Hadara Graubart penetrates the National Mah Jongg League, a group both feared and respected by players of the increasingly popular game. Tablet Magazine columnist Adam Kirsch looks at a new book that wants to eliminate leftist affection for Leon Trotsky once and for all. And all throughout the day, The Scroll will offer insightful updates.

• Amid the latest talk of a prisoner exchange with Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that there is still “no conclusion, no decision, and no deal” for the return of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. [JPost]
• According to an unnamed Israeli TV program quoting unnamed officials, Netanyahu has proposed a 10-month settlement freeze in the West Bank. [AP]
• The Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America bans those with messianic views from membership, which will primarily affect those in Chabad who believe the Lubavitcher Rebbe may come back from the dead. [COLlive]
• Bernard Avishai speaks up for J Street: “[I]f Jews can be said to have stood for anything traditionally, was it not this allergy to dogma—this breaking of idols? Did we not see the democratic rights as, well, commanded? And, tragically, have not the land of Israel and Jewish military power themselves become idols for American Jews since 1967?” [WPost]

• Despite feeling “really torn” about trading in property that once belonged to a “horrible mass murderer,” a German car dealer has reportedly arranged the sale of Hitler’s Mercedes to a Russian billionaire. [AP]
• A group of Los Angeles Catholic schoolteachers celebrated a midweek Shabbat as part of the ADL’s “Bearing Witness” program, which reinforced the connection between the religions—guilt—when one woman was moved by a Holocaust story to ask herself “[W]hat am I doing with Darfur and the genocide in Africa?” [LAT]
• To mark the anniversary of the Chabad center bombing in Mumbai, a blogger reflects on how a video tribute to victims Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg led him to a transcendent viewing of the Denzel Washington thriller Déjà Vu. Yes, you read that right. [Blogcritics]
• Kiki Smith, a German-born American artist known for using ideas of feminism and Catholicism in her work, has been chosen to create a window for New York City’s landmark Eldridge Street Synagogue along with architect Deborah Gans. [NYT]

Last week, a group of kids at a Florida middle school tried to declare Thursday “Kick a Jew Day.” According to the Naples News, ten students at North Naples Middle School sent around an e-mail on Wednesday night telling classmates that if they saw someone Jewish, they should deliver a kick. The kids have all been suspended, and now, instead of reading for 20 minutes during homeroom, all the students in the school will have to watch videos about bullying and take lessons in respect and kindness. Maybe they were just jealous after “Hug a Jew Day” earlier this month.

10 North Naples Middle Students Suspended for ‘Kick a Jew Day’ E-Mail [Naples News]

Seth Rogovoy, author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, joins a long tradition of people reading whatever the heck they want into the life and works of the elusive musician. (Some people are tired of hearing about him altogether.) Jews have a leg up on this practice—after all, the artist was formerly known as Robert Zimmerman—and in an interview, Rogovoy offers a peek into his process that serves to illustrate some Dylanology basics:

1. If you look hard enough, you will find something: “It involved a lot of dedicated listening over and over again to all of Dylan’s recordings; re-reading fundamental Jewish texts and key guidebooks, including Abraham Joshua Heschel on the Prophets—you read him on the likes of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and just substitute Bob Dylan for the ancients and it totally resonates.”

2. Evidence against your point can always be turned around to support it: “I go to great pains to show how, in fact, the gospel albums are a lot less about the narrator’s belief in Jesus than they are about the narrator’s identification of Jesus with the Jewish prophets.”

3. Don’t speak for the man, he doesn’t like that: “I don’t really pretend to have any insight into what, if anything, Bob Dylan believes in.”

Interview with Seth Rogovoy, author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet” (Part One) [Examiner]

Seventy-five years ago, 600 Jews from Ukraine and Belarus traveled across Siberia to be the first settlers of Birobidzhan, a Jewish autonomous region 50 miles short of the Chinese border. To research a book she’s writing on the would-be homeland for Nextbook Press, journalist Masha Gessen retraced their path across Russia. She arrived at a train station marked by “two signs, one in Hebrew letters and one in Russian,” she writes on Slate. “The Hebrew faces the tracks, and though it is a fair bet that virtually no one on the Trans-Siberian can read it, it communicates all the necessary information. (I assume it says Birobidzhan, but I can’t read it, either.)” The mountainous region is by turns rocky, wet, and crowded with insects, all factors which made the establishment of Birobidzhan no less than “the worst good idea ever.”

Jewish Mother Russia [Slate]

The New York Post reports that a shady Iranian charity organization has been donating big bucks to Columbia University and Rutgers University to support the hiring of pro-Iran, anti-Israel faculty. The Alavi Foundation seems to have been under the thumb of Iran’s government and has also been found to have supplied money to Iranian spies in Europe; Federal authorities are now attempting to seize the organization’s funds, which total as much as $650 million.

Among the results of what Michael Rubin, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, describes as “the ivory tower…prostituting itself for money” were Columbia’s hosting of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007 and its hiring of Professor Gary Sick, who has expressed the following:

He [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] made it very clear that, whether he is talking about ‘wiping Israel off the map,’ or ‘erased from the pages of time,’ or whatever the quote is, what he means is that there should be a free referendum among the peoples of the Palestine that existed to the partition in 1948 to vote about the kind of a government they should have. He is confident that, in a free vote, Israel and Israelis would lose that vote and it would turn out to be something else: a unitary state, probably run by the Palestinians.

Schools’ Iran $$ Pipeline [NYPost]

In this week’s edition of our podcast, Vox Tablet, Sara Ivry talks to “citizen diplomat” Stephen P. Cohen about the “need to reconceptualize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one in which there are no victors.” Allison Hoffman interviews Hannah Rosenthal, the newly appointed U.S. anti-Semitism envoy. Marjorie Ingall’s suggestions of what not to give your kids for Hanukkah include a “techno draydel” and plush mohel scissors. Josh Lambert reviews books on the spectrum of Zionism, poetry, music, and drama. And much more as always, here on The Scroll.

• The Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council plans to meet in December to authorize current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to continue running the government along with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in order to stave off the problem of postponed elections and Abbas’s declaration that he will not seek another term. [WPost]
• Hungarian riot police busted a beer-hall meeting of the nation’s illegal neo-Nazi group Hungarian Guard. [JTA]
• Israel attacked two suspected weapons factories and a smuggling tunnel in Gaza on Sunday, wounding at least seven, to retaliate for rocket attacks; the night before, Hamas had declared that it would cease firing at Israel. [AP]
• A German auction house has halted the sale of a painting by Alexander Adriaenssen after an estate claimed it had belonged to a Jewish family who was forced by the Nazis to sell it. [AP]
• A used-car dealership in Colorado displays a large billboard depicting President Barack Obama in a turban and the words “PRESIDENT or JIHAD?”, “BIRTH CERTIFICATE, PROVE IT!”, and “WAKE UP AMERICA! REMEMBER FT. HOOD.” [AP]

• A renegade monkey was spotted heading toward the Tampa Jewish Community Center, sending police on a search and forcing the Center’s day-care participants to stay indoors today; if it had been this primate, they might not have had a problem. [Tampa Bay Online]
• David Cohen, a 25-year-old jockey with the fourth most wins in the United States, says he’s an expert at “how to hit a horse properly” but dreams of someday owning a Jewish deli. [Forward]
• In other Jewish equestrian news, Bobby Frankel, a horse trainer who had a particularly successful relationship with the stable of Saudi Arabian Prince Khalid Abdullah, died at 68. [BloodHorse]
• Some rabbis advise that while flying, it’s better to pray in one’s seat rather than to arrange a minyan: “The airlines don’t like people congregating in the back of the plane any more,” said one. [JC]
• Job Cohen, the unfortunately-named mayor of Amsterdam, is the fourth Jew who has held the position since World War II, which, a blogger pointed out, is “a better record than New York.” [JTA]