• But one experienced observer predicts that such rebukes will be the beginning and end of U.S. response: “for this very busy president, the Arab-Israeli issue now has little to do with his stock at home. Frankly, it isn’t even the most important priority in the region.” [Politico]

• Birthright co-founder Michael Steinhardt has an idea—involving significant reparations as well as resettlement—for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [WSJ]

• A survey found that nearly half of Israeli high-schoolers would refuse to evacuate West Bank settlements as soldiers, and believe Israeli Arabs do not merit the same rights as Israeli Jews. [Haaretz]

• A good long look at the Hurva, the grand 300-year-old synagogue in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, which is about to be rededicated after extensive restoration. [WSJ]

• Jon Stewart on Biden’s trip to Israel:

Rachel Corrie, then 23, was killed in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting in Gaza. The facts in dispute concern whether Corrie’s death took place in an active combat zone, and how visible Corrie made herself to the bulldozer’s driver. An Israeli probe cleared the driver and the authorities; the Corries, as well as U.S. authorities, don’t fully buy it. The civil trial is currently going on in Haifa District Court.

Corrie’s Sister to Haaretz: U.S. Encouraged Family to Sue Israel [Haaretz]

Meanwhile, do enjoy Rabins’s take on this week’s Parsha. Gives you a good sense of what her music’s like. And I would challenge you to find a more pleasant way to spend four pre-Shabbat minutes.


Parshat Vayakhel from G-dcast.com

More Torah cartoons at www.g-dcast.com

Related: Female Trouble

God help us when she finds out about Brooklyn.

Vulture Is Undressed by ‘The Millionaire Matchmaker’ [Vulture]

Earler: The Scroll on ‘The Millionaire Matchmaker’
Fellas: Heed the Millionaire Matchmaker

Here’s what’s odd. The two Israeli scholars are anti-Zionist. The book in question is called The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule. And the book contains, according to the academic, “a detailed analysis of the ways in which Israel deploys technologies of power and systems of control to maintain its stranglehold over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is a book that concentrates on the illegality of the occupation regime.”

Fellas! The whole “strange bedfellows” thing works best if you let them stay the night!

Boycott and Madness [NOW Lebanon]

In his article, Foxman establishes that the announcement “it couldn’t have been worse.” And he says—in apparent revision of what he told Haaretz earlier this week—that he fully understands the administration’s anger.

By the end, we are back in Dog Bites Man territory. Foxman concludes: “Ultimately, Palestinian unwillingness to compromise for peace and to stop the hate are the real obstacles to peace.”

After Biden’s Israel Contretemps, Stepping Back [Huffington Post]

But you want to know where the Jews—say, those in the top 50—are. The short answer is: They’re down.

• The richest Jew, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, fell from fourth to sixth, and from $22.5 billion to … well, to $28 billion, but obviously you’d rather have the higher ranking than the extra $5.5 billion.

• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped further, from 17th to 23rd, and from $16 billion to $18 billion (no way you could trade me six slots for $2 billion).

• Googlers Sergey Brin and Larry Page tied (with others) for 24th at $7.5 billion.

• Microsoft’s Steven Ballmer (Jewish mother!) is 33rd, with $14.5 billion.

• George Soros (35th, $14 billion).

• Michael Dell (37th, $13.5 billion).

• Mikhail Fridman (42nd, $12.7 billion).

• Donald Bren (45th, $12 billion).

• Roman Abramovich (50th, $11.2 billion. His consolation prize is he gets to own Manchester United.)

The World’s Billionaires [Forbes]

• The IDF indicted two soldiers in military court for allegedly getting a Palestinian boy to open a suspected booby-trapped package during last year’s Gaza conflict. [LAT]

• To head off buzzed-about rioting, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered a 48-hour full closure of the West Bank. [Ynet]

• In Saudia Arabia, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Gulf countries will pressure China to support anti-Iran sanctions. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Egypt continues to clamp down on Hamas after sealing its Gaza border. [Haaretz]

• West Bank Palestinians commemorated the 32nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history. [NYT]

• One day after endorsing the Goldstone Report, the E.U. parliament demanded that Hamas immediately release Gilad Shalit, the captured Israeli soldier who also holds French citizenship. [JTA]

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will speak at the annual AIPAC Conference later this month. Should be interesting, given recent events. [Ben Smith]

• An Israeli book called The Confessions of Noa Weber won the award for Best Translated Novel of 2010. [Jewcy]

• Scholar Martin Kramer, who has come under fire for proposing the end of Gaza pro-natal subsidies, argues his case in a “Q&A” with various Hamas interlocutors. [Sandbox]

• Lehavi, an Israeli group that works to get Jews to break up with non-Jewish significant others, has called on Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli to ditch Leonardo DiCaprio. [Gawker]

I am a very recent (like a week ago) convert to Judaism, and as such I am still learning about the culture, customs, people, society, etc. So, it is in the spirit of learning that I ask this question:

Why are the people who responded to this story so angry with it and the author? I read the comments and I understand the commentors think the author is obnoxious and arrogant, but it seems there is another underlying reason for the hostility. Why?

Oh, “Victoria”: consider this your welcome to the club!

Related: Paradise Lost [Tablet Magazine]

Such is the understandable despair setting in. In fact, as Biden leaves the country (he heads for Jordan), the proximity talks will apparently still happen (over the Arab League’s reported protestations). Although, the New York Times reports, disagreements remain even on those: the Palestinians see them as focusing on borders and the like—on the substance of what peace would look like—while the Israelis see their ideal end result as merely putting the two sides in the same room together. The Israelis, in other words, appear more content to take things slowly than the Palestinians do.

Which begs the question: is time on Israel’s side? Demographically, of course not: every day that passes, the Palestinians attain a higher percentage of people between the river and the sea. And politically? Israel’s main supporter, the United States, seems (justifiably) as close to wit’s end as ever. The Jerusalem Post puts it best: Biden’s speech in Tel Aviv today (transcript here), while overwhelmingly about the importance of maintaining America’s and Israel’s close ties, was also “a get-your-act-together lecture from a frustrated parent to a beloved but occasionally errant child.” In private, Biden was apparently much more direct: “This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden, long known as a top American friend of Israel’s, told Prime Minister Netanyahu (my bold). “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”

Both the Palestinians and the Israelis have an unfortunate tendency to miss opportunities for peace. But it seems increasingly clear that the Israelis, more than the Palestinians, have fewer of those left.

Analysis: Biden’s Get-Your-Act-Together Lecture [JPost]

The exhibit’s location opens onto the broader question of how Einstein—very possibly the most famous and influential Jew of the 20th century—felt about Israel, both before and after its inception. “Einstein’s relationship to Israel was complex,” the Times’s Ethan Bronner writes. “A self-described universalist, he became a Zionist when he witnessed anti-Semitism in Europe. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, was a key influence on him. Walter Isaacson, who wrote a 2007 biography of Einstein, said by telephone that Einstein wanted Jews to move here but did not back a separate Jewish nation-state until after it was declared in 1948.”

Last year, Tablet Magazine book critic Adam Kirsch pushed back against a book, Einstein on Israel and Zionism, that argued that the great physicist was lukewarm toward the Zionist project at best. Einstein “was an unwavering supporter of the Yishuv, and he spent a great deal of effort making speeches and raising money for Jewish institutions in Palestine,” Kirsch writes. “But he was also a principled cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist, and he was chagrined by the growing antagonism between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.”

Rewrite of Physics by Einstein on Display [NYT]
Related: Relatively Speaking, A Zionist

A group of stunned primary schoolchildren began crying when their teacher told them during a bizarre Holocaust game that they were to be taken away from their families.

The pupils, aged 11, became upset after a number of them were segregated and told they were being sent away or might end up in an orphanage.

The ordeal was meant to give the youngsters at the Lanarkshire school an insight into the horrors faced by Jewish children during World War II. …

One girl said her classmates began crying when Mrs. McGlynn told them she had a letter from the Scottish Executive saying nine children had to be separated from their classmates.

She told the shocked youngsters those who were born in January, February and March had lower IQs than other children, ‘due to lack of sunlight in their mother’s womb’, and that they had to put yellow hats on and be sent to the library.

The mother added: “When I asked why on earth they thought it was appropriate to deliver a role play situation to the children in this way, Mrs Stewart informed me that they didn’t inform the children beforehand.

“This was because they wanted the children to experience an “accurate emotional response” to this scenario in order for it to be reflected in their story writing.

Jeeze.

Primary Schoolchildren in Tears After They Are Told They Will Be Removed From Families as Part of Holocaust ‘Game’ [Daily Mail]

Israel’s interior minister says the announcement’s timing was unfortunate and not intended to offend. Even if that last part is true, it made the Palestinians look stupid for agreeing to the talks (it also made them look like the victims of Israeli bullying); it made it seem that Israel was passive-aggressively expressing unseriousness about the talks; and it made the Americans appear, simply, foolish.

Even so, Biden’s condemnation was notable. One expert put it well to Haaretz: “If Netanyahu is at all serious about talks with the Palestinian Authority, this will be just the beginning of his coalition woes. Meanwhile, the Israeli bilateral relationship with the United States has just become much more difficult. It is hard to remember a time when a senior U.S. official used the word ‘condemn’ to describe the actions of any ally.”

The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and Americans for Peace Now of course sided with Biden. J Street, with typical savvy—J Street’s savvy being the one thing its admirers and detractors seem able to agree about—let Biden do the talking: “J Street joins Vice President Biden in condemning … As Vice President Biden said … We echo Vice President Biden’s call.” The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group seems to be betting that when it actively evangelizes for its positions, it does more alienating than persuading. Instead, it is positioning itself to be there, waiting, when (it believes) the facts on the ground usher Americans, and particularly American Jews, into its camp.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman told Haaretz that the announcement’s timing was poor but that Biden lacked tact: “The condemnation should have been issued by the State Department in Washington. … Biden undermined the central purpose of his trip to Israel—strengthening the friendship and cooperation between Israel and the U.S.” Meanwhile, no mention of the announcement appears on AIPAC’s Website. The silence is conspicuous, but is it wise? Joe Biden is known as a talker, and American Jews can surely hear him, even across a couple continents.

How Did U.S. Groups React to Biden’s Condemnation of Israel? [Haaretz]

Earlier: Biden Bashes Settlement Announcement

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to stick to the proximity talks, even after the construction announcement. [NYT]

• The Arab League secretary-general said Abbas wouldn’t start the talks now, due to the construction announcement. Hrmm. [JPost]

• The E.U. parliament formally supported the Goldstone Report’s findings, to strong Israeli criticism. [Haaretz]

• Consensus among high-level Israelis is shifting away from military action against Iran and toward supporting the Islamic Republic’s homegrown opposition. [WSJ]

• Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived in Saudi Arabia to drum up support for harsh sanctions against Iran. [NYT]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reform Movement Changes Intermarriage Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I said: awkward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q&A with Hillel Halkin [Jewish Star]

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

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

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

The story is excellent: Give it a listen.

Russian Village Haunted By A Hidden Holocaust Past [NPR]

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

What do you guys think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below, the making of the haircut:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mile End

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

Earlier: Bagel Wars

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

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

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

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee
Your Oscar Cheat Sheet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now, the list.

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

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

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

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

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

• Up for: Foreign Language Film; Cinematography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Up for: Foreign Language Film.

• Will win: It’s a long shot.

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

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

• Up for: Picture; Original Screenplay.

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

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

Nominations [The Oscars]

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

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran: Engagement or Regime Change? [Atlantic Council]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those were the days!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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