Joan Rivers last month.

Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festiva

Move over Betty White: Joan Rivers is the next young lady of the moment. Besides making two television series—her second season of TV Land’s How’d You Get So Rich? has just begun, and shooting for her WE reality show Mother Knows Best starts this summer—Rivers is the subject of a critically-acclaimed documentary that premiered at Sundance, and a profile in New York.

The article follows the 76-year-old comedienne as she goes to Sundance to promote Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work, set for a theatrical release on June 11. Along the way, we learn about:

• The Joan Rivers Diet, under which “You can eat anything you want before 3 p.m. and then nothing for the rest of the day.”

•Her friendship with Prince Charles. “Not inner circle,” she says. “Outer-inner circle.”

• Her age. “Age sucks. It’s the final mountain.”

The documentary also highlights the doggedness that keeps Rivers in a Versailles-like mansion on East 62nd Street, including her meticulous maintenance of an archive of one-liners, which are organized by category in an index card catalog (think your town library anytime before 1999). The documentary also apparently shows her soft side, including intimate moments with her grandson Cooper as they make a Thanksgiving food delivery to a wheelchair-bound woman living with multiple sclerosis.

This past Sunday night, on NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice —yup, she’s on that too; a former winner, she is host Donald Trump’s right-hand-woman this season—she kvelled over Bret Michaels’s rock-solid performance on the show as well as his tenacity to live through recent health problems. Perhaps Rivers should be kvelling about herself, too?

Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny [NYMag]

Soul Khan.

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When Mos Def, the dean of brainy hip-hop, calls a free-style rap showdown “one of the dopest battles I’ve ever seen,” you know you’re in for something of Biblical proportions. Quite literally, in this case: When West Coast rapper QP met Brooklyn’s Soul Khan—a mustachioed, bespectacled Jew who looks more like a summer intern in an accounting firm than an MC—the rhymes soon came down to Old Testament vs. New.

“His dad’s name is Judas,” rapped QP, “the same dude who betrayed Jesus / ‘Cause that’s the type of shit a Jew does.” (“Jew does,” “Judas”: Not a bad rhyme.)

Reaching back into his own tradition, Soul Khan quickly retorted with the perfect comeback. “You spit the ten plagues,” he rapped, “I can’t really lose / ‘Cause that was dope, but guess what / The plagues came from the Jews.”

A few quips later, Khan was even more definitive: “I’m part of the chosen people,” he shouted, “We wrote the Old Testament, you followed a phony sequel.”

Your lunchtime listening/viewing is Peter Beinart—he of that essay—and Washington Times reporter Eli Lake duking it out on Bloggingheads.

Below: Lake pushes back against the notion that AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and others in the American Jewish establishment have an obligation to publicly criticize Israel more than they already do; Beinart maintains that AIPAC worked against, for example, the 1990s peace process.

The Crisis of Liberal Zionism [BhTV]
Related: King Without a Crown [Tablet Magazine]
The Go-Between [Tablet Magazine]

A press conference in front of the mosque site.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

The path has been cleared for a mosque to be built about two blocks north of the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. Last night, the relevant community board approved the planned 13-story, $100 million mosque—to be called Cordoba House—at 45 Park Place.

Though the actual vote was overwhelmingly in favor, many are vocally against it. Foremost among these is Tea Party activist Mark Williams, who called the mosque “a 13 story middle finger aimed at 911 victims.” Earlier, he accused Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who supports the mosque’s construction, of being a “Jewish Uncle Tom.” Charming, those people!

Community Board Approves Mosque Near World Trade Center Site After Emotional Meeting [DNA Info]

Today in Tablet Magazine, contributing editor Robin Cembalest considers how a forthcoming Holocaust memorial in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, might break from past trends. Yoav Fromer culls lessons for the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan from the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon ten years ago. Mideast columnist Lee Smith talks to Jordan’s ambassador about the new state that may soon exist on his country’s border. And The Scroll sure could use a second cup of coffee.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky.

Random House

At Just Journalism, former Tablet Magazine staffer Michael Weiss interviewed Sasha Polakow-Suransky, whose new book, Unspoken Alliance, was responsible for the recent report (vigorously denied by Israeli officials) that in the 1970s Israel offered to sell apartheid-era South Africa nuclear weapons. (In fact, the titular “unspoken alliance” is that between post-1967 Israel and the white South African regime. Benjamin Pogrund praised the book in Tablet Magazine last week.)

Polakow-Suransky stands by his research, though he says that certain other revelations in his book—for example, that Israel purchased uranium from South Africa in the ‘80s without safeguards—were perhaps more worthy of front-page treatment.

Most interestingly, to me at least, Polakow-Suransky lays out his typology for where Israeli politicians fell regarding the apartheid state. He sees three broad groups:

• The founding fathers, like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, who were morally opposed to apartheid and therefore had no desire for a South African partnership. “They represented the moral vision of Israeli policy,” Polakow-Suransky states.

• The Labour Party realists, like current President Shimon Peres. Their desires to strengthen Israel’s security trumped other moral considerations, and therefore they sought out the helpful alliance. “It was strict realpolitik,” he explains. “So Israel and South Africa got in bed together.”

• The Revisionist Zionists, like Ariel Sharon, who were hardcore anti-Communist and so approved of South African on that ground.

Polakow-Suransky explicitly denies that Israel currently has an apartheid system. However, it is nonetheless interesting to ponder how the three above categories might map on to present-day critics and supporters of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

Interview with Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Source for Guardian Report on Israel and South Africa [Just Journalism]
Related: Binding Ties [Tablet Magazine]

Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday.

Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

• The Iran sanctions bill’s sponsors have deliberately slowed its progress—with AIPAC’s backing—now that multilateral U.N. sanctions are on track. [Laura Rozen]

• Come on down! President Obama told Prime Minister Netanyahu that, y’know, since he is going to be in Canada next week anyway, he should probably just drop by the White House and say hi. [Haaretz]

• And Netanyahu told chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel that, since he is in the neighborhood and all for his son’s bar mitzvah, they may as well meet today, and they are. [JTA]

• The “Gaza flotilla” of nine aid ships should hit the Strip by Friday or Saturday. It is not entirely clear whether the IDF will allow them through the blockade. [JPost]

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Yasser Arafat’s Second Intifada “one of the worst mistakes of our lives.” [JPost]

• A New York left-wing activist named Lori Berenson was released from a Peruvian jail in order to raise her child, though she still may not leave the country until 2015, when her sentence for collaborating with terrorists is over. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering, her lawyer is her husband and the child’s father.) [LAT]

Rahm Emanuel.

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

• Spotted! Rahm Emanuel and family, in Eilat! Eating shellfish! But don’t worry, folks: He bought his own shrimp. [Ben Smith]

• A $33 million grant from the Jim Joseph Foundation is to be divided between the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements. [JTA]

• A small, Gaza-based, Syrian-backed terrorist group blew up 200 kilograms of dynamite in a donkey cart. No one was killed; the donkey was. [Sighs.] [JPost]

• Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said he had not known of appointee Fred Malek’s Jew-counting past, and also vouched for him. [WP]

• A Belgian rocker named Eric Grossman called Elvis Costello a “douchebag” for canceling his Israeli tour. [Ynet]

Yuri Foreman this morning.

All photos by Marc Tracy

It was just like how several attendees said they hoped the old days had been: A real crowd gathered at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn this morning to see Yuri Foreman, the junior middleweight belt-holder, train for his fight against Puerto Rican sensation Miguel Cotto on June 5 at Yankee Stadium. While ordinary decent folks hit the bags, shadow-boxed, and took lessons elsewhere in the gym, dozens of reporters, hangers-on, and plain old fans watched Foreman, the 29-year-old Belorussian who in his spare time is studying to be an Orthodox rabbi, rev himself up for the biggest boxing match involving a Jew in quite a few decades.

Foreman was a man of few words this morning. He moved from jumping rope—for like ten straight minutes!—to the ring, where he first shadow-boxed and then sparred with a pads-wearing trainer, and then finally to the speed bag. As a sport, boxing tends to enforce a dialectic between competition and spectacle: The more competitive a bout gets, the more spectacular it is; the more lop-sided, the more boring. Training is a little different, though. The most important part of this morning for Foreman, it was clear, was his time in the ring, but the segment that made for the most exciting viewing was the speed bag. I can’t quite ascertain its practical value—if a boxer ever tried to hit another boxer with that sidehand, up-down motion, he would certainly get pummeled by a hook to the body to be followed by a definitive opposite-hand uppercut. But it sure is cool to see as stunning a physical specimen as Foreman hit the bag in a speedy blur.

Foreman at the speed bag.

Foreman wasn’t taking much in the way of questions, but I did get a chance to chat with legendary promoter Bob Arum, the old Jewish guy behind the young Jewish guy. Arum also promotes Cotto and, most notably, the world’s greatest fighter, Manny Pacquaio. (I of course asked him whether we are going to be treated to the fight everyone wants to see: Pacquaio vs. Floyd Mayweather, Jr. He said it was too soon to tell.)
[MORE]

Elie Wiesel last year.

Gergely Botar/AFP/Getty Images

There was a to-do in last week when Theater J, the Washington, D.C., JCC’s theater company, canceled what was to have been the world premiere of a play about Bernard Madoff. They canned it, specifically, after Elie Wiesel complained about its depiction of a fictional jailhouse scene between him and the notorious Ponzi schemer. (Wiesel reportedly lost a substantial sum in the morass of Madoff’s machinations!)

Well, if you still want to see the play—which is called Imagining Madoff, and was written by Deborah Margolin—you can check it out at Stageworks Hudson, a couple hours’ drive north of New York City.

Also, the NPR show All Things Considered did a brief segment on the legal legitimacy of Wiesel’s objection.

Theater Cancels Play With Wiesel Character [NYT]
When Truth Meets Fiction, Lawyers Intervene [NPR]