May 2008

Most members of the Jewish community are familiar with the Taglit-Birthright programs that offer young American Jews an opportunity to visit Israel for 10 days at no cost. This summer, Birthright is set to register its 200,000 participant on its now famous trips. Two writers at Columbia University have taken a needed pause to evaluate Birthright’s impact on the American Jewish community in the last ten years. The first piece, written by Jordan Hirsch, appears in the latest issue of PresenTense Magazine. Hirsch deftly captures Birthright’s impact on Israel programming in the U.S. and concludes with the modest (and perhaps obvious) suggestion that for Birthright to continue to succeed it must enlarge its network, and strengthen the ties not only between its alumni, but also between those alumni and their Jewish communities. The second piece, by Avi Herring, appears in the latest issue of The Columbia Current, and takes a closer look at Birthright’s program and its effectiveness. Herring’s main argument is that where Birthright truly fails is its inability to advance a compelling reason to its participants to remain part of the Jewish community in the first place. Herring carefully points out that at not quite ten-years-old, Birthright’s level of success may only become clear once its “alumni start to marry, having children, and raise families.”

One thing is clear: Birthright is a phenomenon that has already left its mark on American Jewish communities across the country, and as such, is a worthy topic of discussion for these and other writers.

…in Latin, or the Hoopoe in English. Duchifat in Hebrew. In any case, this bird today takes its place next to the Menora, the Magen David and the sabra fruit as the most recent symbol of Israel. Yes, that’s right, Israel now has a national bird. And that bird has a mohawk.

On the one hand, this bird appears in Tanach, making it Jewish. On the other, it appears as one of the non-kosher birds listed Vayikra. I think Israel could have probably done a better job in determining which bird would be the national icon. Instead, they threw it open to popular vote, coordinated through mass media. The naming of a national bird was part of Israel’s 60th birthday.

Just for fun, match the country to its national bird:

1. Australia, 2. Canada, 3. India, 4. Jordan, 5. New Zealand, 6. Philippines, 7. Thailand, 8. USA

A. Peacock B. Siamese Fireback Pheasant, C. Sinai Rosefinch, D. Emu, E. Kiwi, F. Common Loon, G. Monkey Eating Eagle, H. Bald Eagle

1D 2F 3A 4C 5E 6G 7B 8H

Lots of fun stuff going on around Israel as we move closer to summer.

Today marks the beginning of one of my favorite times of the year, Israeli Book Week. Israelis love to read, and this is a great time to check out the new titles out this year and practice your Hebrew, or browse the dozens of publishing houses and pick out a book you’ve had your eye on at a great discount. I also usually buy my niece a children’s book for her birthday next month. This event is happening in Jerusalem, Haifa, Herzelia, Netanya, Rishon L’Tzion, Petach Tikva, Tel Aviv, Be’er Sheva, Kfar Saba, Ramat Gan, Cholon and Modi’in between now and June 7th, with day events in various other cities as well. The first book festival was held in 1926 in Tel Aviv, and this has been an annual, national event since 1961.

This week has also been marked by the Tel Aviv food festival, Snacks in the City. It is running until tomorrow night. From Haaretz:

“Stalls from over 100 restaurants will sell a choice of dishes at very reasonable prices that will give visitors the opportunity to discover the wide range of flavors available and redefine their perceptions of food. “

Also occurring, from this week through the 22nd of June, is the Israel Festival. Every day there are great cultural events to attend. Today, for example, there is a Songs of Cinema concert at the Sultan’s Pool in Jerusalem. Just the music acts alone look fantastic, but there are also dance troops and theater performance as well.

On June 1, to celebrate Jerusalem Day, there is going to be an art exhibit in Mamilla called Israel Draws Jerusalem. The exhibit will be up the whole month of June. This will be one of the many events happening on Jerusalem Day to mark the capture of all of Jerusalem during the Six Day War.

These are just a few of the many things going on in Israel. All summer long there are going to be many more festivals. This is one of the reasons it’s so nice to be in Israel during this time of year.

For people who are blind, dealing with money can be very problematic. Without special indicators that help them differentiate between - let’s say - a twenty and a one, it can be very easy to make a mistake and be cheated out of money. Some countries have taken steps to alleviate this problem. Euros, for example, are different sizes depending on the denomination. However, the United States Dollar has no marking of any kind on it to aid the blind. This might be changing, though. From the NY Times:

“On Tuesday, a federal appeals court panel in Washington upheld a lower court ruling that said the government discriminated against the blind or partly blind by making its paper money all the same size and texture. Under the ruling, which may be appealed, the Treasury Department may need to redesign its bills, and vending machines may need to be refitted to accommodate new currency.”

I was all set to write about how Israeli currency needs to also accomodate the blind, when a friend of mine pointed out that it already does. At the top left of NIS notes, there are vertical lines in intaglio ink that are slightly raised. The twenty has two vertical lines, the fifty has three vertical lines, the hundred has one horizontal line and the two-hundred has two horizontal lines. In fact, even the old series of New Israeli Shekels had a sign for the blind. Even the OLD Israeli Shekel did. In fact, Israeli currency has been accessible to the blind since 1975, when the fourth series of the Israeli Pound was issued.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I acknowledged that Senator Barack Obama, now the likely Democratic nominee for President, has generally been supportive of Israel and has a solid voting record during his four year tenure in the U.S. Senate. I expressed deep reservations, however, about his choice of foreign policy advisers, specifically Robert Malley and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both of whom are stridently anti-Israel and have a history of blaming all the ills of the Middle East on Israel in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Even more worrisome is Obama campaign co-chair and chief military adviser, General Merrill “Tony” McPeak. Writing about McPeak in the conservative American Spectator Robert Goldberg describes the General’s views:

He also has a penchant for bashing Israel or, more particularly, Jews who oppose negotiating with terrorists.

McPeak has a long history of criticizing Israel for not going back to the 1967 borders as part of any peace agreement with Arab states. In 1976 McPeak wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine questioning Israel’s insistence on holding on to the Golan Heights and parts of the West Bank.

In a 2003 interview in The Oregonian newspaper, when asked why efforts at peacemaking between Palestinians and Israel have failed McPeak had the audacity (to borrow Obama’s favorite term) to blame it on American Jewry. Asked where the problem lies, McPeak responded:

New York City. Miami. We have a large vote - vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.

McPeak also blames Jewish and Christian Zionists of manipulating U.S. policy in Iraq:

Let’s say that one of your abiding concerns is the security of Israel as opposed to a purely American self-interest, then it would make sense to build a dozen or so bases in Iraq.

While Senator Obama has recently started distancing himself from Zbigniew Brzezinski and has clearly staed that he disagrees with Brzezinski on Israel he has made no similar statements about McPeak. Quite the contrary. In the run up to Tuesday’s Oregon primary television commercials with Obama and McPeak together appeared. (McPeak is an Oregon native.) Obama turned to McPeak to boost his credibility as a future Commander-In-Chief.

McPeak clearly doeen’t believe that Israeli interests and American interests coincide in the Middle East. If Obama’s top military man is McPeak can an Obama administration be trusted to do what is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? Would McPeak simply dismiss any calls to do so as another attempt at manipulation of U.S. foreign policy by Jews and Christian Zionists? Would Obama take his advice? I don’t know for certain but I certainly don’t want to find out.

Last night I witnessed a new mesh where the Klezmer style, Stockhausen and the lost tribes of Israel gave birth to the group called The Sway Machinery, located in the dark bayous of Brooklyn. The incendiary sounds and cantorial approach by the lead singer-guitarist, Jeremiah Lockwood, blend into a traditionally new sound of Jewish music. Upon looking at the song list you can see the infusion of Jewish litergy, lore and Zion. I highly recommend to the masses spanning the globe to stop, look and behold our sounds projected by these wonderful purveyors of song. As “they” describe the band, “The music of The Sway Machinery invites the listener to become like children wandering the forest, discovering something mythic and wonderful.”

In order to take a gander at the truth visit their myspace page at: www.myspace.com/theswaymachinery 

Tonight marks the beginning of Lag Baomer, a minor Jewish holiday traditionally associated with:

• The end of a plague that killed thousands of Rabbi Akiva’s students
• The death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai
• The Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-135
• Bonfires
• The start of the Great Flood

And more recently associated in Israel with:

• The start of wedding season
• Student’s Day
• A  day celebrating soldiers who do Milu’im - reserve duty (held Thursday this year, since Friday is the weekend. Please excuse the link to a Hebrew story, I couldn’t find one in English. I think this is held on Lag Baomer out of association with the bravery of Bar Kochba’s soldiers. Bar Kochba, it is said, would only take a soldier into his army if he was brave enough to amputate one of his fingers. Later, when this was deemed inappropriate by the rabbis, the test was changed to uprooting a shrubbery while riding by on horseback.)

It’s also apparently a pretty good day to start a Zionist organization. For example, the Palmach was established on Lag Baomer. So was Gedudei Noar, or Gadn”a, a one-week program that prepares high school age youths for their army service. (Gadn”a’s logo even has a bow and arrow in it for this reason.) The same can be said of Bnei Akiva, which was founded on this day in 1929. The yeshuv Sitriyya, near Rechovot, was founded on Lag Baomer 1949. And the first Caesaria Jazz Festival was on Lag Baomer 2005.

So, who has a good idea for a new Zionist organization? Today would be a good day to get things rolling…

Do you ever think about Israel and Aliyah? Are you between the ages of 18-24? Fill out this quick survey sponsored by ImpactAliyah and you will be automatically entered into a raffle for a $100 Amazon gift card.

Who is ImpactAliyah? ImpactAliyah is a student organization that aims to support, organize, and enable young Jews to move to Israel and make a transformative impact on Israeli Society, the Jewish Community and the world. This January, we engaged students in a 10-day program in Israel focusing on practicalities of life in the Jewish State and also equipping students with skills to make a positive impact on arrival. This survey is a part of our initiative to learn more about student aliyah so we can work with students at more universities.

Come one come all and pick up the unadulterated, raw and uncut truth about plicymaking in the Middle East. Martin Sieff recently published his (right leaning) polemic The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East. I added the commentary from the inside flap below for a taste of the bitter humor and sober history.

Why most of what you think you know about the Middle East is wrong

The Middle East: a region that’s almost never off the front pages, yet one most Americans know little about. The mainstream media and Ivy League academics only make matters worse by casting everything in the usual politically correct mold: Arab terrorists are just desperate freedom fighters, and the region’s one free democracy–Israel–is the oppressor, not least because of its alliance with America. And if Islamic extremism is a problem, the establishment tells us, it’s only because it’s rooted in that source of all evils: religion. A different strain of political correctness has seeped into some minds on the right–most notably the Bush administration, which, so ready to buy into the egalitarian myths we are all taught, believed that Western-style democracy could flourish anywhere. Now, in The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to the Middle East, veteran Middle East correspondent Martin Sieff puts the lie to all these myths and clichés, giving you everything you need to know about the region to understand its past, its present, and its possible future. In The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to the Middle East, you’ll learn:

* How, for three decades, the British supported parliamentary democracy throughout the Middle East, but it didn’t work
* Why Britain’s post-World War I Middle East policy was a comedy of errors and incompetence that soon escalated into tragedy
* Where America went wrong in Iraq: how U.S. policymakers vastly underestimated the intransigent, unsophisticated, and anti-Western nature of its competing communities
* How Saudi Arabia’s security forces defeated al Qaeda–and why you never heard about it
* Why we’ll miss the Arab dictators when they’re gone
* How the Muslim nations of the Middle East took an irrevocable turn toward radical Islam not in the tenth century or after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in the thirteenth century–but in 1979
* How the Arab states openly declared their determination to prevent a Jewish state from being born in 1947–twenty years before the West Bank and Gaza were first occupied

So check your local kiosk for this book and spread the word…

A month ago, on April 28th a statue was erected in the newly inaugurated Park of the Australian Soldier in Beersheba. The statue is a bronze sculpture by Peter Colett depicting ‘The Australian Light Horseman.’ The statue (which I attached below)commemorates the Australian role during World War I, focusing on the 800 Australian Light Horsemen who played a vital role in defeating the Turkish forces on October 31, 1917. On that day the courageous Horsemen defeated a Turkish force of 4,000 that was a determinative factor in the British victory in the battle of Gaza. The victory at Beersheba led to the domino effect of Jerusalem being captured by General Allenby ending Turkish rule, paving the way for an eventuall state. There is a detailed article in the Jerusalem Report regarding the battle and the recent ceremonies in Beersheba. The statue poignantly points out that many non-Jewish soldiers helped lay the foundations of Israel with their blood, sweat and tears (homage to Churchill).

 The article is located at: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668623245&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull