New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is infamous for his bombastic takedowns of critics in public forums, from union leaders to school teachers. His antics, though dubbed "bullying" by his opponents, have made him a hero among many conservatives across America. Yair Lapid, the second most powerful politician in Israel, seems to be following a similar rhetorical playbook as he works to fulfill his campaign pledge to wrest control of Israel's political establishment from the country's ultra-Orthodox. Over at Tablet, I write about his latest sparring match with his Haredi opponents:This past week, Yair Lapid delivered his first speech as Finance Minister of the new Israeli government. In most countries, this might not sound like edge-of-your-seat material. But Israel is not most countries. What began as an effort by Lapid to explain his austerity budget quickly devolved into a shouting match with the Knesset’s ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) members, who accused Lapid of unfairly targeting their community with his cuts. Read the whole thing here, including subtitled video of Lapid's biting ripostes in the Knesset.
My latest at Tablet uncovers a remarkable historical artifact: On Yom ha-Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, in 1955, Albert Einstein was scheduled to address the American people on ABC, NBC and CBS. His speech--a passionate plea for peace and defense of the fledgling state of Israel--had been written in conjunction with the Israeli consulate and famed Ambassador Abba Eban. But on April 18, eight days before Einstein was to deliver it, the physicist died suddenly at the age of 76.
As regular readers know, I'm not a fan of pundits bashing politicians for their religious beliefs. Like the Constitution, I don't believe in a religious test for office. And as a reporter, I've found that such attacks tend to stem from ignorance and political opportunism rather than principle or genuine concern. Today in Tablet, I wrote about one hypocrisy evident in this unfortunate discourse: Imagine if a group of prominent religious leaders went to Washington, D.C., to advocate against abortion. Imagine these clerics filmed a television ad in which they made a faith-based appeal for the cause, citing scripture while dressed in full religious regalia. And suppose this campaign were funded by a political action committee backed by one of America’s wealthiest politicians. Can you imagine the outcry from the commentariat? How quickly such an initiative would be denounced by liberal columnists and politicians as a religious encroachment on our country’s politics—a dangerous theocratic imposition on our secular democracy?
This past weekend, such a faith-fueled campaign kicked off in the nation’s capital, except it wasn’t pushing restrictions on abortions—it was pushing restrictions on guns. Backed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the political action committee co-chaired by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, dozens of esteemed faith leaders converged on Washington on Friday to kick off National Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath. The event coincided with the release of a pro-gun control TV ad featuring many of these clerics, including Rev. Gary Hall, dean of the Washington National Cathedral, and Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center.
Not a single column was written protesting these religious leaders preaching in service of a partisan political cause. But such selective censure should not be surprising: The charge that faith leaders are inappropriately meddling in our politics is one that only seems to be leveled at religious conservatives and not at their liberal counterparts. For the overwhelming majority of critics, it’s not really the fact of religion’s involvement in politics that’s troubling—it’s the “wrong” religious views being involved in politics. Take a closer look and one finds that their cries of “theocracy!” tend to be motivated more by partisanship than principle.
I spent half of last week covering the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It's a political pageant that draws over half of Congress, dozens of administration officials, scores of dignitaries, an army of journalists, and thousands of delegates from across America. So naturally, the first thing I did when I got there was design a bingo board. Since there are particular buzzwords and catchphrases that the speakers are pretty much contractually obligated to say ("Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East," "all options are on the table for dealing with Iran"), it's a fun game to play. Certainly, attendees thought so--some even tweeted pictures of their boards during the speeches. One thing you couldn't help but notice at the conference was the visible presence of Orthodox Jews. Regular readers (ok, my mom) will recall that I first wrote about the increasing political engagement of this group at the Republican National Convention. At AIPAC, I talked to the major movers in the Orthodox Union, among others, to get a sense of the Orthodox involvement in the country's largest pro-Israel lobby: “The official buzz is Iron Dome, but the unofficial buzz might be velvet dome,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, a longtime Chabad emissary in Washington, D.C. (who famously kashered the White House kitchen), referring to the velvet skullcaps worn by the numerous Chabad attendees. “You used to see maybe a couple dozen yarmulkes at the AIPAC conference. Now there are many hundreds.”
“Join me in a mob-like chant,” exclaims the 59-year-old scholar standing in front of the packed auditorium. As he raises his hands into the air, hundreds of the nation’s most talented students begin to intone in unison: “USA! USA! Latkes, Latkes, USA!” The place? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The occasion: MIT Hillel’s sixth annual Latke-Hamentaschen debate on March 5, 2008. It’s a ritual that will soon be repeated on college campuses nationwide, as star academics face off on the perennial culinary question of Jewish tradition: latkes or hamentaschen? Which is superior—the fried potato pancakes traditionally served on Hanukkah, or the triangular jelly or poppy-filled pastries of the holiday of Purim? I wrote about this custom for Tablet, and talked to scholars and conflict resolution experts about it: So, what’s it like to participate in a Latke-Hamantaschen debate? “It’s like getting into a debate with Alan Dershowitz,” said Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor of psychology, who debated Alan Dershowitz on the subject in 2007 at Harvard Hillel. Few showdowns in his career, he said, have measured up. “The closest was my debate with Stephen Jay Gould on the evolution of language.”
“It’s great,” enthused Jack Rakove, a professor of American history at Stanford who referenced the debate in the opening pages of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Constitution, Original Meanings. “I tell all my students about it—not just the Jewish ones—and they seem to get a kick out of it.” Is there a debate in the history of the American founding that compares? “Probably Madison and Jefferson on the one hand, and Hamilton on the other, discussing the Necessary and Proper clause.”
The media tends to report about Israeli politics through the lens of foreign policy--the peace process, the conflict with Iran, and so on. This makes sense from a reporter's perspective, because international readers are most interested in, and will be most affected by, a country's foreign policy rather than its local domestic concerns like the economy, or religion and state relations. But it's not a particularly good way to actually understand Israeli politics, or the politics of any democracy for that matter. Domestic issues matter--they shape elections and help determine who comes to power. Today in Tablet, I show how one such issue--the Jewish state's entanglement in religion--is driving Israeli politics today:This past summer, out of view of the press and the spotlight, an unlikely cabal of secular and religious politicians began plotting to shake up the Israeli chief rabbinate. The conspirators: Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, and a renegade rabbinic organization called Tzohar—three of the strangest bedfellows in Israeli politics. Their plan, if successful, would break the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on the country’s rabbinate and install a moderate religious Zionist chief rabbi for the first time in decades...
But why would the leaders of Yisrael Beiteinu—a party known chiefly for its hard-line nationalist stance, rather than for any religious commitment—take an interest in reforming the chief rabbinate? And how did Tzohar, a small liberal Orthodox splinter group dedicated to that cause, find itself with the political clout to go head-to-head with the ultra-Orthodox establishment that has long dominated the institution?
Over the past five months, interviews with prominent Israeli politicians, rabbis, academics, and activists make it clear that there is an emerging alliance of religious and secular ideologues who seek to upend the status quo of religion and state in Israel. Through legislation, backroom deals, and public pressure campaigns, this political coalition hopes to make Israel’s rabbinate more responsive to its citizens, eliminate the bureaucracy and corruption endemic to it, and give Israelis greater control over their own lives.
Recently, a number of critics from Salon to The Guardian have claimed that "Homeland," the award-winning Showtime drama about America's war on terror, traffics in anti-Muslim tropes. Over at The Atlantic--where I last critiqued the political realism of The West Wing--I show that this is far from the case: None of these critiques ... make any attempt to grapple with the counter-evidence to their allegations of bigotry. In doing so, they miss what makes this show so valuable. That's because Homeland, which wrapped up its second season on Sunday, is no gung-ho salute to U.S. militarism and tactics in the war on terror, nor a black-and-white portrayal of "good" Americans versus "evil" Muslims. In fact, a closer look at the drama reveals just the opposite of what its critics claim: a show that challenges the prejudices of its viewers rather than affirming them.
Over at Tablet, I profile Josh Hantman, the Oxford and Harvard-educated English language spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Defense and personal adviser to Ehud Barak on English correspondence, interviews and speeches: As spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Josh Hantman is the face of Defense Minister Ehud Barak in the English world media. Which meant he spent last week alternating between giving dozens of interviews and running for his life.
“In the middle of a Sky News interview, a rocket was fired into Sderot, and I had fifteen seconds to get to the shelter,” he recalls. “It took me six seconds to realize that there was a Red Alert. It took me another three seconds to catch on that the producer and the cameraman had already run to hide beneath the car. Then it took me another two seconds to apologize to the viewers that I had to go because a rocket was coming—and by then it was too late.”
I crashed the annual Chabad Kinus Hashluchim and spent Sunday with over 3000 Chabad rabbis from around the world. I wrote about it in Tablet: How packed was this past weekend’s Kinus Hashluchim, the annual gathering for Chabad Lubavitch rabbis from across the globe? So packed that when the organizers received a last-minute video from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conveying his personal best wishes, they were initially worried that they didn’t have time to air it at their dinner on Sunday. After some scrambling, they did–with the only hint that the Hebrew greeting was a late addition to the program being its lack of English subtitles.
That the program might not have had room for the Prime Minister of Israel should give you an idea of the scale and intensity of the Kinus, which was held from November 7 – 11 in New York, and brought together over 3,000 shluchim from 72 countries. These Hasidic emissaries—along with their wives, who have their own annual gathering in February—run Chabad Houses around the world, from U.S. college campuses to far-flung locales like Kathmandu, often providing essential Jewish infrastructure, from kosher food to daily minyan.
For these rabbis, the Kinus serves as part boot camp, part family reunion, and part personal inspiration. Read the rest--including the source of the quote in the title of this post-- here.
I got some superb rabbis from across the different Jewish denominations to argue about the question over at Tablet. And I took the opportunity to explore some of the fascinating history of this dispute: It’s an old controversy. For many decades, rabbis have debated the place of politics in American Jewish life. For some, Jewish texts become irrelevant if they are not made to speak directly to the pressing issues of the day. For others, the tradition is made superfluous when it becomes near indistinguishable from a particular political platform or party.
Back in the 1980s, prominent Reform Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver criticized his own movement for becoming synonymous with American liberalism, writing that “what was called prophetic Judaism was often a political statement more than a statement of concern about Jewish religious life.” (Tellingly, he noted, when the Reform movement established a lobbying center in Washington, it initially dubbed it the “Social Action Center,” and only later renamed it the “Religious Action Center.”) Other Jewish leaders however, like Abraham Joshua Heschel, stressed the interconnection of religious reflection and political action and marched for causes like civil rights under the banner of Jewish tradition. Read it all here while you're waiting for the election results to come in. Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver's critique, tucked away in an obscure 1985 academic volume on modern Judaism, is worth reading in full (feel free to get in touch if you'd like a scanned PDF). Silver himself was a very impressive figure in American Judaism and today, a fellowship for rabbis at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies is named in his honor.
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