• The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has already found upwards of 15,000 volumes in Chaim Grade’s old apartment. [Arts Beat]

• Forward cartoonist Eli Valley discusses his life and work. [The Comics Journal]

• Christopher Hitchens further elaborates on the topic of praying (and not praying) for him. [VF]

• Reza Aslan and Bernard Avishai call on President Obama to do all in his power to prevent Israel from taking military action against Iran. [IHT]

• Buzz Bissinger asks: Who are the two Jewish pitchers who won the Cy Young Award? Peruse his whole feed to find the answer. [@buzzbissinger]

The Times reports:

Ms. Seibel made no secret of her admiration for the pioneering comic work of Mr. Pekar, whom she described as “a 70-year-old hipster who loved listening to the Beastie Boys in the car.” In turn he provided her with stories that she illustrated for publications like Chicago Newcity, The Austin Chronicle and The Jewish Review of Books.

Ms. Seibel was also one of four artists whom Mr. Pekar invited to work on the Pekar Project, which starting in 2009 was an effort to translate his work and persona to the Internet. …

As the Pekar Project continued, it became apparent that Ms. Brabner was displeased with one contributor in particular: Ms. Seibel, the only female artist involved, and the only one who worked face to face with Mr. Pekar.

Ms. Seibel, whose husband and three children also became acquainted with Mr. Pekar, said that Ms. Brabner would abruptly pull Mr. Pekar out of their telephone conversations, and that she tried to interfere with a Brooklyn book-signing event at which Ms. Seibel appeared with Mr. Pekar in November. Ms. Seibel said Mr. Pekar told her these conflicts were “for him to worry about,” not her. “He put it under his business,” she said. (Ms. Brabner declined to comment on these matters.)

No one in their artistic circle believes the relationship between Mr. Pekar and Ms. Seibel crossed professional boundaries, but some could see how it strained Mr. Pekar’s marriage.

“A part of him was enjoying the attention he was getting from this very good-looking young woman,” said Mr. Parker, one of the Pekar Project artists. “And, naturally, Joyce, how could she enjoy that? You don’t have to be a psychologist to see that one’s not going to be good.”

Not even Mr. Pekar’s death quelled the tensions between Ms. Seibel, who has said she spent part of his last day alive with him, and Ms. Brabner.

Among her husband’s work with Ms. Seibel that Ms. Brabner has objected to is an illustration created for the catalog of “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women,” an exhibition opening Oct. 1 at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. (Ms. Brabner said she was embarrassed that the show, ostensibly about Jewish women, is “being hyped by way of saying we’ve got an old dead Jewish guy.”)

Mr. Parker said he was contacted by Ms. Brabner, who wanted to “cut Tara out of the equation” of the Pekar Project’s work. Other people with direct knowledge of the project’s operations, but who did not want to speak for attribution for fear of offending Ms. Brabner, said she would not allow a book to be published if it included Ms. Seibel’s contributions.

The Unfinished Tale of an Unlikely Hero [NYT]
Related: Gut Shabbes [Jewish Review of Books]
Splendor [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Harvey Pekar Dies

But what would we have done without him? To many Jews, especially in the Diaspora, he gave at least the illusion that some of the perpetrators would be brought to justice. “Justice not vengeance,” as Wiesenthal liked to say.

Segev, an indefatigable historian and highly respected reporter for the leftist Israeli daily Haaretz, tells us he had access to 300,000 Wiesenthal-related documents, although he doesn’t say how many he read. (Among his many human sources are agents of the Mossad who believe they deserve credit for some of his successes.) But his attempt at de-mythologizing Wiesenthal can sometimes make one feel he misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the Wiesenthal behind the legend may have been all too human, and it’s always valuable to set the record straight for history, but could this be a case where the legend is more important to the course of history than the life? Is publicity-seeking intrinsically bad if one is seeking to publicize the untroubled afterlives of mass murderers in order to shame the world into action?

The fact that this question has to be asked is due to something we have chosen to forget: the world community’s stunning failure after World War II to treat the Final Solution as a crime unto itself. The 19 Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were found guilty of “crimes against humanity” mainly for planning and starting a devastating war of aggression. Wiesenthal, Segev reminds us, was always adamant that the Final Solution was a crime against humanity as well as against Jews. But it was a different crime from that for which the Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg.

There was a lamentable loss of distinction between the two crimes, or rather a shameful failure to prosecute the second crime, for some 15 years after the war. Hitler lost the war against the Allies, yes. But in effect he won his personal “war against the Jews” (as Lucy Dawidowicz described his greatest priority) by a factor of some 6 million to one.

The world preferred to focus on the fact that the official war was won. We are fortunate that someone—Simon Wiesenthal—made the pursuit of the perpetrators of the second war his lonely obsession. But what if there had been no Wiesenthal? What if he hadn’t started pestering people around the world as early as 1953 that Adolf Eichmann, the chief operating officer of the Holocaust, was alive and living in Buenos Aires? Wiesenthal became the Ancient Mariner of Mauthausen, the Austrian camp he’d been sent to from his native Lvov, buttonholing anyone and everyone, trying to get them to care that there was a monster of evil living a thinly disguised second life in Buenos Aires. And for a long time nobody cared enough to do anything about it. It wasn’t a priority.

Eichamann still may have been caught—Segev is meticulous in disentangling the different threads of information that finally propelled the Mossad to kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and transport him to Israel for trial in 1960—but it was Wiesenthal who seized upon the capture (and his role in it) to make belated justice for ex-Nazi war criminals a worldwide cause.

That was the significance of the Eichmann trial, making the world face the fact that it had let the perpetrators of the greatest mass murder in history walk away for the most part unscathed and unindicted.

Wiesenthal or the myth that grew up around Wiesenthal—that Nazis all over the world were being pursued by the vast inexorable forces of Wiesenthal’s all-powerful, all-knowing “Documentation Center”—served several purposes. It was satisfying to a certain extent to Jews, particularly because many ex-Nazis believed the legend and could be thought of as living in fear of capture. But however exaggerated some of his claims may have been, the exaggerations (the hyping of the so-called ODESSA Nazi escape network, for instance) may have served a purpose—not just psychic healing for Holocaust survivors who could at least imagine justice would eventually be done. Alas, the legend also served as an excuse for the indifference of the rest of the world to the murderers in their midst. It allowed the rest of the world to think that there was no need to make a systematic effort to punish the perpetrators of the greatest mass murder in history—they were being hunted down by Simon Wiesenthal.

In Segev’s account, we come to understand how Wiesenthal was driven close to madness by the indifference of the rest of the world to the pursuit of justice and ironically, his work, his legend gave the rest of the world a fig leaf for its inaction.

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of it all was the way many Jewish leaders such as the World Jewish Congress’s Nahum Goldman failed to act with any vigor on the escaped Nazi information Wiesenthal supplied. And there was the episode when Austria’s Jewish chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, found excuses to attack Wiesenthal.

“The dispute with Kreisky caused Wiesenthal great pain,” Segev writes. “He reckoned that most, if not all, Austrians were happy that someone had taken upon himself to free them at long last from their Nazi past…. ‘I am their bad conscience,’ he wrote some time later, ‘because each one of them should have taken upon himself what I have done for Austrian society.’ Never had he felt so alone.”

And indeed looking back it’s rather astonishing that of all the Jews in the world just one man, however flawed, systematically unappeasably dedicated himself to being the world’s “bad conscience” and the Nazi’s living nightmare. Segev is good at capturing the catch-as-catch-can origins of Wiesenthal’s “Documentation Center.” He makes much of what a sloppy, disorganized, out-of-pocket, one-man shop it was for much of its early history, how it depended on stacks of newspaper clippings, old phone books, barely legible letters, flawed memories from camp survivors who randomly wandered in, false trails, red herrings—this was no CSI Vienna, no Cold Case Squad. For a long time it was one irritable guy who’d lived through a hellish experience he wasn’t going to allow the perpetrators to forget.

Wiesenthal started by collecting information from his fellow camp survivors and then looking up SS murderers in Austrian phone books and pressuring authorities to prosecute them, or dismiss them from whatever important office they held (often with the tacit knowledge of everyone around them). Soon his “bad conscience” became an inconvenience not just to ex-Nazis but to the American foreign policy, which was more heavily invested in prosecuting the Cold War than on prosecuting the many Nazi war criminals West Germany allowed to hold prominent state positions.

Segev demonstrates the way Wiesenthal learned to manipulate the media, play politicians against each other, sometimes plant false stories about sightings (Eichmann in Syria!) just to keep an escaped Nazi’s name in the news. He was a combination of detective and showman. Segev sometimes makes him seem like Geraldo Rivera, which I think is a bit unfair: Look at what he was taking on—the burden the world had shrugged off its shoulders, the moral weight of the world. The immoral wait of the world.

Yes, Wiesenthal was a born tummler. He stirred things up, made things up, sometimes got things wrong, but he made it impossible for people to forget the murderers—like Eichmann.

Wiesenthal and Eichmann: the two poles of post-Holocaust consciousness. Let us take a moment to give Eichmann some consideration since he was the central figure in the drama of Wiesenthal’s life and legend.

The late Milton Himmelfarb once wrote an influential polemic called “No Hitler, No Holocaust” arguing—against pseudo-sophisticated detractors of the “great man” theory of history—that in fact it had been Hitler’s implacable drive alone that made the Jews the victims, not just of oppression or Pogroms as they had been in the past in Europe, but of systematic extermination. One could say of Eichmann, “No Eichmann, no systematic, industrialized continent-wide extermination.” He made the trains run on time. To review: Heydrich called Eichmann and told him that the Furher has given the order for the extermination of the Jews. You’re in charge.

Aside from the industrialized gas chamber/crematoria complex, Eichmann can be held responsible for the psychological component of the continent-wide extraction, concentration, and transportation of Jews with minimum fuss. The technique of promising “work in the east” to the ghettoized Jews if they’d just get on board the trains. The diabolical “wish you were here” postcards home from the dead.

But you won’t find in Segev’s book a full description of the real Eichmann. He was not merely the neutral administrator par excellence but an ideologically committed, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating killer. You have to go to a book such as Neal Bascomb’s recent Hunting Eichmann, where in five pages he tells you more than Segev’s entire book does about Eichmann’s obscene ferocity in personally coming to Budapest at the end of the war to insure that the last surviving Jewish community, the 400,000 that had been protected in Hungary from extermination by the fascist but somewhat independent Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, were shipped to the death camps.

Even though the war was lost, and there was no point (as if there ever was) in Eichmann’s making sure every last Jew alive in Hungary died, but Eichmann did his best, sending the last 7,500 Jews left in Budapest to Auschwitz until, Bascomb reports, Eichmann had to be summoned by Himmler himself (who was trying to make some devil’s bargain for the lives of those Jews), who ordered Eichmann to stop the final frenzy of extermination. Wiesenthal pieced it altogether from the ground up, from Eichmann’s collaborators and victim/survivors. That’s why he got into everyone’s face about Eichmann. He was no cog in a machine, he was the screeching driving wheel.

At least Segev doesn’t buy into Hannah Arendt’s fatuous pseudo-profound notion of Eichmann’s “banality of evil,” a scandalously inaccurate, philosophically meretricious phase that historically ignorant people parrot to make themselves seem intellectually sophisticated.

Actually, Segev’s attitude toward Eichmann seems inconsistent, which is a problem since he is so central to the Wiesenthal narrative and Wiesenthal’s iconic triumph, however much he may have exaggerated his role in the final denouement.

In fact, Segev seems to be of two minds about Eichmann. When he first introduces him early in the book he claims Eichmann “was never a maker of policy, he implemented it. He was one of those Nazi killers who as a rule did his work sitting behind a desk.” In Eichmann’s case this is utterly misleading considering how eager Eichmann was to get out from behind his desk to outrace the coming end of the war to complete his final evil project, the murder of the Hungarian Jews.

Which gives you the feeling that Segev buys into Arendt’s bogus “banality of evil” theory—that Eichmann was merely a paper-pushing bureaucrat who had no emotional investment in the mass murder he was enabling, a follower of orders, an exculpatory line Arendt foolishly took directly from Eichmann’s own dishonest attempt to exculpate himself—and save himself from the hangman—at his trial in Jerusalem.

But then Segev seems to have had a change of heart because a hundred pages later he tells us that he was shocked, shocked by some new Eichmann revelations in the year 2000, “when Israel permitted the publication of an autobiography written by Eichmann in prison,” and, Segev says, “a different person emerged.”

Different person! No more Mr. Nice Guy, I guess. Anyone who didn’t know the nature of Eichmann by 2000 was ignoring the well-documented history of his fanatic frenzied last-ditch crusade to kill every last Jew in Hungary.

Which leads one to wonder about Segev’s imputing a belief in Arendt’s banality theory to Wiesenthal, although Segev offers an empathetic (or perhaps patronizing) explanation.

“As a man who identified with the principles of humanistic ethics, Wiesenthal found it difficult to accept this [the profound and vicious calculation behind Eichmann’s hatred,] so he preferred Arendt’s thesis. She too refused to see in Eichmann a thinking person, she therefore erred in her assessment of him as did Wiesenthal.”

So now Segev tells us Arendt was wrong to see Eichmann as a mere paper-pushing deskman but uses the fraudulence of her theory to reprove Wiesenthal for an alleged failure to see Eichmann’s anti-Semitic “ferocity.” Somehow I doubt Segev’s claim to see Eichmann’s nature more clearly than Wiesenthal.

What’s fascinating is that, despite all his strenuous debunking and attempted debunking of the Wiesenthal myth, Segev is too good a reporter, too honest an observer, not to have developed a grudging admiration for his subject that he will sometimes allow to slip through.

What could be the cause of the demythologizing impulse that seems to drive Segev’s book, though? I believe it can be traced back to something Segev himself describes:

Many of the Israelis who had settled in the country before World War II or were born there, tended to relate condescendingly to Holocaust victims and survivors, identifying them with the Jews of the Diaspora, whom they despised as the polar opposite of the “new Hebrews” they were trying to create in the Land of Israel, in the spirit of the Zionist vision. It was the customary to blame the victims for not coming to the country beforehand, remaining in Europe instead and waiting to be slaughtered without doing anything to prevent it.

Harsh, no? And the length to which he goes to describe this prejudice suggests that part of him still shares the Israeli contempt for the survivors and that part of him treats Wiesenthal as the man who thrust the Holocaust upon Israel—an unwanted legacy for a nation founded on a vision of the future not the past, as the central focus of Jewishness. One could argue this case, but it’s unfair to take it out on Wiesenthal.

It’s hard to read Segev’s mind, but he is one of the leading “revisionist” historians of Israel. Does he resent the focus on the Holocaust of the European Jews as a rationale for the state of Israel, as a focus of Jewish identity? Does he share the early Israeli’s contempt for alleged Diasporic weakness that allowed the Holocaust to happen? This blame-the-victim attitude all too prevalent in Jewish and non-Jewish circles discounts the hideous progressive dehumanization of the victims before the slaughter. I actually think Segev has overcome a great deal of this Sabra attitude. One could speculate that Segev’s Mossad sources convinced him Wiesenthal grabbed too much credit for the Eichmann capture and other exploits. One could also speculate he sold the book as a sensational debunking project but the deeper he got into the documentation of the crimes Wiesenthal was seeking justice for, the loneliness of his quest, the more Segev’s integrity as a historian and a human being deepened his own world view to see the value as well as the hype in Wiesenthal’s work.

Try this thought experiment: What would the history of post-Holocaust Judaism have been like without Wiesenthal, this edgy irritable man who loved to spend his weekends with a stamp-collectors club at the Museum Cafe in Vienna but who managed—like pasting stamps in an album—to put hundreds of ex-Nazis in jail and redeem a portion of justice for Holocaust perpetrators?

Does Wiesenthal represent the inexorable triumph of justice? Alas no, we should be grateful for his work but realize that it was a lucky accident in a world that didn’t want to care, an aberration in a world where people and nations consciously and unconsciously fled from facing the fact of their complicity in perhaps the greatest crime in history. Sought to bury it in the past. Is too much attention to the past being paid now? How much does it matter that the Wiesenthal legend was exaggerated? Segev’s book provokes fascinating and important questions, especially when the prospect of a second holocaust (from a nuclear attack on the Jewish state) is not out of the question. If few cared then, will many care next time?

Wiesenthal was a tummler, but there’s something more to him, a moral seriousness that gets lost in Segev’s focus on the colorful fabrication of the legend surrounding him. He was a tummler but he was also kind of golem summoned up from the collective unconscious of the survivors and dead souls of the victims, someone who, as Segev points out, would almost have had to be invented if he hadn’t existed.

He was a larger-than-life figure and his stories were sometimes larger than truth, but he was dealing with a crime that was larger than death.

Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars, and a forthcoming book on the new age of nuclear war, is a cultural columnist for Slate.

You can also come see the band in concert (and say hi to me! I’ll be introducing them!) on September 26th, at 11 am, at the Tablet Magazine/JDub/Congregation Beth Elohim Sukkot street fair in Park Slope, Brooklyn (on Garfield Place between 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West).

Though the rebooted version of the series, which airs on the CW, does include an Iranian character, Navid Shirazi (pictured!), back in the old days the Tribe was represented solely by Andrea Zuckerman, who, naturally, was smart, nerdy, and had curly hair and glasses. She was the editor of the school newspaper and came from “wrong” (read: Lower-middle-class) side of the tracks, and was played by the Jewish actress Gabrielle Carteris, who though tasked with playing a high school sophomore was actually old enough to lie about her age on JDate (had it existed).

Also Jewish in real life but less obviously so on the show were Ian Ziering, who played the superficial ladies’ man Steve Sanders, and, of course, Tori Spelling, who played the virginal Donna Martin. Spelling earned the role based on talent alone; it had nothing to do with her father, the show’s producer, Aaron Spelling.

But last week, as I heard of Hapoel Tel Aviv’s advancement to the prestigious group stage of the UEFA Champions League—the annual tournament that pits Europe’s 32 greatest clubs against each other—I was delighted to discover that the silly prejudices of my youth have faded away. I was thrilled for Hapoel, and proud to see an Israeli soccer club enjoy such a sensational achievement.

Philosophically speaking, there have been Jewish teams in the tournament before: Amsterdam’s Ajax and London’s Tottenham Hotspur are, for reasons too complicated to consider here, known to fans as the Jews and the Yids, respectively. But Hapoel is a real Jewish team (with mostly Israeli players; Israeli clubs are allowed only up to five non-nationals), and it has already given Europe a taste of its convictions: As the Reds from Tel Aviv defeated Austria’s FC Red Bull Salzburg, Hapoel’s Itay Schechter, having scored a goal, pulled a yarmulke out of his sock and defiantly placed it on his head. On September 14, as Hapoel faces Benfica Lisbon for its first game in the arduous tournament, I’ll be rooting for the home team, its colors be damned.

Another Jewish Twist To UEFA Champions League [JTA]

Wrong! “There’s one more challenge in D.C., before the finale,” someone says. Wait, what? They’re leaving D.C.? Have they really run out of gimmicky political and indelibly local things to do? (Realizes they’ve done The Palm, the C.I.A., Capitol Hill, Ethiopian food, the Chesapeake Bay, Nationals Stadium, and even Bethesda.) Okay, fair enough. You have to watch a bit more to find out where they are headed after this episode, though. Or you could just keep reading.

Ooh, but first, we learn a little more about Angelo’s mysterious marital situation, which appears to consist of a Russian bride whom he talks to more than the rest of us talk to girls (five hours most nights!), only he does it by phone and has only met her “a few times.” Apparently he was divorced last year; apparently his passion for cooking was part of the problem. It got in the way of the relationship!

Only Host Padma Lakshmi read the black-tie fineprint at the bottom of the invitation to this episode.

She is joined by Dana Cowin, the editor-in-chief of the elegantly ampersanded Food & Wine magazine. Ed is friends with her on Facebook! Such an insider! He is also friends with Sam Sifton: Not Sam Sifton, the Times restaurant critic, but Sam Sifton, this guy he went to high school with.

The Elimination Challenge features the pairing of food and & wine. Winner gets a trip to London. Kevin is making pork belly. Kelly is making boar. Angelo is going with foie gras (nice). Ed is mixing grape juice and beer, he calls it Sparkling Beer-Wine; no, he’s doing Wagyu beef. Tiffany’s doing rib eye. They are spending a lot of time showing them cooking, probably because the loud Jews are gone and the producers have no more content.

Kevin’s pressure-cooker didn’t do his pork belly properly, and now as a consequence he must, yes, cook under pressure! This is a very dialectically useful pressure-cooker. With the pork belly out of the question, Kevin’s gambit is to grab a pigeon from the windowsill and start defeathering grill quail. Cause when you hear “I have seven minutes to cook and I must pair what I cook with red wine,” you think quail. What, you don’t?

Time to eat and judge. Kevin’s on the bottom, obviously. So is Kelly, whose blue cheese foam took her otherwise-good dish “off the chart,” according to Cowin—“off the chart,” you see, is bad, as opposed to “off the charts,” which is good. Dana Cowin is a lover of food, wine, & linguistic nuance.

On the top are Angelo and Tiffany. And the winner is Angelo! “I haven’t won in three challenges,” Angelo says. Which is like eight challenges for normal people, and 72 in dog years.

Now it’s time for the big reveal. Which place-that-isn’t-D.C. will the four cheftesants remaining after this episode travel to? It’s …

… Singapore? Wait. Okay. They’re going to Singapore? In fairness, I have heard Singapore referred to as the “D.C. of Southeast Asia.” Or maybe that was Phuket. Anyway, at least Angelo is happy: “I feel Asian inside, 100 percent. I tingle inside just to think about it.” Maybe you should get that checked out by a doctor! (Sorry, I feel obliged to insert what little Jewiness I can.)

But we still have this episode, and surely there’s one more gimmicky-government-D.C. button they haven’t pushed yet? “We’re sending you,” says Padma, “to NASA.” Yup, there it is.

Now the chefs are receiving instructions from astronauts aboard the International Space Station. This is actually kind of cool. Apparently their favorite meal up there is chicken fajita, which is extra handy, as you can see, as a flotation device, should you ever find yourself drowning in outer space.

The challenge? “Design a dish that’s truly out of this world.” Oh, I get it! The Top Chef writers were really proud of that one, I bet. Winner’s dish gets prepped and freeze-dried for space travel down in Houston, and then gets sent up for the astronauts, the aliens, and all the other denizens of outer space, like Larry King. “Shoot for the stars!” the cheftestants are advised. The writer who came up with that one didn’t have to pay for pizza that day.

Oh, and one more thing: Buzz Aldrin is a guest! This is also cool, although he is going to have to work extra-hard to top his next most recent TV appearance.

The guidelines for the dish include not using too much sugar (doesn’t freeze-dry well) or large pieces of ingredients (ditto); and, spicy is good, as is comfort food. Angelo is horrified that his sugar use will be limited. He was planning on making candy canes, with extra sugar!

Back at the kitchen. “You guys missed it,” Kevin says after Tiffany slips. “Tiff did the moonwalk.” Get it?? Kevin, no matter what happens, know that you just made a place for yourself on the Top Chef writing staff. Angelo says it would be “extremely embarassing” not to go to Singapore, what with him having recently beaten the Chinese premier in a who’s-more-Asian gameshow, and so he has carefully drawn up instructions, adopted from Alex Reznik’s recipe, for how to steal Ed’s pea purée. (Actually, I don’t believe Angelo ends up making pea purée after all. So much waste of a perfectly good Sharpie!)

Angelo tells Tom he’s doing glazed short ribs, and Tom gives him a look, and then Angelo wants to know what that look was all about, and Tom says, Nothing and mutters something about what Angelo is factoring in from what the NASA person told them, and Angelo says, Look, I am consciously using less sugar, and Tom is like, Well but I was hoping, and then Angelo is like, Why do you always have to undermine me in front of the cameras, and Tom goes like, You are just acting insecure because your father never showed his love for you but I am not your father, and then Angelo screams, GOD you ALWAYS DO THIS, ugh.

Kevin says he has to think “outside the box,” and then announces he is making New York strip with bacon-jalapeño marmalade and corn purée, which sounds fairly standard to me, but I don’t eat pork so what do I know? I didn’t even know that jalapeño is a fruit!

Uh-oh. Tiffany’s mussels have frozen, and are therefore unusable. Who would have thought they would freeze in the freezer?

Now we’re at the Ronald Reagan building downtown. It’s a small kitchen—Ed says they’re having … no just wait for it … “spacing issues.” Spacing issues! Tiffany is dealing with the mussels conundrum by just sorta working around it, I guess? Oh sure, Top Chef producers, pour on the inspirational syrup: Have Tiffany tell us how she started as an IHOP hostess (see what I did there with syrup?), and she was told women couldn’t work in the kitchen, and that just made her work harder, and look where she is now. Oh jeeze.

Meanwhile, Buzz Aldrin is just cooler than you. He looks great at 80, he helps Padma Lakshmi into her chair, and—and here is where he beats even Salman Rushdie—he walked on the moon! “How was that feeling,” Tom asks Aldrin. “You know, it’s funny,” Aldrin replies. “No one’s ever asked me that before.” Kidding! His response is, “Magnificent.” Hey Russia, remind me, which of our countries got to the moon first? It was you guys, right? Or maybe it was us who beat you there? I can’t remember.

Kelly is having plating issues, but here her dish comes. She’s talking, and the camera pans over the judges, who include several astronauts. Padma, yeah, there’s Padma … Buzz Aldrin—Buzz frickin’ Aldrin!—giving the thumb’s up … Eric Ripert, he’s here for this one … Anthony Bourdain, that’s nice … Tom … Wait. Hold on. OMG. No, OMFG.

It’s Anthony Bourdain! Okay, sorry but I love Anthony Bourdain, and if you don’t, you probably just haven’t seen his show yet (much less read the excellent Kitchen Confidential). Anyway, anyone who’s job description is “Chef/Author/World Traveler” is going to be the one with the coolest job description at the table, or rather at any table where someone else’s job description isn’t “astronaut.”

Kelly serves pan-roasted halibut with artichoke and fennel barigoule (barigoule? don’t mind if I do!) and salsa verde salad. Aldrin likes it, but they wonder how they could ever freeze-dry something with so much excess liquid.

“Well,” Tom quips—get ready for this one—“if they can put a man on the moon, they can probably figure it out.”

Such a quip! Here, let me try: I mean, I’m sure they can manage to freeze-dry it, it isn’t rocket science! The quipping is contagious! I have the hic-quips! Okay I’ll stop now.

Next is Ed. “I took us on a trip to Morocco,” he announces. Didn’t you hear them, Ed? You’re going to need to take Buzz Aldrin to Saturn to impress him. But your yogurt-marinated rack of lamb with eggplant purée and couscous croquette, plus some hummus (why not?), looks alright. Tom likes it; Ripert doesn’t. Anthony Bourdain, entertain us!

“I just want to express my disappointment with my comrade the Ripper over here,” Bourdain says. “I’ve been to Morocco, and I think Ed nailed it.” Eric Ripert, Chef; Anthony Bourdain, Chef/Author/World Traveler. Guess who wins? (By the way, there is an awesome No Reservations where Bourdain and Ripert cook on the line at Les Halles, Bourdain’s kinda-crappy Park Avenue South bistro, and Bourdain can barely keep up with his lowly cooks, while Ripert, naturally, is a genius at it. Anyway.)

Meanwhile, the diners are kibbitzing like pros. Aldrin says he still has his spoon from Apollo 11. One astronaut says she was up in space with a cosmonaut who was there for a year, he went up when it was the Soviet Union and came back when it was Russia. “Sounds like a sitcom to me,” Bourdain says. Can you do wrong, Bourdain? (Although, technically, this was a movie.)

“If I would have done something different,” Tiffany says, “I would’ve had my mussels on the plate.” Yes, well, that we knew. What do you have? Pan-seared Alaskan halibut with coconut curry, snow pea shoots, and jasmine rice. Ripert is not loving it. But Bourdain likes the fish sauce.

And now comes Angelo, with ginger-lacquered short ribs and horseradish crème fraiche. Tom thinks it is too sweet, although he likes it. Ripert likes the pickled mushrooms, but they are just a tiny too acidic. Monsieur Bourdain? “Well I’m shocked by Ripert’s dark, cynical, snarky, and negative worldview,” he replies. “It’s all about love and optimism for me now, because I thought this dish was very sophisticated, and might actually be adoptable to an extraterrestrial situation.” Never leave us.

Back in the kitchen, Angelo feels “like I just put my heart on the plate.” Which would explain the extra acidity.

Judges’ Table! “The difference between the winner and loser is really small,” Tom says. How small, Tom and Padma, who seem to know the precise length?

Thank you.

They go through them all, and they like them all, but maybe Tiffany’s is a little less than perfect—even Bourdain wanted a stronger taste from the fish. Kelly’s turn is kind of great: Tom says her artichokes were cooked “as nicely as I’ve ever seen an artichoke cooked,” and then Ripert asks if she’s ever been to Provence and learned its technique—turns out, she has—and Ripert, one of the world’s greatest French cuisine chefs, concludes, “It shows.”

Now, Angelo’s turn. “I felt like I made love to [the short ribs],” Angelo says, talking about how he just kept glazing and re-glazing them, over and over, just really getting exhausted and sweaty and glazing them all night long and then again in the morning, twice. The antidote to Angelo is, obviously, Bourdain. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says. “Really, I just know that I loved it.”

Bourdain thinks Kevin played it a little safe with the sirloin. I mean, it is just sirloin. Kevin replies that he was going for comfort food for the astronauts, which is the most compelling back-against-the-wall rationalization in the history of the show.

There isn’t a clear loser. “It’s so close that it’s all subjectivity at this point,” Angelo philosophizes. Deep. Ripert’s favorite dish was Kelly’s—“I think she cooked without safety net.” But Tom and Bourdain point out that it wasn’t a particularly original dish. Ripert’s response? “It’s a classic.” Meanwhile, Tom and Ripert love Kevin’s sirloin, while Bourdain thinks it’s boring. Tiffany is in trouble: Cooking the pea shoots killed the freshness. Clearly they’re nitpicking, or “splitting hairs” if you prefer Tom’s simile, but someone’s gotta go home.

Bourdain—can I call you Tony?—announces the winner. It’s Angelo! Tony clearly pulled rank (rank of awesomeness) on this one. Angelo also gets a copy of Tony’s new book, Medium Raw, which, I mean, go buy a copy, it’s by Anthony Bourdain, it’s gonna be good.

And the loser is … Tiffany.

Kevin thanks Jesus (boy we really are the past the Jews, eh?). Tiffany is crying. The others are pretty ecstatic, except Ed is also sad, cause he and Tiffany were besties. “She just knew how to cook,” is his Hemingway-esque epitaph. On to Singapore! Wait, Singapore? Why Singapore? D.C., D.C., how we shall miss thee.

Earlier: Episode 11: Tartarrific?
Episode 10: Blown Cover
Episode 9: War Comes to Bethesda
Episode 8: Ethiopian Cabbage
Episode 7: The Purloined Purée
Episode 6: Of Tragedy and Testicles
Episode 5: You’re Tearing Me Apart, Maryland!
Episode 4: Babies Making Baby Food
Episode 3: Booze Jokes, Not Funny Anymore
Episode 2: Giving Booze to Kids
Episode 1: Cheftestant Cooks His Mother’s Borscht

• Obama, meanwhile, pledged his “full weight” behind the peace effort while asserting that the United States “cannot impose a solution.” [Politico]

• The figure driving much of the optimism and short timeframe is actually Netanyahu, who believes that he—with his hawkish bona fides back home—is the one who can actually get peace done. Columnist Aluf Benn compared him to Mikhail Gorbachev. [NYT]

• As the Palestinian Authority exerted great effort to find and arrest those behind the murder of four Israeli settlers, two Israelis were wounded in a shooting in Ramallah, in an attack also claimed by Hamas (which has accused the P.A. of overly harsh raids). [NYT]

• Former negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley argue that Palestinian leadership is in an unfairly weaker position vis-à-vis Israel. [WP]

• Tom Segev’s new biography shows, with documents from his estate, that famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal was a Mossad agent. [Haaretz]

“I learned,” she said, after careful consideration, “that it is really hard work to create something new and your own from those texts.”

Hard work, to be sure; but worth it, judging by the results.

The idea for The Naming, which encompasses a CD due out September 14 along with song-specific videos and dance pieces, came to Dardashti shortly before the birth of her son two and a half years ago. “Gender hadn’t really been an issue for me up until that point,” says Dardashti, who leads the all-girl band Divahn and recently completed a PhD in cultural anthropology. “We were three girls in my family, and there was never any question that there was something we couldn’t do. But it suddenly occurred to me that, yes, I am a woman; and my husband and I are going to have really different roles in child rearing.” That led her to consider some of the women who have been misrepresented in rabbinical commentary down through the ages—like Vashti, the queen of Persia, whom Dardashti claims the rabbis vilified so as to make her replacement by Esther appear more just; or Sheba, Solomon’s lover, whom they made out to be some kind of half-animal, with excessively hairy legs and perhaps even a tail.

At the same time, Dardashti had been delving deeper and deeper into the music of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews—including the Persian tradition represented by her grandfather, Yona Dardashti, who had been a cantor and renowned singer of Persian classical music in Iran during the days of the Shah; and her father, Farid Dardashti, once a pop star in Tehran and now a cantor at Beth El Synagogue in New Rochelle, New York. The latter first introduced her to the Persian style of cantillation, which is closely related to the classical music that his own father sang, and that Dardashti heard at family gatherings and on her grandfather’s old recordings. She began to perform the music in public, and the response was encouraging.

“The reaction I got from older Sephardic and Mizrahi women was, ‘Wow, hearing a woman do this repertoire is really powerful!’ ” she said.

That reaction might have had something to do with the particular woman they were hearing. There’s a lot to recommend The Naming, including the skillful blending of electronic beats with Middle Eastern hand drums and other acoustic instruments (dig the lean string arrangements on “Dinah,” and the gorgeous santur solo on “Vashti”). But nothing is more satisfying than the sound of Dardashti’s own voice. From the first notes of the opening track, “Michal,” you know that you’re dealing with someone in possession of an unusually powerful and flexible instrument.

Dardashti wrote “Michal” as an homage to her great-aunt Tova, who, like her biblical predecessor—the woman who saved her future husband, David, from the wrath of her father, Saul—donned tefillin like a man. Appropriately enough, she begins the piece by chanting the prayer for the wearing of phylacteries, using a vocal ornament called taqrir that sounds almost like ululation and that comes straight out of Persian classical technique.

It’s an amazing sound, and Dardashti initially doubted her ability to master it when she began studying Persian classical music. She was in Israel at the time, researching her dissertation on the political implications of Middle Eastern and Arab music in the country, and she found a Persian-Jewish singer who knew her grandfather’s music and was willing to teach her the tradition. “I had heard this music growing up, but it wasn’t the stuff that was playing in my house. It was pretty foreign to me,” she said. “I thought there was no way in hell I would get those sounds to come out of my mouth, but it happened really fast.”

Similarly, on “Dinah,” Dardashti chants in the Persian style that she learned from her father. It doesn’t sound anything like Ashkenazi cantillation; but it’s not quite like other Sephardic or Mizrahi styles either.

Persian music is, in general, distinct from the Arab music with which most Westerners are familiar. For one thing, it is based on a modal system known as dastgah, which is not the same as the maqam system prevalent throughout the rest of the Middle East. That distinctive flavor has rubbed off on Persian Jewish music as well. You can hear it straight from Farid Dardashti’s own mouth as he chants from the book of Samuel on “Endora,” which recounts the meeting between King Saul and the witch of Endor. (Saul asks the witch to summon the ghost of Samuel, hoping for some advice on how to defeat the Philistines; what he gets is a prophecy of his own doom.)

Indeed, one of the delights of The Naming lies in the way Dardashti weaves many different strands of Sephardic and Mizrahi music into the mix. “Dinah,” for example, employs a text from a Sephardic piyut, or song of supplication, that is traditionally sung at the birth of a girl. The traditional Moroccan melody Dardashti uses for it is as distinct from the Persian chant of “Michal” as Memphis crunk is from DC go-go.

Not everybody appreciates these distinctions. At least some of the people who come to hear Dardashti perform this material think it all just sounds vaguely Islamic. “The most common question I get is, ‘What’s Jewish about this music?’ ” she said. “They’ll say, ‘It sounds like a muezzin’s call to prayer!’ ”

It’s a fair point—Jewish and Islamic music have a lot in common, and if you weren’t familiar with Sephardic or Mizrahi chant, you might easily mistake them for their Arab equivalents—but it obscures a larger one.

Jews have been living in the Middle East and surrounding regions for a long time; the longest time, one might say. And it would be nice if their unique traditions, musical and otherwise, were better known and more widely appreciated within the broader Jewish community. Dardashti intended The Naming to call attention to some of the biblical female figures that have been slighted or distorted down through the ages; but she has also succeeded in calling attention to a vast body of music that has for many years been given relatively short shrift by Ashkenazim like me. If to name it is to claim it, I’ll gladly call it my own.

SEE PART 1: Toby Perl Freilich introduces Inventing Our Life
SEE PART 2: The birth of kibbutzim and their service to the nascent Jewish state
SEE PART 3: Growing up on a kibbutz
SEE PART 4: The third generation

We made plans to meet in early November, after a lecture I was giving at New York University. But Salem didn’t show. I went back to my hotel that night and had chalked it up as a lost opportunity. The phone rang at 2 in the morning. It was Salem, summoning me to a meeting outside 26 Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI’s New York office. Very cloak and dagger, but that’s how this man rolls. You don’t infiltrate the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing without practicing a little tradecraft. Anyway, when my cab pulled in to Foley Square a few minutes later, Salem was standing in the shadows.

That was the start of a series of interviews that led to some astonishing revelations about two of the most infamous al-Qaida murders since Osama Bin Laden formed his terror network. The first one—in fact, arguably the first blood spilled by al-Qaida on U.S. soil—occurred on the night of November 5, 1990, just after Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Defense League, finished a speech at the Marriott East Side in New York.

Kahane, a volatile figure who had been expelled from the Israeli Knesset in the mid-1980s and returned to the United States to warn American Jews about what he believed to be a “second holocaust” at the hands of radical Islam, was gunned down by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian émigré. The New York Police Department initially labeled him a lone gunman. I have argued that it was much more than that: an unsolved murder with dire implications for the war on terror.

Now, as a result of new intelligence I’ve learned from Salem, it’s clear for the first time that the rabbi’s death was directly linked to Osama Bin Laden. More surprising, there was a second gunman on the night of Kahane’s murder: a young Jordanian cab driver named Bilal Alkaisi. Alkaisi was also identified in FBI files I’ve obtained as the “emir” of a hit team in a second grisly al-Qaida-related homicide months after the assassination—the 1991 murder of Egyptian immigrant Mustafa Shalabi. The identities of the alleged killers in that second slaying have now become known as a result of information from Salem that prompted the New York Police Department to reopen the Shalabi case.

But the real news is that Alkaisi, originally indicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was cut loose by the feds in 1994 and presumably remains at large. This new intelligence, about a pair of historic terror-related homicides in New York City, lay buried for years in the files of the Joint Terrorism Task Force—until I obtained them from a government source.

As I tell it in “The Spy Who Came in for the Heat,” an investigative piece I wrote for Playboy’s September issue, Emad Salem was arguably the most important asset in the U.S. war with al-Qaida. But my interviews with him and the intel they have kicked loose provide shocking new insights into the ongoing failure of the FBI to reform its counterterrorism capabilities almost a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In order to fully appreciate the significance of these two murders in the history of the war on terror, we need to go back to the summer of 1989, when George Bush was in the White House and terrorism was considered a backwater assignment at the FBI.

The First Shots Fired in Bin Laden’s War Against America

The story begins a year and half before El Sayyid Nosair, wearing a yarmulke, walked into the Morgan D Room at the New York Marriott and killed Kahane.

On four successive weekends in July 1989 (according to trial testimony), agents from the FBI’s Special Operations Group followed a group of “ME’s”—FBI-speak for “Middle Eastern Men”—from the al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to the Calverton shooting range, a large outdoor sand pit located at the end of Long Island.

Firing a series of weapons, including AK-47s and hand guns, the “ME’s” at the Calverton range included Nosair, then a 34-year-old janitor from Port Said, Egypt, who reportedly popped Prozac and worked in the basement of the Civil Courthouse on Centre Street in Manhattan; Mahmoud Abouhalima, aka “The Red,” a 6-foot-2-inch Egyptian cab and limo driver; Mohammed Salameh, a diminutive Palestinian; and Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti who had graduated from Rutgers University. According to interviews with former FBI agent Jack Cloonan, each of them had been instructed by Ali Aboelseoud Mohamed, an ex-Egyptian Army commando from the unit that assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Mohamed was the focus of my last book, Triple Cross. In the early 1980s, shortly after being purged by the Egyptian Army for his radical views, Mohamed came under the influence of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Cairo surgeon who had been jailed for a time for the Sadat murder and went on to form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. By the end of the decade, after al-Zawahiri met Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad group into what would become al-Qaida, Ali Mohamed became the terror network’s principal espionage agent.

In 1984, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA briefly in Hamburg, Germany, got past a watch list to enter the United States a year later, enlisted in the U.S. Army and, astonishingly, managed to get posted to the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, where elite Green Beret officers study. From there, he traveled to New York City on weekends to train the Calverton shooters.

Mohamed was so trusted by Bin Laden that he moved the Saudi billionaire’s entire entourage from Afghanistan to Sudan in 1991, set up al-Qaida’s training camps there, and trained Bin Laden’s personal body guards. He was also one of the principal planners in the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed at least 223 and injured thousands.

Three of Mohamed’s Calverton trainees were convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot. Nosair was convicted in the Kahane killing. A U.S.-born Muslim named Clement Hampton-El was convicted with Nosair in the 1993 “Day of Terror” plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, the United Nations, and 26 Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI’s New York office.

At the time of the Calverton surveillance, the FBI’s Special Operations Group clearly knew that these men were terrorists in training. New York Police Det. Tommy Corrigan, a former senior member of the NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, told me in an interview for Triple Cross that the surveillance stemmed from a tip that PLO terrorists were threatening to blow up casinos in Atlantic City. But for unknown reasons the FBI shut down the surveillance. By the end of that summer of 1989, the “ME’s” and their Green Beret-linked leader faded back into the shadows.

***

In July 1990, following a path similar to Ali Mohamed’s, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual “emir” of al-Qaida who became known as “the blind sheikh,” got a visa, slipped past the same State Department watch list, and landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was met at the airport by Mustafa Shalabi, a big, burly 30-year-old electrical contractor from Egypt who ran the Alkifah Center at the al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn.

The Alkifah was the principal U.S. office for the Makhtab al-Kidimat, often referred to as the MAK, a worldwide center of storefronts through which millions of dollars in cash was collected to support the Afghan Mujahadeen war against the Soviets, as Steven Emerson documents in American Jihad. By 1989, a year before Abdel-Rahman arrived in New York, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had merged their new terror network with the MAK. Its leader, Abdullah Azzam, had been killed in a car bomb in Pakistan in November of that year. Once al-Qaida’s takeover of the financing network was complete, Bin Laden’s group had what amounted to a New York clubhouse at the Alkifah Center.

“Prior to that time—1988, ’89—terrorism for all intents and purposes didn’t exist in the United States,” says Corrigan, the retired Joint Terrorism Task Force investigator. “But Abdel-Rahman’s arrival in 1990 really stoked the flames of terrorism in this country. This was a major-league ball player in what, at the time, was a minor-league ballpark.”

In Corrigan’s view, the arrival of Abdel-Rahman was “a real coup for the local cell members like Shalabi, Nosair, Abouhalima, and Ayyad.” Before long, as court documents show, Abdel-Rahman was preaching at three separate mosques: the Abu Bakr on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn; the Al-Salam, located on the third floor of a dingy Jersey City building; and the Shalabi-connected al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue. At first, Shalabi welcomed the sheikh with open arms—even installing him in a Brooklyn apartment. But their warm relationship wouldn’t last very long. Abdel-Rahman coveted the cash rolling into the Alkifah—as much as $2 million, a year according to The New Yorker’s Mary Ann Weaver, but no one knows for sure. In any case, as the months went by, Abdel-Rahman began quarreling with Shalabi openly in the mosques.

***

By the fall of 1990, one of the Calverton trainees was growing more and more restless. El Sayyid Nosair, the janitor who worked in the courthouse basement, had joined Abdel-Rahman’s ultra-violent Islamic Group, or Al Gamma Islamyah, and he was itching to make his bones for the jihad. The newly uncovered FBI documents reveal a confession by Nosair that on the night of the Kahane murder he was aided by Alkaisi, then a 25-year-old Jordanian immigrant who worked as a cab driver in New Jersey and instructor at the al Farooq Mosque.

Describing Alkaisi as “a veteran of jihadist activity overseas,” including Afghanistan, Nosair told the feds that the two of them entered the Marriott East Side and that, just after Kahane had finished speaking, Nosair exclaimed, “This is the moment.” He then lunged forward with the same chrome-plated .357 Magnum photographed by the FBI at Calverton and fired the single shot that hit Kahane in the neck, blowing him to the floor.

As I later learned from Alkaisi’s former attorney, Robert L. Ellis, Alkaisi “left the Marriott and escaped by way of the subway station at 51st Street and Lexington Avenue.” Meanwhile, as Nosair rushed from the conference room, he was grabbed by Irving Franklin, a 73-year-old Kahane supporter. After a brief scuffle, Nosair shot the old man in the leg and raced toward the hotel’s front door, searching for a taxi.

His intended getaway driver was Mahmoud Abouhalima, who had been waiting outside, but moments earlier, the doorman had waved him away from the entrance, according to reports. So when Nosair ran from the hotel, he mistakenly got into a taxi driven by Franklin Garcia, a New York City cabbie. Suddenly, a young follower of Kahane jumped in front of the cab and prevented it from moving.

In the back seat, Nosair realized the error and pointed the barrel of the .357 at Garcia’s head, whereupon the taxi driver burst from the cab. Nosair then exited the taxi and ran down Lexington Avenue with the gun, where he was spotted by Carlos Acosta, a uniformed U.S. postal inspector, who drew his service weapon. Nosair fired first, wounding Acosta in the shoulder, just outside the edge of his flak vest, but the heroic officer dropped to his knee and returned fire as Nosair started to run, striking the Egyptian with a single shot. A pair of ambulances rushed both Nosair and Kahane to Bellevue Hospital’s trauma unit, where they were operated on in parallel stalls. The shooter survived; Kahane did not.

***

Later that night, Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh (another Calverton shooter) regrouped at Nosair’s home in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. But they were soon taken into custody as material witnesses by New York police after the house was raided. According to a series of FBI documents, detectives and FBI agents also seized 47 boxes in the raid—material that included prima facie evidence of an international bombing conspiracy with the World Trade Center as a target. Among the files seized was a potential hit list of prominent Jewish figures, including federal judge Jack B. Weinstein, a legendary jurist known as “the lion of the Eastern District.”

The seized material also contained documents presumably left by Ali Mohamed, including Green Beret training manuals and communiqués from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that investigators believe he’d pilfered from Fort Bragg, a sign of al-Qaida’s intent to attack strategic U.S. targets. There was a Joint Chiefs of Staff “Warning Order,” addressed to eight separate U.S. military command centers, the White House, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, plus the U.S. embassies in Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia.

The presence of these documents, many labeled “top secret for training,” not to mention Abouhalima and Salameh, suggested a conspiracy in the Kahane murder. Yet the very next day, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Borelli concluded that the killing was a “lone-gunman” shooting. “There hadn’t been any political assassinations in New York in more than a decade and Borelli didn’t want one on his watch,” Newsday reporters Jim Dwyer, David Kocieniewski, Diedre Murphy, and Peg Tyre wrote in their book on the World Trade Center bombing, Two Seconds Under the World.

Although the raid on Nosair’s house was conducted by New York police and the FBI—which had the Calverton photos not just of Nosair but also of Abouhalima and Salameh—the latter two were released within hours and never charged in the crime.

***

By the summer of 1990, just about when Shalabi picked up Abdel-Rahman at JFK, the Brooklyn Alkifah Center was grossing more than $100,000 per month in cash for the “struggle.” So when Nosair was arrested, Shalabi took it upon himself to raise the money for his legal fund, particularly after star attorney William Kunstler signed on for the defense. By the time Nosair’s trial began in late 1991, $163,000 had poured in—$20,000 of which, court documents would later show, came from Osama Bin Laden, who had been contacted by Nosair’s cousin.

But Shalabi was intent on making his own decisions. While respectful of al-Qaida, the terror network that had consumed the financing system known as MAK, Shalabi remained loyal to Abdullah Azzam, his old mentor, who had wanted to use the money to set up a Taliban-like government in Afghanistan. That put him in direct conflict with Bin Laden and the Egyptians around him, who wanted the funds to be used for the worldwide jihad. And even though Shalabi himself sponsored Abdel-Rahman’s visa entry into the United States, he balked when Abdel-Rahman demanded that some of the Alkifah’s monthly income be used for a fund to help overthrow Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

And so by the late summer of 1990, tensions were mounting between Shalabi and Abdel-Rahman. In the Brooklyn-based Abu Bakr Mosque, Abdel-Rahman began denouncing Shalabi openly as a “bad Muslim.” Abdel-Rahman even suggested that his fellow Egyptian was embezzling the Alkifah’s funds. Handouts were circulated under the Sheikh’s name. “We should not allow ourselves to be manipulated by his deviousness,” the leaflets said. Other handouts included mini fatwas declaring that Shalabi was “no longer a Muslim.”

Soon Shalabi began to fear for his life.

Continue reading: A murder case reopened. Or view as a single page.

• The U.S. government is funding an ad campaign in Israel touting moderate Palestinians as partners for peace. It seems fine, and then you stop to think about it, and it actually seems kind of weird, and worse. No? [UPI]

• Just how Jewish is Michael Bloomberg? [WSJ via Just ASC]

• The Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America will investigate Rabbi Marc Schneier’s reputed dalliances with many, many women, only several of them his wives. [New York Jewish Week]

• Berlin: A capital of Israeli music. History is, like, ironic, y’know? [PRI’s The World]

• Today, contributing editor Joan Nathan wrote about food and Rosh Hashanah for a daily magazine of Jewish life and culture. Plus, she wrote that great piece for us! [NYT]

Jewcy’s Jason Diamond found he doesn’t like: Jennifer Grey’s. Here she is, gloriously and gloriously pre-nose job, opposite the ultimate sheygets himself, in Dirty Dancing’s best scene (that’s right I said it).

Especially since Israel did not qualify, I think it’s safe to say that Tablet Magazine’s official 2010 FIBA World Championships team just cruised to a 4-0 record and will play (and defeat) Tunisia tomorrow in the final game of the preliminary round. Make Kevin Love, not war!

The e-mail came from pastor Lou Engle, a prominent right-wing activist who identifies himself as a prayer warrior and is a central figure in dominionist theology. (Dominionists believe that, until Jesus Christ returns to earth, society should be governed exclusively by God’s law as revealed through a literal reading of Scripture.) In the e-mail, Engle compared Palin to the biblical Queen Esther. “This is an Esther moment in your life,” he wrote. “Esther hid her identity until Mordecai challenged her to risk everything for such a time as this. Your identity is ‘Sarah Barracuda.’ Esther removed corruption from the Persian government and Haman fell. She didn’t have experience, she had grace and favor. Sarah, don’t hide your identity tonight.”

(In case you’re wondering, this makes John McCain Ahasuerus and William Kristol Mordecai. Haman is obviously Obama. Oh and Vashti is Joe Lieberman, clearly. Except Obama won, right? Now I’m confused.)

More broadly, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate has been reaching out to Jews by hosting Jews for Sarah Shabbat dinners. “Meeting Sarah Palin turns out to be not the kind of celebrity thrill one experiences by meeting, say, a member of the Rolling Stones,” Benyamin Korn writes. “My wife and I found her unpretentious and gracious both, with an un-politician-like sincerity.” Me, I just want to know how you kept your dinner down! Ah, I’m just playing. (No I’m not.)

“Maybe it’s not just Palin’s right-wing politics that gets secular Jews so riled up,” wonders John Podhoretz. “Maybe it’s also that Palin, that idiot [his word, not mine!], may actually know more about Judaism and feel no discomfort about emulating Jewish traditions and Jewish particularism in the way that they seem to.” Or maybe it is that she tried to become the vice president despite being as qualified for the job as you or I? Or maybe it is that her right-wing politics differ markedly from the left-wing politics of secular Jews who are left-wing, as opposed to the secular Jews who are right-wing whom Podhoretz seems to think don’t exist? Anything is possible!

Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury [VF]
Sarah Palin Celebrates Shabbat and Offers Echoes of Esther [NY Sun]

Who is the senator? It’s Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), last seen in these digital pages singing about Hannukah. In addition to his respect for private property, Muslims, the Constitution, and everything else, Hatch cited past instances in which his Mormon faith has been threatened with similar discrimination.

Because it’s been nine months since it was last in your head … here’s “Eight Days of Hannukah”!

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Republican Orrin Hatch Stands Up For Cordoba House [TPM]
Related: Eight Days of Hannukah [Tablet Magazine]

David Sanger’s analysis of how risky this is for Obama is must-read. And experienced negotiator Aaron David Miller tells Politico’s Laura Rozen, “These talks aren’t quite ready for prime time yet, and everyone should be slow-walking the process. If they get more ambitious now, it will collapse.”

He adds,

What counts are only three things this round. One, that the Israelis and Americans work out (or toward) an agreement on a moratorium on settlements; two, that Benjamin Netanyahu, even while he pushes security, shows some movement in the Palestinian direction on one other issue—borders; three, that the Palestinians hang in there and not bolt the talks because they believe they’re the key to an empty room.

(Remember that settling the question of the settlement moratorium, or freeze—which is currently scheduled to expire in September—must somehow be resolved before further progress can be made on other issues.)

Complicating matters further, of course, was Hamas’s killing yesterday of four Israeli settlers in the West Bank. There is no mistaking the message it sent: Hamas—backed by Iran—does not want to see these talks happen. The Palestinian Authority fears Hamas’s gambit could work, which helps to explain the hundreds of arrests carried out earlier today.

But all that is back in the Mideast. Today, in D.C., everyone will be making nice.

W.H. Kick-Starts Middle East Talks [Politico]
Trying To Buck Odds, Obama Takes On 3 Big Mideast Tasks [NYT]
Analysis: An Attempt to Torpedo Peace Talks [JPost]
Related: Religion of Yes [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Direct Peace Talk

Now is also a good time to mention that Tablet Magazine (and The Scroll) will not be publishing new content during Rosh Hashanah—or during Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah.

Personally, I’m a fan of that policy, and not (only) for the time off/saved vacation days it gives me: I think it is a compelling and potent statement about the magazine’s editorial priorities. Which is why, even though this event is “part ritual,” I question whether the magazine’s sponsorship is undercutting that statement. But maybe folks think I am being nitpicky? Or maybe people think we should be publishing during Jewish holidays? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

• Thomas Friedman predicts that extremist efforts to thwart peace, from Rabbi Yosef’s comments about Palestinians to yesterday’s attack, are only going to get worse. [NYT]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell spoke cryptically about the peace process last night but maintained the administration’s one-year goal. [Laura Rozen]

• President Obama is trying to deal with Iran, Iraq, and Israel-Palestine all at once, under the theory and hope that winning one will beget winning in the others. [NYT]

• Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who will be at the Washington, D.C., banquet tonight, laid out a vision of strong Egyptian participation in the upcoming series of talks. [NYT]

• Jeff Greene, the Jewish Florida Senate candidate who lost last week, is suing two local papers for libel relating to stories about his his wild life in L.A. [NYT]

Bartenura Prosecco Brut NV (Italy, $18)
You will start your Rosh Hashanah feast on a high note if you opt for Prosecco, which delivers bubbles and fun at half the price of Champagne. It may be not be as elegant as its French cousin, but this zesty Prosecco makes a fine aperitif or cuts through the richness of any tsimmes it encounters.

Goose Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2008 (New Zealand, $17)
I like to say New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc’s grassy, citrusy personality is so distinctive that it’s almost flourescent. Goose Bay’s refreshingly crisp rendition is no exception, and it harmonizes well with fish, including a forkful of gefilte with horseradish.

Daltôn Galilee Chardonnay Unoaked 2009 (Israel, $17)
Have you ever tried Chardonnay freed from its oaky, vanilla-shake shackles? Insiders have been enjoying this style for years, and Daltôn’s crisp and subtly peachy version makes their lips smack with satisfaction. Savor it with everything from seafood to salads to matzo ball soup.

Recanati Galilee Rosé (Israel, $15)
Summer may be waning, but your passion for pink needn’t. Clean and zesty, this dry, cherry-scented wine pivots between the world of white- and red-wine foods, equally at home with fish dishes as it is with more substantial fare like barbecue, lamb, or kasha varnishkes.

Tabor Merlot “Adama” Chalk Soil 2006 (Israel, $21)
The famous rant in Sideways notwithstanding, this selection proves that Merlot doesn’t have to be a wine for the wounded. Its soft, generous blackberry character and hints of coffee bean and sweet spice flatter a range of rich meals, from stuffed cabbage to stews.

Bodega Flecha de los Andes Gran Malbec 2008 (Argentina, $20)
It seems like everyone I interviewed for my new book—including John Lithgow and John Leguizamo—waxed rhapsodic for the pleasures of Malbec, and this version makes it easy to see why. Lush and ripe, it offers plenty of blackberry and blueberry fruit, joined by whiffs of coca powder and licorice, with a smooth, enduring finish. It is perfect with brisket and other richer, meaty creations.

If you have a kosher wine question you want me to answer, maybe you need a suggestion of a particular wine to pair with specific dishes, post a comment below and I’ll see what I can do to help you out

Mark Oldman is a wine expert whose new book is Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine.

Learning about food traditions is a major challenge in every mixed marriage, but perhaps more so when one partner is Jewish and the other must learn from scratch how to navigate both kashrut and the culinary customs that characterize the cycle of holidays that kicks off anew next week, with Rosh Hashanah.

“When you grow up outside the tradition you don’t know the holidays,” said Colleen Fain, 63, a community volunteer in Coral Gables, Florida, who converted to Judaism when she got married more than 40 years ago. “You have to learn the rituals, and it’s hard to pass that down when you are not familiar or comfortable with them. The convert has to work really hard to understand the customs so they unify the family.”

For Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, 54, who converted when she married writer Tony Horwitz, Judaism was a natural progression. “I didn’t know any Jews growing up,” Brooks said over a glass of wine on the porch of her Victorian home on Martha’s Vineyard, far from Australia, where she was born and raised. “For some reason my father was a lefty Zionist Socialist who got caught up with the Zionist movement, even though we were not Jewish. It rubbed off on me.” As a teenager, Brooks started wearing a star of David because “of my rabid history reading, especially about the Shoah to express identification with the Jewish people.” Conversion seemed “like the natural thing to do,” she said. It was a move “much more about history than faith, I wasn’t going to be the end of the line of a faith that survived so many years.”

Brooks knew Jewish deli food in New York and Ashkenazic cooking from Tony’s family, but she likes the Middle Eastern cuisine of Israel best. “When I lived in Cairo as a writer, I kept visiting Israel and loved the Levantine-inspired food,” she said. For breaking the fast after Yom Kippur, she goes Sephardic, sometimes serving Poopa Dweck’s Syrian brisket with fruit from her cookbook Aromas of Aleppo and other times harira, a rich Moroccan lamb-based vegetable soup often used to break the fast during Ramadan, which she first tasted when she was in Morocco in the late 1980s. “It was the only thing that got me up in the morning,” she said. “You feel like you have been fed with that.”

Brooks speaks passionately about cooking. When she doesn’t get challah from her son’s class at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, where the students make it, she bakes it herself. “I like to get my hands in the dough, and I get some of my best novelistic ideas when making challah,” she said. “I chew over the issues from my morning’s writing and sometimes gnarly plot points resolve themselves. Turning the compost works well too.”

Tom Ashe similarly follows the Jewish rituals of his spouse, Joanne. The son of a police officer from Queens, Ashe converted when he married Joanne 33 years ago. The couple cooks together (during the holidays he plays the role of assistant; the rest of the time he’s in charge) and rarely host fewer than 10 family members on weekends in their home in Placitas, New Mexico. “Since I am a convert, each holiday brings back memories of when I was in my mid-20s and chose Judaism,” said Ashe, 58, a real estate developer. “They are definitely my holidays too, and I look forward to the foods, the smells, and the traditions. The Jewish palate is more eclectic than what I grew up with as a young Protestant boy in Queens. Jews have the whole world, from Middle Eastern to Asian foods.”

Although the Ashes still pull out Joanne’s mother’s recipes for the holidays, they occasionally tweak dishes, as in a delicious smoked brisket holiday recipe more reminiscent of the far West than Eastern Europe.

Veronica Goode knew nothing about Jewish customs growing up in Venezuela and had to learn everything—from Shabbat candle-lighting rules to what ingredients to include in a holiday meal. “Cooking Jewish is a real shock,” said Goode, 36, a social work student in Washington, D.C. “When I got married, I didn’t know how to cook anything Jewish, even brisket, so I called my step mother-in-law.” Veronica now makes her recipes with lots of onions, tomato paste, and long cooking. Her one complaint: “I haven’t learned to make matzoh balls yet.”

Goode underlined a lament I have heard from many converts I meet at book signings and other events. Judaism is intimidating, and they need a gentle soul to mentor them through the traditions.

“The best thing to do is to ask friends and relatives for recipes and don’t be afraid to try them,” said Fain. When she first wanted to make kugel, for example, she asked her sister-in-law, Sally Ann Epstein, who had a family recipe from a cousin for help. Fain was not afraid to ask, Epstein was flattered, and now making that kugel—a dairy version more appropriate for a break-fast—is a family tradition. “If I had married someone else, I wouldn’t know how to make kugel or brisket,” she said.

Imagine life without that!

HARIRA (MOROCCAN VEGETABLE SOUP)
Adapted from Geraldine Brooks

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large onions, diced (about 4 cups)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2-inch knob of ginger, peeled and grated
3 celery stalks, diced
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut in rounds
2 zucchini, diced
8 cups good lamb, beef, or vegetable stock
12-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 19-ounce can chick peas,
1 cup barley
1 cup chopped fresh mint
2 cups chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon cardamom or to taste
1 teaspoon cumin or to taste
Pinch of saffron
Salt to taste
¼ teaspoon white pepper or to taste
1 teaspoon hot red pepper or to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper or to taste
½ cup vermicelli noodles, broken up

1. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot and sauté the onions, garlic, ginger, celery, carrots, and zucchini for a few minutes.

2. Add the broth and the tomatoes and bring to a boil. Then continue to simmer for another 20 minutes.

3. Add the chick peas and the barley, half the mint and half the cilantro, the cardamom, cumin, saffron, salt, and the three kinds of pepper. Continue to simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, adding 1 to 2 cups water or as needed.

4. Add the vermicelli and continue simmering about 5 minutes or until the pasta is cooked. Stir in the remaining mint and cilantro. Adjust the seasonings to taste and serve.

Yield: 10 to 12 Servings

BARBECUED SMOKED BRISKET
Adapted from Tom and Joanne Ashe

5- to 6-pound Grade-A choice brisket
6 sliced garlic cloves
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 sliced onions
¼ cup liquid smoke
1 bottle Heinz Chili Sauce
1 16-ounce can tomatoes
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup of wine or enough to nearly cover the brisket

1. Wash and dry the brisket and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Pierce holes in the brisket and insert the garlic cloves. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Heat the oil and sear on both sides.

3. Put the onions on the bottom of a heavy casserole, just large enough to hold the brisket. Put the brisket on top and then add the liquid smoke, chili sauce, tomatoes, and tomato sauce and pour over the brisket. Cover with the red wine.

4. Cover with tin foil or a top and bake in the oven for 4 hours.

5. Chill overnight, remove fat that has accumulated, slice, reheat and serve.

Yield: about 10 servings

Fain family noodle kugel, as prepared by Joan Nathan.
Gabriela Herman

FAIN FAMILY NOODLE KUGEL
Adapted from Colleen Fain, Sally Ann Epstein, and Bobbi Mayer Joslin

8 ounces broad, flat, egg noodles
½ cup sugar
12 ounces whole milk cottage cheese
1/2 cup milk or a little more
1/2 cup salted butter, melted, but not hot
1/2 cup golden raisins
2 large eggs, slightly beaten 1 cup sour cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon or to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 350-degrees and grease an 8-cup casserole.

2. Cook the noodles in a large pot of salted water and drain, then rinse to cool down a little.

3. Mix the sugar, cottage cheese, milk, melted butter, raisins, eggs, and sour cream in a large bowl. Stir in the noodles, transfer to casserole dish and liberally sprinkle the cinnamon on top.

4. Bake for 40 minutes until browned on top. If you use a flat casserole you will need slightly less time for cooking.

Yield: about 8 servings

Joan Nathan’s forthcoming book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, is due out this fall.

But there is an Arab lobby in the United States—one as old as, if not older than, the Israel lobby, and it has helped to shape U.S. foreign policy and economic life since the end of World War II. Mitchell Bard’s The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East describes how this Arab lobby—from U.S. foreign service officers, oil companies, Christian anti-Zionists, and Ivy League universities to Gulf Arab states, Arab-American activists and Islamist ideologues—exercises its influence in U.S. politics. The book is already being dismissed by critics as a slapdash attempt by a former AIPAC employee to answer Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, The Israel Lobby. But those who actually read the new book will find a serious and timely look at a powerful and remarkably under-studied influence on U.S. foreign policy.

“Unlike Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, I don’t think it’s illegitimate to lobby for one’s interests,” Bard told me on the phone last week. The executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Bard wrote his dissertation at UCLA on the limits to domestic influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. “I’ve been writing for more than 20 years about this issue,” he said. “The point of my book is to inform the American public that an Arab lobby exists despite the claims of others that it does not and to explain what its interests are.”

In describing AIPAC’s Arab cousin, Bard draws some useful comparisons between the two lobbies, which are not as similar as one might imagine from his book’s title. AIPAC is a grassroots organization funded by U.S. citizens that represents the broad sentiment of Christians and Jews who are interested in one issue—protecting and promoting the U.S.-Israel relationship. The Arab lobby, by comparison, has little organic U.S. backing and divides its efforts between two causes—oil and Palestine. The former is managed in Washington by what Bard calls the “petrodiplomatic complex” of former U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers, politicians, and defense executives. Funded by oil companies, the weapons industry, and Arab energy producers, mainly Saudi Arabia, it enjoys virtually unlimited financial resources. For instance, AIPAC’s annual operating budget is $60 million a year—pocket change to a Saudi prince, like Alwaleed Bin Talal, who in 2005 gave $20 million apiece to Georgetown and Harvard.

The Palestinian issue is paramount to the Arab-American sector of the Arab lobby. However, just as the Palestinians are divided against themselves—between Hamas and Fatah, among contending Fatah factions, as well as among competing clans—it is not the Palestinian cause that unites the Arabs or Arab-Americans but anti-Israel sentiment. The same goes for many of the Arab lobby’s domestic anti-Zionist partners, some of whom are motivated by religious conviction, especially the Presbyterians, and others by political ideology, but all of whom can agree on disliking first the idea and then the reality of a Jewish state.

The Arab lobby’s Palestine agenda, then, tends to be negative and, as Bard writes, “aimed at undermining the US-Israel relationship,” only rarely promoting a positive vision of a Palestinian state as a regional beacon of social justice or economic development, or defending the rights of Palestinian journalists, Christians, or other endangered social groups against the threats of the Palestinian political leadership. This part of the Arab lobby, writes Bard, “is small and mostly impotent.”

The real power is in the hands of the Arab lobby’s oil sector, the role of which is to keep the Arab oil producers happy by ensuring that Americans stay addicted to oil, that the defense industry keeps its production lines open, and that the image of Arab states stays polished, even for state sponsors of terror, like Saudi Arabia, and states whose rule is founded on flagrant social inequalities, the torture of dissidents and unbelievers, and other practices that most Americans rightly find abhorrent.

Surely the most depressing aspect of Bard’s book is his depiction of the craven subservience of so many U.S. diplomats and officials to the Saudi royal family. “Even when the Saudis had no money, and they only started to pump oil,” Bard told me, “a fear permeated the State Department that if we didn’t give in to them, we would lose our interest there. And the Saudis were clever about exploiting our fear. First they said they’d go with the British instead of us, then they threatened that they’d go with the Soviet Union, even as they portrayed themselves as anti-Communist and said they needed U.S. weapons to defend themselves against Moscow.”

Bard says that the Saudis are using the Iran threat now in similar ways. “The U.S. knows that in the end we have to defend the royal family,” he said. “The Saudis just want the latest toys and act like petulant children until they get them. Then the U.S. tells the Israelis not to worry when they sell the Saudis weapons because they can’t use them, but we go to Congress and say Riyadh needs these arms for their defense.”

With all the demands for U.S. presidents to pressure Israel, it’s worth noting that U.S. officials have rarely done anything but accommodate the Saudis. The one striking exception, as Bard notes, was John F. Kennedy’s demand that Saudi Arabia abolish slavery. Typically, U.S.-Saudi relations have been conducted in the dark, a trend that started in July 1945, when President Harry Truman approved construction of the Dhahran air base using existing War Department funds to evade congressional oversight. This became a precedent for keeping most of the U.S.-Saudi relationship secret, or at least beyond public scrutiny. For years, the U.S. government acceded to the wishes of the Saudis and other Gulf states to conceal information about Arab investments in the United States, and even U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia were classified between 1950 and 1972.

Today the unspoken issue is Saudi support for terror. Were U.S. officials to complain about how the kingdom funds jihad against the United States and its allies, “there’s a fear,” says Bard, “that the Saudis may punish us by withdrawing some of their billions of dollars in investments, cut U.S. companies out of deals to explore for gas or oil, or take other measures to damage our interests.”

Nor are the Saudis shy about promising to unleash jihad against those who cross their path, as when they threatened the British government when it was investigating the unsavory details of a Saudi arms purchase from a British weapons maker.

Given the nature of the Saudi regime, it is little wonder that the oil lobby prefers to work in the shadows. As one publicist explained in laying out his PR strategy for Riyadh: “Saudi Arabia has a need to influence the few that influence the many, rather than the need to influence the many to whom the few must respond.”

“This is a fairly smart lobbying tactic,” Bard told me. “It is very difficult to take a democratic approach, when most people don’t take your position.”

The story of the Arab lobby is also a story about Washington, more specifically an influential segment of the U.S. political elite that has contempt for the rubes who don’t understand that it is in the U.S. national interest to lean on the Zionists in order to make the Middle East’s Muslim Arab majority happy.

Bard believes that the Arabs and their Washington handlers were spitting in the wind of a post-World War II history that had turned in favor of the Jews. The Arabs, Bard writes, were “convinced that the United States supported the Zionists because of their propaganda. … Consequently, [the Arabs] never understood the depth of Americans’ feeling for the justness of the Zionist cause.”

Perhaps that is true, but it’s worth remembering that at the same time the Zionists succeeded in lobbying the Truman Administration to support a Jewish state, there was still widespread anti-Semitism throughout America, even as the horrors of the Final Solution were becoming known to the general public. It is comforting to believe that the 63 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, who side with Israel rather than the Palestinians are now and will always be stalwart friends of the Jews. But in the end all we know for certain about Americans is that they can smell what stinks. The Saudi lobby pays Washington power-brokers to talk over the heads of ordinary Americans because the latter have enough horse sense to know that a regime that withholds the rights of women as well as those of its Shia minority, outlaws the practice of Christianity and Judaism, and promotes anti-American causes is not in any meaningful sense of the term a U.S. ally.

As Bard’s book documents, the Saudis’ well-paid American agents have been making the same arguments for 60 years. The reason their message is not getting through is not that Americans are stupid and susceptible to Zionist propaganda or that the Jews who “control” Congress and the media are blocking access to the truth. The majority of Americans haven’t yet joined in the chorus led by Walt, Mearsheimer, and their cohort because Americans simply do not like to be threatened by extortionists who warn that if you don’t do what we say we will turn off your lights and shut down your car engines, and if you don’t change your position on Israel, we will kill you.

• Mayor Bloomberg opposed a state investigation into Park51’s funding: “I think it’s a terrible precedent. You don’t want them investigating donations to religious organizations.” [City Room]

• There’s a lot of tension between the Israeli government and private companies/investors over the new natural gas fields. [WSJ]

• The Emergency Committee for Israel-J Street spat continues. Only in August, folks. [Ben Smith/Ben Smith]

• Despite Jewish QB Sage Rosenfels’s awesome preseason play, Coach Brad Childress insists that mediocre Tarvaris Jackson will be the Minnesota Vikings’s second-string snap-taker. (#4 is starting.) [AP/NYT]

• Popular indie band LCD Soundsystem is getting Facebook wall-spammed because of its plans to play a Tel Aviv gig. [Negev Rock City]

Here’s my favorite LCD Soundsystem song, “North American Scum.”

New Photo Shows Fidel Castro With Jewish Leaders of Cuba [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

Though the IDF is unsure about the attack’s specifics—how organized it was, whether the murderers were roadside or in another car—it’s obviously impossible not to see it in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian direct talks scheduled to kick off tomorrow night in Washington, D.C.

An Israeli Embassy spokesperson there told reporters, “The timing of this is deliberate—to try and derail the Palestinians and all those who seek peace in the region from coming and sitting down at the negotiating table with Israel.” He also pointed to the incident as evidence that Israel would require considerable security guarantees before acceding to a Palestinian state.

Four Killed as Terrorists Open Fire Near Kiryat Arba [JPost]
Four Israelis Killed in Shooting Attack Near Hebron [Haaretz]
Before Talks, An Attack [Ben Smith]

To further get you into the holiday spirit, the guys behind God & Co. put together an advice-rap. Enjoy.

Rosh Hashana Rap from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Lapin, who has notoriously been tied to Jack Abramoff, echoed the larger themes of the night: “When you sever a flower from its roots, it dies,” he reportedly told the crowd. “I think what is happening in America is we’re being severed from our Biblical roots.” According to one of the event’s hosts, he urged the crowd to “study the Bible, make more money and say extra prayers for America.”

Of course, it was Shabbat, and so a microphone was a no-no. The audience, however, could apparently hear him fine, and even greeted him with a “Shabbat Shalom.”

The rally, Lapin told Tablet Magazine yesterday, demonstrated that “America is a country that is rooted in Christianity, and that this is one of the factors that have made America one of the most tranquil and prosperous homes that Jews have enjoyed for 2000 years.” He added, “I think of the Bible Belt as Judaism’s safety belt.”

At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth [NYT]
Glenn Beck Goes Messianic at America’s Divine Destiny Event Before 2500 Screaming Fans [Alternet]
Glenn Beck’s ‘Divine Destiny’ Event Focuses on Faith [Daily Caller]

If Córdoba symbolizes anything in the context of architecture and religion, it is how all religions use power, when they have it, to promote their concept of their own grandeur and importance in architectural terms. The proposed construction of Cordoba House on a site two blocks from the area razed by Muslim jihadists is no exception to this rule. It is no worse than what has been done countless other times in the course of history, but it is not much better, either.

Philologos should definitely take a look at Nextbook Press’s Yehuda Halevi, by Hillel Halkin, which expertly examines the same time and place. The columnist would find much to agree with.

A Cordoban Chord [Forward]
Related: Why Cordoba?
Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]

This strategy has a name: The Fayyad Plan. Fayyad has repudiated it, except he seems to have taken a renewed liking to it. Under it, Fayyad, a Westernized technocrat who is not a member of Fatah, builds the infrastructure essential to statehood in the West Bank so that unilateral Palestinian independence seems credible, if only as a bargaining chip. In fact, columnist Yossi Alpher notices that the original timeline of the Fayyad Plan—Fayyad had said a Palestinian state would be viable by August 2011—seems to coincide immaculately with the one-year goal set by the Obama administration for this round of direct talks.

And the problem with the Fayyad Plan—in addition to the fact that unilateral statehood would probably not be recognized by the United States or Israel and therefore isn’t really credible anyway; that it does nothing to address Gaza; and that it could give Hamas an opening in the West Bank—is that, according to a comprehensive and neutral report, Fayyad’s nascent “state-building” is mostly not all it is cracked up to be; and even where it has been all it is cracked up to be, it has been imposed via a toxic mixture of corruption, favoritism, and authoritarianism. “He’s honest, he’s competent,” writes Ben Smith, channeling Secretary of State Clinton, “he’s really getting things done and the situation on the ground in the West Bank—security, economy—is better than it’s been in memory.” It is hardly clear that all of that is actually true, although this morning the Times’s Ethan Bronner did report that the West Bank has experienced increased security and prosperity of late. (Fayyad has probably been most effective organizing boycotts of settlement-produced products, which nonviolently and moderately oppose the settlements as well as help forge national identity.)

So as (if?) direct talks continue beyond this week, it is worth keeping the Fayyad Plan (and the problems with it) in the back of your mind. It’s a fair bet the main players will be.

Fayyad: Netanyahu Must Explain His Definition of Palestinian State [Reuters/Haaretz]
Fayyad: PA Will Be Prepared To Establish a State in a Year [Ynet]
Where The Negotiations Could Be Useful [JPost]
Related: Decoding the Mideast Peace Rhetoric [Politico]
Are Palestinians Building a State? [Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]

• By contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu reassured party members that he knows where the redlines are and he won’t cross them. [JPost]

• Abbas and Defense Minister Barak met secretly in Amman over the weekend concerning the talks. [JTA]

• The New York Times editorializes for peace, among other things calling on Netanyahu to continue to halt settlement-building. [NYT]

• With its basic security and services, the West Bank is beginning to feel like an actual state—and that may be the one advantage compared to past talks. [NYT]

• Richard Cohen argues that we are in many ways stuck in the long-settled debate of whether Israel should exist. [WP]

Palmahim beach is a turning point in the relationship between developers and the environmental movement in Israel. It’s a short drive from the city of Rishon Lezion, or “first to Zion,” whose old town center is filled with the trademark four-story stucco apartment buildings common to most Israeli cities built in the pre-state years. Flower pots hang off the balconies, and falafel stands pepper the sidewalks. To the west, Rishon Lezion morphs into a modern Israeli suburbia. Gleaming white apartment buildings scale the skies. The nearby mall’s 26-screen cinema is only outsized by the replicas of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Brontosaurus that tower over the parking lot.

Perched next to a kibbutz of the same name, Palmahim beach stands out as untouched land against Rishon Lezion’s building boom. That also makes it a particularly attractive resort site.

“Look, you can still get to the beach,” Asher said in late July, as he looked at blueprints on a screen in Malka’s Rishon Lezion office. Since moving back to Israel with his wife and two children, Asher added, he has aged much more than 13 years. His wiry gray hair framed a warm pair of blue eyes. He wore the Israeli casual business uniform of white polo shirt, jeans, and black leather shoes, while Malka wore a pink collared T-shirt and smoked Parliament cigarettes.

It took the pair three and a half years to prepare the plans and brochures for a replica of a Greek village, complete with white buildings, blue shutters, and leggy women rafting across azure pools. It was to be the first Israeli full-on resort village of its kind, and the partners consulted with international brands like Hyatt and Four Seasons to operate it.

Just after Malka and Asher bought their site in 2004, Israel passed a coastal protection law prohibiting construction within nearly 1,000 feet of the seashore. Their resort village would be 300 feet off the coast, but the site had been approved for tourism construction four years prior.

Yet as Asher and Malka fenced off their site and prepared to break ground, all hell broke loose. Within a week, their fences and signs were destroyed, and a group of protesters had set up a tent next to their construction site.

“They started saying we’re stealing the beach,” Malka said.

Adi Lustig was 17 when she visited her favorite strip of beach and saw a fence running across the sand.

“I went home and started looking into what they were doing. We used our own printers to make fliers,” she told me. Within days, she had pulled together a motley coalition to oppose the site and named it the Committee to Save Palmahim. For four months, Lustig and members of her group slept in the beachside protest tent and climbed on bulldozers to stop their digging.

Lustig, now 20, said she launched the Palmahim protest by herself, not through any of Israel’s numerous environmental organizations that later joined the fight. In a recent interview she wore a tattered black tank top and red-and-white striped skirt. Bangles jangled on her wrists. Her campaign to save the beach touched a nerve in Israel.

“It was amazing, the first time [Environment Minister] Gilad Erdan got to the beach and spoke, to see he is with us and willing to help,” Lustig said. For her, the campaign was an empowering moment. “We can’t complain about what the government does if we don’t do anything ourselves.”

But Lustig’s first taste of politics touched off a nightmare for Malka and Asher, who expected gratitude for bringing tourists to Israel and instead faced ongoing vandalism. Malka said his car was scratched and stink bombs were thrown at his house. Asher said the water pipes to his house were cut.

When Knesset members attended the protests at the site, Asher said he wanted to show them the plans. Instead, he said, “They didn’t even talk to us. They walked straight to the protest tent.”

In May 2008, the state comptroller froze all construction at the site and began a year-and-a-half-long investigation into the building deal. That report, never formally ratified, faulted the government for selling the site at half the value the district appraiser had set, for allowing construction too close to the coast, and for publishing partial information in the printed calls for tenders that resulted in only two bidders. Finally, in early July, Israel’s minister of the environment appealed to the government to convene a special session on Palmahim in light of the public interest in preserving the beach. That committee voted to send the plan back to the district planning board, which will likely cancel it.

Yael Dori, who has worked for 10 years as an urban planner with the advocacy group Israeli Union for Environmental Defense, said Palmahim represents a shift in Israel’s approach to public space and reflects the issue’s move into the mainstream.

“The fact that the minister of the environment joined the struggle at the governmental level is absolutely wonderful,” Dori said. “It’s not just some esoteric issue for treehuggers.”

At the mid-July party organized by the Save Palmahim Committee to celebrate what they saw as a victory, Minister Erdan set his sights on another resort project planned for the Betzet beach in northern Israel.

“Palmahim is only the start,” Erdan said. “We need development, tourism, and construction, but we can do it in other places. You can’t move the beach.”

But carrying on the Palmahim fight means overturning other legally approved projects that have been dormant for years in Israel’s highly centralized planning boards. Some developments in Betzet beach, north of Nahariya, were green-lighted as early as 1983 and 1992 and never, or only partially, completed; Palmahim was approved in 2000. Lustig’s successful battle over Palmahim sets a precedent that after a plan is approved, there is still a chance to stop it. For Malka and Asher, of course, this is the problem.

“There are no apartments for young couples, there is a lack of housing, and there are 20,000 missing hotel rooms,” Malka said. “To get a permit in the most trivial place in Israel takes two years. Once it took four months, in the 1990s, and even that’s too long.”

Rishon Lezion Mayor Dov Tzur says it’s not that simple. He supports development—but only if it’s what he calls the right kind. Tzur attended furniture giant Ikea’s opening last spring but threw his weight behind Lustig in the Palmahim battle.

“There is no doubt that tourism and water go together, but the question is where,” he said. “There are seven kilometers of beach here. The army took 6.3. So, there’s only 700 meters of beach left.”

Tzur was one of more than 500 people at the victory party Lustig and the “Save Palmahim Committee” held on the beach. Lilach Kaduri, 33, passed her summers on the Palmahim shore as a kid in Rishon. She came to the party in a green dress with a white flower pinned into her red hair.

“There’s a lot of places here with little ponds and orchards,” Kaduri said on a drive to the beach. She passed a white van parked under a eucalyptus tree and pointed to it. “He has the best malabi (milky dessert) in the world. We used to sometimes just come to buy it and then drive back.”

Palmahim is an inspiring win for environmentalists in Israel, especially in light of their less successful battles. Last week, police recommended indicting former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on charges of taking bribes to allow construction of a 32-story luxury housing complex called Holy Land. Despite protests by environmentalists, that six-tower complex sits on a pristine hill in southern Jerusalem.

But the story of the beach resort also offers troubling insight into a cumbersome Israeli planning system that has not caught up with the increasingly vocal public demand for development-free beaches and open space. “Between 70 and 90 percent of the Israeli population mistrusts the planning bodies, so who is going to manage our land?” asked urban planner Rachelle Alterman, of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Haifa’s Technion Institute.

Because the resort was legally approved, Asher and Malka are suing the state for $100 million in damages. And until the Israeli planning system catches up to growing public scrutiny of development, the cost of the shortfall will continue to rise.

Daniella Cheslow is a master’s student in geography at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. She is based in Jerusalem.

The first person to learn about the Balfour Declaration—even before Rothschild—was Chaim Weizmann, who more than any other individual was responsible for winning the British government over to the Zionist cause. In The Balfour Declaration, his dynamic new telling of this famous history, Jonathan Schneer describes Weizmann’s reaction to the news, as recalled by a fellow Zionist leader, Shmuel Tolkowsky. “Weizmann was so filled with pleasure, Tolkowsky recorded, that he ‘behaved like a child: He embraced me for a long time, placed his head on my shoulder and pressed my hand, repeating over and over mazel tov.’ That night, at his home, at an impromptu celebration, Weizmann and his wife and friends literally danced for joy.” A month later, at a mass meeting in London, thousands of people heard Rothschild declare, “We are met on the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last eighteen hundred years.”

But was it? The Balfour Declaration is still regarded, almost a century later, as one of the great milestones in Jewish history and as the unofficial beginning of the State of Israel—if not its birthday, then its date of conception. Certainly, as Schneer shows, Weizmann and his colleagues—including Nahum Sokolow, the Zionist movement’s chief diplomat, and less famous figures like the Manchester-based Zionists Harry Sacher, Israel Sieff, and Simon Marks—had ample reason to celebrate. They had been working for years to convince the British government that Jewish settlement in Palestine would advance British interests in the Middle East, as well as being an act of historical justice for the Jews. They lobbied politicians all the way up to the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. They enlisted journalists like C.P. Scott, liberal editor of the Manchester Guardian, and society figures like Dorothy Rothschild, the 18-year-old daughter-in-law of the family’s French scion. And they met with a surprising degree of enthusiasm from the British Foreign Office, especially from Sir Mark Sykes, the roving diplomat who was Britain’s chief Middle East expert. (It was Sykes who told Weizmann about the Declaration, greeting him with the words, “It’s a boy.”)

One of the many ironies in this story is that Weizmann, a Russian-born Jew who more or less appointed himself the leader of British Zionism, came to be seen by the government as a more legitimate representative of Jewish interests than Britain’s own established Jewish organizations, which were mostly anti-Zionist. Schneer focuses on the figure of Lucien Wolf, a former journalist who was the head of the Conjoint Committee, a group devoted to lobbying against the Zionist program. To Wolf, just as to some Jewish anti-Zionists today, Zionism was a betrayal of the Jews’ “invincible attachment to things of the spirit and … their strongly marked individualism.” The future, he and his supporters believed, would be post-national, with no place for ethnically based states. Worse, creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine would endanger the claims of Jews everywhere else to equal citizenship.

It was to assuage this fear that the Declaration included the phrase about not prejudicing the rights of Jews in any other country. But this provision was not enough to satisfy Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, who was the only Jew in the Cabinet that approved the Balfour Declaration—and its most vocal opponent. When the Declaration was approved, Montagu wrote in his diary: “The Government has dealt an irreparable blow to Jewish Britons, and they have endeavoured to set up a people which does not exist.” There was a certain idealism in the assimilationist view, Schneer shows, as well as an obvious dread of Jewish conspicuousness. What it lacked, as Schneer points out, was any realism about the Jewish predicament. “Anti-Semitism has scaled heights beyond Montagu’s imagining in 1917,” he writes, “but without regard to Britain’s recognition of Palestine as ‘a national home for the Jewish people.’ ”

In other ways, however, it is surprising how much the Balfour Declaration still seems to matter. Readers of Tablet will remember, for instance, that this summer, Israel’s President Shimon Peres caused a sensation when he undiplomatically told Benny Morris that the British establishment had always been pro-Arab and anti-Jewish. In the ensuing debate, exhibit number one was the Balfour Declaration. To Zionists, it is a standing rebuke to British hypocrisy, since—according to historian Efraim Karsh, writing about Peres’ comment in the Jerusalem Post—“no sooner had Britain been appointed as the mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the country in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation.” To foes of Israel, on the other hand, the Declaration looks like proof that the country is a creature of imperialism. Thus a writer at the anti-Israel website middleeastmonitor.org speaks of “the persistent question marks over [Israel’s] legitimacy, going back to 1917 and colonial Britain’s endorsement of the Zionist project through the Balfour Declaration.”

It seems bizarrely easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the 93 years since the Declaration was issued, the Jewish population of what began as Palestine and is now Israel has grown from less than a hundred thousand to nearly 6 million. A network of agricultural settlements has become an advanced urban society and a powerful state. In short, it should no longer matter, practically or morally or legally, whether the Balfour Declaration made Israel possible, since it certainly did not make modern Israel actual. As Karsh notes, in fact, the Declaration was the high point of British enthusiasm for the Zionist project. Within five years of the Declaration, the British were restricting land purchases by Jews in Palestine; in the 1930s, they closed the region to Jewish immigration, just as Nazism made it more necessary than ever; and in the 1940s, they resisted Jewish claims to statehood as long as possible, including with violence.

Even the subtitle of Schneer’s book—“The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict”—seems to overstate the Declaration’s real significance. It is certainly true that Britain’s Middle East policy during World War I—and nothing less than that is Schneer’s real subject—laid up plenty of trouble for the future. Parallel to the story of the Declaration, Schneer tells the even better-known story of the Arab Revolt: the attempt, assisted by British officials including Lawrence of Arabia, to overthrow the Ottomans and establish an Arab state in the Middle East. Even before the war was over, it became clear that Britain’s promise to Sharif Hussein of Mecca—to install him as king of an Arab empire stretching from Damascus to Baghdad—was not made in good faith.

For one thing, of course, it contradicted the pledge of Palestine to the Jews. Still more duplicitous was the Sykes-Picot agreement, in which Britain and France secretly carved up the map of the Middle East between them. Britain even considered making a deal with the Ottoman Turks—a part of the story that Schneer tells in great detail, even though the unofficial negotiations never amounted to much. Even the willingness to consider a separate peace with the Turks, however, showed how ready the British were to throw over their Arab and Jewish clients in the interest of winning the war.

But even if the British had not been so feckless, there is no reason to think that more careful diplomacy could have headed off “the Arab-Israeli conflict.” The root of that conflict was not that Britain promised the same land to two different peoples, but that two different peoples wanted the same land. The Balfour Declaration, which inspired such jubilation among Zionists in 1917, did not give that land to the Jews. It only gave the Jews the opportunity to struggle for it.

Beet Carpaccio With Wild Arugula, Goat Cheese, and Orange Vinaigrette

1 pound large loose beets, golden, red and/or candy striped
4 cups wild arugula
¼ cup goat cheese, crumbled
1 orange, segmented and juiced, separated
1 tablespoon good quality local honey
¼ cup olive oil
¼ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1. De-stem and scrub beets. Wrap in foil and place on a sheet tray. Bake for 50 minutes or until tender. Transfer to a bowl, cover with saran wrap, and refrigerate for at least two hours.

2. After beets have cooled, peel all beets. On a mandoline or slicer, slice beets very thinly. This may be done with a knife, but will take a little longer. Keep all different color beets separate so that the color does not bleed.

3. Arrange beets in concentric circles in any pattern you wish on a serving platter.

4. To make the dressing, combine the orange juice (1/3 cup) and honey, whisk in the olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Reserve.

5. Right before serving, toss arugula in the reserved dressing and place in the center of arranged beets. Top with crumbled goat cheese and orange segments. Serve immediately.

Yield: 4 servings

Honey Glazed Striped Bass With Fresh Herb, Cucumber, and Pomegranate Salad

4 4-ounce pieces fillets of striped bass, skin on
4 teaspoons honey
½ teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon and pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup cucumber, julienned
¼ cup chopped chives
¼ cup basil leaves
¼ cup chervil leaves
¼ cup parsley leaves
¼ cup pomegranate seeds
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

1. In a medium bowl, combine cucumbers, chives, basil, chervil, parsley, and pomegranate seeds. Season with salt and pepper and set aside.

2. On a baking sheet lined with foil, season fish fillets with salt and pepper.

3. In a large non-stick or anodized pan over medium high heat, add the olive oil. Swirl the oil to coat the entire pan. Add the fillets skin side down and allow to cook for 3 minutes. Do not move the fillets around, you want a caramelized crust on the bottom. After 2 minutes, drizzle the fish with honey.

4. Flip the fillets and cook an additional 3 minutes or until golden brown and caramelized. Transfer fillets back to the baking sheet.

5. Bake the fillets for 5 minutes or until cooked throughout. This will differ depending on thickness of fish fillets.

6. Drizzle the herb salad with olive oil and toss.

7. To serve, transfer the bass to a serving platter and top with the herb salad.

Yield: 4 servings

Pomegranate Molasses, Cinnamon, and Chive Pan-Seared Lamb Chops

8 lamb loin chops, 1.5 to 2 inches in thickness
¼ cup pomegranate molasses
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon sea or kosher salt
1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons chopped chives
¼ cup pomegranate seeds
2 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees and line a baking sheet with foil, set aside.

1. In a large bowl, combine pomegranate molasses, cinnamon, salt, and pepper to form a paste. Rub paste on each lamb hop and allow to marinate for up to 2 hours.

2. In a large non-stick sauté pan or grill pan, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil over medium heat. Once oil is hot, but not smoking, add 4 lamb chops and sear for 2 minutes on each side or until a crust forms. The pomegranate molasses has a high sugar content, so be careful not to overcook the chops at this point or the crust will easily turn into a burnt one. After searing the chops on the second side, transfer seared chops to foil lined baking sheet. Wipe sauté or grill pan clean with a paper towel and repeat with remaining 1 tablespoon oil and 4 lamb chops. This step may be done ahead of time.

3. Once chops are seared, transfer baking sheet to preheated oven. Depending on the thickness of lamb and the desired degree of doneness, cooking time will differ. For rare, an internal temperature of 120 degrees and approximately 5 minutes cooking time. For medium rare, an internal temperature of 130 degrees and approximately 7 minutes cooking time. For medium, an internal temperature of 140 degrees and 9 minutes cooking time.

4. Once lamb chops are cooked to desired doneness, transfer lamb to a platter and garnish with chives and pomegranate seeds and serve!

Yield: 4 servings

• Don’t be silly says, the U.S. State Department, we don’t think we’ll achieve peace in one meeting. Just in one year. [Haaretz]

• The Emergency Committee for Israel and J Street have another spat. [J Street]

• The Times highlights contributing editor Rachel Shukert’s Everything’s Coming Up Moses, a Tablet Magazine production. [Paper Cuts]

• I’ve tried really hard to avoid the whole Silly Bandz thing, but now that there’s Biblical Bandz … . [ModernTribe]

• Jew’s Ear Juice? I’ll take two! [New Atlas Beverage]

It’s hot out, go get some gelato!

A few notes that did not make it into the final podcast, which was edited for time:

• Though I did not count them as being Jewish-owned, the Green Bay Packers almost certainly have Jewish owners: They are owned by the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which has at least one synagogue.

• New York Jets owner Woody Johnson (as in Johnson & Johnson) is not Jewish, but was a great friend to the Jews last season, when he successfully complained after the NFL scheduled his team’s first two home games during the High Holidays. Indeed, though the Giants are 50-percent Jewish-owned, I think you have to consider the Jets (whose prior owners were Jews, who come from the scrappy and heavily Jewish AFL, and whose current general manager is Jewish) the more Jewish New York-area franchise.

• The owner of the Detroit Lions is William Clay Ford. Ford is not Jewish, but is descended from one of history’s most influential anti-Semites.

• You should follow Ray’s Twitter feed, @VeryFakeAlDavis.

• Finally, Julian Edelman is not Jewish. Taylor Mays, however, is.

After the jump: The 11.5 (maybe 10.5) Jewish-owned NFL franchises, along with Ray’s and my pick for Tablet Magazine’s official team. (But really, listen to the podcast!)

Jewish franchises:
Atlanta Falcons
Cleveland Browns
Denver Broncos (maybe)
Miami Dolphins
Minnesota Vikings
New England Patriots
New York Giants (.5)
Oakland Raiders
Philadelphia Eagles
St. Louis Rams
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Washington Redskins

As for official team. It should be the Vikings, who are owned by the son of two Holocaust survivors; surely have a significant Jewish fanbase (The Land of 10,000 Lakes gave us Bob Dylan, the Coen Brothers, and Thomas Friedman, and are represented in the Senate by Al Franken); and have Jewish QB Sage Rosenfels on their roster. However, Brett Favre’s return has likely doomed Rosenfels to another year of no snaps, which if anything counts against them. While Ray’s and my honorable mention was the New England Patriots, and we would certainly fault no Jew for rooting for them, ultimately the spot went to … the Washington Redskins. Mazel tov!

Kosher Pigskin [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Patriots Receiver Edelman To Start in Playoffs

The Zionist movement sought to achieve by human means what Jews for two millenniums considered to be God’s work alone: the gathering of the diaspora in the land of Israel. Most rabbis therefore shunned Herzl, but not all. Some joined the movement, even formed a party within it, based on a separation of religion and politics. For them, secular Zionism was primarily a solution to the earthly predicament of the Jews; it was not so theologically laden.

(Raise your hand if you remember being surprised when, in The Chosen, the ultra-Orthodox rabbi is a vehement opponent of Zionism.)

Two weeks ago, Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch praised Taub’s new book:

The philosophical danger of the Occupation—to say nothing of the diplomatic and military and economic dangers—is that its illiberalism will make Zionism itself look illiberal in retrospect. This is, as Taub points out, the view of the “post-Zionists” in Israel and of much of the left in Europe and America: that “Zionism was never democratic, and the very idea of a Jewish democratic state is a mere contradiction in terms.” Ironically, Taub argues, this is the same thing that the settler movement believes. The difference is that, while anti-Zionists want to resolve the contradiction by making Israel cease to be Jewish (the so-called “one-state solution”), the settlers want to resolve it by making Israel cease to be democratic.

In Israel, Settling for Less [NYT]
Related: Unsettling [Tablet Magazine]

• The best overview of what Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas might be hoping to get out of the talks comes courtesy Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz. If you read one article on the talks, read this one. [JPost]

• President Obama is yoking some of his prestige and credibility to the mother of all impossible conflicts. Why? [LAT]

• And how is he going to keep the American pro-Israel community onboard? [Politico]

• But he is getting praise for including Egypt and Jordan, whose heads of states will also be in Washington, D.C., this week. [Politico]

• Back to Israel, where the head of the main settlers’ organization vociferously opposes an extension of the settlement freeze, which is being requested of Netanyahu. The head of the main settlers’ organization’s previous job? Chief-of-staff to Netanyahu. [LAT]

• If you’re the Palestinian Authority, here is one way to keep Hamas from accusing you of selling out the cause by talking to the Israelis: Ban their clerics from preaching. No way that’ll backfire. [JPost]

• The European Union wants in on the talks. [AP/JPost]

• Egypt also wants the EU in on the talks. [Haaretz]

• The U.S. wants Syria to stay far, far away from the talks. [JPost]

• Last and least, a group of retired IDF generals enacted an amusing but probably altogether worthless negotiation simulation (say that ten times fast). [JPost]

Seriously, this one is not to be missed. (And nor, presumably, is the gefilte fish prepared by one subject’s mother, “seasoned with Jamaican peppers and spices.” Recipe, anyone?)

Black and Jewish, and Seeing No Contradiction [NYT]

• That soon-to-expire settlement freeze really is the only issue worth trying to solve for now (but you already knew that). [NYT]

• The spiritual leader of Israel’s ultra-religious, co-governing Shas Party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, said Abbas and the Palestinians should “perish from the world,” earning the United States’s condemnation. [Politico]

• One report has the Obama administration presenting a final resolution outline to the two sides, and President Obama himself visiting the region over the next year. [Ynet]

• Another report has it that Israel will bomb Hezbollah facilities in Syria soon. [Arutz Sheva]

• Israel’s offshore natural gas fields have provoked conflict not only between Israel and Lebanon but between the state of Israel, which wants to reap most of the rents, and private Israeli and U.S. investors. [WP]

Among its other distinctions, the new Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur prayerbook produced by the Conservative movement, which will be used for the first time during the upcoming holidays, is almost certainly the first such book to be introduced with a book trailer and therein touted as a “game-changer.” Edited by a committee led by Rabbi Edward Feld and titled Mahzor Lev Shalem (Rabbinical Assembly, 2010), the book draws inspiration from its 1972 predecessor, including alongside the traditional prayer service many tidbits of poetry and spiritual reflections from modern and contemporary writers and rabbis such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, and Lawrence Kushner. Among other noticeable features are the “bowing sign” indicating when to lean forward, and an English translation that attempts to avoid “arcane or baroque language” and to be “as gender-neutral as possible, while remaining faithful to the intent and meaning of the original”: as such, it translates “אָבִינוּ” as “our parent,” not “our father,” and “אָבִינוּ מַלְכֵּנוּ” as, er, “Avinu Malkeinu.”

The Rabbinical Assembly intends Mahzor Lev Shalem to appeal broadly: As Feld notes in the trailer, “What this book represents is Conservative Judaism as a big tent, and welcoming everybody into the tent.” Whether or not anyone accepts that invitation, the mahzor shows how attentive Conservative leaders have been to the success of Artscroll. As Jeremy Stolow notes in his recent study Orthodox By Design, Artscroll’s editors espouse rigid Orthodoxy—don’t expect any pussyfooting about God’s maleness from them—but market prayerbooks especially to those with minimal knowledge of Jewish texts and practice. Thus, the Seif Edition (Artscroll/Mesorah, 2000), a fully transliterated mahzor, sells itself with the tagline, “Can’t read Hebrew yet? It’s for you!” And the Schottenstein Edition (Artscroll/Mesorah, 2004) centers on an interlinear translation, preventing those who want to read both the Hebrew and English from looking like spectators at a tennis match. (And, yes, both are available bound in alligator skin, perfect for a newly frum wild game fetishist.)

Mahzor Lev Shalem has other precedents: In Hebrew, poet Yonadav Kaplan’s Mimekha Elekha (Miskal, 2004) includes an even wider range of modern texts alongside the traditional Rosh Hashanah liturgy, with poems by Bialik, Leah Goldberg, and others, as well as quotations from political and literary figures like Ben Gurion or Haim Sabato. Offering a “gender-neutral translation” that goes even further than the Conservatives have, Ronald Aigen’s Mahzor Hadesh Yameinu (2001), meanwhile presents a Reconstructionist take on the liturgy, “reflecting a religious humanist theology.” Even at the reasonable price of $30, Mahzor Lev Shalem cannot quite undersell Mahzor Kol Bo (Star Hebrew Book Co., 1932), which is free for download from the National Yiddish Book Center and can easily be imported as a PDF file onto an iPad for convenient e-davening—though Kol Bo’s instructions and commentaries, in Yiddish only, may not appeal quite as widely in 5771 as the book’s lack of a price tag and digital format.

***

One constituency generally not catered to very well by standard holiday prayerbooks: little kids. To address this gap, a few children’s mahzors have been published in the last decade. The Yom Kippur Children’s Machzor (Gefen, 2006) includes photographs of clay sculptures “that reflect passages from the prayer” made on the occasion of her bat mitzvah by a 14-year-old Israeli girl. And the Reform movement offers Gates of Repentance for Young People (CCAR, 2002), which includes trippy, full-color illustrations and encourages older children to get into the spirit of impending judgment that suffuses the days of awe by recalling “a time you showed a report card to your parents.”

Much more common, though, are children’s picture books that eschew liturgy in favor of imparting basic facts and the spirit of the rituals, like Susan Schnur and Anna Schnur-Fishman’s new Tashlich at Turtle Rock (Kar-Ben, August, ages 5–9), with illustrations by Alex Steele-Morgan. The story features a girl named Annie, her family, and, predictably enough, some breadcrumbs and a creek. Don’t expect pap from this particular mother-daughter team, though: When Schnur, a rabbi who serves as editor at large for Lilith, talked to another one of her daughters and a couple of the young woman’s college friends about their dating life recently, it resulted in what the Jewish Week’s Gary Rosenblatt called “one of the most enlightening and disturbing articles on Jewish life that I’ve read in awhile.”

***

Nancy Rips aims for heartwarming rather than disturbing in High Holiday Stories (Frederick Fell, September), which puts the Jewish shmaltz back into the formula perfected by Chicken Soup for the Soul. Based in Omaha, Rips bills herself as “Nebraska’s book maven” and has assembled 101 anecdotes of holiday observance and cheer that shuttle from India to Iraq and Los Angeles to Houston and vary in subject from repentance to humor.

***

It’s not news that the tale of the akedah, or sacrifice, is at the center of the Rosh Hashanah ritual: After all, every shofar blast is a reminder of that hapless ram, caught in the wrong thicket at the wrong time, who took Isaac’s place on the altar. More surprising is the central place of that narrative in modern Hebrew culture, as traced by Yael Feldman in Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford, September). Feldman treats more than just Isaac’s story—she also considers the martyrdom narratives of Ishmael, Jephthah’s daughter, Iphigenia, and Jesus—and ranges from the dawn of the 20th century to the present, exploring the rich interplay between religious mythology and modern art, philosophy, and politics.

But Rosenfels isn’t the only Jew in professional football. Tablet Magazine’s Marc Tracy has been keeping tabs on his coreligionists on the gridiron. He spoke with The Atlantic Wire’s Ray Gustini, a similarly avid fan who formerly wrote for the National Football Post, about which teams are friendly to the Jews—and which could end up as Tablet Magazine’s favorite squad.

Something else is different for my kids this year: They’ll both be in inclusion classes. “Inclusion” is when students with special educational needs spend all or most of their class time with non-disabled students. My kids’ public school is starting “collaborative team teaching” classes for the first time—that’s when a special-education teacher and a general-education teacher work together with one class that combines both populations.

Maxie is one of the kids with special needs. She has motor, speech, and other challenges. Josie, on the other hand, could read young-adult novels in second grade and scores sky-high in standard measures of achievement. I think they’re both brilliant (and beautiful and hilarious, and here, let me show you our vacation slides), but they learn in very different ways. And I think this model of education is going to work beautifully for both of them.

There’s been a seismic shift in the way public schools approach kids with special needs in New York City. In the past, most were shunted off to self-contained special-ed classes. Kids with less severe learning issues were helped using a “pull out, push in” model, in which a learning specialist takes the kid out of class for a while or shadows them in the classroom, quietly helping. This method, of course, means that a kid misses out on a lot of classroom life. Maxie had pull-out-push-in assistance last year. I predict that collaborative team teaching will help her feel a greater sense of community.

Private schools have historically been a lot less interested in kids with special needs. Many still counsel out kids who need extra help or tell parents to pay for specialists’ services on their own, and if the kid can’t keep up, too bad. Sadly, this has also described Jewish day schools and synagogue Hebrew schools.

I recently chatted with Dori Frumin Kirshner, the executive director of Matan (the name means “gift”), an organization that supports Jewish communities in educating children with special learning needs.

“The Orthodox have always taken on responsibility for educating all Jews,” she told me. “But Conservative, Reform, unaffiliated, and non-denominational institutions—well, the going attitude was, ‘Sorry, we can’t handle that. Bye. It’s not you; it’s us.’ The latent message, of course, was, ‘It’s you.’ ”

Things are slowly changing. More Jewish organizations are calling Matan for help, and a number of Jewish day schools are trying to be more embracing of kids with learning differences. “There’s a big difference from 10 years ago,” Kirshner said. “But it still takes time, attitude change, and advocacy. Clergy, early-childhood, and educational directors, the president of the shul, they need to step up more and take the full responsibility off parents’ shoulders. This is everyone’s bag. It’s a health and human services issue, an educational issue, and a cultural issue—because there are so many kids out there with no entry points to the beauty of Jewish culture.”

Inclusion, Kirshner said, was a policy equal in importance to the civil rights movement. “You don’t have to be from the South or African-American to feel in your kishkes that it’s wrong to leave children separate,” she said. “I feel strongly—just as my mom, a white Jew who grew up in Shreveport and marched and got arrested for civil rights felt—this is wrong. It’s wrong to tell people there’s no room for them at the Jewish communal table. They have to start adding other chairs.”

Of course, inclusion—in both secular and Jewish settings—isn’t easy. It takes teachers who recognize different learning styles and plan for them. It calls for professional development for teachers—general and special educators alike—to help work out how best to foster cooperative learning and peer tutoring. It requires smaller class sizes.

And most of all, it needs a schoolwide commitment to true diversity and community. “There’s a social benefit to discovering that everyone has strengths,” said my kids’ principal. “It’s important to be able to work with different kinds of people, to care for people who are different from you, and to see school—and life—as more than just a rat race and a competition. We had a kid with autism in one class who had an incredible instinct for spelling and grammar. He was the best grammarian in the class, and kids really gravitated to him for that and then found other commonalities.”

My kids’ school has a leg up in introducing inclusion classes because it already has mixed-age classrooms. Teachers are accustomed to multilevel instructional approaches and individualized education. Maxie will be in a 1st-2nd grade inclusion class, and Josie will be in a 4th-5th grade inclusion class. I hope collaborative team teaching will help Maxie with her special needs and help Josie with hers (namely impatience, hyper-competitiveness, bossiness).

My mom, a professor of Jewish education, laughs at how many parents, when considering Jewish day schools for their kids, only want to know what high schools or colleges the graduates get into. (Of course, this is true at non-Jewish schools too.) It can be a lot harder to convince competitive upper-middle-class parents that inclusive education can be good for their precious, advanced little flower.

But it really can be. Even “gifted” kids can benefit. “Done well, inclusive education taps into the depth a kid is capable of,” my girls’ principal said. “Many gifted programs simply offer accelerated learning from a grade level or two up. But keeping curriculum across the grades open and wide-ranging means that every kid can reach the heights he or she is capable of.” One kid may be just learning spelling, while another is writing a novel, and good teachers help both. “There’s a saying,” says the principal: “Good special-ed teaching is good teaching.”

Too often, unfortunately, “gifted” education brings to mind the following story: A guy runs to his rabbi yelling, “Rabbi! Rabbi! I learned the whole Torah by heart!” The rabbi replies, “And how much of it penetrated your heart?” In other words, it’s not only the acquisition of knowledge we should be concerned with. It’s g’milut chasadim, too—kindness, mutual support, and solidarity.

There are times when inclusion isn’t appropriate. “Learning Hebrew or tfilot can work better in a self-contained setting,” said Kirshner. “For instance, if a kid has serious ADHD or Tourette’s in addition to a spectrum disorder. And sometimes parents of kids in mainstreamed classes will tell me no one ever invites them for a play date. A self-contained class can be a meaningful social setting.”

Gifted kids are special-needs kids too; they also benefit from special enrichment. But, Kirshner warns, “ ‘gifted education’ shouldn’t universally be the way your kid learns.” Inclusivity, done right, is beneficial to all students. And, as I said, it’s not easy.

But I’m confident that Josie and Maxie’s school is ready. Pairs of special-ed and general-ed teachers have spent the summer doing professional development and learning the most effective classroom set-up, structures, and pedagogy. I’m hopeful. And as Kirshner puts it, “We’re all gonna have a special need sometime. We may lose our hearing; we may break a leg. By engendering the values of inclusion, the fact that we all have something to contribute, we create a better world.”

Ritual and Observance:

Rosh Hashanah: A Guide for the Perplexed: Everything you ever wanted to know about the holiday, by the Editors

My Education: What I learned about myself and my family by leading High Holiday services at UCLA, by Mayim Bialik

Blow, Gabriel, Blow: Learning about the shofar, then trying to play one, by Vox Tablet

Books:

Pilgrimage: Each year before Rosh Hashanah, thousands of Jews visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Rodger Kamenetz joined them and brought along a friend: Franz Kafka.

On the Bookshelf: High Holiday prayerbooks of every stripe, by Josh Lambert

Food:

Kitchen Conversions: Intermarried couples must learn new holiday recipes and traditions, by Joan Nathan

L’Chaim!: Six kosher wines to spruce up your holiday meals, by Mark Oldman

Market Value: With Rosh Hashanah falling earlier than usual, a chef offers holiday dishes built around late-summer produce, by Melissa Petitto

Happy New Year: A Manhattan bartender devises some Rosh Hashanah cocktails, by Marissa Brostoff

Taste Test: The Tablet staff discovers the perfect apple-honey combo, by the Editors

Ritual and Observance:

Yom Kippur: A Guide for the Perplexed: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Day of Atonement, by The Editors

Shoes You Can Use: What to wear on Yom Kippur, when leather is banned, by Allison Hoffman

Pardon Me: My childhood bullying, and an attempt to atone for it, by David Rakoff

Music:

Melancholy Melody: Kol Nidre gets me every time, by Alexander Gelfand

• Hezbollah head advocates a nuclear reactor in Lebanon. Sure, why not? [Now Lebanon]

• Ron Kampeas takes Paul Krugman to task for demagoguing the ADL/Park51 issue. [Capital J]

• Joseph O’Neil has a great essay on novelist Muriel Spark, who—who knew?—had a Jewish father. [The Atlantic]

• Iranian Jews: They live in America! And are ambivalent about Things! [The Atlantic]

• Wanna meet another Jew? Start singing. [JTA]

Hizzonner went on The Daily Show last night to stand up for the Islamic center … and for the sliced-bagel tax?