thanks to his recent investments in the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team and Hapoel Jerusalem, the city’s basketball franchise. Kaplan and Aguiar cemented a philanthropic relationship with Tropper by directing millions of dollars to his Eternal Jewish Family. That money, in turn, enabled Tropper to influence determinations of which rabbis would have the authority to perform conversions—that is, to determine who is and who is not a Jew.

“On a personal level, he was not particularly well respected,” said Rosenberg, who is a fierce critic of the ultra-Orthodox world on his blog. “But insert EJF and conversions into it, along with Tom Kaplan’s money and Guma’s money, and suddenly Tropper became one of the most powerful rabbis in the world.”

Tropper’s relationship with Kaplan and Aguiar, once the source of his power, ultimately played a role in his undoing. For the past year, the two men have been locked in an Oedipal court battle over the $2.55 billion fortune resulting from the 2007 sale of their natural-gas exploration company, Leor Energy, to the oil giant EnCana. Tropper agreed to appear as a witness for Kaplan, and, in response, Aguiar turned against his former mentor. According to Tropper’s wife, Laurel Blond, Aguiar made a phone call to the rabbi’s house in March in which he claimed he had “thousands of rabbis praying for Tom Kaplan’s death” and encouraged the rabbi to “switch sides.” In early April, Aguiar confronted Tropper in Jerusalem at the David Citadel Hotel and, according to court records, threatened to throw the rabbi off a ninth-floor balcony.

Then, in October, Aguiar sued Tropper in an Israeli court, claiming that the rabbi misappropriated donations. “He had gone to Rabbi Tropper for several years as his rabbi—he had confidential discussions with him, he was his spiritual advisor,” Aguiar’s lawyers told a federal judge in Florida last June. (Kaplan’s attorney, Harley Tropin, said in a statement that Kaplan would not comment on the Tropper scandal in light of ongoing litigation.)

When the sex-tape scandal broke last month, Aguiar was among those who forwarded the audio recordings of Tropper’s conversations with Orand to Failed Messiah’s Rosenberg, ensuring that the rabbi would be publicly humiliated. In a phone conversation with Tablet Magazine, Aguiar initially said he forwarded the audio “to some people because I thought they were funny,” but subsequently said he only sent the recordings in response to a request from Rosenberg. “There’s no such thing as revenge,” Aguiar said. “It’s just exposing the truth.”

Aguiar said Kaplan introduced him to Tropper in 2003, after he had already begun studying Judaism with another Monsey rabbi, Tovia Singer, who specializes in reaching out to evangelical Christians who, like Aguiar, were born Jewish, and getting them to “return” to Judaism. With his uncle, Aguiar was instrumental in prompting Tropper to expand beyond his work with baalei teshuva—returning Jews—into the world of conversions. (Aguiar’s wife, Jamie, whom he met in high school, is a blond former evangelical Christian who converted to Judaism.) By 2004, according to emails filed in one of the federal court cases, Tropper had started writing a manual designed to streamline conversions among the various religious courts in America. That year, Kaplan’s foundation gave Tropper’s organization $154,000; the next year, Kaplan and Aguiar directed more than $700,000 to the rabbi’s group.

In early 2006, Tropper told a reporter that EJF was going to offer “Cadillac conversions” to non-Jews who were concerned about making sure their conversions—and, particularly for those converting to marry, their children’s status as born Jews—would be recognized by religious authorities in Israel, where full citizenship depends on it. Tropper offered a clever soundbite: “Why settle for a broken Chevy, which may go down the highway but nobody wants it in their driveway?”

The timing for Tropper’s new product line couldn’t have been better. A feud that had been simmering for years between Israel’s insular, powerful rabbinate and American rabbis erupted into full-scale war in April 2006, when Shlomo Amar, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, announced that he would not automatically recognize conversions approved by the Rabbinical Council of America, the main union of Modern Orthodox rabbis. (The Israeli chief rabbinate does not recognize any conversions, marriages, or other rabbinical functions performed by Reform or Conservative rabbis, on the grounds that the Reform and Conservative movements do not recognize halachic authority and hence are no longer branches of Judaism). Amar’s announcement created a groundswell of interest in Tropper’s Cadillacs, and the rabbi spent lavishly to promote his brand of specially certified conversions to the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate. According to financial records, in 2006 Tropper spent $1.6 million—more than double his previous year’s budget—hosting conferences and paying for rabbis to attend his educational programming, including a lavish Jerusalem summit in July 2006 at the five-star David Citadel devoted to “Improving Conversions and Preventing Intermarriage.” Amar turned up, along with Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger and Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, a nonagenarian considered to be one of the ultra-Orthodox world’s leading halachic authorities.

Overnight, the rabbi from Monsey had become a major power broker in the ultra-Orthodox world in both America and Israel. In 2007, the last year for which federal tax records are available, Tropper distributed $2.3 million in scholarships and hundreds of thousands of dollars more in unspecified travel and conference accommodations from his Monsey redoubt.

Tropper has been removed from his post at Eternal Jewish Family—which is still chaired by Kaplan—and, according to the group’s executive director, Rabbi Dovid Jacobs, has also been replaced at Horizons, EJF’s parent organization. It isn’t clear whether he remains in control of his yeshiva, Kol Yaakov; a person who answered the phone there Tuesday refused to comment. But in the weeks since Tropper’s downfall, no one in the ultra-Orthodox world has been willing to officially criticize or reprimand the rabbi for what appear to be his profound and sickening sins. At a December meeting, the Council of Torah Sages, the halachic body of Agudath Israel, an ultra-Orthodox umbrella group, discussed the scandal but decided against issuing a comment. Only the Modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America has condemned Tropper’s behavior: “What we have heard, if true, violates the fundamental elements of all that Judaism holds sacred,” the council said in a statement, adding that the rabbis welcomed any of Tropper’s victims for counseling.

“It’s like Nixon,” said Tovia Singer, the rabbi who initially sparked Aguiar’s interest in Judaism. “The damage has obviously been done to the haredi community and the more that they’re in denial the more damage it’ll do.”

MORE: Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff profiled Shannon Orand here.
MORE: Read transcripts of the phone calls, plus hear some audio clips, here.
MORE: Allison Hoffman profiled Guma Aguiar here.

Tablet Magazine reached Rosenthal earlier today at home in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is busy packing up her furniture for the move to Washington, D.C., later this week. She declined to comment on the furor her comments provoked, except to say that she believes the original Haaretz headline—which said she “blasted” Oren—exaggerated what she actually said, which was that she thought it “most unfortunate” that Oren apparently thinks J Street’s dovish policy positions could put the lives of Israeli Jews at risk.

“The interview focused on what is and what isn’t anti-Semitism,” Rosenthal said. “I don’t think a reporter asking me about J Street is out of bounds, and I don’t think my answer was out of bounds.”

American Envoy Sparks Furor with Criticism of Oren [Haaretz]
U.S. Official Slammed for Criticizing Ambassador Oren [JPost]

Earlier: U.S. Anti-Semitism Envoy Attacks Ambassador Oren

Related: The Anti-Anti-Semite [Tablet Magazine]

Benedict, who is already booked for a visit to Rome’s synagogue in January, responded earlier today with a mollifying speech about, yes, the Holocaust: specifically, about his visit earlier this year to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. “The visit to the Yad Vashem has meant an upsetting encounter with the cruelty of human fault, with the hatred of a blind ideology that, with no justification, sent millions of people to their deaths,” he said. Human fault: another way of saying that not everyone’s a saint.

Pope Says Visit to Holocaust Memorial ‘Upsetting’ [AP]

Except … it doesn’t, really. Since the whole effort is merely an exercise in political saber-rattling anyway, everyone is both having and eating their respective cakes: hawks—Jewish or not—can say Congress is willing to move against Iran, with or without help from other countries; and Obama can still go to prospective allies and say he’d like their help, and actually, hey, could they please get on board sooner rather than later, because Congress is getting a little restive, you know? “The administration did not say, ‘Go ahead,’ and they did not tell me not to go ahead,” Berman told reporters yesterday. And what did Israel—whose security is a key part of why everyone’s so worried about Iran getting nuclear weapons—say? Ambassador Michael Oren “deeply appreciates” the U.S. effort to stop Iran from getting the bomb. Win-win-win.

House Votes to Expand Sanctions on Iran [AP]
Obama and Kerry Slowing Sanctions Legislation Push [JTA]
Berman: Iran Sanctions Bill Empowers Obama [Politico]

The Vogels’ apartment was arguably its own conceptual installation: a perfectly ordinary, cramped New York space filled with one of the best private collections of contemporary art in the city, or maybe anywhere. Herbert, 87, and Dorothy, 74, originally aspired to be artists themselves. As newlyweds, they rented a studio on Union Square, took classes in Abstract Expressionist painting, and started buying art from friends and acquaintances whose studios they visited. “We started to take our work down from the walls and started to put other artists’ works up,” Dorothy tells filmmaker Megumi Sasaki in the documentary Herb and Dorothy, which was released on DVD this week. “We thought they were better than we were, so we gave it up.”

The Vogels began collecting at a particularly auspicious time—at precisely the moment when New York became the capital of the art world and when the son of a Russian Jewish garment worker from Harlem and the daughter of an Orthodox shopkeeper from Elmira, New York, could easily befriend the people who were shaping culture in New York, many of whom were Jewish émigrés from Europe or upstarts from Brooklyn. These tastemakers grew up as part of a generation that was encouraged, thanks to New Deal programs that subsidized artists, to take art seriously, and they became adults in the wake of World War II, just as New York was replacing Paris and Berlin as the global hub for art and ideas. And, while not explicitly Jewish, the American avant garde was to a great extent shaped by Jewish collectors, dealers, artists, and critics—not least by curators at the Jewish Museum, who mounted a series of influential shows for New York School artists like Jasper Johns starting in the late 1950s. “If you were collecting, what you were valuing was, to a great extent, what Jewish critics told you to value—abstract art, color,” said Catherine Soussloff, a professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Jewish identification with the avant garde wasn’t, of course, new; the Nazis had early on marginalized Jewish artists in Europe with the “degenerate” label. “Jews took a role in the American avant garde, and within that role they maintained their identity as Jews,” said Margaret Olin, an art historian at Yale University. “Part of the pride that they took in their place in society was that they didn’t have to just collect Jewish things—in the 1950s and 1960s, we became a part of the mainstream of American culture.” The Vogels met in 1960 and married in 1962. Herbert, known as Herby, worked at the post office; Dorothy was a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. Down in the Village, where Herby went to hang out with Abstract Expressionist painters at the Cedar Tavern on his way to the graveyard shift, no one cared about what anyone did for a living. Their first purchase together, after a Picasso vase Herby bought Dorothy as an engagement gift, was a metal sculpture by John Chamberlain. Quickly, they arrived at a simple arrangement: they would live on Dorothy’s income, and buy art with Herby’s salary. Their budget constrained their purchases; they could afford only the edgiest, most “difficult” pieces from artists who were already getting notice or work by unknown artists who welcomed the Vogels’ cash-and-carry policy. (Literally—they didn’t buy things they couldn’t cart home on the subway.) “The artists were really very appreciative of people looking at their work,” Dorothy told Tablet last week.

The Vogels weren’t the only people collecting on a shoestring in the postwar era. Dorothy recalled crossing paths in the early 1960s with Sam Hunter, the former New York Times art critic who, in his capacity as director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University—an institution financed by a mattress manufacturer—had a mandate to spend no more than $5,000 on any single piece he acquired for the fledgling museum. (The cheapest was a Claes Oldenburg he picked up for a couple hundred dollars, Hunter recalled to me earlier this year.) But they quickly gained notice among other dealers and collectors for the amount of time and energy they spent getting to know artists’ work—though some dealers objected to their practice of going straight for studio sales. “They weren’t collecting for status—they were collecting because of their commitment to the artists and their ideas,” said Norman Kleeblatt, chief curator at the Jewish Museum. “So the Vogels were able to get in on the ground level.” For years, Herby had regular phone calls and visits with Robert Barry, Dan Graham, and Sol LeWitt; European dealers would consult with the couple on trips to New York to get the lowdown. “Often we did not have time to go to the galleries,” Jeanne-Claude, the late wife of the environmental artist Christo, explains in the documentary. “In one dinner with Herby and Dorothy, the four of us, we would know everything that happened in the past six months in New York.”

Over time, the Vogels achieved every middle-class collector’s fantasy: a collection of art, assembled on the cheap, by artists who subsequently became very, very famous. And unlike other Jewish collectors who came up in the 1960s, some of whom famously sold their pieces for quick profits, the Vogels held on to everything they bought, and only agreed to part with the collection when the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, promised to make a home for it. Today, more than a thousand of their pieces are held in Washington, while another 2,500 have been distributed to museums in each of the 50 states to allow as much of their work as possible to be displayed. (There is also a newly launched website, Vogel 50×50, that catalogues the entire collection online.)

“The idea that they are ordinary people is so important,” said Ruth Fine, the National Gallery curator who handles the Vogel collection. “They made good choices before these artists were well-known, and they took on the aura of being prescient.”

Paul A. Samuelson, Economist, Dies at 94 [NYT]
Remembering Paul Samuelson [WSJ]

Related: Something Old, Something New

Now, according to JTA’s Eric Fingerhut, Oren appears willing to concede that his government and J Street share at least some common ground—namely, Iran. Oren, Fingerhut reported, said in a short telephone interview that he appreciated that J Street had “made a statement and supported these efforts” to push sanctions measures in Congress. Which is reassuring, because it shows that peace, at least between these two parties, is still possible.

Oren: U.S. and Israel Tight on Iran, Appreciates J Street Support of Sanctions [JTA]
In Shift, Oren Calls J Street ‘A Unique Problem’ [Forward]

Related: The Pragmatist

Lieberman Faces a Long, Chilly Walk to Saturday’s Healthcare Debate [The Hill]

The synagogue’s president, 87-year-old Sam Teitelman, remembers the congregation’s heyday—a time when the Oak Street neighborhood, just west of downtown, was essentially a Yiddish-speaking ghetto dotted with shtiebels, kosher lunch counters, and butcher shops like the one around the corner from Orchard Street that his father once ran after arriving in the United States in 1924. When Teitelman’s family—Ukrainian, by way of Cuba—moved farther west, to a nicer area, his father would trek back to the old neighborhood by foot each Shabbat to occupy seat No. 57. Today, the congregation no longer holds services, though prayer books sit out on the bimah in readiness for the occasional, and increasingly rare, weekday minyan. “Every one of our members is also a member somewhere else,” Teitelman said earlier this week. “We are never going to be a traditional Orthodox synagogue again.”

Orchard Street is one of only a handful of the immigrant-founded synagogues that once dotted cities across America to have remained in the hands of its congregation, rather than being demolished or sold and converted into, often, immigrant churches. Other survivors—the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side or the Vilna Shul in Boston—have been reborn in recent years as cultural institutions. Teitelman’s hope is that the same might be possible for his shul. While the building’s fate remains in limbo, a group of artists from around the country has stepped in to create a “cultural heritage” exhibit of works inspired by the synagogue, or by its now-absent congregation, opening this weekend at the John Slade Ely House, an art space a few blocks from the shul. “It’s not up to us what becomes of this building—they have to figure out for themselves what they want,” said Cynthia Beth Rubin, a digital artist based in New Haven, who coordinated the project. “What we can do as artists is help them realize that the story of the shul touches people beyond their own community.”

The idea of using contemporary art to illuminate the relevance of deteriorating institutions isn’t new, but the New Haven project is about something else—using a deteriorating institution as a conduit for broader ideas about Jewishness, nostalgia, and the vast gulf separating contemporary American Jewish life from the quotidian realities our grandparents and great-grandparents knew. The charm of the Orchard Street shul lies in its ordinariness, but that also made it an almost perfect canvas for the two dozen or so participating artists—some Jewish, some not—to project their own notions of what it meant to be Jewish then or what we have lost with the disappearance of these congregations, places where restrooms were labeled with Yiddish signs reading “Menner” and “Froyen.”

The participating artists were required to visit the building, and to respect the values of the shul—no desecration of holy texts, for example, was allowed in their work—but were otherwise set free to make what they wanted: rich portraits of the synagogue’s interior and cemetery, audio interviews with congregants, a sukkah made from paper decorated with archival photographs. One team of Yale computer scientists contributed a digital recreation of the shul’s interior, made using the same techniques that have been used to model Michelangelo’s Florence Pieta, which could eventually be used as the basis for a virtual tour of the building. The results are, in many cases, beautiful, or heartbreaking—as in the case of a Shaimos box, intended for the disposal of religious texts, placed in front of the image of the shul’s disarrayed shelves of siddurim. The question left unanswered is: what should we save, and how?