Panic in Jerusalem
by Menachem Kaiser, Tablet, November 29, 2012
A community in the grips of a moral panic will, as a rule, first target its misfits. All who have been arrested or questioned by police in Nahlaot are very clearly outsiders in the community. They were, a neighbor told me, “atypical, easy to accuse, misfit, single older men.” Many, like Satz and Primashelanu, are mentally handicapped. Noach Friedman, who was institutionalized after being released, would barge into homes and break plates and has had to be rescued from his studio apartment twice after setting his bed on fire. Naftali Zilberman and Yaakov Weissfish, who were both arrested and released, are also mentally handicapped. Zalman Cohen is a belligerent South African immigrant married to a convert who used to interrupt walking tours of the neighborhood. Skippy is a non-Haredi senior citizen with a ponytail who was repeatedly described to me with terms like “obnoxious” or “asshole,” and is an exercise fanatic. (He was originally identified, I was told by a parent, after the kids said they were forced to do calisthenics. “These retarded guys were forcing the kids, as part of the molestation, to do exercise,” the parent told me.) Missionary Christians, of course, are the ultimate “other” in a Haredi community.
This is the reality that the Nahlaot community now finds itself in. There is no room for skepticism. Even the accused pedophiles whom I have communicated with believe there are pedophiles in Nahlaot—it’s just not them. But the required logistics of a secret pedophile ring this size—the organization necessary to continually and extensively abuse an entire demographic of a whole neighborhood without being discovered—remains the least credible aspect of the allegations. The difficulty of keeping a conspiracy a secret increases exponentially with each additional member, and with as many as 70 it’s virtually impossible. “You cannot be engaged in this kind of activity for this long and leave behind little or no corroborative evidence,” Lanning said. “The more people involved in a crime, the greater the crime, the greater the likelihood that there’s going to be some kind of corroborative evidence left behind, physical evidence.”
After expressing the findings of my early research, I told Steinherz, the therapist, that I needed corroborative evidence aside from the children’s testimony in order to report that there was indeed a pedophile ring in Nahlaot. The evidence I was ultimately provided or made aware of included: court documentation that strongly suggested police incompetence or corruption; archived web pages that showed that some of the accused had lied about not knowing each other; medical records of various ailments; pictures the children drew; the detailed account of a therapist named Levana Khalili, a witness for the prosecution; and stories of corroboration among the children. None was evidence of a pedophile ring; all was material that reinforced an already assumed narrative. Yet in all my conversations with Steinherz, parents, rabbis, therapists, and community organizers, not once was it acknowledged that these might be the products of a child’s imagination.
Exodus 14:19-20, a demonstration of the origins of the term “Pillar of Cloud”, the Hebrew name of the IDF operations in Gaza. As Yair Rosenberg explains excellently in a post for Tablet:
For a campaign intended to halt the barrage of rockets currently raining down on southern Israel, “Pillar of Cloud” is thus a particularly apt title. Just as the cloud protected the Israelites from Egyptian projectiles, so to does the IDF hope to protect Israel’s citizens. However, a literal translation of עמוד ענן—i.e. “Pillar of Cloud”—fails to convey the meaning of the biblical allusion to a lay audience. As such, the IDF chose “Pillar of Defense” as the campaign’s English designation, a conceptual translation which makes clear the intended meaning of the Hebrew.
I have been learned.
Free-Speech Hypocrisy in Europe
by Jamie Kirchick, Tablet, August 14, 2012
Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech encapsulates the divergent American and European attitudes to free speech, with the former tending to view it as an absolute and the latter as a relative value that must be weighed against the “right” not to be offended. But “the right to insult” has always been a part of the liberal European concept of free speech, something that Kilpper, with his insulting artwork, especially ought to understand. Yet in a short video documentary inside the exhibit, Kilpper pronounces the cartoons “not emancipatory but chauvinistic.” In fact, the real chauvinists of the Mohammed cartoons controversy were the Muslim extremists—many of whom lived half a world away and never saw the actual cartoons—who considered it their religious duty to burn down the embassies of a small European democracy because a newspaper in that country published pictures they deemed offensive. That one can open a paper in any Muslim country on any given day and find anti-Semitic cartoons more at home in the rancid pages of Der Sturmer (a state of affairs that does not cause Jews the world over to incite murder) is a phenomenon that doesn’t seem to faze Kilpper.
The Way Marvin Hamlisch Was
by Rachel Shukert, Tablet, August 10, 2012
But the title song elevates The Way We Were. The piece, with its demure opening chime soon taken over by Barbra at her soaring best, gives a period-specific and often melodramatic story a kind of nobility, a epic sense of timelessness. Hamlisch’s music and Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyrics allude to heartbreak and loss but are neither defeated by nor wholly triumphant over them. It’s not a question so much of banishing one’s demons as accepting them for having made you what you are; a wistful, bittersweet ambivalence that is no less powerful for being inconclusive; the kind of decision that, to borrow a line from Sondheim (who at 82, is still going strong, God help the person who has to peel me off the floor when he kicks it, they’re going to need a big, waterproof spatula) “is not to decide.” It’s precisely this kind of complexity that makes a Katie girl a Katie girl. Is it schmaltzy too? Sure. But so is love.
Of course, there’s also a larger, less romantic context in which to look at this, which is that in “The Way We Were,” Hamlisch, the son of Viennese refugees from Hitler, wrote the ultimate survivor’s song. Rare among the genre, it never trivializes the pain of the past. Instead, it gently, even lovingly, suggests that the pain is never really what’s important. It’s not about the broken heart; it’s about that single beautiful afternoon outside the Plaza Hotel when we pushed Robert Redford’s hair out of his beautiful face. It’s not about the blacklist; it’s about the belief that the world can be a better place. It’s not about the Holocaust, it’s about the fact that we were here at all.
Scientology Is Not a Religion
by James Kirchick, Tablet Magazine, July 24, 2012
Around the world, a handful of politicians have urged their governments to prosecute Scientology as a criminal conspiracy. Three years ago, a Paris court found the Church guilty of fraud and fined it $900,000. That same year, a member of the Australian Senate, Nick Xenophon, delivered a speech in which he described Scientology as “criminal organization that hides behind its so-called religious beliefs.” After calling for an investigation into the Church’s tax-exempt status during a television interview, he began to receive letters from ex-Scientologists across Australia detailing what he described as “a worldwide pattern of abuse and criminality,” including torture, forced confinement, and coerced abortions. (Xenophon’s call for a parliamentary inquiry into the Church was ultimately rejected by the Australian government.) In 2007, following a 10-year investigation, a Belgian prosecutor called for the Church to be labeled a criminal organization and recommended that up to 12 Church officials face charges for the illegal practice of medicine, violation of privacy, and use of illegal contracts. The State Department criticized the move, stating that the United States would “oppose any effort to stigmatize an entire group based solely upon religious beliefs and would be concerned over infringement of any individual’s rights because of religious affiliation.”
But it was not long ago that the U.S. government came close to cracking down on Scientology. In a New Yorker profile last year of Paul Haggis, the Academy Award-winning director of Crash who recently defected from the Church, Lawrence Wright reported that the FBI was investigating Scientology on charges of human trafficking. According to Tony Ortega, the editor of the Village Voice who has long written about the Church, the bureau was preparing to raid Scientology’s California international headquarters—using footage it had shot with drone aircraft—based upon evidence that a defector had given them about “an office-prison made up of two double-wide trailers where fallen officials were kept day and night, sleeping on the floor and being forced to take part in mass confessions.” The probe was ultimately called off for unknown reasons.
…For obvious reasons—beginning with the Constitution, and the fact the United States was founded by Europeans seeking religious persecution—most Americans are loath to do anything that would appear to infringe upon someone else’s religious liberty. Though some of us may find each other’s religious convictions, or religion itself, strange, few believe that it should be the government’s role to tell other people how, if at all, to pray. And so while the consensus in the United States may be that Scientology is a bit nutty, the general attitude, owing to Americans’ dedication to individual liberty, seems to be: live and let live. The problem with Scientology is that it is not content to let other people “let live,” certainly not those who join the Church or criticize it from the outside.
The differences in historical traditions of American individualism and European communalism should not be used to discourage a tougher American approach to dealing with the Church of Scientology. Revoking its ill-gotten tax-exempt status is the obvious first start, followed by an end to criticism of foreign governments, such as Germany’s, for doing precisely what the U.S. government should be doing: investigating Scientology as a harmful enterprise, with the ultimate aim of shutting it down. Congress should establish a commission, as have many other governments, to investigate the Church and its activities and actively warn citizens about its dangers. Such policies should be seen as no different from a public-health measure, like long-existing, widely popular government campaigns to discourage smoking.
Kadima Means Nothing — Ariel Is Worse
The break-up of Benjamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz’s marriage of convenience bears no significance for the future of the peace process. The partnership between Likud and Kadima was never a serious endeavour to begin with, in spite of much talk about reforming the electoral process, introducing a universal draft, and even kick-starting the moribund talks between Netanyahu and Abbas. Rather, the deal was made entirely out of necessity: for Mofaz to elongate the life of his sham of a party, a project he has now surely annulled; for Netanyahu to continue his principal policy of inactivity on all fronts, under the auspices of national unity.
Far more noteworthy, at least when it comes to the hope that, someday, a democratic, Jewish state might reside with a democratic, Palestinian state in a condition of perpetual if uneasy peace, is the decision by the Judea and Samaria Council for Higher Education (JSCHE) to recognise the Ariel University Center as a full-fledged university. In doing so, the JSCHE have gone over the heads of the Council for Higher Education which recommended against recognition, thereby establishing Israel’s first university beyond the Green Line in the occupied territories.
But, as Liel Leibovitz notes in Tablet, the word of the council is essentially meaningless when it comes to the occupied territories:
Because Israeli law doesn’t apply in the West Bank…all civilian affairs in the region are overseen by the Israel Defence Forces. In 1997, after the council refused to supervise a number of nascent Jewish academic institutions established east of the Green Line, a new body was formed, called the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria (CHEJS). Its members are appointed by the army.
And, that this university has been established in Ariel only augments the controversy, given the settlement’s position in the West Bank. Ariel competes with Ma’ale Adumim for the indignity of being the most controversial settlement in all of the West Bank, principally due to its size – a city of some 17,700 people – and its location, some 13km west of the Green Line, north of Ramallah and southwest of Nablus. Netanyahu has previously referred to Ariel as a suburb of Tel Aviv, “the heart of Israel”, and “an integral, inseparable part of the state of Israel in any future arrangement”. Yet having the borders of any prospective Israeli state swoop around the settlement would create a lengthy talon of land that not would only threaten the contiguity of a Palestinian state, but would be indefensible and vulnerable to enemy assault.
The decision by the JSCHE is a far more dangerous and destructive event than the slipping away of Shaul Mofaz and his gang of status quo politicians into the political night. Because, much like the Levy Report, its acceptance beyond those who have a vested interest in its continuation represents a normalisation of perpetual occupation or eventual annexation, either of which would end finally and irreversibly the notion of Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state.
My own view is, you can’t claim as a foundation the principle of international law and what BDS calls a rights-based approach and deny the fundamental principle that under international law, Israel is a state. That’s a fact. There are no “ifs,” there are no “ands,” there are no “buts.”
…There is what you call intellectual dishonesty—I’ll call it intellectual disingenuousness, because I prefer the euphemism—and then there’s the practical side. You’re not going to rope in the Jewish community and say that Israel does not have the right to exist as a state. It’s there, it’s a state.
” Norman Finkelstein, as quoted in Tablet Magazine(Source: tabletmag.com)
Lightning Rod
by Allison Hoffmann, Tablet Magazine, March 22, 2012
It’s understandable that young liberal Jews would welcome Beinart’s ability to act as a lightning rod. The problem is that the discussion has increasingly become about Beinart, and not about Israel’s policies. That’s partly a reflection of the poverty of debate within American Jewry when it comes to Israel, and the deep structural questions facing the community. “The American Jewish institutional world is terrible, plain unadulterated terrible,” said Michael Steinhardt, the hedge-fund manager and philanthropist behind Birthright Israel. “So, when Peter says something, whether it’s right or not, it sounds fresh and new.”
Some of Beinart’s critics have also been more than happy to make the whole thing personal. “It’s a narcissistic book, and the narcissism of privileged and haughty people is never particularly attractive,” Martin Peretz, the former owner of the New Republic and Beinart’s earliest patron, told me. “I always knew he was a very vain man, but a lot of us are vain, and if you had his mother, or if I had his mother, I’d be even more vain than I am.” Peretz put on a mocking falsetto—“this is the most brilliant boy, he’s so smart, he’s so touching”—before going on: “It’s a Jewish mother situation. You can use that—even if it makes me sound a little bitchy.”
It does. Still, there is something fundamentally self-regarding about the way Beinart often goes about making his case. In his book, Beinart asserts that the failure of Zionist democracy would be “one of the greatest tragedies of my life.” It may be too much to expect that Beinart, and others who are as concerned about Israel’s future, pick up their lives and move to the Levant, but it’s striking that his argument isn’t directed at Israelis—the people enfranchised with the power to either betray or redeem the idea of Israel that Beinart loves. They aren’t addressed in his book at all. It’s another example of what Gorenberg recently ridiculed as the desert island effect in American Jewish debate about Israel—conducted at a sanctimonious, comfortable remove. “Obviously, someone arguing 6,000 miles away about our politics is less interesting to Israelis than arguing about our own politics,” Gorenberg told me when we spoke.
“To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements” (Or Not)
In The New York Times March 18, Peter Beinart called for a boycott of and divestment from Israeli settlements located beyond the Green Line, in the West Bank, or what he termed (perhaps rather pointlessly) “non-democratic Israel”. Beinart states in part:
Having made that rhetorical distinction, American Jews should seek every opportunity to reinforce it. We should lobby to exclude settler-produced goods from America’s free-trade deal with Israel. We should push to end Internal Revenue Service policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities. Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line.
…Supporters of the current B.D.S. movement will argue that the distinction between democratic and nondemocratic Israel is artificial. After all, many companies profit from the occupation without being based on occupied land. Why shouldn’t we boycott them, too? The answer is that boycotting anything inside the green line invites ambiguity about the boycott’s ultimate goal — whether it seeks to end Israel’s occupation or Israel’s existence.
…The relevant question is not “Are there worse offenders?” but rather, “Is there systematic oppression that a boycott might help relieve?” That Israel systematically oppresses West Bank Palestinians has been acknowledged even by the former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who have warned that Israel’s continued rule there could eventually lead to a South African-style apartheid system.
Beinart’s op-ed has provoked much reaction fromTablet Magazine’s Marc Tracy has termed the shtetlsphere. To begin with the aforementioned, Tracy concluded that such a boycott would only benefit “those liberal Zionists—not all liberal Zionists—who want an easy salve on their consciences without the full burden, whether of guilt or of principle, of actually abandoning Zionism altogether”.
