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Sephardic Heritage Update A collection of current Essays, Articles, Events and Information

Impacting our community and our culture

A Publication of the Center for Sephardic Heritage

“Service is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time. Education is improving the lives of others and leaving your community and world better than you found it.” -Marian

Wright Edelman

Contents 29 June 2011

Sephardi, an Exile Within By: David Ramirez

Chaim Amsellem: Toward a Sephardic Spiritual

Revival in Israel?

By: Misha Uzan

Israel and the ‘M’ Word

By: Philologos

Activist Jews Use Mimouna Festival to Protest

Ultra-Orthodox Conversion Stance

By: Yair Ettinger

Killing Jews in the Balkans, Saving Jews in the

Balkans

By: Edward Serotta

Arab Spring? Not Quite By: Yoram Ettinger

The Seder Night Question

By: Amalia Rosenblum

Israel Unveils First ‘Sin-Free Yiddish

Smartphone’

By: Bangkok Post Staff

Meet Bart Ehrman: A One-Man God Fraud

Squad By: Anneli Rufus

Why Being a ‘Foodie’ isn’t Elitist

By: Eric Schlosser

A Budget for the 21st Century

By: Paul Ryan

Ultimate Spoiler Alert

By: David Brooks

Sephardi, an Exile Within By: David Ramírez

In the life of every individual a person is faced with an array of choices, which determine his or her decisions. Sometimes some of these choices are forced on the individual because of the circumstances, other times these options are freely elected according to the goals one sets in life. As many Jews of our era, I was not raised in a religious milieu. I became religious by my own choices, which gave me an advantage from the Jews who had been raised religiously, who are trained from a young age to believe and behave a certain way. The advantage was the freedom to look at things critically from the outside in, and rationalize every step of the way.

Being already a Jew of Sephardi stock, the decision as to the tradition I was to follow was an intuitive and natural option. However, I – as many other Sephardim of my generation – really did not know what it meant being a Sephardi. Most of the books available in print gave a partial and disjointed understanding of the subject, not to mention these were hardly authored by a Sephardi, both in ethnic and cultural terms. The situation was very confusing because nothing was coherent; nothing actually made sense.

My Sephardic Rodhesli synagogue, which I had been attending since I became religious, had gone through a process of abandonment of tradition long before I was born. It did not take a rocket scientist to realize that much of the Ottoman Sephardic tradition had not been carried over by the subsequent generations, which I had to understand it in the context of cultural adaptation to Anglo American culture and issues of acceptance within the larger American Ashkenazi community and Israeli Zionism, as well as certain cultural particularities the synagogue’s founders already came with, a baggage of its own already developing during the 19th c. which included the denouement of rabbinic norms. Though newer generations of the community’s Rhodesli-Turkish Sephardim had fled the community through intermarriage with Ashkenazim,

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migration to Israel, or conversions to ultra-Orthodoxy, the older congregants maintained the traditional Sephardic marks of dignified abnegation, humility, happy contentment, hospitality and kindness very much reminiscent of my own grandparents and family back in Mexico – one contrasting picture to the aggressiveness, intrusiveness, smugness and inhospitable environment of the neighboring Ashkenazi religious community.

At one point, as many other Sephardim of my generation wanting to “uplift” their spiritual experience, I migrated to a “more observant Sephardic” community. At the suggestion of a fellow community member who was doing the same, I did so, but such community was precisely located at the heart of the Ashkenazi religious community. The rabbi there was of Persian Jewish stock, trained in a Lubavitch environment since his youth. The members of this new community, some of whom had migrated from the older Sephardic community for the same reasons I had, were very much at the mercy of what the rabbi said. Its environment had little to do with my older synagogue. In the course of time, they had adopted the same smugness and inhospitality characteristic of their Ashkenazi religious neighbors, with the added bonus of a sense of righteous superiority at the idea they were doing something “right,” unlike the city’s mother Sephardic “slipshod” community three miles away.

The worst part of that experience came during services and the third appointed meal of Shabbat, where it was commonplace – and perhaps still is – for small altercations to break out and discuss money and business matters at the table, something I hardly – if ever – experienced in my older community. Historically, traditional Sephardic communities and families have been particularly attentive to dérekh eress, a Hebrew term for “good manners,” so experiencing the uncouth attitudes in the new place, especially during the Sabbath when such things should not happen at all, was particularly shocking to me. Had it not being for an angel, a young fellow Jew of Persian stock and his extended family with whom I shared many holidays and Sabbaths, who took seriously the lessons of kindness and hospitality from Abraham our ancient Patriarch, that interim of my life would have been a complete waste. Were it not for the countless times we spent together at his family’s table, with an array of Persian and Middle-Eastern dishes and desserts complimented with the lively and ease of conversations, the period of my life would had remained very disconcerting; a true Lot in the midst of Sodom.

The breaking point for me came at hearing the community’s rabbi say in one of his regular lessons that one should recite the blessings over fruit and vegetables because it “liberated” the human souls trapped in them. Such thing not only stroke me of superstitious and naïve, but also completely against the purpose of the berakhót (Jewish blessings).

Not soon after this I migrated back to my older community. By this time, my older community had seen some changes.

Having hired new rabbis to replace the retiring one, my community was able to see renewed commitment to Jewish observance.

All the while through these phases, I had discovered by chance the writings of Hahám José Faúr, a Syrian rabbi of Sephardic extraction who had been working all his life to explain Rabbinic Tradition to the modern mind. This discovery was watershed, momentous. For the first time in my reading experience Jewish tradition made all the sense, where all its intellectual infrastructure was neatly organized, a seedbed of ideas and legal principles explained with documented accuracy, working as loci (a collection of departing points) upon which the entire civilizing-organism of Judaism is based. Even though such Judaism as transmitted by Faur was no longer part of our contemporary lives, it was nonetheless a burning flame that kept me from falling into the skepticism, cynicism, cul-de-sac perplexity, convenient hypocrisy, awkward complacency or outright abandonment of tradition as experienced by so many Jews of our age.

The time of my life when it all came together to maturity was when I was invited to be part of a start-up Spanish & Portuguese synagogue, where I was able to get in direct touch with a rabbi who carried this Western Sephardic tradition. Myself being coming from this traditional stock, it was a very meaningful part of my life, where I was able to reaffirm many family traditions that had been lost through assimilation. This experience made me realize the importance of Sephardic tradition first hand, their meanings and objectives, as well as having found a new respect to community leaders and communal rabbis everywhere. Managing a community is not an easy task, beset with the brutal realities of human existence. And despite the heartache, it was for the first time in my life where I was able to experience a true freedom and the vision that things can be changed for the better, starting from a humble seedling, away from the baggage current world Jewry is suffering from literary decades of accommodation to secular-Zionists prerogatives and recent cliquey religious awakenings, which have created an untold unprecedented confusion in the minds of our young generations.

Though often criticized for being an idealist, seeking and longing for a Sephardic Judaism no longer in existence or one impossible to “resurrect,” my peers often do not seem to understand that my enthusiasm should not be confused with the lessons ancient Sephardic Judaism carries for our contemporary lives. It seems especially uncomfortable to them that one can show a viable alternative, which often is in opposition to what they were raised to believe and hold dear in their hearts.

One thing I often heard was that there was very little difference between the two dominant modes of Jewish tradition, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Perhaps – but only when mediated by secondary sources and readings by our contemporary scholars. But when one gets to read first hand the works and lives of Sephardic rabbis and

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community leaders, one cannot help but to realize that Sephardic Judaism, heir to the Geonic-Babylonian academies, is a very different parallel universe from what we are now accustomed to see and hear – even in the post-Kabbalist debacle. The slight-of-hand attempt to collapse differences, though at heart noble, it only achieves to dampen inquiry.

Now, when I hear that again, I think who would ever say that the English and Italians have little difference among each other, despite both being Europeans? Anyone with the slightest understanding of both cultures would look at you as if you were crazy, besides the English and Italians being personally insulted. But somehow the current discourse has gotten away with that seemingly benign lie, purposefully ignoring that both of our traditions developed contingent on our historical experience, and how each decided to deal differently with the realities thrown at us.

What is so threatening about a Judaism that demands both secular and religious erudition from its rabbis? What is so threatening about a Judaism that allows each individual his or her personal space for growth and development? What is so threatening about a Judaism that does not appreciate populism and banal superstitions? What is so threatening about a Judaism that dares to speak its mind, and though disagreeing, always holding a civility of respect and mutual freedom of expression? What is so threatening about a Judaism that views our legal texts through the lenses of the contingent realities, and not through some high-pedestal a-priory idealism? What is so threatening about a Judaism where the community is in charge of its own affairs through the highly regulated medium of its communal Constitution (Ascamot), independent from the personal interest and ideologies of the community’s rabbi? What is so threatening about a Judaism that maintains ethical principle over personal ideology?

What is so threatening about all that, and whole lot more that Sephardic Judaism represents, is the issue of giving up control. Most of our people do not realize how much our lives are being controlled by forces which we cannot truly understand, yet we all have a latent discomfort deep within ourselves which we cannot exorcise.

Choosing to live by the example of our ancestors, who very much imitate the Biblical personalities such as Abraham, Jacob and Moses, is a freedom who sets us in exile once more, from the confusion brought in by the controlling idolatry and tyranny of Pharaoh.

Being true to Sephardic Judaism today means to be in Exile, and exile within another Exile of the historical Galut. Yet one, despite its desert daunting loneliness, where we as individuals can experience a peace of mind, freedom of expression, and finally a liberation from perplexity.

Chaim Amsellem: Toward a Sephardic Spiritual Revival in Israel? By: Misha Uzan A year ago he was nearly unknown, but within a few months he made headlines, defied his own Shas party, and was exposed to criticism from the orthodox Haredi world. They are talking about him for a possible new party, and whether we like it or not, we can only emphasize his audacity and more, in fact, use his position to appreciate and reflect on the relationship between Judaism and Israeli Zionism. Chaim Amsellem is a rav (rabbi) and Israeli MP elected under the banner of the Shas Party for the first time in 2006. He was born on October 12, 1959 in Oran, Algeria, of a family recently having emigrated from Morocco (recall that Morocco became formally independent in 1956). At the age of six months as Algeria was in full blown war his family moved to Lyon. He lived there until age 11, then his family moved to Israel. Chaim Amsellem is francophone. The journey of a rabbi Amsellem is foremost a rabbi: he graduated in 1990 and was ordained a rabbi in 1993. He became the rabbi of Moshav Sharsheret in the northwestern Negev, then the neighborhood rabbi in Netivot proper, a small town north of Moshav. He was also director of a yeshiva (religious study center) and Kolel Baba Sali (named after the famous Sephardic rabbi) in the same city. Then he moved to Jerusalem in the Har Nof neighborhood and founded another Kolel. He still lives with his wife and eight children. He also officiated at the Sephardic community of Geneva in Switzerland. Amsellem is primarily an intellectual rabbi, he is the author of several books (including one on Zera Israel, the seed of Israel , meaning the Jewish origin). His work follows, he said in an interview with Jerusalem Post, in the tradition of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’ mentor, who has read, agreed and often cited in his own works. Rabbi Amsellem says, to whoever still wants to hear it, that he has always been loyal to Rabbi Yosef, former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, who ordained him, and who he always perceived as a great scholar and the great inspirer of the "Sephardic spiritual renaissance" in Israel. Along with Nissim Ze'ev he is the only ordained rabbi to serve in the Shas group in the Knesset. That said, since 2009, although elected to the eleventh seat on the Shas list in 2006 and tenth in 2009, Chaim Amsellem expressed his differences with the party leadership on several sensitive levels. The comings and goings of Shas To understand the emergence of Amsellem’s criticism, we must retrace the history of Shas. The political party was born in 1984 just before national elections. It was created

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on the initiative of the late Rabbi Eliezer Menachem Schach, a leader of the current Lithuanian Ashkenazi Haredim, not Sephardic, excluded from the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party after a power struggle, which found itself without a label thereafter. At the outset therefore, the Sephardic Shas is a party created by Ashkenazim. Its officers are from the ultra-Orthodox world and were schooled in traditional Ashkenazi yeshivot, called Lithuanian. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was named official leader but it was Schach who made the major decisions. As an orthodox party, it has religion at the source of its decisions which are then applied to society, that is to say that religion takes precedence over politics. As such Ovadia Yosef is what might be called the spiritual leader while others are responsible for representing the party politically in the Knesset. In the case of Chaim Amsellem, he served as Rabbi Meni Mazuz's representative. At the time, from 1984 to 1988, it is therefore Itzhak Perez (born in Morocco, raised in Israel and became Orthodox in the Lithuanian sense) who takes the reins of the party, that is to say its political wing. Its original goal, and that of Yosef, is to bring together the moderately religious Sephardic with the traditionalist lifestyle practiced by the ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian school. Therefore, the goal is to create a Sephardi Haredi world. Everything changes with the arrival of Arieh Deri at the head of the party and what some have called the ‘Deri revolution’(1). In 1988 a break occurs between Yosef and Schach. Schach decides to create Degel Hatorah, an Orthodox party without Sephardic Jews. Seen as an affront, Ovadia Yosef gets rid of Peretz, supported by Schach, and appoints Arieh Deri as the head of Shas. Deri then leads the Shas as a party with an ethnic rather than religious claim, and in fact as the great Sephardic party of the country. Taking votes from secular voters or from the traditional Likud party, Shas managed to get 17 seats in the Knesset in 1999. Deri distanced himself from Ovadia Yosef’s original idea of creating a Sephardic orthodoxy, and sees himself more generally as a defender of Oriental Jews. The success is such that Ovadia cannot honestly oppose it. That being said, every revolution comes to an end. And it occurs in 1999 when Eli Yishai heads the party in place of Deri, highly disturbed by problems of corruption that landed Deri to prison. Yishai puts an end to Deri’s ethnic orientation to return to the original design, and devotes himself more fully in the defense of the ultra-Orthodox body in its entirety. The June 2010 Emmanuel School episode was the point of no return for Shas. Faced with a case of conflict between the Israeli Supreme Court, seen as secular, and the Ashkenazi Haredi world, even though the charge was ethnic discrimination against Sephardic students within an ultra-Orthodox school, Shas chose the Haredi camp. In their defense, Shas, like the Lithuanians,

denies ethnic discrimination but justifies the exclusion of pupils in question for reasons of insufficiently orthodox religious practice. If there had been real discrimination is irrelevant. By its approach Shas approves of the ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian lifestyle and believes that the Sephardim must comply. Shas has returned to the principles that have established it Amsellem’s Criticisms This is where Chaim Amsellem enters the story. Since spring of 2009 he showed his disagreement with this form of ultra-Orthodox thinking. In many places Amsellem’s views are shocking. First, there is the military. Although he did not serve himself (the army would not have needed him) most of his children did serve. Within the leadership of Shas it is often the contrary. Because the party has aligned itself with the hard-line, ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists who refuse military service and even consider the army as the most concentrated place of secular heresy. Amsellem believes instead that it is the duty of every Jew to serve his country and he is willing to use the Torah to prove it. Similarly he calls on the Orthodox world to go to work. He categorically rejects the idea that Torah study is the only thing that matters. “If this is how the Lithuanians see things”, he said, “it was never part of the Sephardic tradition, and it is even a "deviation" which does not conform to Judaism, which recommends that Jews feed their families by their own means. The Orthodox world has instead created a "vicious circle of poverty”, he says. With another of his criticisms Chaim Amsellem becomes the defender of conversions in the army, criticized and rejected by the Orthodox rabbinate. The intransigence of the Israeli ultra-orthodox position is such that it intends to reject Orthodox conversions performed abroad and therefore refuse converts to make aliya (despite the fact that the Supreme Court recognizes conversions of the liberal movement as well as the Masorti movement to immigrate to Israel). Again, Amsellem takes a sympathetic stance towards those who serve the people of Israel, that fight for it, and sometimes die for it, who are of Jewish descent but whose mother is not Jewish. The former rabbi of Sharsheret also evokes the failure of orthodox teaching. In Israel there are four totally different formats of teaching, depending on whether the school follows secular, Arab, Haredi or national religious instruction. Amsellem denounces Haredi education in Shas schools, which neglects general subjects of instruction. According to him, in order to understand the Torah, the Talmud and Jewish texts one needs to obtain a well rounded education. Very sharp in his understanding of the texts he invokes traditional works such as Massekhet Shabbat, Masseket Sukkah , Masseket Erouvim or Masseket Kil'ayim, which according to him are not within reach without a comprehensive understanding of general knowledge.

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Also in general, Chaim Amsellem severely criticizes the ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian line, which is, according to him, that followed by Shas. By showing it as too harsh, too severe, too narrow and, after all, contrary to Jewish tradition, he appeals to humanistic values derived directly from the Hebrew Bible. We owe him this sentence: "The Jewish people must be an example, for themselves, of tolerance, of acceptance of the other, and of non-persecution of others for their beliefs" (2). All of Amsellem’s statements about military service, conversions, teaching or work for the ultra-Orthodox have not appealed to Shas. In an interview with Israeli newspaper Maariv in August 2009, Amsellem described the Shas party as "Sephardi-Ashkenazi" for submission to the Lithuanian spiritual leadership. Since then, things have just gotten worse and worse. By the end of 2010, the break was sealed; Amsellem was excluded from Shas, insulted, and threatened with total exclusion from all ultra-Orthodox synagogues. Amsellem, and then what? Chaim Amsellem's speech, by contrast, was rather well received by the secular establishment, religious Zionists, or simply the non-orthodox. Amsellem himself is said to be supported by thousands of people, having received letters from all over the world, from Israel and from some parts of the Orthodox public. Still, in order to be elected, he needs a list, a label, a party capable of putting together members and a program. Mere sympathy to his criticism of the Orthodox way of life vis-à-vis the state of Israel that was able to inspire secular or the religious-Zionist public is not enough to make him a viable candidate. Amsellem said himself that he went into politics because he was convinced that the religious sphere was not sufficient to change Israeli society. By cutting himself off from the support of Shas, did Chaim Amsellem shut the only door open to a Sephardic Haredi like him or have other doors already opened? What will happen to Chaim Amsellem? The future will tell. Several options have been discussed in the Israeli media and the rabbi said himself that he had had several proposals. There has been talk of an alliance between Aryeh Deri (who is trying to re-establish himself after two years in prison) and Chaim Amsellem. We saw that the revolution led by Sephardic Deri had what it takes to bring him somewhat closer to the speech by the former member of Shas, which defends the Sephardic religious tradition as less radical and attacks the Lithuanian Ashkenazi lifestyle. One point however that cannot not be ignored and is major: the Rabbi’s Zionism. A Haredi Zionist? Without any hesitation, Chaim Amsellem has repeatedly said that he is a Jew, a Haredi and a Zionist. In his

interview with the Jerusalem Post he said: "I am someone who believes that the rebirth of Israel is one of the biggest and most obvious miracles that the Holy One, blessed be He, has done for us. This is our state. We must contribute. "These few sentences are enough to understand the nature of the gap that separates Amsellem from the Lithuanian leadership. Seeing the state of Israel as a divine gift, a miracle, a state registered not only in history but in the miracles of God, Amsellem holds the discourse of a religious Zionist, those known as Dati-Leumi, the national religious. Their Zionism and Judaism go together. This is why a religious Zionist party as Ha-bayit Ha-yehudi has been in contact with him. Without going into details of the religious Zionist ideology, one can see however, that Amsellem is distancing himself from the ideology of Ashkenazi Jews of Lithuanian inspiration. We need to recall that this type of Judaism is not Zionist. This anti-Zionism is the cumulative radical rejection of secular Israeli society, which largely explains the ultra-orthodox positions on labor, education or military service. Conversely, it is a concept that explains Amsellem’s Zionist positions on conversions or things relating to the State of Israel. In the case in point, that of Amsellem is characteristic of the complex relationships that govern Judaism, its different religious traditions, and Zionism. In the Ashkenazi world, the Orthodox group which has a history rooted in Zionism is embodied in the political world by Agudat Israel (apart from this religious Zionism which has its own ideology and its construction, led by Rabbi Kook), but this trend is less straightforward in the Sephardic world. In the same way as Sephardic orthodoxy is less rigorous in its foundation on the societal level that the Lithuanian Haredi, its Zionism is more natural. In his book, Jews and Arabs (Paris, Gallimard, 1974), the Franco-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi illustrates this fact by stressing that the Sephardic Jews believed in the Jewish state and the recovery of Jewish sovereignty well before the Zionists and the European Zionist political movement in itself (3). Having later immigrated to Israel (except mainly for Yemenis), the Zionist ideological conception of Agudat Israel was almost totally inconceivable to Sephardic Jews. Although more attached to religion and tradition that secular Ashkenazim, this population was not ultra-Orthodox as in the Lithuanian manner. By wanting to bring the lifestyle of Sephardic Jews closer to the Ashkenazi-inspired ultra-Orthodox, Shas also brought them closer to a form of anti-Zionism that was unknown to them. However, even today, these religious and ideological differences (in their relationship to Zionism) can still be found in everyday life. The strength of Zionism and the reality of helping Israel, few have poured into the radical anti-Zionism, at most a form of abstention to Zionism, a-Zionism (4). In this sense, Shas has failed and Amsellem is a symptomatic component. Irreproachable in terms of religious orthodoxy, he has not embraced anti-Zionism nor the lifestyle, that is to say the refusal to work within the

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State of Israel, the rejection of any secular education, or the systematic opposition to the defense of the country. In a 2006 essay, David Andre Belhassen and Gerard Nissim Amzallag, two researchers in Canaanite archeology and history, consider the loss of reference of religious Zionism after disengagement from Gaza. If a two-state solution were accomplished even temporarily the religious Zionist movement would be challenged in its very foundation - that is to say the perception of the state Israel as part of an integral Messianic process that would return the whole land of Israel to the people of Israel - could die or, at any rate, diminish. Chaim Amsellem’s positions, which derive from the Haredi world, show that Zionism in the religious world still has something with which to revive itself. For more by Misha Uzan see his blog http://mishauzan.over-blog.com Notes (1) An expression used in a particular section of Aryeh Dayan for the Jerusalem Report in June 2010 (2) Quoted in the Jerusalem Post, January 2011 (3) On this point see my university thesis, page 81, available at the IEP of Paris: Misha Uzan, Images of Israel and understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict by French intellectuals, 1967-1982, Paris: IEP, 2007. This thesis has been summarized and extended in my article published in Controversies, No. 7, Israel and French intellectuals, from 1967 to 1982 (4) On this term see even my university thesis and my article Israel and French intellectuals, from 1967 to 1982. (5) David Andre Belhassen, Gérard Nissim Amzallag, La Haine now? Zionism and Palestine. The seven traps of conflict, Paris: Editions de la Difference, 2006.

Translated from the French by Aimee Dassa Kligman

From Un Echo d’Israel, February 24, 2011

Israel and the ‘M’ Word By: Philologos For those who do not recall Philologos and his anti-Sephardi racism, please see the special newsletter we did that was occasioned by his articles on the term “Arab Jew”: http://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/b4d6d3a2672ee62f#

In this article there are no surprises. We have, yet again, more anti-Sephardi bias cloaked in a pseudo-scientific garb. The Moroccans are responsible for their own ignorance and Israeli Ashkenazim are all well-meaning liberals. I am particularly taken with the blatantly racist characterization of the Hebrew pronunciation of the Mizrahi Jews. The Ashkenazim, who pronounce Hebrew as if it was a variant of German or French, are seen as the standard here. The Sephardic pronunciation is identified as “guttural” and as “Arab” – the veritable kiss of death from a Zionist-Israeli point of view. The Ashkenazim have even tried to discriminate against Sephardim based on their incorrect pronunciation of the Hebrew language! It is all you need to know about how Ashkenazi Jews close ranks when they are accused of being racists. They proclaim that they are innocent of the charge and that, anyway, the Arab Jews are primitives anyway. Poor Mr. Herzog! How terrible these attacks against him are. And, for good measure, those who raise the issue of Ashkenazi racism are agitators who are not speaking in good faith. This is how the Ashkenazi discourse works. Deny the truth, obfuscate, and then blame your victim. DS On the face of it, there was no need for anyone to be embarrassed by the much publicized WikiLeaks disclosure that Israel’s former minister of housing, Labor Party member Yitzhak Herzog, told an American diplomat in 2006 that ex-defense minister and then Labor Party head Amir Peretz was perceived by the Israeli public as being “inexperienced, aggressive, and a Moroccan.” Herzog was commenting, after all, not on his own opinion of Peretz, but on how the latter, so he thought, was perceived by many Israelis who did not intend to vote for him in the upcoming national elections. There was nothing wrong with this, which can’t be said for Herzog’s hasty and politically correct disclaimer that he couldn’t possibly have said such a thing. He would have looked better had he simply declared: “Of course I said it. Why shouldn’t I have?”

Inasmuch as there is nothing reprehensible in calling someone inexperienced (Peretz, though a seasoned politician, had had no administrative experience in military matters when appointed minister of defense), and aggressiveness isn’t necessarily a bad quality in politicians, the problematic word attributed to Herzog was obviously “Moroccan” — which, it so happens, Peretz is in his origins. Born in Morocco in 1952, he came to Israel with his family when he was 6, and lived as a young person through the worst period of the discrimination once practiced by the

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country’s Ashkenazi elite against immigrants from Arab lands. Although these immigrants, known as mizraḥim or “Easterners,” came from different places, such as North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq, and although they all encountered some degree of prejudice, the North Africans, who are generally known to Israelis as “the Moroccans,” the largest group among them, suffered from particularly negative ethnic stereotypes that labeled them as ignorant, primitive, shiftless, hot-tempered and violent.

There was a reason for this. Unlike Jews from other Arab countries, who immigrated to Israel as entire communities, the Jews of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, all of whom had been granted the right to French citizenship by French colonial regimes, split into two groups: The better-off urban class, nearly all of it French speaking, largely immigrated to France, while the rural poor left mostly for Israel. The result was a North African population in Israel more heavily weighted to the latter than other “Easterners,” with all the inevitable problems caused by low social and educational levels. In the 1950s and ’60s, therefore, the word marokai, “Moroccan,” took on for Ashkenazi Israelis a more disparaging connotation than did “Egyptian,” “Yemenite” or “Iraqi.”

But marokai was never a taboo word, and its primary meaning in Israeli Hebrew continued to be simply “Moroccan” rather than “a primitive, shiftless, hot-tempered immigrant from North Africa.” The Hebrew slang word for that was tshakh-tshakh, which probably originated as tsakh-tsakh, one of the features of a heavy Moroccan accent in Hebrew being the tendency, influenced by the Berbers in rural Morocco, to sibilate the “t”-sound into a “ts.” This was a word that became a cause célèbre in the 1981 Israeli elections, when the entertainer Dudu Topaz, speaking at a political rally, called the supporters of Menahem Begin’s Likud tshakh-tshakhim. Begin, who was heavily backed by mizraḥi Israelis, made the most of this and finished his campaign strongly because of it.

Although Amir Peretz does not sibilate his “t’s,” he does speak Hebrew with a discernible mizraḥi accent, evidenced mostly by his pronunciation of the letter ḥet in the Arabic fashion, as a guttural fricative produced by a contraction of the larynx, rather than as the velar fricative, made by scraping the back of the tongue against the hard palate, characteristic of most Israelis. Yet the word tshakh-tshakh itself, ever since Topaz’s gaffe, has been taboo and is rarely heard anymore, while the only remaining pejorative Hebrew slang word associated with North African Jews, freykh or (for a woman) freykha, would never be applied by anyone to Peretz. A freykh in Israeli slang — the word derives from the once common Moroccan-Jewish female name Freyḥa — is a cheap, flashy dresser with vulgar taste and loud behavior. These are traits that, while once identified in the minds of many Israelis with lower-class Moroccan Jews, are certainly not Peretz’s.

In any event, there is something anachronistic about the whole attack on Herzog, who actively supported Peretz in the 2006 elections and is far from being prejudiced himself. Despite the attempts of some ideologists to keep the Ashkenazi-mizraḥi issue on the front burner, it has little meaning to most young Israelis, who often don’t know and rarely care where anyone’s parents or grandparents came from. If Yitzhak Herzog said anything foolish to the American diplomat, this lay in his mistaken assumption that being Moroccan would hurt Amir Peretz’s electoral chances. Peretz did far better at the head of the Labor Party than did super-Ashkenazi Ehud Barak three years later, and there is no evidence that his Moroccan ancestry was a stigma for Labor voters. In Israel today, the M-word is nothing to be scared of. From The Forward, April 29, 2011

Activist Jews Use Mimouna Festival to Protest Ultra-Orthodox Conversion Stance By: Yair Ettinger It is interesting to see the way the word “activist” is used in this article about Moroccan Jews whose views are closer to Ashkenazi Zionism than to the Sephardic tradition. It is a troubling sign of the transformation of Israeli Sephardim and the way that they have ignored their mistreatment by the Ashkenazi leaders of Israel over the course of many decades. DS Sam Ben-Sheetrit is one of the people who turned the Mimouna Festival into a national holiday, without any mention of discrimination. He's chairman of the World Federation of Moroccan Jews, which chooses a "positive" subject for the Mimouna every year, such as "Every person is a world" and "Bridges."

This year, for the first time, the federation is coming out against injustices to converted Jews and people in the process of conversion to Judaism. This Mimouna (which began last night and is taking place today ) will be held as a protest and a way of supporting the converts, in the shadow of the political and halakhic controversy surrounding it.

Paradoxically, the topic has little bearing on Jews of Moroccan descent but impacts on immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The protest is also directed against Shas, which unofficially represents Israelis of Moroccan origin.

Sam Ben-Sheetrit, what does the Mimouna have to do with the conversion controversy?

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"Is there any better occasion to show our support for the converts than the Mimouna? This is a celebration of hospitality, love of man, bringing people together. Every year the Mimouna celebrations are marked by some value or another. This year they are marked by protest. We will raise a cry against the ultra-Orthodox laws pushing away all those who want to join our people. Regrettably, the ultra-Orthodox groups have taken over our lives. Not only the money, the public coffer, but everyday life. They're simply closing doors in the face of all those who want to join our people."

What has been planned for the celebrations?

"We've invited hundreds of converts from all over the country to the main celebration in Ashkelon's Beit Yad Lebanim. My good friend [former Ashkenazi Chief] Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau will be there. The event will be hosted by Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, who converts people to Judaism. Six converts from different countries will tell their story of how they ended up as Jews and mainly how society treats them and what they feel now. We must treat converts leniently and tolerantly. They will be guests of honor in Mimouna celebrations worldwide, we will put them in the front rows and embrace them."

Why are Jews of Moroccan origin getting involved with a problem relating to FSU immigrants?

"How do you think we improved Moroccan Jewry's image? We used the Mimouna to bring people together. We will demand of the ultra-Orthodox to stop bullying us, to get out of our life, to allow this country to work. I hope our bitter cry, and especially the government, are able to stop them."

Are you also speaking out against Shas? It is a member of the government that is responsible for the conversion policy and a party that recently ejected MK Chaim Amsellem because of his lenient views regarding conversion.

"If Shas is keen on the ultra-Orthodox laws and acts in their spirit, then [our] protest is certainly against it. This is one of the tragedies that befell us Moroccan Jews. Moroccan Jewry advanced in huge steps and became integrated in every field, but when it comes to tolerance, for which our sages were famous, Shas' leaders have learned and done nothing. They are lagging behind."

But Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled in favor of the IDF conversions.

"A halakhic ruling is a halakhic ruling but I heard he backed down a little afterward. That's why legislation is required."

Many Jews, including yourself, are received by Morocco's king, King Mohammed VI. How is the wave of Arab protest reflected in the Palace? The monarch's stability is upheld but there have been shock waves and people have been killed there. Is it possible that in the next Mimouna there will be another regime in Morocco?

"I don't believe it. The Moroccan people love the king. He runs all over the place, creating work opportunities. He isn't even interested in international politics. Note how in Operation Cast Lead he didn't utter a word. He is concentrating on helping his people. I certainly don't expect a revolution. It's an almost democratic monarchy."

How do you respond to WikiLeaks reports of Isaac Herzog's statement in 2006, that "Amir Peretz is seen as inexperienced, aggressive and Moroccan?"

"He denied having said those things. I denounce those who attacked him. Herzog and his family represent the integration in Israel. His mother, of Egyptian descent, married an Ashkenazi. Apart from that, he is a member of the federation's presidium and takes part in its activities. He will be a guest of honor in this Mimouna as well. There is nothing farther from him than ethnic discrimination. I said in an interview to Israel Radio that if [Eitan] Cabel and Peretz continue attacking him they will have us to deal with, and we haven't heard them since. We won't let ethnic discrimination become an issue again. It's flogging a dead horse."

From Haaretz, April 26, 2011

Killing Jews in the Balkans, Saving Jews in the Balkans By: Edward Serotta Seventy years ago this month, Hana Montijo had not quite reached her first birthday. Her parents, Menahem and Flora, lived in a mostly Muslim neighborhood on a steep hill overlooking Sarajevo. They were a poor family; Menahem worked as a tailor. Matilda and Breda Kalef were 10 and nine-year-old sisters, and lived in a large house in Belgrade’s Jewish quarter, Dorcol. Their family owned a textile store, and everyone – uncles, grandparents, parents – worked there. And in the southern Yugoslav Macedonian town of Bitola, Roza Kamhi and Beno Ruso were a pair of 21-year-olds, deeply in love, and planning for their future. All of them were Jewish. Then came Nazi Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, and immediately after, its invasion of Greece. The Wehrmacht was accompanied, or followed by, the SS and foreign ministry diplomats. After the Royal Yugoslav Army collapsed in two weeks, regular soldiers, committed Nazis and professional diplomats all began planning how to murder every living Jew in Yugoslavia, and then in Greece. Who were these Jews? Albahari, Arditi, Farhi, Kanhi, Alvo, Amouli, Kalef, Saltiel, Molho, Behar, Montijo, Kabilo, Finci – these were Sephardic family names, descendents of those who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Unwanted by

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most of Europe, they had sailed east and found a home in Balkan lands, then ruled by the Ottomans. For the 450 years they had lived in the Balkans, the Sephardim kept their traditions, their recipes, their customs, even their Spanish dialect, Ladino, or Judeo- Español, all while becoming part and parcel of Balkan city life. In the north, their great city was Sarajevo, with a Jewish population of 10,000. But the greatest of all Sephardic communities was Salonika, or Thessaloniki as it was known after it became part of Greece in 1912. More than 53,000 Jews lived in this bustling port city on the Aegean.

Through the centuries of the Ottoman empire’s expansion, Balkan Jewish communities flourished. During the empire’s long decline, as industrialized northern Europe sped past the Ottoman economies in the south, most Jews in the region became impoverished. But in these lands, there had never been a pogrom against them. They had never been forced to live in a ghetto. What makes the story of Hana in Sarajevo, Breda and Matilda in Belgrade, and Roza and Beno in Bitola so different is that they survived the Holocaust, whereas more than 96 percent of their fellow Balkan Sephardic Jews did not. The four women – all alive today and still living in the Balkans – owe their survival to Muslim and Christian neighbors who risked their own lives to protect them.Each of these women has a story to tell. Breda and Matilda, for instance, will never forget that day in March, 1942. Their mother had gotten them false papers so they could pass as Catholics, and that morning was taking them to the Jewish hospital, where the girls’ crippled father and his mother were imprisoned. Breda and Matilda had hoped to visit them, but something was happening. German soldiers had blocked off the street, and the girls and their mother hid behind a curtain in a nearby house. They watched as soldiers loaded the patients and doctors into a windowless van, and the girls saw it drive off. This was the first use of the carbon monoxide gas vans in Serbia, and this would be the preferred method for murdering around 6,200 Serbian Jewish women, their children and the handicapped. Beno Ruso, Roza’s boyfriend, didn’t thank anyone for hiding him during the war. That’s because he picked up a rifle, joined Tito’s communist partisans and fought back. By the time the war ended in May, 1945, Beno, all of 24 years old, had reached the rank of general. Then he raced home to Macedonia to look for Roza. Where approximately 150,000 Jews lived between Sarajevo and Thessaloniki in 1940, today there are less

than 7,000. Yet these remnant communities are a remarkable lot. One reason is they were re-established by former partisans. That meant they were – and still are – a feisty bunch. When war came to Sarajevo in the 1990s, for instance, a handful of Holocaust survivors sent most of their family members to safety, then opened a nonsectarian humanitarian aid agency to help everyone – Muslims, Serbs and Croats. In fact, all ethnic groups staffed their aid agency, La Benevolencija, and they doled out food, medicine and jokes in equal measure. No sooner had the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia become an independent country in 1991 than a small band of Jews – some of them aging partisans – made their way to the new government and asked for support to build a Holocaust museum so they could honor all those who had perished. It took a few years to write all the legislation to return heirless property to the Jewish community, but the answer was yes. Although General Beno Ruso did not live to see the new museum open its doors last month, his girlfriend, who had become his wife, Roza, did attend. Although she is 89 years old and blind, her grandchildren and children escorted her through the museum, and read to her the panels that told tales of Sephardic Balkan life, which had blossomed for 450 years. Until this month, 70 years ago. The writer is director of www.centropa.org, a Vienna-based Jewish historical institute. He acted as co-curator of the Macedonian Holocaust Museum. From The Jerusalem Post, April 30, 2011

Arab Spring? Not Quite By: Yoram Ettinger This shameless and deeply offensive article might not seem like much without some contextual historical understanding. But after looking at the matter more closely, we can see a number of disturbing things emerge. The shamelessness of the article rests in its blind allegiance to a philo-European attitude that forgets two World Wars and the tragedy of the Holocaust. As I write these comments on Holocaust Memorial Day, I am struck by the knee-jerk and idiotic Zionist allegiance to the very European values that caused so much destruction to humanity in general and to the Jews more specifically. In addition, we should note how the author extols the European Imperial system and demonizes the Arabs for not democratizing their societies. Now there are a few ways to see this:

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We can see the Arabs as barbaric thugs who cannot rise to the elite level of Europe; a Europe which was expert in settling political conflict in a series of wars that shed much blood over the course of many centuries. Wars of religion are – of course – not limited to the Arab-Muslim world in spite of how Europe wishes to see itself. We can also see it as a justification of European civilization in light of the Zionist pantomime as a reflexive imitation of these racially-charged nationalist values. The tradition of 19th century Nationalism is championed in the article as if that Nationalism was not the cause of many of the political problems that continue to plague us. Ignored in all this is the desperate attempt by many Arabs – and others in the so-called Third World – to modernize their countries through electoral and legal reforms while having to bear the brunt of Colonial domination which effectively sought to curtail independence movements, leaving many generations of reformers dead or imprisoned. The European hammer is completely ignored here and for good reason. The racism and ethnocentrism of the European nationalism has become a vital part of the Zionist enterprise and has caused Israel to deal with Arabs and Arab culture in a dismissive manner. So the article is suffused with the ethnocentric chauvinism that marked 19th century European Nationalism as it promotes a political ideology that served to decimate the Jews of Europe and infect the world with a xenophobic mentality that continues to inform Western politics. How any Jew can square this adoption of European racial values in the wake of the Holocaust is beyond me. But, as we have learned, in the Zionist mind anything is possible. DS The 19th Century violence on the European street signaled the arrival of the Spring of Nations: National cohesion, liberty and rebellion against tyranny. In contrast, the 2011 Middle East upheaval exposes the Arab Street: No “spring” and no “nations,” but the exacerbation of tribal-ethnic-religious-geographic loyalties, splits and power struggles, the intensification of domestic and intra-Arab fragmentation, the escalation of intolerance, violence and hate-culture, the absence of stability, the deepening of uncertainty, exposing the tenuous nature of Arab regimes, the ruthless submission of democracy-seeking elements and the perpetuation of ruthless tyrannies. The 19th Century Spring of Nations was energized by waves of enthusiastic optimism. On the other hand, the 2011 delusion of the Spring of Nations is exposed by the impotence, despair and frustration of pro-democracy Arab

activists, who are forced to emigrate as not to be persecuted. The expectation for a near-term Arab Spring of Nations is detached from Middle East reality, could produce another victory of wishful-thinking over experience, already leads to a delusion-based policy and risks a lethal boomerang caused by delusional yearning. In February, 2010 President Obama appointed a new ambassador to Damascus – following four years of diplomatic absence – "because Assad could play a constructive role in the Middle East." In July 2000, Western policy-makers and public opinion molders cheered the prospect of Spring in Damascus upon the succession of Hafez Assad by his son, Bashar. They were not alarmed by his 97% victory in two elections. They assumed that as an eye doctor, who interned in London, who is fluent in English and French, who was the chairman of the Syria Internet Association, and married to a London-educated wife who advocates women rights, he must be a moderate. They sacrificed documented facts – about the Assad family, the ruling Alawite minority, the Damascus vision and the centrality of the strategic cooperation between Syria and Iran – on the altar of the yearning of peace with Syria. The current turmoil in Syria exposes Western oversimplification and the authentic merciless nature of this Syrian despot. In February 2011, President Obama and Secretary Clinton hastily proclaimed the ushering of democracy into Arab lands and the reincarnation of the spirit of MLK and Gandhi in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt. However, their expectations are thwarted by the thousands of moderate Tunisians who are escaping to the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa and by the horrific campaign of killings, murder, torture, hate and corruption, which has accompanied recent volcanic eruptions in Arab countries.

In 1993, upon signing the Oslo Accord, the New Middle East visionaries announced Spring in Ramallah, the supremacy of standard-of-living over ideological and military considerations, the age of no-wars and the irrelevance of borders and military forces. However, the conduct of the Palestinian Authority (epitomized by hate-education), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the intensification of Islamic terrorism, the Iranian threat, the proliferation of advanced missiles, the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, the wars in Lebanon and Gaza and the current Middle East upheaval crashed the superficial New Middle East and Spring in Ramallah visions. Yet in order to sustain the “peace process,” Israeli and Western “elites” have ignored the unprecedented Arafat and Abbas-initiated hate-education and terrorism.

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In January 2005, they were further encouraged by Abbas' rise to the chairmanship of the Palestinian Authority. They would not be diverted from the pursuit of their visions by his track record: Introducing hate-education into Palestinian schools, mosques and media, subversion against Arab regimes, Holocaust denial, enrollment in KGB and Muslim Brotherhood schooling, the embracing of ruthless Soviet Bloc Communist regimes and centrality in the 1972 Munich Massacre. The 1989 dismantling of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered a Spring of Nations hope and a New World Order concept, which was swiftly transformed into a New World Disorder. While the Spring of Nations introduced democracy into Eastern Europe, it could not advance the cause of liberty in Arab lands. Some 1,400 years of Muslim-Arab tyranny, guided by an imperialistic, intolerant and violent religion, which embraces terrorism and tolerates “female circumcision” (genital mutilation), constitutes too high a hurdle for the Spring of Nations. The British Empire attempted to democratize Arab countries - but failed, due to the lack of essential infrastructure of democratic values and education in Arab lands. The turmoil in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman and Syria (and you ain’t seen nothing yet…), coupled with the expected US evacuation from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iranian threat and the inherent non-reliability of international or Western guarantees and forces do not usher in Spring; they do usher in lethal geo-political twisters and floods, which require the retaining – and not the giveaway - of critical Israeli security assets. From Ynet News, April 29, 2011

The Seder Night Question By: Amalia Rosenblum In discussing the thorny question of Judaism and the state of Israel, I am often told by Zionist partisans that Israel is a Jewish country because the vast majority of Israelis have a Seder and fast on Yom Kippur. This article looks more closely at what the Seder in Israel is and what it means in inner-Jewish terms. Israel’s Eastern European socialist founders were largely antagonistic to Judaism and religion in general. They did not believe in God and felt that their great success in the transformation of the Jewish people gave them license to promote an amorphous secularism that was paradoxically based some sense of Jewish religious identity. This paradox hits a wall when secular Israelis are set face to face with the Seder which is in its deepest sense an affirmation of the rabbinic system of education and its

unique way of parsing Scripture. The Sages set out a scholastic form of Judaism that was developed in the wake of a profound and earth-shattering political defeat at the hands of the Romans. In addition, a schismatic form of Judaism – Christianity – grew alongside the emergence of the Talmudic civilization, only serving to make matters even more complicated. Most Israelis have little facility with the intimate aspects of Jewish tradition; its language, rituals, and its strange way of seeing the world are somewhat alien to them. Israelis pride themselves as Zionists who have transcended what they see as the lachrymose history of the Diaspora and have created a place where Jews can now be free of the shackles of tradition and Jewish heritage. They do not know much about the Jewish past and are largely unaware of the vast literary heritage that is, of course, closely connected to a rabbinical tradition that is seen as suspect. Israelis do not pronounce Hebrew correctly and have Westernized Hebrew grammar. The Haggadah is, naturally, an alien text to them because their short history as an independent nation has taught them to reject this past as an organic totality. The Haggadah is spoken, as is much of the Hebrew liturgy, from the perspective of Diaspora. For secular Israelis, Judaism is what the Haredim do, and what we, the real Israelis, do not do. That both secular Israelis and the Haredim are alienated from Jewish tradition is itself a complex matter that speaks to the nature of religious modernity and the profound transformations that have taken place in most religious traditions. It is at times like Passover that secular Israelis are forced to face the Jewish tradition; a tradition that they know precious little about. Thus this article recounts the confusion many Israelis face when they sit down to conduct a Seder which is a mark of their vaunted Jewishness that they have largely abandoned. DS Hundreds of thousands of Israeli households held a Passover seder last week. According to the findings of a national survey, 30 percent conduct a seder out of religious beliefs, and as such, take pains to adhere to halakha during the ceremony. Most of the other 70 percent said they hold a seder for "reasons that have to do with family, Jewish culture and tradition."

Despite the desire to use this ceremony to connect with Jewish culture and tradition, in many secular homes, reading the Haggadah and conducting a seder arouses much confusion. How much of the Haggadah should be read (just the part before the meal or after as well)? How are certain words pronounced? Which instructions written in the Haggadah actually need to be followed?

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The confusion is often resolved in some strange compromise, like singing only some of the songs or putting the most devout person in the family in charge.

How does one explain the gap between the importance of this holiday in many secular Jewish homes and the inability to extract much significance out of it? Some of the confusion indicates a lack of confidence that is characteristic of secular Jews interested in defining themselves as Jewish in a cultural, rather than religious, sense. A paradigm has taken root in Israel, according to which authentic Judaism is associated with pagan rituals and with traditionalism in the folklorist sense of the word. The ceremonies and traditions serve to preserve Judaism in its ethnological sense but leave little for the secular. Indeed, apart from institutions like Alma College, there are few places in this country where secular Jews can explore questions of Jewish-Israeli identity and Hebrew culture. This paradigm was able to take root not only because of a hostile takeover by a small group who sought to impose their own definition of Judaism on the uneducated masses, but also because the first generations of secular Jews in Israel surrendered, without any fight whatsoever, anything that smacked to them of exile and the Diaspora. They did this because they believed it was a necessary price to pay in their struggle to create a new Jew.

But that historical context is no longer relevant. Secular Jews who give up their right to Jewish identity, as part of a political battle against what they perceive as the ultra-Orthodox or right-wing radicalization of society, are forfeiting an important asset, both in personal terms and in terms of the battle over Israeli culture. The seder provides an excellent opportunity to learn how the historical memory of a people is shaped, to explore the historical transformations of the Jewish holidays, and to discuss how Jewish tradition was influenced by the struggle to distinguish itself initially from neighboring pagan traditions, and subsequently, from Muslim and Christian rites.

It also provides an opportunity to spark a discussion among friends and family on the following key questions: Why do we seek signs of divinity in the supernatural rather than the natural? Is it possible to talk about prophecy without revelation, in terms relevant for modern leaders and thinkers? Is it legitimate to promote fantasies like divine supervision and the existence of an afterworld to preserve Judaism? And do we need a detailed list of rewards and punishments in order to encourage moral behavior? These questions are relevant to any Jew, and whoever suffices with singing Had Gadya alone, whether out of a sense of inferiority or confusion, has forfeited his right to understand his history and culture, Passover after Passover.

From Haaretz, April 28, 2011

Israel Unveils First ‘Sin-Free Yiddish Smartphone’ By: Bangkok Post Staff

This short announcement – from a Bangkok newspaper! – speaks volumes about the Orthodox Jewish world. It is a world that exists in a Yiddish-only environment and where its religious fanaticism extends to every aspect of an outside world which it loathes and mistrusts but tries desperately to emulate. After all, these Orthodox Jews can theoretically live without the new technology altogether, but instead seek to make the technology “Kosher.” This means that their extreme view of Jewish ritual law must be accommodated and nestled within their Eastern European comfort zone. For those of us who live in the Orthodox community, this is an old story which typifies the alienation and fanaticism of the Haredim and the insular world that they have created for themselves; a world which seems to be authentically Jewish, but which in point of fact is more a product of a set of social norms that are only marginally related to the Jewish law. It is a form of cloistered monasticism that is much closer to Christianity than it is to Jewish tradition. Those Sephardim who have entered into this Haredi world understand very well that they are making a mental and social move to Eastern Europe which leaves them as far away from their Middle Eastern roots as possible. It is therefore deeply ironic that Arab Jews who lived in their traditional culture for centuries have now – after the advent of Jewish independence in Israel – have relinquished that noble heritage for that of the Eastern European shtetl and its religious psychosis. DS Israel - While other firms have tapped into the religious market by offering phones free of Internet access, with no email or access to Facebook which could lead users into temptation, none has so far offered its services in Yiddish, Yediot Aharonot said. "This phone has no text messages, Internet access, Facebook or email. It doesn?t even have a camera," said the paper. "And if you call from it on the Sabbath, you will pay an exorbitant price of 10 shekels ($2 euros) per minute." And all the menus are in Yiddish -- the traditional German-derived language still widely used by ultra-Orthodox Jews, with the local market estimated at between 350,000 to 400,000 people, the paper said. Local importer Accel Telecom said it took four months for a pair of ultra-Orthodox translators to come up with the interface which is written in Hebrew characters and uses words such as "Klingen" (ringtone) and "Schirm Verteidikung" (screensaver). But to win rabbinical approval for the device, which is based on an Alcatel T-701 handset, Accel had to first prove

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that tech-savvy users would not be able to work their magic to circumvent the safeguards and succumb to sin. "It is not simple to make the phones kosher and bring them to a level in which you prove that the phone cannot be breached or changed in such a way that it will be possible to send text messages or surf the Internet with it," Accel CEO Mark Seelenfreund told the paper. From The Bangkok Post, April 27, 2011, Reprinted in Vos iz Neias with the title “First ‘Kosher’ Cellphone with Hasidic Folk Music Ringtones”

Meet Bart Ehrman: A One-Man God Fraud Squad By: Anneli Rufus This is an interesting article in a number of ways: What we see here is the imposition of modern standards of knowledge on ancient texts like the Bible. The idea is that by setting a contemporary metric for interpreting the texts, the texts will falter and lose their status as truth documents. Next, we should make careful note of the way in which Professor Ehrman is presented. His story as written in the article is that of a convert. When he began his academic study he was a zealous believer who over time became convinced that what he believed was wrong. The idea here is that there are competing truth claims – as if reading texts was akin to scientific investigation – and that one claim must be correct while the other is incorrect. It is a “Road to Damascus” moment – in reverse. The truth seeker begins with Christ but ends with atheism. The matter is important because of the way in which Orthodoxy and atheistic non-belief now function in our culture. The truth claims of Orthodoxy are marked by non-believers as the “correct” way of parsing Scripture. This lends total credence to the fundamentalist viewpoint which sees the Bible as a document that emerged fully formed out of the mind of God. The historical record has correctly shown that this contention of the Bible being a supernatural document is not empirically true, so the non-believers think they have won the argument. Game, set, match! This then leads the historicists to make the larger claim that the Bible is a tissue of lies meant to brainwash believers. And while in the case of fundamentalism this might well be true, it does not undermine the rhetorical and philosophical power of the Biblical texts within their cultural contexts. To wit, communities of faith and practice grew up around these texts and were formed around a tradition of Biblical exegesis. These communities are an empirical reality and

continued to grapple with the texts as time evolved. Marking them as delusional does not free to investigator from the necessity of understanding what such people thought and said about these texts and how the texts were made into a central part of our civilization. By marking the Biblical texts as abstractions that are to be read solely in terms of who wrote them and when they were written – details that cannot be identified with exact precision in spite of the widely-held “beliefs” of the academics – the epistemological heritage of Biblical interpretation and the place that these texts have in the organic lives of people and religious institutions is blunted. What is being missed by the Bible critics is that their animus towards the Bible precedes their investigations. The great epiphany of discovering that the Bible is a sham is simply a replacement of one set of absolutist beliefs with another. The academics have created a myth of authorship and set out a heuristic historiography based on a dangerous combination of archaeology and speculation that is often presented as definitive science. And that is the ultimate point here: It is highly unlikely that any one group has the “truth.” It is highly unlikely that such a “truth” even exists. Historicism has its place in the study of religion and the Bible, just as the Biblical interpretation of the Sages and the Church has its rightful place in our study of the texts. One does not simply strike down texts and traditions as “false” as if they were conducting a scientific experiment on a Bunsen burner or as if they were looking at the texts through some magical microscope. “Truth” is not a singular thing and we must be careful to study all aspects of a subject before thinking that we have definitively understood it. DS

Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to a world-renowned Bible scholar whose new book fingering the forgers is making evangelical Christians as mad as — well, hell. "Bart Ehrman has waged war on Christianity for years. This is just his latest salvo," snaps a FreeRepublic commenter. "Bart himself is a forgery. More of his usual tragic, groundless, infantile, bigoted narcissism enslaved to the father of lies, mammon ... a willful subtle prevaricator ... a disgusting, arrogant hack. God have mercy on his benighted soul," rages another at the Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth blog. Ehrman is used to it. The University of North Carolina religious studies professor stoked evangelical ire with his previous bestsellers The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. He's

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doing it again with Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (HarperOne, 2011). "When Bart D. Ehrman and all his so called 'scholar' friends are long gone, Jesus Christ will still be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords to whom EVERY KNEE will one day bow. Friends — repent," pleads a Daily Mail commenter. Ehrman knows where they're coming from. He used to be one of them. As an undergrad at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute in the mid-1970s, Ehrman was "an extremely zealous, rigorous, pious (self-righteous)" evangelical who followed the school's draconian rules — no smoking, drinking, card-playing, dancing, movies, or beards — because Bible verses seemed to support them. Unlike most college students, unlike nearly all young Americans, Moody students didn't question authority. When you take the Bible literally, you don't subvert dominant paradigms. Such bullet-proof belief "was comforting," Ehrman says now, "because we thought we had a corner on the truth and that we were right and everybody else was wrong. And these were eternal truths, so they were going to bring us eternal life and everybody else was going to hell. It's very comforting to think you're always right." Studying for his PhD a few years later at Princeton Theological Seminary, poring over each part of the New Testament in its original Koine Greek, the born-again young scholar remained "passionate about my studies and the truth that I could find." But what he found instead were errors. Contradictions. Self-defeating arguments. Historical inaccuracies. And worse. "The New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament, where the problems are even more severe) was chock full of discrepancies. ... I wrestled with these problems, I prayed about them. ... Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies." Lies. Not just fact-twisting fabrications but the composition of entire books by obscure authors who claimed to be the Apostles Peter and Paul and other spiritual celebrities but weren't. According to Ehrman, individuals falsely claiming to be Paul wrote Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. Equally bogus, Ehrman charges, is the premise that the Apostle Peter wrote the Epistles of Peter or anything else in the Bible — or anywhere, ever, because as a poor hick fisherman raised in rural Palestine, Peter was almost certainly illiterate.

Researchers estimate the literacy rate of Roman-era Palestine at only 3 percent. Ehrman surmises that in rural areas, where most residents "would scarcely ever even see a written text," it might have been as low as 1 percent. "Peter probably didn't write anything. Paul, on the other hand, was educated. Unlike Peter, he didn't come from some one-horse town in Galilee." Thus, Ehrman says, seven of the 13 epistles attributed to Paul "were probably written by Paul." Who wrote the rest? And who's behind the Bible's other forgeries, which Ehrman estimates at a whopping 12 of the New Testament's 27 books? And that doesn't even include oodles of counterfeit apocrypha. Ehrman says these materials were not merely discovered unsigned way back when and then mistakenly, well-meaningly, attributed to saints: "The books we are talking about are by authors who lied about their identity in order to deceive their readers into thinking that they were someone they were not. The technical term for this kind of activity is forgery." Writing painstakingly with reed pens on papyrus scrolls, ancient sneaks signed the fruits of their labor with other men's names, leading Christendom to base its beliefs and behaviors on these fibs for the next two thousand years. But why? Not, as motivates modern forgers, for money or fame. Ancient "books" weren't mass-produced, thus couldn't become bestsellers. While forgery wasn't illegal then, it was frowned upon. Forgers, if exposed, faced public shame. Yet some braved that risk as a means of hawking their agendas: doctrine that the devout would devour if declared by Matthew or Luke but dismiss if propounded by a random guy named Flavius. It's relatively easy to fool illiterate hordes. "If people are literate, they can recognize writing styles. But if you can't read or write and you can only listen to writings read aloud" — which was mainly how Christianity was practiced in its first few centuries — "it's hard to do the kind of stylistic analysis" that scholars employ when comparing suspected forgeries with their alleged authors' known works, searching for inconsistencies in grammar, diction and dogma. While some ancient impostures are deft, in other cases "it's like you're reading Mark Twain and then all of a sudden you're reading T.S. Eliot," Ehrman says. Forging holy books in an effort to save souls "is in one sense a noble cause, because it's not for self-aggrandizement, it's not for advancement, and it's not for money. It's because these people had something they thought was worth hearing. It's just sad that they had to lie

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about it. And some of these forgeries are really dangerous, which is a good reason to point out that they're probably forged. Their ramifications are devastating." For example, the First Epistle to Timothy — attributed to Paul, although Ehrman insists it's forged — forbids females from becoming pastors or even speaking aloud in church. "Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden, First Timothy says women are easily deceived, so they should stay silent and submissive and pregnant." This dictate is still followed today by conservative evangelical congregations who believe that Paul wrote it, "when in fact it was a forger writing under Paul's name twenty or thirty years later — someone who was tired of hearing women speak up in church." When Ehrman attended Moody Bible Institute, female students weren't permitted to take classes in preaching. Those classes were male-only, thanks to First Timothy. Ehrman's no longer a born-again. He's now an agnostic. "My evangelical faith couldn't hold up to rational inquiry. I stayed a Christian for many years, but a liberal Christian. The story of Christ was something I wanted to live by. When I became an agnostic fifteen years ago, it wasn't because of all the scholarship. It was because of the problem of suffering, and the question of how a powerful God could exist in a world like this." Faked scriptures warning us to speak the truth: Some liars lie for what they say is our own good. Parents assure their children that people are kind. Spouses never confess those one-night stands. Is it sometimes okay to lie? In Forged, Ehrman argues that hearing the truth might be a human right. "Maybe children have the right to know what parents honestly believe. ... Maybe it is better for our elected officials to come clean and tell us the truth, rather than mislead us so as to be authorized to do what they desperately want," he wrote in a passage that he says was inspired by "George Bush and this whole business of the war in Iraq with Colin Powell telling one lie after another." He wasn't the first and won't be the last. "From the first century to the twenty-first century, people who have called themselves Christians have seen fit to fabricate, falsify, and forge documents, in most instances in order to authorize views they wanted others to accept," Ehrman writes. If both the Old and New Testaments are full of fibs and forgeries, then what of other so-called holy books? "People always ask me that question about the Koran,"

Ehrman says. "Out of concern for my personal safety, I don't say a thing." However, he doesn't hesitate to say: "The Book of Mormon is completely made up." By whom? "Joseph Smith, I assume. Whether he was completely self-deceived or crazy or just a lying bastard, I don't know. It's one of those three, probably." Maybe someday he'll take that up with Glenn Beck.

From Alternet, April 29, 2011

Why Being a ‘Foodie’ isn’t Elitist By: Eric Schlosser Social activism is sometimes a tricky matter given the socio-economic disparities between activists and those they are advocating for. We have dealt harshly in the SHU with the many Limousine Liberals who live lavish lifestyles while speaking out on behalf of the less fortunate. I can think of the late musician John Denver who in the 1970s was both a mega-star and an insufferable environmentalist. Denver notoriously built a massive gasoline tank on his Colorado estate during the famous Gas crisis of the 1970s so he could fuel his stable of cars and airplanes (he was also a licensed pilot) while the less fortunate were waiting on endless lines at gas stations. I also think of the Obamas and their transformation from social activists in Chicago into political bigwigs who have long forgotten the poor who are disproportionately affected by the malignant policies of the current administration and its inability to toe the line for the less fortunate. When attending a Neil Young concert some years ago, I was struck by his shrill advocacy on behalf of the family farmer and his demand that we all eat organic produce. This to me was quite rich given the fact that the tickets for his concert – like the food products he was promoting – were quite expensive. I was sitting in an elite society that demanded a level of economic status that most people cannot afford. And that is the main problem with Mr. Schlosser’s argument here: I do not think that people go to McDonalds because they want to be obese and unhealthy. They go there to get cheap food. So too do we go to our supermarkets to look to save money in order to feed our families.

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When one goes to the PC supermarkets like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s – places with the best and most healthy food – one sees members of the economic elite. Poor people cannot afford to buy the products at such places because they often cost double the products at the corporatized supermarkets. I agree with all the arguments about this corporatization and yet I cannot help but think that in a practical sense the whole thing is about who has money and who does not. On a larger plane, the Limousine Liberal elites who shop at Whole Foods and who demand ecologically sustainable food more often than not hypocritically earn their money from the very same corrupt system that they are decrying. They go to their corporate jobs where many of them rape and plunder the poorer citizens of the planet, and then they go home – or better, send their poor nannies and housekeepers – to shop for food that is not tainted by corporate interests they protect while working at their day jobs. After all, the Limousine Liberal does not want to be poisoned by the corporate food that they support in their professions! It is similar to a Viacom employee who spews mindless filth through MTV and then goes to Lincoln Center to watch opera and ballet in their leisure time. It is similar to Noam Chomsky and other radical academics who preach socialism from the perch of elite colleges like MIT which are a central part of the corporatization of America. I do not see any of them refusing their corporate paychecks There is no question that the food system we have in America has been corrupted and must be addressed for the health of our fellow citizens. It is not a negligible issue. But it is truly an affront for the economic elites to sit in judgment of the poor and the difficult situation they are in. I do not question the assertion that our food is killing us. But it must be understood that the food that does not kill us is very expensive, and for those on the lower end of the economic ladder this price is one that they cannot bear. It is wrong to maintain distinctions based on wealth and then snidely sit in judgment of the poor. It is not just about what au courant restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper West Side serve to their patrons – who are also part of this Limousine Liberal elite. Rather than attacking the poor and the weak, the Limousine Liberals should start looking at themselves and their place in the corporate hierarchy; that same corporate hierarchy that they decry – after they leave their corporate jobs and come home to a meal of organic food purchased at Whole Foods for a princely sum that only the rich can afford. DS

At the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting this year, Bob Stallman, the group’s president, lashed out at “self-appointed food elitists” who are “hell-bent on misleading consumers.” His target was the growing movement that calls for sustainable farming practices and questions the basic tenets of large-scale industrial agriculture in America.

The “elitist” epithet is a familiar line of attack. In the decade since my book “Fast Food Nation” was published, I’ve been called not only an elitist, but also a socialist, a communist and un-American. In 2009, the documentary “Food, Inc.,” directed by Robby Kenner, was described as “elitist foodie propaganda” by a prominent corporate lobbyist. Nutritionist Marion Nestle has been called a “food fascist,” while an attempt was recently made to cancel a university appearance by Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” who was accused of being an “anti-agricultural” elitist by a wealthy donor.

This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies. And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production — overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels — is profoundly undemocratic. It is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers, workers and consumers.

During the past 40 years, our food system has changed more than in the previous 40,000 years. Genetically modified corn and soybeans, cloned animals, McNuggets — none of these technological marvels existed in 1970. The concentrated economic power now prevalent in U.S. agriculture didn’t exist, either. For example, in 1970 the four largest meatpacking companies slaughtered about 21 percent of America’s cattle; today the four largest companies slaughter about 85 percent. The beef industry is more concentrated now than it was in 1906, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” and criticized the unchecked power of the “Beef Trust.” The markets for pork, poultry, grain, farm chemicals and seeds have also become highly concentrated.

America’s ranchers and farmers are suffering from this lack of competition for their goods. In 1970, farmers received about 32 cents for every consumer dollar spent on food; today they get about 16 cents. The average farm household now earns about 87 percent of its income from non-farm sources.

While small farmers and their families have been forced to take second jobs just to stay on their land, wealthy farmers have received substantial help from the federal government. Between 1995 and 2009, about $250 billion in federal subsidies was given directly to American farmers —

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and about three-quarters of that money was given to the wealthiest 10 percent. Those are the farmers whom the Farm Bureau represents, the ones attacking “big government” and calling the sustainability movement elitist.

Food industry workers are also bearing the brunt of the system’s recent changes. During the 1970s, meatpackers were among America’s highest-paid industrial workers; today they are among the lowest paid. Thanks to the growth of fast-food chains, the wages of restaurant workers have fallen, too. The restaurant industry has long been the largest employer of minimum-wage workers. Since 1968, thanks in part to the industry’s lobbying efforts, the real value of the minimum wage has dropped by 29 percent.

Migrant farmworkers have been hit especially hard. They pick the fresh fruits and vegetables considered the foundation of a healthy diet, but they are hardly well-rewarded for their back-breaking labor. The wages of some migrants, adjusted for inflation, have dropped by more than 50 percent since the late 1970s. Many grape-pickers in California now earn less than their counterparts did a generation ago, when misery in the fields inspired Cesar Chavez to start the United Farm Workers Union.

While workers are earning less, consumers are paying for this industrial food system with their health. Young children, the poor and people of color are being harmed the most. During the past 40 years, the obesity rate among American preschoolers has doubled. Among children ages 6 to 11, it has tripled. Obesity has been linked to asthma, cancer, heart disease and diabetes, among other ailments. Two-thirds of American adults are obese or overweight, and economists from Cornell and Lehigh universities have estimated that obesity is now responsible for 17 percent of the nation’s annual medical costs, or roughly $168 billion.

African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic whites, and more likely to be poor. As upper-middle-class consumers increasingly seek out healthier foods, fast-food chains are targeting low-income minority communities — much like tobacco companies did when wealthy and well-educated people began to quit smoking.

Some aspects of today’s food movement do smack of elitism, and if left unchecked they could sideline the movement or make it irrelevant. Consider the expensive meals and obscure ingredients favored by a number of celebrity chefs, the snobbery that often oozes from restaurant connoisseurs, and the obsessive interest in exotic cooking techniques among a certain type of gourmand.

Those things may be irritating. But they generally don’t sicken or kill people. And our current industrial food system does.

Just last month, a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that nearly half of the beef,

chicken, pork and turkey at supermarkets nationwidemay be contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. About 80 percent of the antibiotics in the United States are currently given to livestock, simply to make the animals grow faster or to prevent them from becoming sick amid the terribly overcrowded conditions at factory farms. In addition to antibiotic-resistant germs, a wide variety of other pathogens are being spread by this centralized and industrialized system for producing meat.

Children under age 4 are the most vulnerable to food-borne pathogens and to pesticide residues in food. According to a report by Georgetown University and the Pew Charitable Trusts, the annual cost of food-borne illness in the United States is about $152 billion. That figure does not include the cost of the roughly 20,000 annual deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

One of the goals of the Farm Bureau Federation is to influence public opinion. In addition to denying the threat of global warming and attacking the legitimacy of federal environmental laws, the Farm Bureau recently created an entity called the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance to “enhance public trust in our food supply.” Backed by a long list of powerful trade groups, the alliance also plans to “serve as a resource to food companies” seeking to defend current agricultural practices.

But despite their talk of openness and trust, the giants of the food industry rarely engage in public debate with their critics. Instead they rely on well-paid surrogates — or they file lawsuits. In 1990, McDonald’s sued a small group called London Greenpeace for criticizing the chain’s food, starting a legal battle that lasted 15 years. In 1996, Texas cattlemen sued Oprah Winfrey for her assertion that mad cow disease might have come to the United States, and kept her in court for six years. Thirteen states passed “veggie libel laws” during the 1990s to facilitate similar lawsuits. Although the laws are unconstitutional, they remain on the books and serve their real purpose: to intimidate critics of industrial food.

In the same spirit of limiting public awareness, companies such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical have blocked the labeling of genetically modified foods, while the meatpacking industry has prevented the labeling of milk and meat from cloned animals. If genetic modification and cloning are such wonderful things, why aren’t companies eager to advertise the use of these revolutionary techniques?

The answer is that they don’t want people to think about what they’re eating. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates. A Florida state senator recently introduced a bill making it a first-degree felony to take a photograph of any farm or processing plant — even from a public road — without the owner’s permission. Similar bills have been introduced in Minnesota and Iowa, with support from Monsanto.

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The cheapness of today’s industrial food is an illusion, and the real cost is too high to pay. While the Farm Bureau Federation clings to an outdated mind-set, companies such as Wal-Mart, Danone, Kellogg’s, General Mills and Compass have invested in organic, sustainable production. Insurance companies such as Kaiser Permanente are opening farmers markets in low-income communities. Whole Foods is demanding fair labor practices, while Chipotle promotes the humane treatment of farm animals. Urban farms are being planted by visionaries such as Milwaukee’s Will Allen; the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is defending the rights of poor migrants; Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is fighting to improve the lives of food-service workers; and Alice Waters, Jamie Oliver and first lady Michelle Obama are pushing for healthier food in schools.

Calling these efforts elitist renders the word meaningless. The wealthy will always eat well. It is the poor and working people who need a new, sustainable food system more than anyone else. They live in the most polluted neighborhoods. They are exposed to the worst toxic chemicals on the job. They are sold the unhealthiest foods and can least afford the medical problems that result.

A food system based on poverty and exploitation will never be sustainable.

From The Washington Post, April 29, 2011

A Budget for the 21st Century By: Paul Ryan Using the same benign language as many Right Wing extremists who would prefer to be seen as high-minded statesmen, Paul Ryan confirms my analysis in the comments on David Brooks’ article. He completely ignores the profound structural problems with the current economic system and picks away at taxes and social programs. By reframing the debate Ryan wins. What he has effectively done is to provide even more support to those who have destroyed the economy. Under his plan the poor will have to pay for the sins of the rich. And the rich – the “Job Creators” – will make out like bandits. Never mind that since the age of the execrable Ronald Reagan that these economic ideas have not worked; the idea is not to make things better for the majority of Americans. No, the idea is to maintain the imbalance of financial power and provide the wealthy with all they desire. Taxes must always be lowered and government should be starved. Not starved for the rich though – their corporations should continue to receive the welfare that is now a critical part of the system. It is for the less well off to figure out how to deal with the new realities.

The problem is that the system can only extend itself so much to the wishes of the rich. The continued pillage of the US economy by Wall Street and corporate interests – which the Ryan plan is designed to enhance and expand to historic levels – would have the potential effect of creating a perpetual debt for America; a matter that Ryan seems to be aware of given the fact that he has invented economic numbers out of thin air and in the end does not seriously eliminating that debt and balancing the budget. As has been the recent Republican strategy, the idea is to make the wealthy more wealthy by draining the marketplace through tax cuts and the hoarding of capital; effectively destroying the production base of the country and creating an elite that now effectively controls the vast resources of the economy. Ryan is having his “Let them eat cake” moment – we are waiting for someone to call him out on it. The Democrats and the president do not seem to have the guts to do it. DS

This week the House of Representatives will take the first real step in addressing our looming fiscal crisis by bringing “The Path to Prosperity,” a budget resolution for next year and beyond, to the House floor. This budget offers a clear contrast to the president’s speech on Wednesday.

It offers a contrast in credibility. Unlike the president’s speech, which was rhetorically heated but substantively hollow, our budget contains specific solutions for confronting the debt and averting the most predictable crisis in our nation’s history. It also offers a contrast in visions. Unlike the speech, our budget advances a vision of America in which government both keeps its promises to seniors and lives within its means.

Two months ago, President Obama submitted a budget for fiscal 2012 that did not deal with the major sources of government spending while calling for much higher taxes on American businesses and families. This budget was widely panned as lacking seriousness.

Now comes a deficit speech that doesn’t even rise to the level of a plan. Missing was a credible way to curb out-of-control spending. Instead, the president called for greater reliance on government price controls, which would strictly limit the health-care options of current seniors while failing to control costs. The president would couple this approach with $1 trillion in tax increases, which would destroy jobs and hurt the economy.

We cannot accept an approach that starts from the premise that ever-higher levels of spending and taxes represent America’s new normal. We have an obligation to fulfill the mission of health and retirement security for current retirees and future generations. We have a historic commitment to limited government and free enterprise. And

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we have a duty to leave the next generation with a more prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

The House Republican budget keeps America’s promises to seniors and those near retirement by making no changes to their current arrangements. It keeps America’s promises of health and retirement security for future generations by saving and strengthening our most important programs. And it keeps a promise that is implicit in our form of government: that a government instituted to secure our rights must be a limited government.

That is why “The Path to Prosperity” prevents spending and taxes from rising steadily to unprecedented levels, as they are currently projected to do. Doing otherwise would leave our children a nation that is less prosperous, less free and much deeper in debt.

If you are someone who agrees with the president that we cannot avoid this outcome without resorting to large tax increases, know this: No amount of taxes can keep pace with the amount of money government is projected to spend on health care in the coming years. Medicare and Medicaid are growing twice as fast as the economy — and taxes cannot rise that fast without a devastating impact on jobs and growth.

If you believe that spending on these programs can be controlled by restricting what doctors and hospitals are paid, know this: Medicare is on track to pay doctors less than Medicaid pays, and Medicaid already pays so little that many doctors refuse to see Medicaid patients. These arbitrary cuts not only fail to control costs, they also leave our most vulnerable citizens with fewer health-care choices and reduced access to care.

And if you believe that we must eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in these programs, know this: Eliminating inefficient spending is critical, but the only way to do so is to reward providers who deliver high-quality, low-cost health care, while punishing those who don’t. Time and again, the federal government has proved incapable of doing that.

Medicare is projected to go bankrupt in just nine years unless we act to curb the relentlessly rising cost of health care. This cannot be done with across-the-board cuts in Washington. It has to be done by giving seniors the tools to fight back against skyrocketing costs. That’s why our budget saves Medicare by using competition to weed out inefficient providers, improve the quality of health care for seniors and drive costs down.

The president’s proposals are aimed more at empowering government than strengthening the free market. He continues to prove he’s not up to the challenging work of reforming government to meet 21st-century needs. If he gets his way, the nation will endure huge tax hikes, seniors’ access to health care will be reduced — and we will experience an epic collapse of our health and retirement

programs that would devastate our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

House Republicans are fighting to prevent this. Our budget offers a compassionate and optimistic contrast to a future of health-care rationing and unbearably high taxes. We lift the crushing burden of debt, repair the safety net, make America’s tax system fair and competitive, and ensure that our health and retirement programs have a strong and lasting future. These issues are too important to leave to the politics of the past. If President Obama won’t lead, we will.

From The Washington Post, April 15, 2011

Ultimate Spoiler Alert By: David Brooks Here is another excellent example of the subversiveness of the David Brooks stealth approach. He lists a number of items that characterize the current debate, a debate initiated and controlled by the Right Wing extremist approach, as if the list is a comprehensive recap of all the issues involved. It is most certainly true that this partial list of the relevant items is the one deployed by both the media and by the president himself. It has sadly become the conventional wisdom of the punditocracy and the political class. If Brooks were as smart as he makes himself out to be, he would not be following the party line on the issues as he does constantly. What is missing from this pseudo-scientific analysis of our economic situation in America is the larger financial framework that underlies the trouble with are in. In essence, it is not all that hard to identify the problems if one thinks a bit deeper: It is all about the massive financial drain on the system that was created by Wall Street malfeasance. The national economy was drained by the swindles with Wall Street firms both pocketing huge chunks of cash – taking that money from pensions and other public sources – while tanking their companies and imperiling the nation’s economy. The government then rewarded the most egregious of the Wall Street firms and bailed them out with money taken from the US Treasury. These firms now have a direct “free credit” line with the Fed. It should be noted that the government officials involved in these financial schemes are more often than not employees or former employees of the same Wall Street firms who have drained our economy and made boatloads of money for themselves.

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Wall Street – the firms who made it through the collapse – was thus able to “double-dip” and receive profits from both their swindles and the bailouts that came in their wake. This is why they continue to pop the corks on their champagne bottles in celebration of the obscene amounts of money that they have absconded with. This money is a transfer of American wealth – corporate socialism – that has blown a huge hole in the economy and because of the way the Fed and the TARP system has worked, it is money that will remain in the hands of the thieves and not in the hands of the American people. Nothing less than a complete overhaul of the Wall Street system will solve this problem – and the president has shown a complete lack of interest in doing such a thing. Second – the inability of President Obama to create a workable alternative to the private healthcare industry – as he promised in his election campaign speeches – has led to a complete dominance of greedy financial interests which have since the presidency of Richard Nixon continued to eat up our healthcare dollar. The idea of a Single-Payer system would solve the problems of Medicare and Medicaid, but because the president refused to propose such a system, we are still at the tender mercies of a healthcare industry that – like Wall Street – is in the driver’s seat. Making record profits at the expense of the American taxpayers these companies have gamed the system and are making out like bandits. I will leave discussion of the Defense budget out of my analysis for the purposes of brevity – but there too we have another huge drain on our economy. And as far as taxes go – the Ryan lie – which Obama seems to be buying – is that any movement from the Bush cuts which are not a permanent part of the tax code is considered an “increase.” But by law, the tax rates have not changed since the time of Bill Clinton – the Bush cuts are temporary and should not be renewed; restoring those rates – as even Jon Stewart showed – would significantly lower the national debt. That Obama and the Democrats agreed to renew them is yet another nail in their coffin. To sum up: Until Wall Street firms and the healthcare industry can be reined in, the discussion will remain as Brooks outlines it. The basic debate will revolve around tangential issues – never really getting to the inherent structural problems that have led to the collapse of our economy. Before taxes are discussed we need to know what happened – and what is still happening – with the massive amounts of dollars that have been transferred to corporate and financial interests by means of various schemes that have been made legal or have been left unchecked by a government that is now in the pay of these vested interests. The money is all there – the question is who has it and what are they doing with it.

DS If they [President Obama and Paul Ryan] met, would they resolve their differences? No, but they would understand them better. Paul Ryan believes five things Barack Obama does not. First, he believes that aging populations, expensive new health care technologies and the extravagant political promises have made the current welfare state model unsustainable. Fundamental reform is necessary or the whole thing will collapse, here and in Europe.

Second, he believes that seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be imposed to rebalance these systems. Third, he believes that health care costs will not be brought under control until consumers take responsibility for their decisions and providers have market-based incentives to reduce prices.

Fourth, he believes that tax increases should not be part of these reforms because the economic costs outweigh the gains. Fifth, he does not believe government can nurture growth and reduce wage stagnation with targeted investments.

Obama, meanwhile, does not believe the current welfare arrangements are structurally unsustainable. They have to be adjusted, but not fundamentally altered. He does not believe the seniors and members of the middle class have to suffer significantly in the course of these adjustments. The approach he outlined Wednesday mostly shields these groups from cuts, even if Congress can’t reach a deal on deficit-cutting and a fiscal trigger kicks in.

Obama does not believe in relying on market mechanisms to reduce health care costs. Instead, he would rely mostly on a board of technical experts, who would be given power to force their recommendations upon Congress.

Obama believes that tax increases on the rich have to be part of a fiscal package. His approach claims to contain $3 in cuts for every $1 in taxes, but if you count these things the way a normal person would, it’s closer to 1 to 1. Finally, Obama believes that government investments in research and infrastructure nurture broad-based prosperity.

Personally, I agree with Ryan on items 1-3 and with Obama on items 4 and 5, and I think an acceptable package could be put together to reconcile these views. But I do not believe there is any chance this will happen in the current climate. What’s going to happen is this: We’re going to raise the debt ceiling in a way that fudges the

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issues. Then we’re going to have an election featuring these rival viewpoints, and Obama will win easily.

From The New York Times, April 15, 2011

New David Shasha Book for Sale Please note that The Center for Sephardic Heritage has published David Shasha’s Representing the

Human Family: Essays on the Book of Genesis. The book is available for $20.00 plus $3.00 shipping to US addresses. Please e-mail davidshasha@cfsh.org for more information.

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