The Jew News Review – October 12, 2024 – “One Day”

Shabbat shalom! And G’mar tov (Good seal)! The latter greeting is based on the belief that a person’s fate for the coming year is written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. “G’mar tov” expresses the wish that the person be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for a good year. 

It has not been a good year for Jews. We have lived through a pogrom, a year of death and devestating destruction, and a level of anti-semitism not seen in the post-holocaust period. Period. 

Israel is currently fighting a war on at least 5 fronts, against an enemy that wants to commit a real genocide against our people. And Israel is fighting this war with an incompetent government that lacks trust and that relies on the votes of ultra-Orthodox, who by the way, do not serve in the armies and demand a draft exemption. And the fact that the country is navigating what is probably the darkest moment in its history with the least competent government is rather extraordinary. And despite all that, there is a feeling that a page has turned, and the Israeli lion has awoken and is kicking ass and taking out terrorists and doing the world a giant favor by reducing the ability for the jihadists to continue killing innocent people in the name of Allah. And while Jews around the world celebrate what is considered by many the holiest of holidays, we wait for Israel’s response to the latest missile barrage from Iran. It’s time to chop the head off the evil octopus. 

The toll on the Israeli people has been heavy. This tiny country, the size of New Jersey with a population of 10 million, is still suffering from the trauma of October 7, the worst and most horrific butchering of innocent people in my lifetime. And the hostages, over 100 that are still suffering in the dark dungeons of Hamas hell tunnels, continue to weigh heavily on any decent human’s spirit, but especially on the very soul of Israel and Israelis. And the country remains divided on not only what to do about them, but how to honor them. 

That was symbolized this last week by two competing October 7 ceremonies: an unofficial ceremony that was put together by the families of hostages, most notably by Jonathan Shamriz, a very impressive young Israeli, whose brother Alon was taken hostage on October 7, and then sadly, was one of the three hostages killed mistakenly by the IDF. That ceremony was held in Tel Aviv and was supposed to be attended by about 40,000 people, but tickets ran out within a matter of hours and then was reduced to a much smaller group due to the threat of rocket attacks. That unofficial ceremony was followed by an official state ceremony put together by the Netanyahu government and pre-recorded, in part because they were worried that if it was filmed live, people would protest and/or disrupt the ceremony.

Shamriz, wearing a white t-shirt printed with the name of his devastated kibbutz, Kfar Aza, and a yellow ribbon, recalled being in the shelter with his family, holding the door closed against terrorists with a kitchen knife in his hand, receiving updates on his phone about the massacre taking place.

“It was a day without an army, without a state — a day where all we had was ourselves, the citizens. This is what abandonment looks like,” says Shamriz. “Instead of standing here as multitudes of the people of Israel, united, we stand here waiting for the next siren. Instead of a state inquiry commission being established to investigate this colossal failure, we are asking the questions ourselves without getting any answers.” “There is no personal example, no vision, no leadership, no accountability,” he says, to applause from the audience.

Ouch. 

But Shamriz ends on a positive note, and is a reminder of the redemptive spirit and resilience of this amazing people. Shamriz says he believes a new generation is rising out of the ruins and destruction, a generation that believes in the Israeli spirit, that will rebuild and create a better, more moral country. And it’s the generation that we’re seeing now fighting in Gaza and in Lebanon, an incredible young generation. And while his speech may have been a dark statement on Israeli leadership, it ended with a very positive message, and a statement of pure Zionism.

“Alon, you hero, thank you for showing us the path. Thank you for setting the standards. We will not desist until we have fixed things. We will not rest until we have rebuilt. We are the generation that will emerge from the ruins, the holocaust, the inferno, and will realize the new Zionist vision. And when that happens, I will know that Alon’s path has become reality. Rise! Am Yisrael Chai! The people of Israel live.”

Amazing.

While there are positive developments on the war front in Israel, things have gotten worse here in the diaspora, particularly here in the good ole US of A. For example, at Columbia University, Jewish students tried to organize a quiet ceremony to honor the hostages and Jews slaughtered on October 7th. And it was effectively overrun by a counter protest, by mask wearing, keffiyeh wearing, Hamas and Hezbollah flag waving protesters, who were chanting the language of Hamas, “from the river to the sea”, “bomb Tel Aviv”, “globalize the Intifada”, and other hateful horse shit. These are the same morons that probably tore down posters of hostages. And this kind of nonsense was happening all over the country, not to mention the new report from the ADL that anti-semitic attacks went up by over 200% in a single year. Makes me want to puke.

A silver lining in all this hatred is that Jews are returning to shul, to their synagogues, and to other Jewish communities in record numbers. Probably out of fear and safety, but nevertheless, a silver lining I will take no matter the reason. Even my wife and I attended our synagogue’s Yom Kippur service last night via Zoom, although I confess, and will now atone for, falling asleep during the service. 

Rather than my usual listing of mostly bad news for the Jews across the globe, I thought I would end this post on a more positive note. While some kind of peaceful solution in Israel seems generations away from reality, and while Israelis try to deal with the existential threat imposed upon them by Iran and its proxies, there needs to be some kind of hope for a peaceful way forward, for both Israelis and Palestinians that want peace. After all, the national anthem for Israel, “Hatikvah”, is literally the word “hope”. And so in that perhaps naive context, I present to JNR readers this song of hope, organized by a singing group called Koolulam, and led by Matisyahu, a well known American reggae singer, rapper, beatboxer, and musician. On February 14, 2018, Koolulam invited 3,000 people who had never met before to sing in Haifa, “One Day” in three languages, (Hebrew, Arabic and English), in celebration of co-existence, and in collaboration with Beit HaGefen, the Haifa Municipality, and the Port of Haifa. It took just under one hour for the 3,000 to learn all the parts, and here is the result. 

These are the voices and the faces of hope.

One day, hopefully soon, our hostages will come back alive. One day, there will be peace in the middle east. Until then, be careful out there. 

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – Special Edition – “The Message and the media”

Shalom.

It was in my George Orwell class in college many years ago that my favorite professor, Howard Ziff, challenged the class with this quote about journalism, whose source is not known to me: “The role of the journalist is to broadcast the truth, and at the same time, destroy the ability to perceive.” That quote stuck in my brain for some reason, and it was brought back to me recently by the latest kerfuffle surrounding Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book tour promoting his latest “woke” book offering, The Message. 

I have not read this book, nor have I read any of his books. For those of you new to Coates, he is a former senior editor and national correspondent for The Atlantic, considered one of the fathers of the “woke” movement, a MacArthur Genius Fellowship award winner and author of several books.  The Message, reflects on his visits to Dakar, Senegal; Chapin, South Carolina; and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The latter trip left a deep impression on Coates. In a 2024 profile for New York, he said, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel”. According to the profile, The Message “lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West”.

I have never visited the West Bank, but I have read enough to know life there, in a word, sucks, and Palestinians who live there are treated with a different set of rights and rules than Jews that live there. There are countless horror stories documenting the pernicious nature of checkpoints and their impact on Palestinian daily life. Stories of pregnant women being stopped at checkpoints, clearly in distress, and not being able to get to a hospital in time. The horror of a busload of children injured in a crash on a road that was on the wrong side of the fence, and hence, difficult for ambulances to tend to. And I could go on and on. 

There is of course, a long and nuanced history of the land, which many think is illegally occupied, while Israelis will, rightfully, claim it is disputed territory. Not so nuanced is the terrorism unleashed in the Second Intifada starting in 2000 after Yasser Arafat turned down a peace offer that essentially gave Palestinians everything they had been asking for. In the initial weeks of the Second Intifada, there was a popular element to the violence, but within a short time, grassroots participation in the violence ebbed, and the Palestinians turned to directly attacking Israeli civilian centers, military installations, vehicles, and civilians through suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, and rocket launchings, which killed over 1,000 Israelis, and left thousands severely injured. 

Israel attempted to counter Palestinian violence in a variety of ways. Most directly, it engaged in military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. A major incursion was launched in March-April 2002, following the March 22 Hamas suicide bombing of a Passover seder at a Netanya hotel in which 30 were killed and 140 were wounded. As a proactive measure, in 2003, the Government of Israel approved the building of a security fence or barrier, intended to prevent Palestinian terrorists from reaching their civilian targets inside Israel. And ever since, the bombings, shootings and massacres of innocent people have subsided and for the most part, terrorism has been contained.

Coates admits that his essay on the West Bank was not meant to be a treatise on the nuanced history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. To give him even a slim benefit of the doubt, I think he tried to cut through the nuance and present it simply as human tragedy and a moral crime. But the real crime here is one of gross negligence by the author, who claims to be a reporter but presents a totally one-sided anti-Israel polemic, and who is now making the circuit with the liberal media, who as usual, are fawning over him and by default, his book. I have heard some pretty lame interviews this last week, by Chris Hayes on MSNBC and by Ben Rhodes on Pod Save the World, both examples where supposed “journalists” have not pushed back one bit on the one sided and irresponsible view portrayed by Coates. That is, until he ran into a real journalist on CBS Mornings show, Tony Dokoupil, who had the temerity to ask him a few legitimate questions, which led to a major kerfuffle at CBS. And this is where things get interesting. I’m used to the lame stream media’s biased and double standard reporting about Israel, but when the execs at CBS started shaming Dokoupil for doing his job, and then apologizing for not admonishing him sooner, you know the woke shit is out of control and seeping into traditional main stream media outlets. At the end of the post, I have provided links to the original CBS Mornings interview as well as a panel discussion following it with Bari Weiss and a few others from The Free Press, to which I subscribe. You be the judge.

Mr. Coates seems like a nice man. And I understand from reviews that his prose is exceptional. But, his essay on the West Bank was grossly one sided and irresponsible. His complete lack of anything remotely connected to the reality facing Israel is analogous to writing an essay on the civil war without mentioning slavery. It’s like broadcasting a truth, or part of a truth, in order to destroy the ability to perceive. 

If you want to go deeper on this story, I suggest a critical essay written by Coleman Hughes, also of The Free Press, entitled “The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates”.

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – October 7, 2024 – “”I will not die, but I will live….”

On a more positive note, here is and excerpt from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s speech he gave in 2013 to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference, in which he reminded the audience that “Israel is the greatest collective affirmation of life in the whole of Jewish history.” 

“How probable is it that the universe should exist? How probable is it that life should exist? How probable is it that out of all the 3 million life-forms on planet Earth, only one—us—is capable of asking the question: Why? Nothing interesting is remotely probable.

“Think about the Jewish people. How probable is it that one man—Abraham, who commanded no empire and ordered no army, performed no miracle, delivered no prophecy—should today without doubt be the most influential man who ever lived, who’s claimed as the spiritual ancestor by 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, and most of you in the room today?

“How probable is it that this tiny people—the Jewish people—numbering less than one-fifth of 1 percent of the population of the world, should have outlived the world’s greatest empires. . . How likely is it that, after 2,000 years of exile, our people should have come back to our land and there—having stood eyeball to eyeball with the angel of death in Auschwitz a mere three years earlier in 1948—said, despite the worst crime of man against man, lo amut kiechyeh. I will not die but I will live.

“Israel is the greatest collective affirmation of life in the whole of Jewish history.

“Friends, Judaism is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility. And nowhere will you see the power of possibility more than in the State of Israel today.”

Amen, and RIP Rabbi Sacks. 

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – October 5, 2024 – “The bold. The beautiful. The fat bear.”

Shabbat shalom!

It’s a busy holiday weekend, so I am ignoring the avalanche of news and the normal JNR posting this week. But, I am too excited to also ignore a relatively new US tradition that kicked off last week and will continue into next week. That would be Fat Bear Week. 

Fat Bear Week is an annual online bracket-style competition that celebrates the heft of the brown bears at Katmai’s Brooks Falls. At that waterfall, bears gorge on salmon to pack on the pounds in order to prepare for hibernation. This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the competition, which launched October 2. 

I myself admit to a form of human hibernation, turning my focus in the fall to bingeing on Redzone football and the baseball playoffs while consuming mass amounts of chicken wings, Doritos, and other health food snacks in the confines of my comfy chair. Fortunately, no-one is following me around with a camera as they do with the bears in Katmai Brooks Falls. But if they did, here is what might be recorded in the archives of the competition (Sandra, don’t look):

This year’s Fat Bear competition was delayed by a day or two due to one of the male “titans of tonnage” attacking one of the female fur-bearing fatsoes. However, the Fat Bear show must go on, and the competition is now in full swing. I am throwing my vote and a few hundred salmon behind “Chunk”, who has become a mentor and inspiration to my own seasonal heftiness. Check out his before and after profile:

Here is a brief bio on this bulging bear, taken from the Fat Bear website:

Chunk has gained the confidence and ability to take advantage of opportunities not available to most other bears. His low hanging belly and ample hindquarters bear the fruit of his summer success. He excelled this summer in a place where conflict among bears is necessary to maintain rank and access to the most productive fishing spots.

I know you are all probably wondering how to vote in this year’s competition, so here is a quick overview and a link to the voting website.

And here is the link.

Voting is private of course, but the JNR is fully endorsing Chunk and will provide a free subscription to the JNR for all his supporters.

Let’s go Chunk!

Be careful out there. And don’t be afraid to take an extra chicken wing or two. 

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – October 2, 2024 – “Shanah tovah u’metuka”

Shalom. And a happy and sweet new year to all!

In a normal year, we gather at my brother-in-law’s home for a festive, delicious and game-playing celebration of the Jewish new year. Being traditionalists, we will of course do that once again, but things are far from normal in the Jewish world. Even in the afterglow of my niece’s beautiful and awesomely fun wedding this last weekend, I will not be able to escape the feeling that we have just lived through one of the darkest years in my Jewish memory. First, judicial reform posed an internal threat to the very heart, spirit and soul of Israel, and then we took a gut punch on October 7th, and the ongoing existential threat from Iran’s axis of Jew-hating evil, attacks from which both Israel and Diaspora Jews are still recovering. And then came the hostages and the anti-semitic after shocks. To this day I still get sick to my stomach thinking about Hamas butchers holding dead hostage bodies, or the useless idiots on campus supporting Hamas by ripping down posters of hostages or sporting their keffiyehs and chanting songs of genocide against Israel. And while I feel safe in my Jewish enclave here in the suburbs of Boston, in New York City, which I used to think was the safest place for Jews in this country, incidents of antisemitism have skyrocketed. In one case, a man who demanded that “Zionists” identify themselves on a New York City subway train during a protest over the Israel-Hamas war, then threatened that they get off the train. 

So, to say the least, I am feeling a bit conflicted about how I should feel, and how we should celebrate Rosh Hashanah after all this darkness. But we are Jews, and we have a long history of dealing with this shit and finding and shedding light on a new day. We know how to deal with conflict, both inner and otherwise. Indeed, when we blow the shofar, according to our teachings, we are meant to feel two contradictory things. The terrifying call to change our ways and a great happiness that the King is about to arrive. And perhaps that is the ultimate message of Rosh Hashanah. The message also epitomized by the image of Abraham standing terrified and trembling above his beloved, much hoped-for son, with a knife of sacrifice. Namely the message of confusion. The divided mind. If, like me, you are feeling conflicted, or have a divided mind on Israel, you are in good company. And even if you don’t resolve whatever conflict you may be dealing with, fear not, in 10 days you will have a chance to atone for everything!

I started writing this blog to foster a bit of Jewishness within my family and friends, especially to connect a bit of Jewy-ness to the next generation. Part of the motivation was a selfish one: to continue the line of nachas generators within our descendants. I feel a bit of pride and success in that objective every day my wife and I pick up our grandchildren at Jewish day care/school, and they run to greet and hug their “Bubbie” and “Zadie”. But I have also tried to contribute what I can to battling the lies and misinformation about Israel and Jews, and to provide accurate analysis, and expose media bias and bullshit propaganda. 

And I hope this blog has been a source of entertainment for JNR readers, as well as having an impact on your views and thoughts on Israel and Jews. One of my non-Jewish readers, my good friend Perry Leardi, texted me the other week regarding his recent email supporting top hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman, who will quit Brown University’s board of trustees to protest a planned vote on whether the Ivy League school should exit its investments in companies that have business ties to Israel. Thank you Perry! Keep those letters coming! Many others have responded to my posts with kind emails, or thoughtful and respectful responses. Please keep those letters coming as well!

In preparing each week for this posting, I read a number of Substack writers who inspire me and help me think through my own feelings about my Jewish identity and how I connect to it. One of those is Nachum Kaplan, who posts on the Substack titled, Moral Clarity. I would like to close with an excerpt from his most recent post, “How October 7 changed what it means to be Jewish”. 

Reclaiming Jewish heritage: There is no topic Jews love discussing more than what it is, or what it means, to be Jewish. Judaism is a religion and an ethnicity. Jews hold many different beliefs, some hold none, and they come from many places. This lack of groupthink is a profoundly Jewish trait.

All Jews – whether observant or secular, religious or atheist, matrilineal or patrilineal, born Jewish or converts, right-wing or left-wing – must strengthen the Jewish nation by embracing and interacting with their history and traditions.

This will mean different things to different people. For some, it might mean becoming more observant. For others, it might mean celebrating Jewish holidays and rituals they normally pass over. It might be as simple as holding more Shabbat dinners. Maybe it is putting a mezuzah outside your house or simply wearing a Star of David necklace. People can find a way that is meaningful to them.

Much of this can be shared with the many people who are the Jewish people’s friends – and I mean friends, not allies – religious and irreligious, who are equally disgusted by antisemitism’s return.

It does not matter how Jews choose to connect with their identity and history; it matters that they do so. This will strengthen us all.

It is common to hear that Hamas or Islamism cannot be beaten because it is an ideology and you cannot beat an idea. Yet, being Jewish is also an idea, so we must make it one that is hard to defeat. The best way to do that is by engaging with it, connecting with it, and claiming it as an identity, regardless of how any individual chooses to do this.

This is the defense that has kept the Jewish people alive against improbable odds for more than three millennia.

Let’s continue to do our part. Stay safe out there and stay engaged with whatever form of Judaism you prefer. Celebrate Rosh Hashanah, and celebrate life. Let’s pray for the return of the hostages, and let’s look forward to a happy and sweet new year. 

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – September 28, 2024 – “Sayonara Motherfucker”!

Shabbat shalom!

We partied hearty last night, kicking off the celebration of our niece’s wedding with a delicious welcoming dinner and cocktail party at the yummy Centrolina restaurant. Then it was on to Wok and Roll for a late night karaoke jam, which featured a few pitchers of a drink called “Sayonara Motherfucker”. And that is a great lead in to the news, still breaking as I write, that Israel bombed the shit out of a location in Lebanon where Hassan Nasrallah and his gang of murderous henchmen were housed. Sayonara Nasrallah! A butcher responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, including Palestinian Arabs, his death is being celebrated in Israel, Lebanon, Syria and probably many other Arab nations. 

What happens next is worrying, but Israelis are celebrating another stunning move by the IDF to throttle the bastards that have been shelling Israel without cause since October 8, causing the dislocation of around 80,000 Israelis from their homes in the north, many of those homes and entire communities destroyed by the Hizbollah rockets. I have to hand it to Bibi, he pushed the Go button on the operation immediately following his verbal attack on the United Useless Nations in New York. Nice move. 

Of course, there will be many in the US and Europe that will condemn Israel for having the audacity to defend itself and to attempt to win a war they did not want. The campus clowns in the US will probably start some stupid chant, but folks with real moral clarity will celebrate the defeat of a real terrorist and ethnic cleanser. 

This will be a short JNR this week as we continue with the wedding celebrations and activities. Lots to do, places to go, and hangovers to recover from. But, I thought I would end the week with Bill Maher’s closing New Rule from his latest show. He calls it Patriotic Privilege, and captures my thoughts on some of the protests that really piss me off. Enjoy.

To all my Israeli friends, let’s be careful out there.

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – September 21, 2024 – “It’s Shotime”

Shabbat shalom!

A tip of the baseball kippah this week to Shohei “Shotime” Ohtani, baseball player extraordinaire, who created a new record in the baseball history books by hitting over 50 home runs, and stealing over 50 bases. Ohtani finished his game yesterday against the Miami Marlins going 6-for-6 with three homers, two doubles, two steals, and 10 RBIs. 

Baseball is considered by many to be “America’s Pastime”. Some call it the “greatest show on dirt”. My wife would say it’s a boring way to spend three hours (she used to bring crossword puzzles to Red Sox games). But, there was nothing boring about the new major league record set by Ohtani, who also became the first player in MLB history to hit three homers and steal multiple bases in a single game, a game which helped his Dodgers clinch a playoff berth. 

We could be witnessing the ascendence of the greatest player in baseball history. Yes, better than the “Sultan of Swing”, Babe Ruth, better than Mantle or Maris or Aaron. I think the Ruth comparison is more apt, given the pitching and hitting prowess of both. But comparing across eras, especially in baseball, is almost always a fool’s errand, and I am certainly no expert on the matter. Hence, I will leave it up to the sports sleuths to run the stats comparisons and indulge in the bar stool debates that will surely ensue in the days and weeks and years ahead. But, one thing I am certain of: If not for the barrage of weird and awful news that continues to pummel our media and damage our collective brains, this most amazing athletic feat would be getting much more media attention, certainly more than Moo Deng, the pygmy hippopotamus that is blowing up social media platforms. Although Moo is pretty cute.

Speaking of show time, Israel has stepped up its intelligence game and finally started taking it to the Hezbollah terrorist a-holes. Since October 8, Hezbollah has been pounding northern Israel with thousands of rockets (of course, the useless United Nations has never spoken a word about this aggression) leading to the evacuation of over 80,000 residents from the kibbutzim and villages that ring the northern border. Netanyahu finally and formally added the return of those evacuees as one of their stated war goals. 

The flames from Iran’s ring of fire strategy continue to engulf Israel on multiple fronts but there are more signs beyond the exploding pagers and recent bombings in Lebanon that suggest Israel is about to launch a more strategic operation. For example, Division 98, the elite Israeli division of paratroopers has been in Gaza for nine months, but was moved north just this week. There have been a number of postponements and cancellations of ceremonies where the Defense Minister was scheduled to attend, and then Netanyahu met with Israel’s President to provide him with a security briefing, an unusual move that usually only happens before a major war or operation. 

No-one wants a war, but Iran has been asking for it for many years. And I say, bring it to them Israel! Maybe even bring it directly to Iran instead of devastating Lebanon, whose citizens can’t stand Hezbollah and would probably welcome an Israeli liberating victory. It’s time to lance the terrorist boil that is Iran and stop their exportation of jihad to their proxies that have one goal: kill Jews and eliminate Israel. Is Israel ready for a war way riskier than Hamas? Hezbollah is said to have over 150,000 missiles with precision capability that could hit anywhere in Israel. Are Israelis too exhausted from dealing with Hamas to turn their focus to a much more capable enemy? Will the US and allies continue to support them militarily? Will this be Israel Alone? On the latter question – I hope not, as the issue with Iran and Muslim extremism goes well beyond the middle east. Israel is at the vanguard of the war against that extremism, which is really a battle that needs to be engaged and fought by all civilized and democratic countries.

And now, without any further ajieu, here is this week’s generous selection of Jewie journalistic gems, culled and carefully curated, and copied and pasted from the likes of The Forward, JTA, The Times of Israel, Kveller, Jewish Boston, Haaretz, and other Jewish journals:

  1. More from the war:
    • Israel bombarded Lebanon with airstrikes Thursday, following Tuesday and Wednesday attacks targeting Hezbollah members’ pagers and walkie-talkies, with the IDF saying it had hit more than 100 Hezbollah rocket launchers. As strikes continued this morning, the IDF warned Israelis in the country’s north to stay close to bomb shelters in anticipation of retaliation.
    • IDF confirms eliminating multiple top Hezbollah commanders in Friday’s Beirut strike – Hezbollah acknowledged that the airstrike had killed two of its most senior commanders and 14 other members of the terror group who were meeting in the basement of a Beirut residential building. The devastating strike was a further blow to the Iranian proxy and brought the sides closer to a full-scale war.
    • U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and French President Emmanuel Macron urged against further escalations in the Middle East, particularly against Lebanon.
    • Some U.S. officials no longer see a route forward for a ceasefire deal before the end of Biden’s term, per reporting from The Wall Street Journal.
    • A 72-year-old Israeli businessman is facing charges after allegedly being recruited by Iran to participate in an assassination plot targeting Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials.
    • Vice President Kamala Harris was asked about Israel’s war with Hamas on the campaign trail Tuesday. “I am entirely supportive of the pause that we’ve put on the 2,000-pound bombs. And so there is some leverage that we have had and used. But ultimately, the thing that is going to unlock everything else in that region is getting this deal done.”
    • A poll in June found that a majority of Gazans thought Hamas was correct to attack Israel on Oct. 7. When the poll was conducted again this month, it found something different: Most Gazans no longer support the attack. (Read more findings from the survey.)
    • Institutional investors diverted roughly $40 billion out of Israel since the onset of the war.
  2. On campus…
  3. Donnie-dumb-fuck says Jews would deserve blame if he loses. “In a speech Thursday billed as former President Donald Trump’s answer to rising antisemitism, he said Jews would bear much of the responsibility if he loses the presidential election,” writes The Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh — a stunning moment in an election cycle during which Trump has raised eyebrows with increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward Jewish voters. In back-to-back addresses to largely Jewish audiences, Trump also fell back on a new rhetorical habit that has irkedsome of his pro-Israel supporters: predicting that Israel “will be eradicated” if his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is elected. Read the story ➤
  4. Thousands attend hostage deal rally outside UN headquarters in New York – The rally, which coincided with the start of the 79th UN General Assembly this week, called for world leaders to pay attention to the plight of the captives held in Gaza by Hamas and featured speeches from released hostages and relatives of those still in captivity.
  5. Columnists quit Jewish Chronicle in Gaza articles row – Jonathan Freedland, Hadley Freeman and David Aaronovitch announced they were quitting their columns over what Freedland described as a “great disgrace” at the London-based newspaper. It comes after the JC said it conducted a “thorough investigation” into one of its freelance journalists, Elon Perry, “after allegations were made about aspects of his record”. It said it was “not satisfied” with some of the claims made by the writer, and therefore had deleted his articles and ended its association with him. Jonathan Freedland – who described the stories as fabricated – said the JC had shown only the “thinnest form of contrition”.
  6. Why a rabbi is overseeing PornhubRabbi Solomon Friedman is trying to clean up internet porn from the inside by running one of the world’s most-trafficked porn sites. Which may not be as strange as you think.
    • Judaism is generally sex positive. Most Jewish texts about sex focus on understanding and regulating the act, not warning people of its dangers.
    • The Talmud has passages instructing husbands to have regular sex with their wives, emphasizing the importance of pleasure and encouraging experimentation.
    • Friedman is also a criminal defense lawyer and is working on tech challenges at the site, like how to digitally fingerprint videos or implement facial scans to ensure all the performers are consenting and of age.
  7. 🎞️  A new thriller starring Peter Sarsgaard as an ABC Sports executive covering the 1972 Munich Olympics where Palestinian militants took Israeli athletes hostage was one of the buzziest movies at the recent fall film festivals. Paramount acquired it and plans to release it in November with a big Oscar push. (Hollywood Reporter)

That’s all folks! Enjoy the weekend! And hey, as usual, let’s be careful out there!

I will probably not be posting next week as we have a busy weekend attending the wedding of our niece. So, until the next post….

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – Wacky Wednesday – “Is that a pager in your pocket?”

Shalom.

Every week I read a number of Substacks and newspapers and listen to a crap-load of podcasts in order to educate myself and curate the myriad news and information sources on all things Jewie, in order to bring you readers an interesting plateful of that “all you can eat” news buffet. Sometimes I can sit back and admire the offering, sometimes I think my writing needs a bromide. I certainly could use a good editor to help me avoid some of the catastrophic apostrophe mistake’s and other grammatical errors I have detected in a few postings. But hopefully, most of you enjoy the offering along with my smarmy commentary.

This week is chock full of good stuff. Hence, this special midweek edition with a summary and links to some of the better items warranting an hour or less of your time. Without further ajieu, here you go:

  1. Book Wag of the Week – I referenced this new offering in a recent JNR, but I can’t say enough good things about Israel Alone, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s passionate and outraged cri-de-coeur about the loneliness of Israel and the tragedy of October 7. He also addresses some of the major questions challenging Israel today. Here is a link to Amazon’s offering platform . 
  2. Ear Wag of the Week – There is no question that the most informative and respected authority on Israel and the Jewish community in the podcast world is Dan Senor, American columnist, writer, and political adviser. He was chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and senior foreign policy adviser to U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 election campaign. Dan is interviewing Middle East experts leading up to the October 7 anniversary and his first two interviews included Sam Harris and Douglas Murray. Here is a link to the Sam Harris interview, extremely worth your time.
  3. In the Weeds Wag of the Week – It’s tough to find good journalism on the current state of the war in Gaza. Contrary to what the lame stream media would have you believe, Israel is making great progress on defeating Hamas, but they are probably months away from finishing the job. Here is a link to a Tablet story by Andrew Fox, a former British Army Major and current Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and a lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
  4. Video Wag of the Week – In the “you can’t make this shit up” category, here is a fun take on Donnie-dumb-fuck’s pet eating calamity, a remix from the South African “The Kiffness”.

5. Meme of the Week – Israel’s cunning in their booby-trapping of Hezbollah pagers was nothing short of brilliant. It unleashed a number of equally brilliant memes, including this one:

Have a great rest of the week!

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – September 15, 2024 – “Anniversaries”

Shalom aleichem. 

Anniversaries are of course celebrated, for among other things, to mark and honor special occasions, personal milestones, and historical events. On the personal front, my wife and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary recently, and I can’t speak for her, but I for one would sign on for 40 more, or at least as many as possible, before the inevitable and permanent dirt nap that awaits us all. 

And then there are those historic milestones, such as the day JFK was shot. We all remember “what we were doing when….” On the day JFK was assassinated, I was a seven year old “pollywog” in 1963 returning from a swim lesson at the YMCA in Natalie Levine’s light blue station wagon hearing the news for the first time on the car’s crackling radio. 

On September 11, 2001, I was the only Arthur Andersen Partner that day on the 26th floor of One International Place in Boston hearing that we were potentially under attack from planes that departed from Boston and were flying into tall buildings, including the World Trade Towers. Fearing for our collective safety, I immediately sent everyone home, drove myself home, then watched like the rest of the world as another plane hit the second tower. Later that morning, we received a phone call, I forget from whom, informing us that our cousin Robin Kaplan, died on one of those planes. Robin was a 33 year old beautiful human being on her way to California on American Flight 11, to help TJX set up a new store in the San Francisco area. She had recently spent a month in the hospital battling Crohn’s/colitis, but was working again and feeling better, and was also recently engaged to a fellow TJX employee. Her dreams, her aspirations, her life, were all incinerated as her plane became a missile in the arsenal of terrorism that struck our country that day and ruined so many lives and forever changed America. “We will never forget” what happened on 9/11 became the popular mantra, and I for one, certainly never will. RIP Robin.

Then came October 7, 2023, another “day that will live in infamy”. Roosevelt used that framing for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and it has since become widely used by the media to refer to any moment of supreme disgrace or evil. 

I recently downloaded a book I recommend to all, by the Frenchman Bernard-Henri Lévy, “Israel Alone”. Lévy is a French public intellectual. Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the “Nouveaux Philosophes” movement in 1976. Israel Alone is a passionate and outraged cri-de-coeur, about the loneliness of Israel and the tragedy of October 7, starting with Lévy’s eyewitness account the day after the pogroms. He articulates the horror of the evil he witnesses personally, which I will not repeat here, except for this eloquent passage:

And for a short moment, too short, but long enough to be marked as a black day on the calendar of those who had sworn to remember—the world was gripped by a brutal, ravaging, stunning fear at seeing the Beast unchained and, with its muzzle bared, hungry for Jewish flesh—which is to say, human flesh.

After such a thing, we can always try to drown it in verbiage, bad faith, and an ocean of tweets.

We can, and already have, launched into a frantic yet methodical rewriting of the whole sequence of events.

But everyone saw, everyone knew, everyone recognized the landscape of a hell covered, as in Dante’s Inferno, in blood, fire, and iron.

Evil was there, and it galloped over the patch of ground that the devil had given it.

Evil was back, resounding, insatiable, in a devasted landscape where the light revealed only nothingness.

Radical evil.”

This weekend, as part of one event leading up to the upcoming one year anniversary of the evil committed against innocent Israelis by Hamas during the October 7 pogrom, we attended a lecture after shabbat services, given by Adele Roemer, a resident of Kibbutz Nirim. Hers is just one of many horror stories we have heard or read about, but hearing it directly from someone who lived through it, who lost so many friends in such a horrifying manner, was to say the least, compelling and hard to fathom. Even more hard to fathom was, and unfortunately continues to be, those on the left, including some fellow Jews, that sympathize with and even support the murderous butchers that clearly have a different value for life than most civilized humans. 

How pitiable was this response from one of the more noted Jewish thinkers on the left, Joshua Leifer, who wrote after October 7:

“The loss, the tragedy — incomprehensible,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 8:

Are these not the values that led us to oppose the cruel siege of Gaza? To resist the brutalities of the occupation? To oppose apartheid? Where are these values when Israeli children are held hostage, families wiped out, corpses violated before cheering crowds?

People who were supposed to have been interlocutors, partners in some type of common conversation, self-professed human rights defenders, even would-be colleagues are celebrating and glorifying unspeakable acts that violate the most basic elements of human life. I feel sick.

Now is a time to mourn lives, and, against all odds, keep our faith in the possibility of a better future for all people, Palestinians and Israelis alike. We must not give up on that faith, no matter what, for if we lose that faith, everything is lost.

Israelis are still suffering from the trauma imposed upon them by the brutal Hamas butchers. Their feeling of security, however naive it may have been given their surroundings by nations that want them eliminated, has been shattered. There is no longer any hope of a “two state solution” in a land that is still suffering from such a mortal blow. It will take new leadership, and probably generations of de-radicalized jihadists, before Arabs and Jews in the area will once again be able to even talk about peace, never mind implement some kind of solution. 

To end on a more positive note, here is more from Lévy’s Israel Alone:

I love this little world of people stranded on the tiny strip of land they finally received, three-quarters of a century ago, left there by a West and by a larger world wet with the rivers of Jewish blood spilled into the torrent of centuries….

And I love this miracle of endurance and intelligence, lucidity and goodness: As on the first day, exactly as on the first day, when they heard their neighbors calling for their death and the destruction of their nation, the Israelis remain, for the most part, faithful to their founding principles and receptive to peace—as soon as the others are too.

That is a living Zionism. That is a radiant, luminous, exemplary Zionism. Perhaps it is now less widely shared than I believe. But it is exemplary because, despite wars, despite blows administered and blows received, it holds fast to Abraham’s commandment: “This house that we have built” should be “a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Let those who disagree with that say so. In so doing, they will simply be saying that they hate people.”

Brad out.

The Jew News Review – Special Debate Edition – “Here’s my “concept of a post”

Last night the orange turd was baited into being his unhinged self, but instead of playing to his homies at one his insipid rallies, he was demonstrating to the mega millions tuned into ABC’s greatest show on earth that he is so full of lunatic shit that not even a full body diaper could have saved him from himself. 

Kamala had two objectives last night: One, to present herself as Presidential to those that did not know a lot about her, and two, to get under Trump’s orange and sagging skin. She nailed both objectives, mopping the floor with the turd’s orange flop of Rogaine induced hair. 

And the orange turd had only one objective for the night – Don’t take the bait. Except everyone knew the stupid ass hat would never be able to accomplish anything remotely close to that objective. And while the sane analysts on Fox even admitted he shat the bed, most of his deplorable suck-ups were quick to blame ABC for ganging up on poor, poor Donnie-dumb-fuck. As if ABC had devised this insidious plan to ask a question and just let Donnie-dumb-fuck answer it. Wouldn’t you know, he walked right into their trap! How dare ABC moderators let Donny talk. It’s so unfair! Letting him blither and dither and make a fool of himself in front of the cameras. It’s rigged! Rigged I tell you!

And of course Donnie-dumb-fuck went unhinged as soon as Kamala dropped the bait about his rally crowds getting bored and leaving early. That was the trigger that got him going bat shit crazy, leading to the greatest and most Presidential oratory I have ever seen:

“in Springfield, THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS. the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. they’re eating— they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. and this is what’s happening in our country.”

I have said this often, but you really can’t make this shit up. 

This from Lee Siegel, I found to be a fairly good summary:

As Trump blustered and came apart, Harris’s mediocrity fell away. As he wrecked himself on the rocks of his obsessions, her shallows became depths. She stopped clearing her throat, her trembling voice grew strong, expressions of patient affliction, alternating with a certain narrow-eyed, seething incredulity, began to flow naturally across her face. Lacking originality and charm, she drew vitality from Trump’s bile and rage. In 2016, enough Americans were mesmerised by the utter newness of Trump’s brazen iconoclasm and insults to make him president. In 2024, after a pandemic, racial convulsions, revolutions in patterns of work and in mores, Americans watched rapt last night as perhaps the most ordinary human to ever run for president responded to lies, and menace, and insults by pulling herself together into a recognisable personality. People didn’t need to know who Harris was. They watched as she became Kamala Harris.

You go girl! And topped off with an eloquent endorsement from Taylor Swift, it was a good night for the Kamala crowd, and a good night for the country. As of this morning, Swift’s endorsement already received 8.5 million likes. With any kind of lift from the Swifties, Kamala could negate any shortfall from the young white tech bros, who seem to be leaning more and more to Donnie-dumb-fuck.

What, if any, impact last night had on voters is TBD. The instant poll from CNN had two thirds of viewers calling her the winner. But, this is still a close race. I doubt Donnie-dumb-fuck’s handlers will let him do another debate, but you never know. And it will be interesting to see how Kamala and her handlers proceed from here after a strong night. Will she expose herself to more press conferences? Become more public as her stature and confidence grows? Or will she continue to keep a low profile leading up to the vote? 

A couple of impacts we know for sure is that Kamala’s performance inspired another $25 million in small dollar donations, while Donnie-dumb-fuck’s led to a 15% drop in Untruth Social’s stock price. 

Donnie, you are such a loser. Give it up now, plead out, and maybe President Harris will grant you a pardon and keep you out of the big house. Personally, I hope you rot in jail in an orange jump suit that clashes with your skin tone. 

Brad out.