Jews blaming ourselves for the Holocaust

Once more on the theme of Jews blaming ourselves for the Holocaust. Over on DovBear, Toby Katz has again fallen into the pit which she herself has digged, with the following comment:

1. I said, over and over and over, that no one knows why the Holocaust occurred, that there were numerous reasons for it, and that the only people to "blame" for it are the Nazis. OTOH I did say that "it was no coincidence the Holocaust started in Berlin." That is the only sentence of mine you keep quoting, because you seem to think it shows me at my worst. Mis-nagid [another blogger] has openly admitted he's an atheist, but what about the people who claim to believe in the Torah? Do you deny Hashgacha Pratis [individual Providence - i.e., the idea that God watches over each individual]? Do you deny the validity of the Tochacha [the Rebuke - series of punishments described in Deut. 27-28, which are supposed to come upon the Jewish people if they fail to obey the covenant with God]? Do you think that whatever happened in Europe, it WAS just a coincidence? By causing people to focus their hatred against Torah-true Jews [i.e., Orthodox Jews] instead of against the failings of their own non-Torah movements, you prevent the Ge'ulah [redemption]. And how do you know for sure that it WAS just a coincidence? That Reform was not even one thousandth of a thousandth of a reason for any of G-d's protection to be withheld from His people, not even one tiny bit? Did G-d Himself tell you that the Tochacha is no longer operative?

I find this offensive in so many ways, principally because it involves a Jew blaming other Jews for mass murder inflicted upon Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. I also object to the view of God that Toby Katz (and not only her - see also the comments of a Rabbi Forsythe, A Torah Insight into the Holocaust) puts forward - as an unmerciful, vengeance-seeking, tyrant. What about the prayers that we utter during the Days of Awe, asking for God's forgiveness and being assured that God will forgive us? "And repentance, prayer, and charity/ righteousness will avert the evil decree."

I also object because Toby (and Rabbi Forsythe, and perhaps others) are arguing that this is the only "Torah-true" perspective on the Holocaust, something which is clearly not true. The best example, perhaps, is to be found in the writings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, a Polish Hasidic rebbe (whom I've written about before) who led a very successful yeshiva and educational program before World War II. He was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto after the Nazi invasion of Poland, and lived through the "Great Deportation" in summer of 1942, when the majority of the Ghetto's Jews were taken to Treblinka and killed.

His first attitude towards the sufferings the Jews were enduring at the Nazis was very much the traditional view espoused by Toby Katz & R. Forsythe, although unlike them he was going through this suffering, rather than theologizing about it after the fact. He first held that the Jews were suffering because they had left religion, were not studying Torah with the proper diligence, etc. After a while in the Ghetto, his views began to shift, and he began to believe that it was not because of the sins of the people that they were suffering. Instead, he began to see it as an unknowable mystery about which even God himself was weeping in his inner chambers - and a mystery into which a weeping Jew can enter precisely through his own weeping.

Rabbi Shapira also denied that the sufferings of the Holocaust could be compared to any previous suffering in Jewish history. In November, 1942, after the Great Deportation, he writes in a note, "Only until the end of 5702 [summer of 1942] was it the case that such sufferings were experienced before. However, as for the monstrous torments, the terrible and freakish deaths the malevolent monstrous murderers devised against us, the House of Israel, from the end of 5702 and on - according to my knowledge of rabbinic literature and Jewish history in general, there has never been anything like them. May God have mercy and deliver us from their hands in the twinkling of an eye" (p. 139 of R. Shapira's Esh Kodesh, a collection of his homilies published posthumously after the war; translation from Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 132-133).

One of the qualities that shines through Rabbi Shapira's writing is his love for the Jewish people and individual suffering Jews - and I believe it is this quality of his that we must emulate when writing and speaking about the Holocaust, rather than blaming the victims and besmirching the memory of the Jews were were murdered.

This is another serious issue that Rep. Hostettler took up last year, to defend the morals of the good citizens of Indiana - Hostettler mounting campaign to change the name of Interstate 69. Otherwise, from looking at his official website, he seems a fairly devoted supporter of Pres. Bush's conservative Republican policies, although he voted against the war in Iraq (and also against sending U.S. ground troops to Kosovo). He voted for that perennial favorite, moving the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but since no such thing is going to happen until there's a real peace between Israel and the Palestinians, such a vote is a cheap sop to Zionists.

E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post writes about Rep. David Obey's attempt to Keep Faith With Religious Freedom. Last week Obey offered "an amendment to the military appropriations bill calling on the secretary of the Air Force to 'develop a plan to ensure that the Air Force Academy maintains a climate free from coercive intimidation and inappropriate proselytizing.'" For his pains, Obey, a Roman Catholic, was viciously attacked by Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana, with these words:

Obey's all-American assertion of religious liberty was, for Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.), part of "the long war on Christianity in America [that] continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives. It continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats. . . . Like a moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians."

This appalling statement was eventually stricken from the record, but that was cold comfort for Obey:

Obey rose to his feet and demanded that Hostettler's last words be stricken from the record, which they eventually were. "If Jesus is watching what's happening on the floor of the House of Representatives, with people behaving in such a blasphemous fashion," Obey said this week, "well, I am reminded of that passage, 'Jesus wept.' " Obey said that when he first came to Congress, "there would have been universal condemnation of Hostettler by both parties." In this case, Obey said he was approached afterward by a single sympathetic Republican. Obey was comforted that Jewish House members "appreciated that a Christian would speak out."

This last quote is very scary! Only Jewish house members appreciated what Obey said? And have we descended to the political level now that we have to be grateful that Christians are speaking out in favor of religious tolerance?

The Forward reported earlier this month on how Rep. Steve Israel of New York was also harassed when he tried to introduce two measures to require the Air Force to "submit a plan for ensuring religious tolerance" at its academy.

Several Republican lawmakers are using the controversy as an opportunity to air the view that it is Christians whose constitutional free-speech rights are being suppressed in the military. At a recent Armed Services Committee hearing, Rep. John Hostetler, an Indiana Republican, derided the "mythical wall of church-state separation" as he argued that Israel's amendment "would bring the ACLU" and "the very silliness that's been present on... several courts of justice over the last 50 years" into the United States military. Israel's measure, he added, would "quash the religious expression of millions of service personnel."...

At the hearing, Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, suggested that, contrary to what Israel was reporting about the Air Force Academy, the problem in the military was that some evangelical Christians feel they are "not being promoted" because of their faith, and Christian chaplains say they are not being allowed to conduct prayers referring to Jesus. "There is a problem in the military.... The problem is political correctness," he declared.

No, the problem is what Andrew Sullivan has started calling "Christianism" (a term to parallel with "Islamism") - the belief that Christianity is superior to all other religions, and that this superiority must be upheld by the U.S. government.

As Steve Israel said, "The Republicans [on the Armed Services Committee] just jumped on me," Israel told the Forward. "The people who were coerced were represented as the problem. The people who coerced were represented as the victims."

I wonder what the position these Republicans take on Israel (the nation, not the individual)?

DovBear has decided to train his sights on Daniel Lapin's organization, Toward Tradition, so I thought I'd cruise on over to their web site to take a look at them. On their home page I came across a list of the "four unique programs" of their mission. They include:

1) The Macabee Project. "Combating anti-Jewish/ anti-Christian bigotry; defending Christians unjustly accused of anti-Semitism." The main point seems to be to provide coverage for right-wing Christians whose vision for America doesn't include much tolerance for anybody else. See their comments on the ADL: "The Anti-Defamation League once stood to defend the Jewish faith, as well as the Jewish ethnicity, from anti-Semitic assaults in the media, and in society. They now seem poised to turn every conflict between a secular Jewish individual and a religious Christian into a specious example of anti-Semitism. This will not help the Jewish community. In fact, Judaism seems to be under attack from liberal, secular Jews: this is defamation and anti-Semitism that seems to attract little to no attention from the ADL."

I do agree that the ADL does sometimes blow incidents of antisemitism out of proportion, but I think that Lapin is simply turning his own political disagreement with the ADL into the ADL's supposed lack of interest in defending Jews against antisemitism.

3) The American Alliance of Jews and Christians. "The American Alliance of Jews and Christians (AAJC) is led by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. The Alliance unites American Jews with Christians on behalf of traditional values. The AAJC’s Board of Advisers includes Dr. James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Charles Colson, Rev. Jerry Falwell, Rev. Pat Robertson, Pastor Rick Scarborough, as well as Rabbi Barry Freundel, Rabbi David Novak, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Michael Medved, John Uhlmann."

Well, from this list of advisors we know where their political beliefs lie - uniting with such paragons as Charles Colson, Pat Robertson, et al, and equally conservative Jews like Freundel, Novak, and Medved (although one wonders why they've gone along with such a dubious character as Lapin).

For those who wish to know more, they've published a pamphlet called "Enemies or Allies? Why American Jews Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Conservative Christians."

And finally, 4) The Ethical Capitalism Project, which begins with these words: "Much of America's strength is depleted by the animosity and disrespect heaped on business people. When an employer who has provided jobs for thousands of people is made to feel guilty for being greedy, it's time for society to reassess its values."

As DovBear Rabbi Lapin appears to be deep in the muck with Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist accused of defrauding Indian tribes. So much for ethical capitalism...

Defining "lulei"

On the phrase "lulei de-mistafina," a favorite of Cloojew (and mysterious to most others), two people comment (from On the Main Line):

It's one of those words that no one in ninth grade told me what it literally meant and I never thought about it, but you pick up from context. Contextually it means something like "if I may be so bold".
S. | Homepage | 06.24.05 - 12:00 pm | #

Lit.
If not for the fact that I am less than 100% sure of what I'm saying...

LkwdGuy | 06.24.05 - 12:02 pm | #

I was just cruising through Bloghead and found a link to this hilarious post by Naomi Chana of Baraita, on the broad-ranging cross-blog fight about hagba, women's tefillah groups, and the role of women in Judaism (by the way, why don't we ever have big fights about the role of men in Judaism?). Her best line: "But I had hitherto been ignorant of how participating in groups of women praying and studying Torah together will cause said women to sprout facial hair, stop loving their children, produce Christian grandkids, do something unspecified but presumably nasty to True Judaism (tm), and start participating in incestuous cannibalistic orgies with married terrorists." Read the rest for further amusement....

I've definitely been spending too much time participating in some rather rousing discussions over at DovBear's and Miriam (and Paul) Shaviv's blogs - long arguments, mostly about women and halakhah (a very interesting discussion sparked by Miriam's participating in a women's tefilah group and getting hagba). There's been much spirited argumentation with Toby Katz, and now Lisa, on DovBear's comment threads - they defend a rather (to my mind) rigid version of Orthodoxy and especially what should be important to Orthodox women (having more babies and dressing modestly, it seems).

Two bloggers that I've encountered through these discussions and have started to read with pleasure are Orthomom and Mirty, who has also been drawn into the uproar (see this posting from her: they really don't get it).

Since I currently belong to a Conservative shul, and have never defined myself as Orthodox (even though I did belong to an Orthodox shul for a year in Jerusalem), I sometimes feel a bit of an interloper in these discussions, but one of the pleasures of the internet & especially the blogging world is that it's possible to enter into a community of sorts that one might never enter in the "real world."

I would find it interesting to be introduced to some more Conservative and Reform Jewish bloggers who are as passionate as the usual crew over at DovBear & Bloghd - the inimitable Amshinover, the halakhically correct Gil Student, the lyrically spiritual Barefoot Jewess, GoldaLeah, Conservative Apikorus... the list goes on. Anyone have suggestions?

There were several letters in yesterday's Ithaca Journal responding to the full page of opinion pieces published on May 21, 2005, responding to Sandy Wold's column criticizing Israel. (By the way, I discovered by going back to the site that my letter has made it on to the IJ's web site: "Zionist Jew" rejects inflammatory comments.)

Along with three letters critical of Israel written by other people, Sandy Wold herself wrote an angry retort in yesterday's Journal, in which she said that she is retracting her apologetic letter of May 21:

I have been deeply concerned about the presentation of the May 21 opinion page. While the Journal followed its "journalistic standards," they nevertheless made choices that placated an international group at my expense and neglected to inform readers of significant behind-the-scenes events. Readers should know that 90 percent of the hostile letters published on May 21 came from Honest Reporting", an organization of 120,000 who bombarded me with hostile emails and calls. Readers should know that the Journal publisher urged me to submit a peace-making communication I posted to the honestreporting.com blog on May 9. Readers should also know that the Journal omitted two significant paragraphs from my May 21 guest column without my permission while superfluous quotes remained.

She's right that the letters were prompted by the posting on Honest Reporting, and also by the posting on Little Green Footballs. I went to the HR website and some of the comments posted there were extremely hostile, as were those on the LGF site. While I didn't agree with what she said, some of the HR and LGF comments were over the line and engaged in personal abuse.

My critics made countless false assumptions about what I believe and the Journal misrepresented me and my message of May 21. Ironically, the volatility of my critics and the Journal's appeasement perfectly exemplify the dynamic I was describing in my original guest column of May 7.

I don't quite know what she means by the "volatility" of her critics. Yes, people were mad at her - as advocates of Israel often are at those who criticize or demonize Israel (I think her comments came closer to the latter than the former). I don't see that the Journal "appeased" them - rather, it published letters critical of her remarks - and letters that were not personally abusive. They objected to her on political, rather than personal grounds. Anyone writing in public on Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to be prepared for criticism (and sometimes personal attacks) from those disagreeing with them.

I also object to the choice of pictures for that page which demonized Arab people. Readers deserve to be reminded that not all Palestinians/Arabs agree with PLO behavior. My column and its omitted content was written in a sincere spirit of seeking understanding of the individuals within this group and simultaneously clarifying what I originally meant by the universality of the victim mind-set. I did not know that the Journal would edit my column in such a way that would collude with the agenda of this group to silence dissent; I therefore retract my letter of May 21 and will publish elsewhere.

For the information of readers who only saw the internet version of the Journal from May 21, there were two photographs placed at the top of the page, below which came first my letter, then a whole series of international letters (prompted by the posting on Honest Reporting), and then Sandy Wold's column responding to those who criticized her (specifically, the international letters, not mine). The photograph on the right depicted Palestinian men wearing masks, and aiming guns. The legend below the picture was, in the words of the Journal, "Masked Palestinian militants of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militia linked to the Fatah movement, perform a military exercise in the streets during a rally in Gaza City, Friday. As Palestinian-Israeli fighting spilled over into a third straight day, Israel warned a cease-fire declared in February is in danger of collapse." The photograph on the left depicted Jewish settlers, also armed, in Gaza, with the legend: "Jewish settlers walk toward an abandoned building located between the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom and the Palestinian town of Deir el-Ballah on Friday. Settlers intend to set up a defensive position in the building used earlier on by Palestinian militants who fired missiles and light arms fire at the Jewish settlement." Both pictures were from the AP. The placing of the photos side by side seemed to me the Journal's attempt to be evenhanded - to point out that there is violence on both sides from sources not officially authorized - Jewish settlers and the Popular Resistance Committees.

I think it's very telling that Wold only objected to the picture of the Palestinian gunman, and didn't even mention the photo of the Jewish settlers. She is only capable of seeing media bias on one side (as is true of many of the letters criticizing her).

In response to Wold's letter, the editors of the Journal wrote (June 18): "EDITOR'S NOTE: Wold was repeatedly advised by the opinion page editor that she was welcome to submit a follow-up column to her May 7 piece, but was not required to do so. Wold accepted that invitation, submitting nine versions of her reply as well as a hand-written addendum. The final version of her reply, plus addendum, was about 300 words longer than The Journal's established 750-word limit for such submissions. It was carefully edited to approach that word limit without altering its message. We stand by that effort."

It's because of stories like this - Iraqis Found in Torture House Tell of Brutality of Insurgents - that I can't support U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. We would be abandoning and betraying people like Ahmed Isa Fathil, who briefly joined the new Iraqi army and apparently was captured and tortured by terrorists (I can't bring myself to call them "insurgents" - it's much too anodyne a name for these torturers and murderers). I'm just sad and angry that our administration has screwed things up so badly in Iraq.

As Kevin Drum says, "This [Gov. Bush's insisting on keeping the Schiavo case open], though, simply beggars the imagination. What kind of human being would keep a vendetta like this alive at this point?"

When I read this in yesterday's New York Times, Gov. Bush Seeks Another Inquiry in Schiavo Case, I was astonished and disgusted. Has Jeb Bush no shame at all? He writes in a letter to the Times yesterday: "The New York Times's grotesque and chilling disrespect for the sanctity of life has never been more apparent than in your June 16 editorial 'Autopsy on the Schiavo Tragedy.'" Does he really think that the New York Times, which opposed the Iraq War, opposes the death penalty, and speaks out for those being murdered in Darfur, Sudan actually disrespects "the sanctity of life"? He goes on to write: "Terri Schiavo was a deeply loved daughter, wife, sister and friend. The fact that her brain was atrophied or that she was blind or could not have been rehabilitated doesn't change that fact. While many medical professionals said she was in a persistent vegetative state, still other highly respected neurologists said there was a chance that she was not." Which highly respected neurologiests? Sen. Frist? Anybody who had actually examined her? He finishes by saying, "Despite claims of cynicism and being "\'agenda-driven,' we will continue to strive to protect our most vulnerable citizens. All innocent human life is precious, and government has a duty to protect the weak, the disabled and the vulnerable." What a hypocrite. This is the so-called culture of life? I'm really disgusted.

Last night I went with friends to see a new Israeli movie - Walk on water. It's a story about a Mossad agent whose mission is first to find out if an old Nazi war criminal is still alive, by befriending his grandson who is visiting his sister who is volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel, and then when he discovers that the old man is still alive, to follow the grandson back to Germany to find the war criminal. The grandson is gay, and the sister is estranged from her parents because of their accepting attitude toward her grandfather. I won't reveal the climax because it's rather surprising. I thought the movie was very well made - perhaps the best made of the Israeli movies I've seen. The acting was top-notch, especially the portrayal of the Mossad agent, Eyal - a paradigmatic stoical Israeli man, whose brittle veneer is broken down completely by the end of the film. The gay grandson was also portrayed very well, and there was a fun and revealing look at the gay male culture in Israel. The ending was somewhat pat, but didn't detract from the rest of the film. I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

Steven Fine's new book, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World, has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

From the publisher's description: "Art and Judaism explores the Jewish experience with art during the Greco-Roman period - from the Hellenistic period through the rise of Islam. It starts with the premise that Jewish art in antiquity was a ‘minority’ or ‘ethnic’ art and surveys ways that Jews fully participated in, transformed, and at times rejected the art of their general environment. It focuses upon the politics of identity during the Greco-Roman period, even as it discusses ways that modern identity issues have sometimes distorted and at other times refined scholarly discussion of ancient Jewish material culture."

It sounds like a really interesting book, worthwhile for anyone interested in ancient Jewish art and archaeology. I hope that it might be of some use to me in my current research on the Babylonian incantation bowls (I'm currently writing an article tentatively called "Image and Word: Performative Ritual and Material Culture in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls," a revision of two papers given in the last two years at the Association for Jewish Studies meetings). One of the problems that always concerns me in dealing with the bowls is the question of the relationship between literary sources and material remains. Are they talking about the same thing? Do they give evidence for the same aspects of late Sassanian/early Islamic culture in Iraq? What is the relationship between unequivocally Jewish sources like the Babylonian Talmud and the incantation bowls, which clearly display a pluralism of cultural markers? What do the bowls tell us about cultural/ethnic/religious identity at that time in late antique Iraq? Steve Fine's book deals with the Greco-Roman world, but some of the same intellectual problems would arise there also.

In this Autopsy on the Schiavo Tragedy, the New York Times editorial page points out that "The autopsy results released yesterday should embarrass all the opportunistic politicians and agenda-driven agitators who meddled in Terri Schiavo's right-to-die case. There is no evidence that Ms. Schiavo's husband did any of the awful things attributed to him, and no hope that her greatly damaged brain would ever have recovered. The courts were right to conclude that she should be allowed to die after 15 years in what her doctors described as a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery."

When I was reading about the autopsy yesterday, it made me wonder if Terry Schiavo had actually even been alive before the feeding tube was removed. If her brain was half the size it should have been, and if she could survive only with the feeding tube - why do we call this "being alive"? Some of her body was alive, but not any of the higher centers of the brain, and not some of the lower centers of the brain. Why were people so eager to keep her in this state of existence?

Transience

A friend of mine just started up a blog - Quicksilver - that has as its framework a commentary on the daf yomi - the daily reading of one page of the Talmud. His commentary is very interesting, touching on many issues of the day as well as the Talmudic back-and-forth. His latest post addresses the question of "What causes cancer?" Since I've had many friends and relatives succumb to cancer, this question is of concern to me also.

What causes cancer? Why do these people get those cancers? For half a century, such questions have nagged us. The search for explanation. In the 1950s, we asked, does smoking cause cancer? Later: are there synergistic factors? (E.g., tobacco and asbestos combined.) What about pesticides? Are there cancer “hotspots” caused by hazardous waste sites? We seem to be straddling scientific research and a political / culture war. I suspect many of us gravitate to one pole, e.g. cancer is caused or facilitated by diet and lifestyle, or by toxic pollution, or by our genetic inheritance. But we are all far from able to explain the decline or rise of particular types of cancer.

I wish we could figure out what causes various cancers, and learn how to stop them. It's such an evil disease to die of. (I know, how can a disease be "evil"? "Evil" is a human category, our way of judging the morality of human actions. But still, cancer feels evil to me - especially when a friend is suddenly stricken with cancer and dies a horrible death).

Yesterday evening I took a bicycle ride over to Ithaca Falls, one of our local waterfalls (in the city of Ithaca alone there are two waterfalls - Ithaca Falls and Cascadilla Falls). The whole area of the falls looks like it was scoured out by last winter's heavy snow and cold. The path of Fall Creek flowing from the falls towards Cayuga Lake has shifted. And instead of soil and plants & trees growing from the bank, it's now mostly big and little stones. The pool just under the falls appears to be bigger also, and yesterday a family was swimming there. As I walked back from the falls to my bicycle, I couldn't help but think about the transience of life, how ephemeral human life (and everything else) is. The Fall Creek neighborhood, where I live, is built on the flood plain for Ithaca Falls. Floods are now mostly contained by various measures, so only some people this winter had their basements fill with water - but what about in a hundred years? Will the neighborhood even exist? My house was built in 1870 - will it make it another hundred years?

I just got an e-mail from Macher Search telling me that they have indexed my blog. Quoting from the e-mail: "MacherSearch is a search engine that gives users the opportunity to search through thousands of Jewish and Israeli Sites websites with just one click, and search blogs, the news, and the web-at-large as well." I'll have to check it out and see how well it works.

This is a cool story from Israel that has nothing to do with the current conflict - After 2,000 Years, a Seed From Ancient Judea Sprouts.

Israeli doctors and scientists have succeeded in germinating a date seed nearly 2,000 years old. The seed, nicknamed Methuselah, was taken from an excavation at Masada, the cliff fortress where, in A.D. 73, 960 Jewish zealots died by their own hand, rather than surrender to a Roman assault. The point is to find out what was so exceptional about the original date palm of Judea, much praised in the Bible and the Koran for its shade, food, beauty and medicinal qualities, but long ago destroyed by the crusaders.

"The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree," says Psalm 92. "They shall still bring forth fruit in old age. They shall be fat and flourishing."

Well, we'll see. Dr. Sarah Sallon, who runs a project on medicinal plants of the Middle East, notes that the date palm in ancient times symbolized the tree of life. But Dr. Elaine Solowey, who germinated the seed and is growing it in quarantine, says plants grown from ancient seeds "usually keel over and die soon," having used most of their nutrients in remaining alive.

The plant is now 11.8 inches tall and has produced seven leaves, one of which was removed for DNA testing.

Well, let's hope this one doesn't keel over!

Some rather strange searches recently directed people to my blog:

freemasons in amman (?!)
yentl subtitle hebrew
new york in the summer

and a couple of sad ones:

Janjaweed
pictures about famine in Darfur

And on the note of "New York in the summer" - I think I was probably writing about New York City in the summer, but it's been plenty hot here in Ithaca, New York too. On the other hand, it does mean that the vegetables are growing fast. The roses are blooming (and the Japanese beetles haven't yet arrived), as are the snapdragons (which reseeded themselves), AND the chives (the first plant to come back after the snow melted). My peonies have already finished blooming (and the blossoms were blown away in last Monday's thunderstorm), but other people's are still blooming away. The daylilies are starting to bloom.

I guess it's summer!

Thank you DovBear (Still fuming...) for fisking Toby Katz's horrendous comments about why the Holocaust occurred.

She said (in a comment thread): "Jews tried to leave Judaism but G-d reminded them that He does not allow that. When we try, there are fearful consequences, spelled out in the Torah. The same Torah also promises that our enemies will never be able to destroy us, that we are an eternal people. Individuals die but Klal Yisrael does not die." In a further comment in the same thread, she redoubled her obnoxiousness: "I don't understand those of you who claim to be orthodox & yet attack someone so vehemently for saying that the reform was a major factor in the Holocaust. The Torah at the end of Vakikra & Devorim say clearly that if the Jewish people don't follow the Torah they will be punished with terrible punishments. When the Second Temple was destroyed Chazal gave reasons to explain which sins were the primary cause. Likewise when Betar was destroyed. I think the same was done through out the generations when tragedy struck the Jewish people. In all of those tragedies the good & bad were punished together but that did not stop the Rabbis from attempting to attribute what sins were the primary cause of our punishment. If not following the Torah is the cause of our punishments, is it not logical that the reform movement should be on the top of that list? Certainly religious Jews were not perfect & I'm sure that they too contributed to the punishment, but the point remains that those who abandoned the Torah the most are the most culpable for G-d's decision in decreeing or allowing(per R' Berkovitz) the Holocaust."

Until I had read this discussion on DovBear, I didn't realize that this nonsense was still being propagated in Orthodox (or ultra-Orthodox) circles. When will Jews stop blaming other Jews for the Holocaust? How about blaming the true perpetrators, the Nazis, and their collaborators?

A good response comes from Cara, who replied to her: "Toby- Most of my mother's family was killed in Germany during the Holocaust. None lived in Berlin. Of those who survived and came to America, only my mother's children (and some distant cousins in NY) are still frum. Given my family background, I don't know what pains me more: to read the dreck you just wrote about how certain you are with regards to the reasons why the Holocaust happened the way it did, or to know that you believe what you wrote."

Nicholas Kristof again calls us to pay attention to the genocide in Darfur - Uncover Your Eyes: "Mr. Bush values a frozen embryo. But he hasn't mustered much compassion for an entire population of terrorized widows and orphans. And he is cementing in place the very hopelessness he dreads, by continuing to avert his eyes from the first genocide of the 21st century."

In this article he outlines ways in which the African Union troops, plus international aid groups, have actually saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Darfur. If we could just muster the political will to give real support to the African Union mission, perhaps we could end the genocide - if we would just pay attention...

The ADL executive board met with the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, and: Air Force Academy Chief Admits School Bias.

The superintendent of the Air Force Academy acknowledged to leaders of a national Jewish group Friday that religious intolerance permeates the military school.

"As a commander, I know I have problems in my cadet wing," Lt. Gen. John Rosa said at a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League's executive committee. "I have issues in my staff, and I have issues in my faculty - and that's my whole organization."

He said he admonished the academy's No. 2 commander, Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, a born-again Christian, for sending an e-mail promoting National Prayer Day....

Rosa said he has spoken with academy critics and agrees with many of their complaints. He said he didn't learn of a Yale University memo issued last year on religious intolerance at the school near Colorado Springs until much later.

I have to admit I don't understand why he didn't know about the Yale Divinity School memo - isn't he running the school? Shouldn't he know about these things?

Mikey Weinstein said that "We need new leadership at the Air Force Academy." We certainly do! And especially leadership that pays attention to whether certain cadets are being discriminated against for their religion.

A new AP poll shows that the U.S. is the most religious nation among several surveyed, and the one where the most people are willing to countenance clergy interference in politics: Religious Devotion High in U.S.

Religious devotion sets the United States apart from some of its closest allies. Americans profess unquestioning belief in God and are far more willing to mix faith and politics than people in other countries, AP-Ipsos polling found.

In Western Europe, where Pope Benedict XVI complains that growing secularism has left churches unfilled on Sundays, people are the least devout among the 10 countries surveyed for The Associated Press by Ipsos. Only Mexicans come close to Americans in embracing faith, the poll found. But unlike Americans, Mexicans strongly object to clergy lobbying lawmakers, in line with the nation's historical opposition to church influence....

The polling was conducted in May in the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, South Korea and Spain.

Nearly all U.S. respondents said faith is important to them and only 2 percent said they do not believe in God. Almost 40 percent said religious leaders should try to sway policymakers, notably higher than in other countries. "Our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian policies and religious leaders have an obligation to speak out on public policy, otherwise they're wimps," said David Black, a retiree from Osborne, Pa., who agreed to be interviewed after he was polled.

In contrast, 85 percent of French object to clergy activism - the strongest opposition of any nation surveyed. France has strict curbs on public religious expression and, according to the poll, 19 percent are atheists. South Korea is the only other nation with that high a percentage of nonbelievers [my suspicion is that this number may include non-theistic Buddhists who would be considered religious by other measures - RL]....

But even in Italy, home to the Catholic Church, resistance to religious engagement in politics is evident. Only three in 10 think the clergy should try to influence government decisions; a lower percentage in Spain, Germany and England said the same...

The poll found Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to think clergy should try to influence government decisions - a sign of the challenges ahead for Democrats as they attempt to reach out to more religious voters.

It seems to me that there is a direct connection between my previous posting and this poll. It would be interesting to see a more nuanced poll - who are, exactly, the 40% of Americans who think that clergy should try to sway politicians? I imagine this number doesn't include very many Jews, and probably a lot of evangelical Christians and some Catholics.

This article in Haaretz, I Want You for the U.S. Air Force (but you'd better believe in Jesus), details the series of abuses at the Air Force Academy, where evangelical Christianity appears to have become the official religion. Mikey Weinstein, who served in Reagan's White House, and whose younger son is now at the academy, initiated a public campaign, which has "exposed an intentional policy going back several years of religious guidance from above, active encouragement of Christian evangelism by senior officers and prejudicial discrimination against members of other religions. Hundreds of families have approached Weinstein, and to date 117 people have filed official complaints through him. Only eight are Jews. The majority are Christians who feel persecuted by the policy of promoting evangelical Christianity on an institutional basis while employing the power of military authority." Congress has refused to do anything about this, and in fact when the issue was brought up in a Congressional committee, criticisms of the academy's bias against non-evangelicals were turned into complaints by Republican congressmen of anti-Christian bias (surely a new definition of what the word "chutzpah" means!).

And what is the Air Force Academy doing about this? "Last Friday, USAFA Superintendent Lieutenant-General John Rosa met with Anti-Defamation League activists, and for the first time admitted to them that there was a problem at the base. He said he is losing sleep over it, but noted that it might take up to six years to correct." It doesn't sound to me like he's losing very much sleep over it!

If Jews and non-evangelical Christians are being harassed in this way, just imagine how Muslim cadets might be treated there - if there are any who dare to apply. It's becoming clear that at least some of the people who are fighting the war on terror do think that it's a religious war - evangelical Christianity vs. everyone else.

And yet another excellent op-ed essay by Anne Applebaum, about Democracy Under The Veil, in the Islamic world.

Hooray for this Washington Post editorial ('American Gulag') condemning the head of Amnesty International's recent naming of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times." One does not have to admire what we have done there (or at Abu Ghraib or other U.S. detention facilities) to object to AI's false equivalence with the gulag of the Soviet Union. The Post editorial says:

But we draw the line at the use of the word "gulag" or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there - including new evidence of desecrating the Koran - have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai, the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The convenient left-wing orthodoxy, on the other hand, regards only the U.S. embargo of Cuba as unjust, without ever considering the lack of freedom, injustice, and oppression of the Cuban regime itself.

Now, I don't care about these people at all, but I do love this headline - Paris Hilton Engaged To Paris . She is now engaged to someone named Paris Latsis.

On another note, I just returned from a fun visit to New York City over the Memorial Day weekend. I went to the Jewish Museum and saw two exhibits - on the Jewish salon women (of the 18th-20th centuries), people like Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Gertrude Stein, and one on the art of Maurice Sendak, which was really fun. The weekend also included enjoyable Shabbat meals with friends, and a barbecue yesterday with more friends. I'm now back in Ithaca, where it appears that my grass grew several inches in my absence, where the peonies are now blooming, the lettuce is big enough to eat (planted a few weeks ago), and everything looks intensely green.

The Ithaca Journal devoted its entire editorial page today to responses to Sandy Wold's column two weeks ago. In their own editorial, they bravely argued for the value of free speech, invoking the names of Locke and Voltaire - but without considering the professional responsibility of a newspaper to edit articles responsibly. Sandy Wold apologized for her remarks, saying that:

Rather than defend or explain myself to my critics, I decided to listen and understand, and I was surprised to see how complacent I had become with my point of view. Reading letters that came from around the world, investigating their sources, discovering new ones, questioning my assumptions, and the assumptions of my sources, I had periodic moments of feeling duped. So I went back and studied my original sources and their sources so I could feel reaffirmed. Finally, I came across an example of a battle between Palestinians and Israelis that happened over 50 years ago. According to the media representation, the Palestinians were "massacred," and according to the Israeli source I read, the Israelis were acting in "self-defense." Apparently, the media left out the bigger picture, which was that the Israelis were being blockaded by the Palestinians and facing near starvation. Also, a Red Cross witness to the aftermath of the "massacre" only verified Palestinian gore. I believe that such series of misrepresentation, misunderstanding and media bias is common to all conflict. It is no wonder many of us feel so confused and unable to help.

I commend her for her willingness to listen to and think about the remarks people made to her - some of which were fairly hostile, judging from the Honest Reporting web site, which publicized her column to their subscribers. On the other hand, she does need to do more homework on the Arab-Israeli conflict. For example, in the quoted paragraph, what battle is she referring to? The siege of Jerusalem in 1948? And another quibble: over 50 years ago, when people referred to "Palestinians," they meant Palestinian Jews, not Palestinian Arabs. She should have used the term "Arabs." (With this comment, I'm not denying the existence of a Palestinian people today.)

The Journal also published many letters from people around the world who were outraged by Wold's comments - most of whom probably knew about her column from the story about it on the Honest Reporting web site, or perhaps from LGF.

A letter that I wrote also appeared in the print version of the newspaper, but for some reason doesn't seem to have made it onto the electronic version. This is the text:

I am writing in response to Sandy Wold’s article, “Mothers can make healing a priority,” published on Saturday, May 7, 2005. I identify as a “Zionist Jew,” and ally myself with the Jews who established the state of Israel, whom Sandy Wold condemns as having “occupied Palestinian land in the name of God and victimhood.” I’m not sure exactly where to start in response to her poorly thought-out and inflammatory remarks. The Zionist movement, which fought to establish first a Jewish homeland in Palestine and then an independent state, was founded in the late 1800s, long before the Holocaust. The founders of the state were predominantly secular Jews who wanted to establish a place where Jews could find refuge from anti-semitism in Europe and build their own modern Jewish culture. Far from “getting stuck in the victim role,” as Wold accuses “Zionist Jews” of having done, the Zionist movement very actively tried to solve the problems of Jewish life through the creation of their own national movement – a nationalist movement very akin to the Palestinian national movement, which in parallel to Zionism has the aim of creating a Palestinian state.

Wold also accuses Israel of “terrorist attacks and slaughter of the Palestinians” and says that anyone who criticizes Israel is “guilt-inflicted for the Holocaust without any regard for Palestinian suffering.” This statement minimalizes the suffering that Jews went through in the Holocaust and completely avoids mentioning the Israeli victims of Palestinian violence. Is it only Palestinians who suffer in the ongoing conflict? What of the many terrorist attacks inflicted upon Israeli civilians by Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades?

Wold seems to have taken sides in the ongoing conflict, squarely on the side of the Palestinians – but does this really advance the “self-healing” agenda that she argues for in her article? Isn’t it time for both Israelis and Palestinians (and their supporters in the United States) to recognize the complexity of the situation and admit that there is right in the claims, and the historical memory, of both sides? In my view, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should end, making it possible for a viable Palestinian state to be founded alongside Israel. This would not salve all wounds, but it would make a new beginning possible, where both peoples would suffer less than they have in the past, and perhaps begin the long process of reconciliation with each other.

My letter was also the only one written by someone living in Ithaca, who would read it in its paper form, rather than learning about it from an internet source. I'm disappointed that other people in Ithaca didn't feel motivated, or capable, of writing a response to her, but I am glad they published mine (and thus far I've only gotten positive responses to it).

In re the Newsweek story (now retracted) about a Koran being put into a toilet at Guantanomo Bay, the Washington Post reports that Desecration of Koran Had Been Reported Before. Perhaps Newsweek got the wrong story from their particular source, but it does seem to have corroboration from many other sources. Is such behavior a matter of policy - i.e., was it decided upon specifically in order to break the spirit of the detainees there? Or is this a by-product of the type of behavior we see at the U.S. Airforce Academy - evangelical Christian cadets, chaplains, and school administration harassing Jews and other, non-evangelical Christians by insulting them and saying that they "will burn in the fires of hell." Or perhaps a combination - they disrespect every other religion than their own, and decide specifically because of this disrespect to mistreat the inmates in this particular way? In either case, this is disgusting. Is this what we're coming to?

Haaretz reports that 5 Jews arrested for planning to attack the Temple Mount. Four of the men charged apparently were plotting to launch an anti-tank missile at the Temple Mount, while the other one was detained "over an alleged plan to fly a model aircraft fitted with a camera over the Mount and over Arab population areas as a provocation." All five men were released from detention. The intention seems to have been to provoke a renewed intifada and stall the planned disengagement from Gaza.

This is very scary - what I don't understand is why these people were released from detention. Surely, if they had been Palestinians threatening Jews, they would not be "freed with limitations," and not face charges "on the grounds that they had been unable to implement their plan and had decided not to carry it out." Doesn't that suggest that they might try to figure out some other way to implement their plans. The police and Shin Bet also said "there was not enough evidence to charge them." When has that stopped the police and Shin Bet when it comes to Palestinian threats to Israeli security?

The reactions by two right-wing MKs also strike me as very peculiar responses to the arrests:

In response to the reports, MK Uri Ariel (National Union) said, "This is a clear attempt to stain a loyal and law-abiding community struggling justly and fairly for its values."

The chairman of the National Union Knesset faction, Zvi Hendel, accused the Shin Bet of planting an agent provocateur, as it had done with Avishai Raviv prior to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Does Uriel really think that planning to lob an anti-tank missile at the Temple Mount is part of a "just struggle"? And what does Hendel mean by accusing the Shin Bet of planting an agent provocateur. Who is the provocateur in this case?

I certainly hope the Shin Bet is keeping an eye on these men and their associates!

Via DovBear, a despicable article by Pat Buchanan on Was World War II worth it? Apparently we (and the Brits) should have let Germany and the Soviet Union carve up eastern Europe between them - and as a bonus get rid of all those pesky Jews! Appeasement, 60 years on. And this man is still considered a serious person to listen to?

The Association for Jewish Studies today sent out a message to all its members protesting the British Association of University Teachers' boycott of Haifa and Bar Ilan Universities in Israel. This is the text:

The American Academy of Jewish Research, the oldest body of North American scholars of Jewish studies, and the Association for Jewish Studies, the learned society of academic Jewish studies, condemn the British Association of University Teachers’ decision to boycott two Israeli universities for their alleged complicity in governmental policies and their purported discrimination against a faculty member on political grounds. The boycott is an egregious assault on academic freedom and a woeful misreading of the role of Israeli academics and the Israeli university. Academics have an obligation to support the free exchange of ideas and to participate in international dialogue, not to shun and restrain them. Israeli universities are an important source of the robust discussion and critical evaluation of governmental policy that characterize Israeli society. It is indeed, ironic, and offensive, that in a world where many governments muzzle their faculties, and academic freedom is rare, the AUT should focus solely on Israeli universities, which have maintained academic freedom and diverse student and faculty communities under difficult circumstances. It is also distressing that in a world where, sadly, war and the killing of civilians are far too common only one country is singled out for ostracism.

The AUT has been ill-served by leaders who pushed through the motion without proper investigation of the “facts” on which the decision was purportedly based, and without open debate within the Association itself. Academics should govern ourselves according to the standards of fairness and free discussion we expect from the larger society.

We stand in solidarity with our fellow Israeli academics. We also welcome the criticism of the AUT decision by many British university administrators and by the Times of London as well as the planned reconsideration of the boycott by the AUT. We are confident that the AUT’s declaration of a boycott will be understood internationally to reflect less upon the reality of Israeli universities than upon the politicization of certain leaders of the British academic community. We call on academics throughout the world to refrain from participating in international conferences from which Israeli scholars have been banned.

Paula E. Hyman
American Association for Jewish Research

Sara R. Horowitz
Association for Jewish Studies

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) also issued a condemnation of the AUT's boycott.

Interestingly enough, LGF has now linked to Sandy Wold's article in Saturday's Ithaca Journal - A Mother's Day Antisemitic Rant.

My local newspaper published several articles today for Mother's Day. One, titled Mothers can make healing a priority, by Sandy Wold, launched into a vicious attack on Israel in the middle of discussing how to heal oneself from anger and hatred. The author makes an analogy between her own psychological struggles and war and fascism:

As I enter the fourth year of my healing focus, I now understand war on yet a deeper level. During a recent emotional storm, I saw myself revisiting an old wounded pattern of victimization and fought back with self-righteousness. I then felt the rage of fascism pass through me, which eventually dissipated and turned into squalls. The sun came out, and there was peace. (For some people this sequence can take years or a lifetime; I can do it now in just a few days.) And, finally, in the stillness, I was able to see beyond the illusion and the victim pattern I was playing out. From this place, I found clarity and self respect and was able to find a heart-centered solution to my problem.

What war and fascism have to do with the author's own personal struggles is not clear to me from this paragraph. It does seem, however, that she is very self-satisfied about her own psychological development - "I can do it now in just a few days," as opposed to those poor slobs whose "sequence can take years or a lifetime." It does seem like she's concerned about something she calls the "victim role" - and projects her concept onto the political level. She continues in a far more noxious vein:

Most people get stuck in the victim role, however. On the global scale, for example, Zionist Jews in Israel have occupied Palestinian land in the name of God and victimhood. If anyone criticizes Israel for their terrorist attacks and slaughter of the Palestinians, they are immediately labeled "anti-Semitic" and guilt-inflicted for the Holocaust without any regard for Palestinian suffering. In response, the United States and United Nations fall into a co-dependent behavior of acquiescence and collusion.

I'm not sure where to begin to criticize this. It strikes me as very odd that in the middle of an article about self-healing, she suddenly launches into an attack on Israel, and one that minimalizes the suffering that Jews went through at the hands of the Nazis. For her, Palestinian suffering trumps Jewish suffering - as if one has to make a choice between them! For her, it's Israel that is guilty of terrorism, not Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades. What of all the Israeli civilians killed by terrorist bombers? Is it only Palestinians who can really suffer? She also evinces no knowledge of the history of Israel or how and why it was established as a Jewish state in 1948. If she did, she would know that the founders of the state were predominantly secular Jews, and that the Zionist movement had been trying since the 1880s to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine - long before the Holocaust. (And she would also know that not all the Jews living in Israel now, or then, are or were Zionists - and that most of them arrived because they were fleeing a Europe that had tried to exterminate them or Arab countries that kicked them out after the establishment of Israel). Why did she drop this anti-Semitic paragraph into her article on self-healing? What is self-healing about that? (And her argument is anti-Semitic even though she tries to inoculate herself against such a charge).

I just read a beautiful post on Rachel Barenblat's blog on doing taharah - the ritual of preparing the dead for burial. One paragraph particularly struck me: on how the body was lovingly dressed in simple white garments, which eventually left it "a bundled white human-shaped figure: no features, no distinguishing marks, only legs and arms, a torso and a head, a small still white figure." I thought back to the movie on the concentration camps I saw earlier tonight - which depicted the bodies of the dead simply thrown naked into a pit without care or dignity. What a contrast to Rachel's calm, focused description of how the body of a person should be treated when the soul is no longer there.

Tonight I watched the Frontline program - Memory of the Camps, containing footage of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Austria, filmed soon after liberation. It was put together right after the war but not shown until 1985 by PBS. It is very chilling. It was made apparently to show to German civilians, to demonstrate to them what they and their government were responsible for doing. Some of the footage shows German civilians being shown through the camps, seeing the emaciated survivors, and the bodies of the dead; most it seemed watched stoicly but some began to weep. At Buchenwald German civilians see lampshades made of human skin and tattoos taken from prisoners' skin and tanned, one of the many stomach-turning scenes in the film. As of Thursday (which is Holocaust Remembrance Day), it will be possible to view the film online through the PBS web site. It has very graphic footage - don't have your children watch it!

It made me think of how Darfur will be memorialized if we do not succeed in stopping the genocide. I have recently seen, both on television (the Lehrer Report) and in the New York Times really unrealistically sunny reports on the possibility of peace coming to Darfur. The Lehrer Report piece underestimated the number already dead in Darfur. And tonight on the BBC news shown on our local PBS station after the Frontline show, there was a brief article about the Darfur children's pictures (which I already wrote about below) and how they might be used in the prosecutions at the International Criminal Court. The BBC reporter said that "100,000" have already been killed. Why are programs like this continuing to underestimate the number of the dead? Even Amy Goodman's show on Democracy Now (broadcast today), which discussed the disgusting ties between the American CIA and the Sudan Government's Mukhabarat (secret police/intelligence) underestimated the number of deaths. If the numbers are consistently underestimated like this, it leads to people of good will thinking that it's not such a big deal what's happening in Darfur, makes it easier to turn the page and ignore what's going on. These news reports should be using Eric Reeves' figures - almost 400,000 have died thus far, both of direct murder and from hunger and illness.

---------------------------------------
This coming week, the Darfur Action Group at Cornell will be showing documentaries on Darfur and having a panel discussion. If you're in the Ithaca area, please come!

DARFUR ACTION GROUP | CORNELL UNIVERSITY Presents...

"Documenting Darfur" Film Forum
Featuring the best video documentary and alternative media work about the ongoing genocide in the western Sudanese region of Darfur

Monday-Wednesday
May 9, 10 + 11 @ 5:00 pm
McGraw 165

ALSO: 11 May 2005 @ 8 pm (MG 165)
Distinguished professors will take part in a Panel Discussion about the documentaries and the ongoing crisis in Darfur

FREE ADMISSION - ALL ARE WELCOME - REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED

For more information contact asg29@cornell.edu.

If you want to visit my brother's blog, he's started blogging again about My Popular Music Tastes. His profile photo depicts my grandmother (holding my blogging brother), my mother, my other brother, and myself (at age 6? 8? I'm not sure).

For an excellent blog on issues of racism, voting fraud, and most recently, the shocking case of a 5-year old African-
American child handcuffed (!?) by police in Florida, see my friend Ben's blog, HungryBlues.

Rachel Barenblat (of Velveteen Rabbi) sent me a link to these heartbreaking drawings - Children’s Drawings from Darfur. These are drawings from children about what they saw and experienced when the Sudanese army soldiers and the Janjaweed invaded and destroyed their homes and villages. They were collected by Human Rights Watch workers sent to refugee camps in Chad.

Here is one of the images:

While cruising on the Ha'aretz web site, I found this hilarious guide to street Hebrew - The Hebrew they never taught you. I think that most of these words come from Army slang, Arabic, or Russian. I knew some of them but the more outre or more Army ones were less familiar. Ahla!

Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica.com has an extensive post on the Association of University Teachers' proposed boycott of three Israeli universities, quoting the proposals and criticizing them in much the same terms as Frances Raday's letter to the Guardian, which I quoted in a previous post. The amazing hypocrisy and anti-semitism of these proposals knows no bounds. If they are so exercised about human rights abuses, perhaps they should consider the repression in almost all Arab countries of political dissent, the prohibition of the open practice of any religion except Islam in Saudi Arabia, the exceptionally bloody war in Chechnya, etc. No, nothing is terrible except what is done by Israel (and probably by the U.S. as well).

Somehow, I knew this: Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says. Can we now stop with the hysteria about being fat? And note: this new study says that in 2000, in the United States, it is estimaged that 33,746 people died of health problems associated with being underweight, while 25,814 died of health problems associated with being overweight or obese.

The British Association of University Teachers is debating a motion to boycott three Israeli universities for their supposed support of Israeli government policies in the occupied territories. (See also Don't Boycott us, plead Israeli academics). Frances Raday, a distinguished Israeli professor of law at the Hebrew University and President of the Israel Association of Feminist and Gender Studies has published a letter on the Guardian's website protesting this attempt to ostracize Israeli academics. I received a copy of the letter because I'm on a Israeli feminist listserve. I thought it deserved more publicity and copy it here:

Open letter from Israeli feminist academics to their colleagues in England

Dear Colleagues,

We recently learned that the (British) Association of University Teachers, at its forthcoming council, is to debate a decision to boycott three Israeli universities for their alleged complicity with the Israeli government's policies on the Palestinian territories. Such a decision would reflect an assumption, widely shared by academics on the left (particularly in Europe), that Israel is a colonialist if not an apartheid state, which systematically and gratuitously violates the human rights of Palestinians both in the territories and in Israel. It is an attitude that stigmatises us Israelis as lepers, beyond the pale, not fit for human interaction. Israelis have become the one currently legitimate case for social exclusion in the eyes of those very people who are fighting social exclusion in all its forms.

Those of you who support the resolution will no doubt say to yourselves: 'but they (the Israelis) deserve it'. And the point of this letter is to ask you to question that rationalisation. The resolution is misguided on two grounds. First, it targets Israel in a disproportionate way. On a graded scale of evil intent, can it really be said that Israel is the worst offender in the world, deserving of the one and only boycott by left wing intellectuals? In condemning Israel, how many of England's academics have employed Karl Popper's empathy test? Would they like to change places with the Israeli population and have to deal with our problems: 60 years of mass immigration of refugee populations, a territory the size of Wales, 3 wars in which the State's survival was threatened, deaths from terrorism and suicide bombings relatively equivalent to recurrent 11th of September tragedies? Second, the resolution ostracises and silences the academic community - one of the most important sources of criticism and debate of the Israeli government's policies.

As feminist academics, many of us, too, are highly critical of our government's policy on occupation and settlement. In order to disseminate our work and our criticism, we need open channels of communication in the international academic community. Boycotts such as the one proposed, by undercutting the international and consequently the national status of the academic institutions within which we work, only weaken the ability of those institutions to serve as forums for the voicing of critical and alternative views - a role in which Israel's universities serve honorably.

Many of you surely have opposed the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. We wonder whether you are considering resigning from your University positions, refusing to lecture to English students and refusing to pay taxes to a government which uses them to kill Iraqis. To the best of our knowledge, the coalition forces have killed in the space of a year at least 5 times as many Iraqi civilians (16,000 as of October 2004, most of them women and children - BBC 29.10.04) as the Israelis have killed in the past 5 years of Intifada (3,574 according to the Palestinian Red Crescent - most of them Palestinian fighters, not civilians). And this - along with the preceding starvation of the Iraqi civilian population as a result of Western sanctions - was not preceded by any Iraqi attack on Britain's population, such as Israel's civilians have repeatedly suffered at the hands of organized Palestinian irregular fighters and suicide bombers; even the evidence of a potential threat of attack, on which Britain went to war, was flimsy and proved false. Is this perhaps a case of seeing "the speck that is in your brother's eye, but not the beam that is in your own eye?"

The academic community in Israel enjoys full academic freedom, as is clear from the wide divergence of views that emanate from it. The proposed boycott by British academics thus must be seen as an attempt to curtail academic freedom. We are convinced that our time as academics would be better spent not in ostracising and silencing other academics for the moral messiness in the world around us, but in encouraging research and exchange of information and ideas as to the most effective ways of rectifying it.

Frances Raday
President of the Israel Association of Feminist and Gender Studies,

Professor of Law
The College of Management Academic Studies
Lieberman Chair, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This kind of boycott is very injurious to Jewish Studies in particular, because we have close contact with Israeli colleagues all the time, and it would be very damaging to our continued collaboration if this kind of official boycott were declared.

As pointed out by Jim Davila at Paleojudaica, the Yeshiva University Museum Presents A Journey Through the Talmud's History. The exhibit will be up through August 2005.

I'm curious whether they deal also with the anti-Talmud slanders frequent among anti-Semitic writers, and now to be found online as well. (I'm thinking of Carol A. Valentine's website, where she has put up a good deal of the Soncino translation of the Talmud into English, following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Dilling's publication of those passages in her book "The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today." Dilling, a notorious anti-Semite, also published "The Plot Against Christianity"). (I'm not providing the links here because I don't want to have direct links from my site to hers!)

And I still wonder why the Soncino publishing company has not sued Valentine to force her to take down her site, since she's clearly violating their copyright.

Cardinal Ratzinger elected new Pope. We will see. Andrew Sullivan is very unhappy that Ratzinger is the new Pope, given Ratzinger's theological conservatism and role as enforcer of Catholic orthodoxy.

Here's the report from the IC student newspaper about yesterday's rally: Hundreds rally to 'Erase the Hate'. A detail that I got wrong from yesterday's posting - Emily Liu is the name of the president of Asian Culture Club.

And also, an important part of the rally I forgot to report on: before the rally started, a new rainbow flag was raised, along with a flag reading "Erase the Hate" with a rainbow fringe. As the Ithacan reported: "Freshman Taryn Michelitch announced that from 9 p.m. Thursday to 7 a.m. Friday, prism will hold a vigil underneath the flagpole to make sure the flag stays in the air."

To see some nice pictures of the rally, go to the "Erase the Hate" photo gallery.

Today's "Erase the Hate" rally was very exciting and hopeful. It was wonderful to see how well students organized the rally, how energetic they were, and how wide a coalition they had brought together to protest against the recent racist and homophobic acts on the Ithaca College campus. There were speakers from the African-Latino Society, including one young man very powerfully leading chants and energizing the crowd. Michelle Berry, the Ithaca Common Council member from the second ward, who also teaches at IC, gave a poetic and encouraging speech, as did Leslyn McBean Claybourn, one of the representatives on the Tompkins County Legislature. Amy Liu, from the Asian Culture Club, gave a powerful speech against racism. Representatives from prism, the student LGBT group, and from Created Equal, the gay-straight alliance, spoke very well. A student from Hillel spoke up about an incident that happened to her last semester, when a swastika was written on her door (an incident I hadn't heard about before). The student trustee (on the Board of Trustees), spoke out, as did the president of the student government, a gay man. There were many others as well. Peggy Williams, IC president, spoke very powerfully (I keep using that word, but it fits) against racism, homophobia, and other forms of xenophobia that destroy community - speaking directly and angrily to the perpetrators and telling them that there was no place in the IC community for hateful acts like these. She said that she wished she were speaking to them in her office and telling them directly what she thought of their acts. About 500 people came to the rally - mostly students, but also many staff and faculty, as well as deans and other administrators. I was very happy to see the seriousness of the student speakers (the president of the Caribbean Student Association was particularly eloquent) and their determination. Many people were wearing white t-shirts with slogans written on them, or holding up the student newspaper, which was published today - the entire back page was a very elegantly designed "Erase the Hate" poster.

I hope that the students remain active and involved, because I think that the administration is behind them, from the president on down, and that if they keep on pushing, there will be real change on this campus.

On the depressing notes of racism and indifference.... at my college this semester there have been several notable racist incidents that are finally giving rise to energetic student activism. Earlier in the semester, an African-American student was harassed in a elevator by a white student, who jumped up and down in the elevator, and when she asked him to stop, he called her a racist slur. A few weeks later, as an Asian-American student was walking past a group of white male students, they yelled at her and called her names. She had earlier been harassed in the same way when using the communal dorm kitchen. This past weekend, across the front doors of one of the residence halls, and on the door of the student convenience store, more racial slurs (anti-Black) were written in green and black marker. The same weekend, the gay pride flag was stolen from the flagpole (this is the third year that's happened). Tomorrow a coalition of student groups is sponsoring an "Erase the Hate" rally and march to protest against these racist actions. The school president, Peggy Williams, expressed her anger in a talk with the student government on Tuesday night. "'I just want to say that I’m so angry I could actually just spit, and you’re going hear it in my voice as I’m just ready to scream,' Williams said. 'I actually am someone who has not grown up with hate as part of my sense of sentiment, and at this point I’m ready to throw whoever these people are off the highest roof I can find on the Ithaca College campus.'" Williams also said in a notice sent to all faculty and staff that

I was outraged and deeply saddened when I heard that acts of bias have once again taken place on our campus. This past weekend, explicit and angry racist graffiti were found written in several locations around the Towers Concourse and the rainbow flag symbolizing gay pride was stolen from the “free speech” flagpole.

As I said at my all-College address on March 15, heinous actions of this type, obviously born of ignorance and intolerance, have no place in a community that values diversity. And let me assure you that we are such a community. All of us -- students, faculty, and staff members alike -- must feel free to pursue our education and our work in a nurturing and safe environment. I urge us to not let these acts tear us apart but instead to bring us together. While I truly believe that these actions are being carried out by a small fraction of our community, we are all responsible for working together to build a campus that accepts and embraces our diversity, individually and collectively.

Once again, I'd like to invite my readers (whoever you are!) to pay a visit to the Coalition for Darfur and to Passion of the Present in order to learn what's going on in Darfur. Passion of the Present posts many current stories and editorials on Darfur, while Coalition for Darfur often posts analyses. Both are attempting to raise awareness of the ongoing genocide in Darfur and arouse citizen activists to action.

I keep being struck by the similarities to world inaction during the Holocaust. We may know more than we knew then (although a lot was known by the U.S. & British governments), but we still occupy our time with useless conferences, useless statements by diplomats (see under: Kofi Annan, Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice), and general indifference. Somehow the Michael Jackson trial is more important. Terri Schiavo's death is more important. Reality TV shows are more important. Britney Spears' pregnancy is more important.

Do we want to spend our time ten years from now commemorating the tragic slaughter, rapes, death from starvation and disease, as we now commemorate the tragic slaughter in Rwanda in 1994 - or do we want to remember that finally the genocide was stopped by organized political action?

In this article, In a Judgmental World, She Was Ashamed of Getting Sick, the author writes about her mother who died of emphysema. She had been a heavy smoker, and felt shame about her death.

I wonder if this kind of shame is why lung cancer, or other lung diseases linked to smoking, gets far less public attention than other forms of cancer, like breast cancer and prostate cancer. It bothers me that when I tell people that my mother died of cancer, they often jump to the conclusion that it must have been breast cancer, even though far more people die every year of lung cancer than of breast cancer. And then when I tell them that it was lung cancer, they ask me if she was a smoker. Does it matter if she was a smoker? I wonder why people ask. Does it make them feel better somehow if the person was a smoker? Is it easier then to blame the person for her own death?

I ask too, when I hear that someone has lung cancer. Earlier this year, when a friend of mine died of lung cancer, I also wanted to know if he had been a smoker. It was disturbing to me - very disturbing - that he had not been a smoker. Since he wasn't a smoker, perhaps that meant that I - also not a smoker - might be vulnerable to lung cancer. It seems to me that being able to point to a definite cause - smoking - makes it easier for people to blame others who get lung cancer for their own illnesses, and simultaneously distance themselves from the sick person. It gives one a sense of having some control over one's death.

But should we gain this sense of control at the expense of shaming another human being? And what is more, what do we gain for ourselves by turning away from the fact that we will all die, from one thing or another, and that in the end, we don't have control over whether we will die?

Once again, Avi Shafran, the "Director of Public Affairs" of Agudath Israel, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group, tries to claim in this letter to the editor of the New York Times - Judaism and the Pope - that ultra-Orthodoxy is more than 3,000 years old, even though it, like the Reform movement, is a creation of the 19th century.

To the Editor:

A word of clarification regarding the contention of Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, that "our religious traditions led us to different conclusions" than Pope John Paul II's regarding gender roles, abortion and homosexuality ("People of All Faiths Recall Pope With Fondness," news article, April 4).

The religious tradition to which the rabbi referred is the less-than-200-year-old Reform theology.

Traditional Judaism, which is more than 3,000 years old and continues to be embraced by Orthodox Jews worldwide, is much closer on all those issues to the stances taken by John Paul II.

(Rabbi) Avi Shafran
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
New York, April 4, 2005

It continues to amaze me how spokesmen for ultra-Orthodoxy can continue to maintain, against the historical evidence, that Judaism has never had a pluralism of views on various controversial issues, and that the current views of ultra-Orthodox rabbis are the only correct Jewish ones. Shafran is correct that ultra-Orthodoxy and Reform differ on these issues - but he is incorrect to think that all of Jewish history corroborates his view of Judaism. If we were to step back 3,000 years, approximately to the time of the building of the First Temple, I think we would find a very different religion than the one practiced by Jews (of any stripe) today. (For one thing, of course, Jews no longer sacrifice animals as part of worship). If we stepped back 2,000 years we would find evidence of some synagogues where women were leaders (see Bernadette Brooten's work, "Women Leaders of the Ancient Synagogue"). If we stepped back a thousand years we would find Jews in the Middle East who rejected the authority of the Talmud and the midrash (the Karaites).

This scary story in Thursday's Haaretz tells about a "High alert amid warnings of Temple Mount attack."

The Shin Bet security service has raised the level of alert in Jerusalem amid indications that extremist Jews are planning to carry out an attack on the mosques of the Temple Mount, and on the basis of new intelligence has beefed up police and security around the site in the heart of the Old City....

Police on Wednesday announced plans to close the Temple Mount compound to Jews on Sunday, when a right-wing extremist group called Revava was planning to hold a mass rally there. Police fear the activists could clash with Muslim worshipers. Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra and Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi have approved an operational plan meant to prevent Revava activists from holding the event. Police will prevent Jews from ascending to the mount Sunday, and will work to prevent any friction between Jews and Muslims in the Old City's alleys. Jerusalem's police chief, Ilan Franco, announced several days ago that Revava activists would not be allowed to enter the Temple Mount compound. The statement came after reports in the Arab media expressed dismay at intentions of Israeli authorities to grant the right-wing activists permission to approach the compound, revered as holy by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Channel One reported Wednesday night that these security concerns have been made known to the political echelon. The radical rightists apparently aim to attack the mosques in the hope that will disrupt the execution of the disengagement plan.

The secret service created a ranking from 1-10 with 10 being the highest security risk. Three months ago, the Shin Bet was ranking the security threat at 7, meaning that "there are signs of planning for an attack," and that there are activists "talking about what to do and as soon as possible." Now, however, the ranking has moved to an 8 - and it is based on much more solid information.... A senior security source said recently that the mosques of the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram el Sharif, have become a "hot topic" among radicals, on the assumption that an attack on the mosques would shock the Muslim world, drag Israel into a new war and prevent the disengagement. The source defined the chances of the threat against the mount being actualized as greater than the threat to the prime minister's life, where the security risk remains stable at 6, largely because of the difficulty of protecting the mount....

Jim Davila at Paleojudaica has been following this story much more carefully than I. It does sound dangerous. Before Israel's pullout from the Sinai Peninsula in the early 1980s there were plots by an armed Jewish underground to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount. They were caught before they could do anything - I hope that the Shin Bet will manage to catch these folks too, this time around. (The 2002 Israeli movie Time of Favor dramatized this story, adding [of course] a romantic plot to spice things up).

Another great Op-Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof on Darfur - The Pope and Hypocrisy. As he says, "'Throughout the West, John Paul's witness reminded us of our obligation to build a culture of life in which the strong protect the weak,' Mr. Bush said. Well, what about that reminder? What kind of a 'culture of life' is it that allows us to shrug as Sudanese soldiers heave children onto bonfires?" Or that allows us to stand by as Sudanese soldiers rape girls and then imprison them for adultery when they get pregnant (after their families have thrown them out of their huts in the refugee camps)?

For two of my classes, I (and hopefully the students as well!) have been reading two fascinating new books - one by Arthur Green, Guide to the Zohar, and one by Harvey Goldberg, Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life.

The first one is assigned for my Jewish Mysticism class as an introduction to the Zohar. It is a beautifully, lyrically written induction into the Zohar, seducing the reader into loving the text of the Zohar as Green does. He explains the symbolism of the sefirot, traces the history of Kabbalah before the Zohar, and describes the midrashic and narrative techniques of the Zohar. I would recommend it for anyone who wants to know what the Zohar is. It was written as an introductory book to the new translation of the Zohar that Daniel Matt is doing (the Pritzker edition of the Zohar) but certainly stands very well alone.

The second one is an introduction to Jewish rituals of the life-cycle by an eminent Israeli anthropologist. It is also beautifully written and accessible to undergraduates. He traces the history of Jewish rituals (for example, circumcision), beginning with the Bible, going into rabbinic and medieval developments, and talks about how the ritual is practiced today. He explores the meaning of Jewish rituals within a wide range of Jewish cultures and brings in his own experiences as a Jewish ethnographer. He provides as well the relevant anthropological theoretical framework - for example, from Arthur van Gennep's Rites de Passage or from Victor Turner's The Ritual Process. He engages the material with a full awareness of his own personal role as an anthropologist/ethnographer. He is also admirably non-judgemental, thus allowing the reader to make up his or her own mind about the information he is providing.

Both of these books provide much information delivered in an effortless manner. I think they are challenging to undergraduates but ultimately very rewarding.

I cannot say the same of a book I used last semester for my Hebrew Scriptures course - John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. The book is marketed as an introductory Hebrew Bible textbook suitable both for undergraduate and graduate courses. I found that it was not appropriate for my 100-level course, which has many first and second-year students in it. They complained that it often assumed too much knowledge on the part of the reader. I agreed, and think it is much more appropriate for a introductory Bible course taught at a seminary, in other words for first-year graduate students who have probably already studied the Bible as undergraduates. In many respects it does not work very well as an introduction - for example, it would have been very helpful if each chapter had summarized the biblical book (or part of biblical book) that it dealt with and outlined the main points it was going to deal with. It was a good summary of contemporary scholarship on a given biblical book, but I found that more useful for preparation for my lectures, rather than for the students to read. In addition to these drawbacks for an undergraduate course, I objected to Collins' political slant that popped up at various points in the book, in particular what seemed to me to be his dragging in contemporary politics to the biblical text. I particularly objected to what he said about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but there were other tendentious political remarks that I also disliked. This aspect of the book seemed to embody what I often find obnoxious about liberal Christian academics' approach to politics.

Previous to using this book I used another introductory textbook, Reading the Old Testament, by Barry Bandstra, which was written at the right level for my undergraduates, but also had occasional superficial excursions into contemporary liberalism that I objected to. If the author of a textbook for undergraduates wants to introduce contemporary politics into the book, I think that he or she should somewhere in the book justify that importation of politics, rather than simply citing his or her political views as if they had the same authority as the scholarship that the book presents.

I just read the article in today's New York Times Magazine about the Dutch-Somali ex-Muslim member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and found it very disturbing for what it says about the relationship between liberalism and extremism. The author of the article, Christopher Caldwell, argues that it was Dutch liberalism that permitted the growth of an alienated Muslim immigrant population in the Netherlands that now includes many people who have embraced the ideology of Al Qaeda and militant Islamism.

Until recently, the Netherlands adhered to a national policy cumbersomely known as ''integration with maintenance of one's own identity.'' It arose partly out of unspoken guilt over the country's failure to save many Jews under German occupation during World War II and partly out of a modish multiculturalism. But letting ethnic communities go their own way also had a long history in the Netherlands. The ''Pacification'' of 1917 formalized a system in which different groups - Catholics, Protestants, secular citizens and others - lived in separate institutional universes, or ''pillars.'' A Catholic would typically attend a Catholic school, read a Catholic newspaper, join a Catholic trade union and social club and vote for a Catholic political party.

The system withered in the 1960's, but many Dutch clung to the hope that its virtues could be revived for an age of immigration. In the early 1990's, Frits Bolkestein, then the leader of the country's pro-free-market party, the VVD, warned in articles and speeches that they could not. He argued that certain identities, unlike the old Catholic and Protestant ones, would, if maintained, undermine the individual rights that are at the heart of the Dutch constitution. He cited the practice of bigamy, for instance. Where clashes occurred, Bolkestein insisted, Dutch norms must prevail. For this observation, he was condemned as a rightist and a racist. Today, most Dutch accept the validity of Bolkestein's critique, even if they can't agree on what to do about it.

Hirsi Ali says that it is not just militant Islam that is the problem - it is much of traditional Islam as well. She began to speak up after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: " She took the floor at a conference in an Amsterdam political club to say that what Islam needed was not understanding from others but its own Voltaire. The national daily Trouw had her write an op-ed on the matter. Asked her opinion of Pim Fortuyn's characterization of Islam as a 'backward religion,' Hirsi Ali replied that by certain measures, including the treatment of women, Fortuyn's statement was not an opinion but a fact."

Eventually, she and Theo van Gogh, an outrageous Dutch filmmaker, made a movie called "Submission" - "It presented four fictional episodes. All involved violence against women and the Koranic verses that had been, or could be, used to justify it. These verses were written on the skin of the actresses' seminaked bodies." Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist terrorist, and "Hirsi Ali says she felt guilt over van Gogh's death - guilt that van Gogh's mother publicly insisted was misplaced -- but she continues to reject any suggestion that the film they made was sensationalist, or gratuitous in its use of see-through clothing. 'Maybe Americans think, "This is a naked body,''' she says. 'But this body is why half the nation in Saudi Arabia is not allowed to drive.'''

The predicament of individual Muslim women has become a public concern in the Netherlands. In February, the daily Volkskrant ran an expose of widespread bigamy among Dutch Moroccans. Muslim views on virginity have led to other clashes. There are clinics that specialize in the surgical repair of broken hymens, a practice that was often covered by national insurance until the ministry of health blocked it last May. Genital mutilation, of the sort practiced on Hirsi Ali and 98 percent of girls in Somalia, has been illegal in Holland since 1993 but still occurs.

Hirsi Ali says of herself, "I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant,'' she says, ''while under their noses women are living like slaves.''

Hirsi Ali raises the question of whether a liberal society that values multiculturalism must accept all possible values in order to be tolerant. Are there certain liberal principles, such as the belief in the equality of human beings, or the emphasis on individual rights, that must override tolerance for the principles of other cultures? In the U.S., this has certainly been true. For example, Utah was only able to become a state when it outlawed polygamy, which had previously been permitted by the dominant Mormon church. If people come to the U.S. from countries where polygamous marriages are permitted, they can't continue to engage in polygamy here. The Supreme Court has generally upheld the ability to hold different religious beliefs, but frowned on accepting different religious practices that collided with the dominant Protestant model of what religion is - for example, not upholding the rights of Native Americans to eat peyote as part of a religious ritual. [My former colleague, Eric Mazur of Bucknell University, is the person who taught me this approach to religious freedom in the United States - see his recent book, Religion on Trial: How Supreme Court Trends Threaten Freedom of Conscience in America.]