I haven't said anything about the death of Ronald Reagan in this blog because, frankly, I voted against him twice and did not like most of his policies (although from the reading I've done this week about him I am becoming persuaded that he had a major role in the downfall of the Soviet Union, something which I am very grateful for). When he was stricken with Alzheimer's, however, I had great sympathy for him and his family. My grandmother died of Alzheimer's, and it is a horrible disease. Al-Muhajabah, a Muslim blogger whom I've referred to before, has a moving post about this:

I think that Reagan's passing must have been a mercy for him and for his family; his mind had already gone on to somewhere that nobody else could follow, and I've always felt that's a terribly sad way to end one's days. My grandmother, who's about the same age as Reagan was, doesn't have the specific Alzheimer's disease, but for her too, she's more gone than there. I think that one of the worst aspects would be to be aware of what's happened to you but unable to communicate it to anybody. I hope that Reagan had passed beyond that stage and my grandmother as well.

She has this useful suggestion:

To me, one of the best ways to honor Reagan's memory in a way that does also something good for others, is to donate for Alzheimer's research and care. The Alzheimer's Association is accepting donations in honor of Reagan and I encourage everybody who can spare some change to make a donation tomorrow on the day of mourning for Reagan. Whether you're a liberal or a conservative and whatever you think of his presidential legacy, he and his family have done a tremendous amount to help other victims of Alzheimer's and that's something we can all feel good about supporting. Thanks.

This story from the AP reports that Western Airliners May Be al-Qaida Target. But why o why does it persist in calling the al Qaida terrorists "militants," for example in this paragraph, "Militants have stepped up attacks on foreigners in Saudi Arabia in past weeks, most recently in a shooting Sunday that killed an Irish cameraman and wounded a British Broadcasting Corp. reporter." The article is willing to call al Qaida "the terror network," so wouldn't it make sense that those who belong to the "terror network" would be terrorists? And isn't the essence of terrorism to attack and kill civilians, as occurred in this latest attack? There's such a thing as being *too careful* in one's speech.

Once again, if you're interested in knowing more of what's going on in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, read the Religious Policeman and Mahmood's Den. I have been reading an interesting (but perhaps not very good) book on the entanglement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia by Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington sold our soul for Saudi crude. It's written rather in the style of a thriller, and doesn't go nearly into the depth I'd like into the history and social analysis of Saudi Arabia, but it's interesting as a first book to read on the U.S.-Saudi relationship. If anyone has some better recommendations on Saudi Arabia and the U.S. relationship with it, I'd like to take a look at them.

And now, a poem from a real poet, my friend Ben Greenberg -- Night and Day.

A poem I wrote in January, while visiting Jerusalem.

In the middle of life

Looking at myself in the mirror,
hair pulled back from my face,
wisps of hair flying out on the left –
a few strands of grey.
I look at the darker hollows under my eyes
the dark under my chin.

This body is so fragile.
What hidden in it now will kill me?
Or maybe my death will come from outside – not an illness,
heart, or lungs, or breasts,
but a fall down the stairs,
a broken hip,
a speeding car,
or something more violent –
a bullet
a bomb?

My mother died at age 48.
My aunt just died at 73.
Tobacco smoke seared their lungs.
The sacred leaf that the Indians smoked only at holy times
ended my mother’s life and her sister’s.

Now at this time of my life, age 47,
life seems so short to enjoy
between the parentheses of eternity
or of forgetfulness.

It’s commonplace to say it –
but when I was younger, life stretched out before me
into the indefinite future.
I didn’t see its end.
(Although when I was much younger, I didn’t think I’d survive 30;
underneath my daily life was always the thought: we will all die in the great conflagration. But we didn’t. Instead the Berlin Wall fell, and the bombers with their world-destroying weight stopped circling the earth).

Now I wonder how much more time is left to me?
Today I sat in Caffit
the table closest to the door
drank my cappuchino with katzefet and powdered chocolate,
ate my croissant with chocolate paste smeared in its middle
and wondered every time someone passed by –
is he a bomber coming with
the explosives bound around his belly?
like the one who came here before,
whose nerves and sweat betrayed him
before he had a chance to touch the detonator?

But that’s an old fear, death by violence –
more likely I think is the slow passage of time
and the illnesses it brings,
the dangers we carry around in our bodies every day,
the deadly freight of living.

Jerusalem, 12/28/03

I signed up with Zogby International (a well-known political polling organization) to answer polls whenever they sent them to me. (I can't remember how I got onto their web site -- I think it was ultimately from a blog). The first poll was rather boring -- market research, but today I got to participate in a political poll on the presidential campaign. From what I can tell from reading the site, my responses won't count into their regular tracking poll (for those, they make phone calls), but I appreciated being asked (although I wonder how they will use the results of this poll). I always feel frustrated when I read about political polls because I have, personally, never been called by one of them -- and unlike many people, I would be happy to answer the questions!

In response to my request for information about Orthodox blogs, I've received a few interesting replies. One reader recommended Joe Schick's blog, which I took a look at. As she commented, however, he talks more about Israeli politics than about the Orthodox world. Dreaming of S/Zion is written by a ba'al teshuvah haredi man who is now studying in yeshiva in Israel. Home Beis is written by another ba'al teshuvah studying at yeshiva in Jerusalem. MOChassid is written by a man who refers to himself as a "Modern Orthodox Chassid." My thanks to those who replied, and any more recommendations are welcomed.

This is a truly frightening article on what has happened to UC Berkeley in the last several years -- Berkeley Intifada: As students embrace the Palestinian cause, UC Berkeley has lost whatever reputation it may once have had for tolerance. The article details horrifying anti-semitic incidents and attitudes. (Via Gary Farber). I find this very disheartening as a Jewish academic. My institution has fortunately (thank God!) not been subjected to anything like what has happened at Berkeley. There is a variety of viewpoints about what should happen in the Israel-Palestinian conflict but people have generally (at least in my experience of the last three years) avoided making wildly offensive and inflammatory statements in public.

On the other hand, we haven't been entirely free of completely unnecessary and inflammatory political rhetoric on other issues. As I wrote about in this blog previously, earlier this year some students brought an exhibit to campus called the "Genocide Awareness Project" -- a series of big posters with pictures of aborted fetuses next to photographs of piles of bodies of victims of the Shoah, the World Trade Center burning, etc. In an article in the student newspaper they claimed that their intention was to promote dialogue on the issue of abortion, but of course this tactic merely polarized the discussion, and disgusted many people who were offended by their coopting of our emotions about the Holocaust, the September 11 terrorist attacks, etc. If there must discussions on campus about abortion, then please let them be rational. (I personally am not sure it's worth having discussions about abortion, because everyone's mind seems to be made up).

And here's a really interesting blog written by a woman from Bahrain now studying in Canada -- Reflections from Canada. She seems to know Mahmoud al-Yousif (of Mahmood's Den) as they frequently discuss back and forth in the comments. I must say that reading these blogs from the Arab world (the Religious Policeman, Mahmood's Den, and now this blog) really does give me hope for the future of the Middle East.

I just started reading Bloghead, another good new blog by a former guest blogger at Protocols, Miriam Shaviv.

I am curious to learn about more blogs by Orthodox/ ultra-Orthodox/ Hasidic Jews. I've stumbled across quite a few by journeying from other people's blogrolls (and I've highlighted some of them in my blog), but I'd like to find more. So if any of you, my readers, can point me in useful directions, please let me know via comments or e-mail. I'll post notices about the interesting blogs I find this way. (Oh, and by the way, I apparently misidentified Hasidic Rebbele's gender -- he is male, not female, as I originally thought. I think I was misled by my own unconscious prejudices -- he posts quite a lot about childrearing, which I must obviously have identified as primarily a woman's concern when trying to figure out the blogger's gender).

I'm visiting family and friends in the Boston area right now, and went (of course) to the Harvard Coop and spent a very pleasant afternoon browsing and reading. I came away with an interesting book by Victor Klemperer, a German Jewish writer who is best known for the publication of the diaries he kept during the Nazi era from 1933-1945: I will bear witness. His book on Nazi language has recently been translated into English under the title The Language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. The book was originally published in Germany in 1957, and translated and published in English in 2002 (presumably after the success of the English translation of the diaries). It has many amazing insights into the Nazi misuse of language and the way that such official misuse can simply enter into one's ordinary linguistic usage without even thinking. I'll post some examples when I get the chance.

Through Blogger, I found my way to another interesting blog, this one from Jerusalem: Jerusalem Wanderings, by a woman who immigrated to Israel from America, has five kids and is living the usual crazy Israeli life. One thing that caught my eye was her mention of Emek Refaim, my favorite street in Jerusalem.

An amazing story about seven Iraqis, former prisoners under Saddam Hussein whose hands were amputated in Abu Ghraib prison -- For Seven Iraqis, A Vital Part of Life Is Restored). One of the seven men says,

Al Fadhly said that, after a year in hellish prisons and five months in Abu Ghraib, he was almost relieved when he heard he and the eight other merchants were going to be freed after having their hands amputated. "We were the lucky ones," Al Fadhly said. "Others stayed in prison much longer. Thirty thousand in Abu Ghraib went to the hangman's noose." Their trial lasted 30 minutes. Al Fadhly said all nine men believe they were scapegoated by Hussein because his economy was collapsing after the Persian Gulf War, and U.S. currency was anathema to him. Two weeks after the men lost their hands, they said, the law banning trade in foreign currency was thrown out. Hussein had the nine hands brought to him, to be sure the sentence was carried out, said Farhad Taha, an attending physician at the amputations who was later interviewed by Al Fadhly, who now works for the media network.

Amnesty International estimates that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Iraqis had their hands amputated for similar crimes.

What American soldiers did in Abu Ghraib to Iraqi prisoners was horrible and disgusting -- but nonetheless Iraqis have been freed from a monstrous regime.

Hmm. According to U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina), it's Israel's and the Jews' fault that the U.S. invaded Iraq -- Bush's failed Mideast policy is creating more terrorism. And who are the Jews to blame? Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Defense Secretary), Richard Perle (former assistant sec'y of defense under President Reagan, former chair of the Defense Policy Board), and Charles Krauthammer. Wow, that gives a lot of power to one conservative Jewish newspaper columnist! Funny that Senator Hollings picks out the Jewish names and doesn't refer to more obvious (and more powerful) non-Jewish figures -- Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, both of whom were also eager to invade Iraq. On this topic, see also, Not so gentle rhetoric from the gentleman from South Carolina.

Well, here's where Hollings digs himself in even deeper -- Sen. Hollings' Floor Statement Setting the Record Straight on his Mideast Newspaper Column. Here's a truly bizarre part of his statement: "The papers are the ones that pointed out Wolfowitz, Pearle, and Charles Krauthammer were of the Jewish faith. They are the ones who brought all this Semitism in there." I must say, I haven't read the word "Semitism" standing on its own since the news a year or so back about the conference on "Semitism" held at the (now defunct) Zayed Center.

It's not bad enough that American bombs destroyed a wedding party in Iraq , not a "safehouse for foreign fighters," but we also have to lie about it in the face of clear contrary evidence? What have we become? And the evidence keeps coming in that it was not just army reservists who humiliated and abused Iraqi prisoners on their own, but that there were orders from military intelligence to behave in disgusting ways towards prisoners -- and yet people are still blaming only those reservists.

More interesting blogs that I've recently been reading: Heimishtown, subtitled, "Thoughts, rants, and other junk from a veibel on the net," by an Orthodox woman. Her most recent posting is on the current controversy over human hair sheitels (wigs) from India that many Orthodox women wear, which may contravene the prohibition against benefiting from idolatry (the hair may be cut as part of a Hindu ritual). (For more information, see the New York Times on this topic: "Rabbis' Rules and Indian Wigs Stir Crisis in Orthodox Brooklyn." A follow-up article tells about burning the wigs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: "Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn Burn Banned Wigs."

Hasidic Rebbele is also from an Orthodox woman (I think), who also addresses the sheitel question. The Shaigetz - Doing it maai vey, from an Orthodox man in Britain, also addresses the sheitel controversy, this time from a man's perspective. Hirhurim - Musings is a blog from an Orthodox rabbi on various halakhic questions, who also discusses the sheitel issue.

More new and interesting blogs -- veiled4allah, by a Muslim woman who, among other things, has an ad for a Muslim site called Hug a Jew. She argues for the use of nonviolent tactics by Palestinians and talks about her own life as a Muslim paralegal, and many other things as well. One incident she reported on was quite disturbing -- when she was entering a building for a job interview, a woman passing harassed her. "Annoyingly, as I was coming up to the building, this woman passing by looked at me and said loudly 'Shame on you'. How rude."

I got to the veiled4allah site from the Velveteen Rabbi's blogroll. Velveteen Rabbi's latest posting is about gay marriage and the interpretation of Leviticus 18:22 -- how to interpret it in such a way as not to condemn gay relationships and sexuality. Well worth reading.

The other new blog that I've started reading is Baraita who writes in a very amusing way about Jewish and academic life. I don't know where she teaches -- she calls her place of employment "Boondoggle University" and the synagogues she goes to "Temple Boondoggle" (Reform) and "Congregation Beth Boondoggle" (Conservative).

More torture in the middle east, this time in Saudi Arabia, via 60 Minutes last week -- Saudi Justice?. This is an account of several westerners accused falsely of setting off car bombs in Saudi Arabia, who were tortured and falsely confessed. Only when Al Qaeda attacked western compounds in Riyadh last summer were the Saudi authorities willing to admit that it was not westerners who were the attacker, it was their fellow Saudis. More details in The Strange Saga of the Booze Bombers by the Religious Policeman, a dissident Saudi.

Go to the Genocide Watch web site to learn more about what is going on both in Darfur, Sudan, and in Ethiopia, where another group of people is being exterminated by its own government while no one else is watching -- the Anuak, since at least the early 1980s (I had never heard about this). As their web page on the international campaign to end genocide says, "'Never again' has turned into 'Again and again.' Again and again, the response to genocide has been too little and too late."