• The State Department is coordinating with Syria’s neighbors about plans for dealing with WMDs in post-Assad Syria. [Foreign Policy]

• Were there real peace negotiations in Jordan last month? Depends whom you ask! It seems Prime Minister Netanyahu is genuinely afraid of the collapse of Jordan’s monarchy, though. [Washington Times]

• Israeli Apartheid Week is next week. What, you didn’t notice? Therein lies a story. [New Voices]

• Seven members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team take an emotional visit to Munich. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Ed Koch wanted to employ wild wolves as municipal guard-dogs. He is truly the greatest. [JTA Capital J]

• Choose Your Own Iran Adventure, with the inimitable Eli Valley. [Forward]

• AIPAC Kremlinology on Newt Gingrich’s speaking spot. I’ll note that Gingrich’s willingness to be in Washington, D.C., on the day before Super Tuesday probably indicates he has given up on winning the nomination. [JTA]

• You’ve got another several weeks to see an exhibit featuring Jewish women comic artists. [Yeshiva University Museum]

• Um, just read this. [Grantland]

General Aladeen responds to the Oscar ban and the “Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Zionists.”

The slight strangeness here, of course, is that he got off on a technical violation. Emily Bazelon has a thoughtful essay about what this says about the American commitment to (critics would say fetishization of) procedural safeguards. Essentially, the lab screwed up, holding his urine for 48 hours when it was supposed to have sent it immediately. So we don’t know that he actually didn’t, knowingly or unknowingly, take illegal substances; and we also don’t know that he did. We may never know. What we do know is that he’ll face no suspension. All the better: let’s get him back on the field and judge him by his performance there and by his next test, which you can be sure will be executed properly.

Or you could take your cues from Braun’s buddy, who probably has one more Super Bowl MVP than you do:

Braun Wins Appeal on Positive Drug Test and Avoid Suspension [NYT]
Ryan Braun’s Press Conference: The ‘Nightmare’ Is Over [Kaplan's Korner]
Pee Brain [Slate]

Second Time Around

Of course, we do know that the regime has killed more than 6,000 people and that the United Nations has found evidence it has committed crimes against humanity. We know its remaining friends on the world stage are Venezuela and China, Russia, and Iran.

We know that, as former Mossad director Ephraim Halevy explained, bringing down the Assad regime will strike a fierce blow against Iran. We know the unrest has already pulled Hamas away from Damascus and toward Cairo and possibly Amman or Qatar—which, again, brings it out of Iran’s orbit, and which is therefore very good for Israel. Just today, Hamas’ leaders endorsed the rebellion against Assad.

And we know that Israel has quietly pointed out that Assad’s fall would be great news. Many months ago, before most countries had taken a position on Syria, the talk was that Israel would kind of prefer that Assad stay: it had just lost President Mubarak, this thinking went, and couldn’t afford more instability. “For the second time, a recent Journal article asserts that Israel has expressed fears of instability in Syria if leader Bashar al-Assad is overthrown,” wrote Ambassador Michael Oren in a letter to the Wall Street Journal last June. “I emphatically denied this the first time and categorically deny it again. Israel has expressed no such concerns. Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region.” He concluded, “The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.”

I’ll step aside and let contributing editor Jeff Goldberg finish my thought:

The hatred of Jews and the Jewish national home by men whom history has adjudged to be comprehensively evil should suggest a couple of lessons. The possible theological and cosmological lessons I will leave for another day, but the political lessons are more obvious: Good people should take the hatred directed at Israel by evil people as a sign that, just maybe, Israel’s basic cause is just. Israel and its supporters should understand that the enmity reflects well on their cause, and they should do whatever they can to guarantee that their behavior could never possibly be seen as analogous to the behavior of their enemies.

Israeli Government Sharply Divided Over Response to Syrian Unrest [Haaretz]
Iran’s Achilles’ Heel [NYT]
Hamas Ditches Assad, Backs Syrian Revolt [Reuters]
U.N. Report Finds Syria Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity [FP Turtle Bay]
Israel Prefers The End of the Assad Regime To Its Continuance [WSJ]
With These Enemies, Israel Needs More Friends [Bloomberg View]

Project Runway

This week’s winner is “Ellen,” who relayed, upon reading Allen Ellenzweig’s essay on representations of Jews in British literature, “On a related note, this is why I could never finish reading Oliver Twist but I love the movie Oliver! because Fagin is the coolest, most nuanced character in the whole work.”

Ellen gets a copy of Esther Schor’s Emma Lazarus, the biography of the poet made famous by the Statue of Liberty, because Ellen recognizes that bad things tend to get better once they dock in America’s harbors.

Likeness of a Jew [Tablet Magazine]
Emma Lazarus [Nextbook Press]

Game Changer

5: The Adventures of Tintin

• What: Steven Spielberg adapts the classic Hergé comic book series with a rarely-seen-before hybrid of live action and animation, all in 3D, and the standard Indy Jones-style adventure script, complete with John Williams score.

• Up for: Score. Seems kinda cheap to keep it out of Best Animated Film, particularly when Kung Fu Panda 2 is nominated.

• Will win: Probably nothing. The Artist‘s score is nominated, and talk about music that had to do some heavy lifting!

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 3.5. Hergé’s collaborationist sentiments are balanced by his being European. And Spielberg is, literally, the alpha and the omega of Jewish filmmaking.

4: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

• What: Adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer novel written by Eric Roth and with a Dresden plotline (only a subplot, though!).

• Up for: Picture; Supporting Actor (Max Von Sydow, as the Dresden survivor).

• Will win: Good shot at Supporting Actor: Von Sydow is an icon (82 years old, and the star of Ingmar Bergman classics like The Seventh Seal), and he plays a mute guy, which you’d think requires less acting but is liable to impress voters. Plus, we know about the Holocaust and the Oscars, and Dresden is fairly close.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 7. No extra points for producer Scott Rudin, because, remember, we are adjusting for Hollywood. But Safran Foer is a big name in the world of Jewish letters and broader culture. And again: Holocaust subplot!

3: The Artist

• What: Black-and-white, almost exclusively silent movie that borrows liberally from Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard and borrows radically from Singin’ in the Rain. Writer/director Michel Hazanavicius is French-Jewish.

• Up for: Picture; Lead Actor (Jean Dujardin); Supporting Actress (Bérénice Bejo); Director; Original Screenplay; Cinematography; Editing; Art Direction; Costume Design; Score.

• Will win: I haven’t followed the race as closely this year, but I’m pretty sure The Artist is the clear frontrunner out of the nine nominees. It’s accessible art that celebrates Hollywood: exactly what Academy voters are suckers scrupulously look for. Feels like Dujardin has competition more likely to divide against each other than Bejo does. Cinematography would make sense; Editing, one guesses, will by contrast be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘s consolation prize. And, of course, Score.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 8. Jewish auteur. Moreover, the fact that it’s about Hollywood, complete with an early mogul named Zimmer played by John Goodman, transcends (and confirms) our standard adjustment for Hollywood.

2: **TIE** In Darkness and Footnote

• What: Polish Holocaust movie; Israeli movie about Talmudic study. (Film critic Daphne Merkin reviewed In Darkness and interviewed Footnote director Joseph Cedar; Sara Ivry reflected on In Darkness.)

• Up for: Foreign Language Film.

• Will win: Well, 40 percent chance, right? Give the edge to In Darkness, which even Timothy Snyder praised as well, and whose director, Agnieszka Holland, has done much work in the English-language world, including for The Wire. Ironically, the one film that could beat Poland’s and Israel’s entries is A Separation: Iran’s.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 8.5 (In Darkness), 9.5 (Footnote).

1: Midnight in Paris

• What: On the one hand, light comedy that is incredibly romantic (as opposed to romantic comedy). On another hand, a giddily delightful vicarious thrill ride through A Moveable Feast. On yet another hand, the first Woody Allen movie nominated for Picture since 1985′s The Purple Rose of Cairo (yup, they forgot Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, and Match Point).

• Up for: Picture; Director; Original Screenplay; Art Direction.

• Will win: I suspect its best chance is Original Screenplay, because, y’know, it’s about books and stuff, and Woody’s already won this category six times. Wouldn’t it be something, though, if it nabbed Picture and Woody’s producer, his sister Letty Aronson, got up on stage and said Woody says hi from the Upper East Side? Also, would you believe me if I told you that Annie Hall and Manhattan were—wait for it—not even nominated for Best Picture?!?!

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 9.5. 10s are reserved for our Top Twenty. Adrien Brody steals the show in his three minutes as Salvador Dalí. An indelibly Jewish musing on nostalgia and its limits. Plus, what, I gotta spell this out for you?

Dictatorial

Austrian writer Stefan Zweig committed suicide 70 years ago yesterday. In 2005, Jennifer Weisberg highlighted 1939′s Beware of Pity, Zweig’s only novel and one of his lesser-known works, which Weisberg called a “micro-portrait of life in the late Hapsburg Empire.” Renowned in the 1920s and ’30s for his biographies, Zweig fled Austria in 1934 for London, where he lived as a refugee until settling in Brazil in 1941.

Set in Hungary just before the start of World War I, Beware of Pity tells the story of Anton Hofmiller, a soldier stationed in a remote town who gets invited to the impressive home of a local nobleman, sparking a complicated relationship with his host’s crippled daughter. Weisberg explains,

Yet it’s the story of the girl’s father that provides the moral spine of the tale. A conversation with Edith’s physician reveals that the man Hofmiller so admires was in fact born “a keen-eyed, narrow-chested little Jewish lad” named Lämmel Kanitz. Canny, thrifty, and somewhat of an autodidact, Kanitz learned to make money, pulling off his biggest coup in an unscrupulous real estate deal. Though he’d taken advantage of a naïve woman, he later felt a good deal of guilt at the way he had swindled her out of her fortune. In the end, “he was, rather, in spite of himself, taken unawares by an emotion that was genuine, and, strangely enough, remained genuine. Out of this absurd courtship was born an unusually happy marriage”—and a new life; baptized, Kanitz purchased the privilege of changing his name to Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva.

Read No Exit, by Jennifer Weisberg

• SYRIA’S OPPOSITION is fractured along several different lines. [NYT]

• DIPLOMATS FROM THE SO-CALLED FRIENDS OF SYRIA, including Secretary of State Clinton, meet in Tunis today to discuss what should happen next. [LAT]

• A LIMITED WESTERN INTERVENTION should happen next, argues Anne-Marie Slaughter. [NYT]

• FOLLOWING UP ITS GILAD SHALIT SUCCESS, it turns out Egyptian intelligence brokered the end of Khader Adnan’s hunger strike. [Haaretz]

• RYAN BRAUN, the Jewish Milwaukee Brewers slugger and reigning National League Most Valuable Player, became the first baseball player ever to successfully appeal a positive result on a drug test. [NYT]

She knew her husband Daniel, 24, had a heart condition—he had told her on their fifth date. But by that point, she was so in love with him that she brushed it aside as “no big deal,” and they married six months later. “That was the most amazing feeling, to be a wife and have a husband and to have that relationship,” she said. Eleven weeks after their wedding, Daniel dropped dead. “That’s pretty much the only way to describe it,” she explained. “It was so sudden and traumatic.”

However much she misses him, Wruble craves that amazing feeling again. Four months after he died, she started dating. “I know it’s not going to be the same,” she said. “I don’t expect it to be the same … I just really hope that it’s soon.”

Wruble is part of a group known, in the lingo of the dating world, as second-time singles—people who have been widowed or divorced who are looking for new spouses. Wruble, who is Modern Orthodox, has found it hard being single in her community, with its emphasis on marriage and family. But the Modern Orthodox community has recently started paying particular attention to second-time singles, helping them find a new match through specially tailored events and dedicated matchmakers.

They face unique problems in the dating world: The widowed may, like Wruble, have memories of their first spouses that loom too large for prospective new mates. The divorced may carry the stigma of having “failed” at marriage once already. And in both cases, the newly single may have children from their first marriage, which may scare off potential paramours.

Statistics about the number of Orthodox second-time singles are hard to come by. Dr. David Pelcovitz, professor of psychology and education at Yeshiva University, said that while there is no “reliable, solid, empirical source” for such information, “there’s a sense that there are more divorces. It’s incredibly unscientific but, for example, when I give talks at rabbinical conferences, I ask, ‘How many of you have experienced a divorce in your community in the past few years?’ You get more people raising their hands. When I ask the people who are doing work in Jewish divorce courts, they tell me that they seem to be busier.”

As second-time singles have become more visible, events tailored to their needs have started to spring up. “I would think there has always been a need for these programs,” said rebbetzin Judi Steinig, director of programming for the National Council of Young Israel. “But events have become more popular. People need to find safe and enjoyable venues to connect with other people in similar situations.”

Last year Steinig brought second-time singles together to learn about Israeli activism at the Young Israel Synagogue of Hillcrest in Flushing, Queens. (Her thinking behind the concept: Why not learn while you mingle?) Fifty people—half men, half women—showed up. That kind of success started a domino effect, and other groups started similar programs. “One group does it and then others start falling into place,” said Steinig.

Seven months later, YUConnects, an affiliate group of Yeshiva University, attracted 70 singles in their 20s and 30s to a private home in Riverdale, where a guest speaker told funny stories about his attempts at dating second time around. Organizer Marjorie Glatt was initially nervous about singling out this particular group for an event; she wondered why they shouldn’t simply be joined with other singles. She was reassured, she said, when “a number of participants came up to me and said when they go to regular singles events they always feel that they have to get out in the initial conversation that they have a 4-year-old at home, or they’ve been divorced, and they never know how the other person is going to react.”

While Glatt acknowledged that she can’t know what happened after the YUConnects event, she said: “There were definitely dates that came out of it. I don’t know of any longer-term relationships, but there definitely were dates.”

In February, Bergen Connections held a wine-and-cheese tasting in Teaneck, N.J., for Modern Orthodox second-time singles in their 30s and 40s. Organizer Leah Shteingart explained she was responding to a direct need in the community for this type of program: “We talk to people and see what is the demand that is needed out there.”

For those who want a more personalized approach to dating, there are matchmakers who cater to second-time singles in particular. Gateway Connections, an online service that employs many matchmakers to help Orthodox Jews meet their bashert, includes a shadchan who specializes in matching second-time singles with others in similar situations: Fayge Rudman. And Nina Bistritv, a volunteer who works with users of the Jewish dating website SawYouAtSinai, says she has a particular knack for setting up second-time singles, who reveal if they’ve been widowed or divorced in their online profiles. “I like working with them,” Bistriv said. “Either they’ve been through a rough time with being widowed or miserable divorces, and it’s very nice that people aren’t jaded. … They still want somebody by their side.”

That somebody is typically another second-time single—someone who has similar experiences and a similar sense of clarity about what they want in a second spouse. And although the matchmakers won’t offer specific numbers, they do say that they’ve made matches that blossom into marriage.

“They just see how amazing their relationship is because they cherish it that much more,” said Bistritv. “Nothing at all is taken for granted.”

But what we may not see is Sacha Baron Cohen. The most mischievously shape-shifting Jewish comedian/folk hero since Herschel of Ostropol has been warned by the Academy in no uncertain terms not to turn up dressed as Admiral General Alladeen, his lavishly bearded Qaddafi-esque alter ego from his upcoming movie, The Dictator. After pre-emptively banning (or so it was rumored) Baron Cohen from the pre-show swanning in the absence of assurances he would do so as “himself” (a concept surely as amorphous for the chameleon-like star as it was for the similarly slippery Peter Sellers), they are now reduced to stern proclamations warning of their extreme displeasure should their warnings be defied. “The red carpet,” sniffed one official Academy spokesperson, “is not about stunting.”

It’s hard to see why Baron Cohen—who turned down a chance to present an award in 2007 when the producers refused to let him to do so in character as the legendarily anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist Borat—should heed the red-carpet dress code for any reason other than the goodness of his heart. Certainly, there may be short-term censure: When 1999 Best Song nominees Trey Parker and Matt Stone attended the ceremony dressed as Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow (accompanied by co-nominee Marc Shaiman, resplendent in full pale-blue fox fur pimp regalia), the Academy’s then-President Jack Valenti called the South Park creators “hairballs” and thundered about his wish to give their nominated film the retroactive NC-17 rating that would have destroyed its box-office potential. But their careers hardly suffered for it; if anything, the so-called “stunt” merely solidified their brand as witty provocateurs willing to speak truth to power (and to publicly drop acid in front of Hollywood’s oldest guard). A high-profile brouhaha over The Dictator shortly before the film’s release may hurt Baron Cohen’s standing with the Academy, but it only stands to help his bottom line.

And besides, what does Sacha care if the Oscars are mad at him? It’s not as though he’s ever likely to win one. For decades, the Academy Awards have been uniquely inhospitable to the jesters in their midst. Not for nothing did Will Ferrell memorably sing the (Shaiman-penned) 2007 lament: “a comedian at the Oscars is the saddest, loneliest, alcoholic clown.” Comedies may rake in cash at the box-office, but it’s a truism verging on the point of cliché to say that they are almost uniformly overlooked come awards season (with the exception of the Golden Globes, which herds them into their own category, like the “Best Younger Actor” award at the Daytime Emmys). It’s possible to count the number of intentionally funny performances that have garnered Oscars in the past 25 years on one hand—and I know, because I just went on Wikipedia and tried it.

Indeed, a comedian of Baron Cohen’s caliber is in the uncomfortable position of making movies far more eloquent about the subjects they satirize than any of the mainstream Oscar contenders that so often strive to cover the same ground. A film like Borat interrogated the dark heart of lingering anti-Semitism more effectively than any number of inspirational/sanctimonious Holocaust flicks featuring incredibly attractive concentration camp inmates and the self-reflective Nazis who torment them, and if The Dictator turns out to be the ruthlessly insightful—not to mention commercially successful—treatise on the War on Terror that Hollywood has been searching for since the first bombs burst over Baghdad, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. That would sting.

Of course, there’s another reason for Baron Cohen to leave his breastplate of military medals and camel escort at home: He’s invited to the ceremony this year not under his own auspices as a Very Famous Person, but as part of the ensemble cast of the Best Picture nominee Hugo, and perhaps the Academy feels it’s only polite to support the film what brung ya, so to speak. It’s a fair enough point that would just about hold water if not for the fact that over the past several years the annual Oscars ceremony has become the world’s most star-studded and elaborate infomercial. The swag bags and gifting suites are old news, but a flurry of recent articles have revealed actresses to be heavily bribed—either with lucrative endorsement contracts or cold hard cash—by publicity-hungry fashion houses to wear their gowns on the red carpet. Studios and distributors spend unthinkable sums on yearlong, highly remunerative Oscars campaigns that resemble nothing so much as, well, American elections post-Citizens United. And like our creaky and imperiled democracy, the whole gruesome enterprise depends on a veneer of fulsomely earnest seriousness to hide the dirty fingerprints. All it takes is a single satirist as sly as Baron Cohen to turn the red carpet into a blatant marketing ploy for his next film for the whole thing to come crashing down around Hollywood’s expensively (and promotionally) shod feet. The emperor has no clothes if the dictator does.

Continue reading: Mean streets

Last Friday night, after the buzzer signaled the end of the first quarter against the New Orleans Hornets, the dancers stormed the court. The Knicks were down 27-13, an unpromising start to what would be their first loss since Linsanity took hold earlier this month, and Madison Square Garden was packed with fans who had come to see the Harvard-educated point guard. But for just a few minutes, all eyes were focused on the dancers as they performed a routine from their early days, part of their 20th anniversary celebration.

The author with her aunt and sister. (Courtesy of the author’s mother)

“My Aunt Pam created the Knicks City Dancers,” I explained loudly, and unnecessarily, since all of my friends already know this. My standard game outfit resembles that of a headstrong, overgrown child: I sport a bedazzled Knicks hat adorned with playoff pins from 1993,‘94, and ‘96, sized to the largest notch, and an early ‘90s Larry Johnson Hornets jersey, which formerly hung to my knees but these days is best described as slim-fitting, from before Johnson was traded to the Knicks in 1996 and the Hornets relocated from Charlotte, N.C., to New Orleans. It’s a nod to my childhood fandom and the ‘90s Knicks, who, though I was only in single digits at the time, figure heavily into my early memories. That’s because my mom’s younger sister, Pamela Harris, joined the Knicks in 1991 as director of marketing. In addition to overseeing the development of the classic “Go NY Go” theme song—which asked fans the ever-important question, “Are you down with the orange and the blue?”—she spearheaded the creation of the Knicks City Dancers. In the process, my aunt facilitated one glorious, loosely interpreted “take your daughter to work day” during which I got to use the announcer’s microphone and even dribble on the court.

With a degree from Stanford and an M.B.A. from Wharton under her belt, Harris dreamed of working in basketball, where the stakes were high and the fans passionate about the product. She knew she could use her marketing background to improve the fan experience. “I wanted to work on something that consumers loved even more than you did, and the thing that speaks to that better than anything is sports,” she explained. She interviewed with Dave Checketts when he become president of the Knicks in early 1991 and got hired as director of marketing when she was 29. (When Harris was named to Crain’s 40 Under 40 list in 1999, Checketts recalled her unique résumé, which listed her ability to “do a Tomahawk dunk on a 6-foot basket.”)

Harris joined the team for the 1991-1992 season, just as famed former Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley began as the Knicks’ new coach. The Knicks and the Garden were in the midst of a transformation, and so was Harris: She was now the fifth member of an all-male executive team.

***

Given the ubiquity of the Knicks City Dancers (they appeared in a Sex and the City episode in 2003, solidifying their pop-culture immortality) and family-friendly spinoffs the Knicks City Kids, Knicks Acroback tumblers, and even the Knicks City Sticks at Knicks home games, it’s hard to imagine a time when bright, loud, and energetic entertainment didn’t fill the court at the Garden during time-outs and between quarters. But while Madison Square Garden is touted as the world’s most famous arena, it was more recent technological advancements that helped transform the fan experience.

“While I couldn’t do anything about the product itself on the floor,” Harris explained, “what I could control is the environment.” In 1991 the facilities were renovated; large screens and an enhanced music system were installed. Hip hop took over as the music of choice as players warmed up. Every change was scrutinized by the fans and the press. “When you work for a sports team and there are six full-time beat writers that are paid just to follow the team, everything you do is examined,” she said. Harris learned this the hard way, when a short-lived promotion that got the crowd free pizza from a sponsor if the Knicks could keep the opposing team down to a certain number of points led to crazed chants of “Pizza, pizza” and raised the stakes for the players beyond just a win or loss.

But the biggest change was the creation of the Knicks City Dancers. At the time, only a handful of NBA teams had cheerleaders, and the Laker Girls were the most high-profile. Harris realized that dancers could be a great way to raise team spirit and reach out to the fan base in ways the players’ schedules simply didn’t permit. She also saw an opportunity for sponsorship revenue. Harris began thinking of ways to put an authentic New York stamp on team dancers. She hired Petra Pope, who had worked with the Laker Girls (and who is currently a senior vice president for event marketing for the New Jersey Nets), who put together a diverse, talented group of dancers who would represent the Knicks at home games.

But unlike the Laker Girls, they weren’t going to be tawdry. A New York Times article about the first Knicks City Dancers auditions, published Sept. 22, 1991, starts with this:

“No skin,” Pam Harris, the director of marketing for the New York Knicks promised solemnly, as 200 beautiful young women in leotards, tight halter tops and bicycle shorts practiced pelvic thrusts on the basketball court behind her. “We won’t have them do anything demeaning.”

While the bright orange Donna Karan motorcycle jackets with sequined Knicks logos that Harris commissioned in the early 1990s as costumes eventually gave way to the spandex superhero-inspired outfits worn today, Harris isn’t surprised about the dancers’ continued success: “People really came to look forward to them, and it became an integral part of a Knicks game. I like the way that they’ve grown and evolved over time.” In the early seasons the dancers were heavily styled, with elaborate—and expensive—designer outfits, but only so much of that fashion-forward effort was visible to fans. “There was a fine line,” Harris recalls, of not wanting them too be dressed revealingly, but understanding that they were dancers and the most important thing was for them to be able to move freely. “I knew the women, they were smart and funny and cool,” she explained. “We were giving dancers another outlet to perform, and where are you going to find better dancers than New York City?”

Though Harris left the Garden in 2000, having served as vice president of marketing for the Knicks then senior vice president of marketing for all of Madison Square Garden, she remains a loyal Knicks fan—barring the occasional network blackout. An active member of Women in Sports and Events, where she has been a mentor for the WISE Within program, Harris still has a sharp eye for marketing. As a fan, Harris thinks Jeremy Lin’s success has been exciting for New York, providing the jump-start the team has sorely needed for some time. “That’s the really fun thing about sports, you don’t know what’s going to happen day to day.”

• This headline has the best pun in world history. Trust me on this. [Daily Mail]

• Jew-spotting, meet Mormon-spotting. [Gawker]

• After much internal wrangling, the Jewish anti-poverty group Avodah’s trip to Israel will include a visit to the West Bank and a meeting with anti-occupation activists. [Forward]

• An excellent review traces how and why the great Jewish leftist I.F. Stone moved from a bi-nationalist to, in effect, a Zionist. [TNR The Book]

• A U.S. congressman has come under fire for employing an Orthodox man who is refusing his wife a get. When you think about it, “get” is somewhat onomatopoetic, no? [Change.org]

Pleased to say I saw this in person last night.

Woody’s poor estimation of his own dramaturgical talent suddenly seems relevant with the news that his 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway is going to become a Broadway musical … and Woody is writing the book. (The composer and lyricist haven’t been announced yet.)

The film is about the theater: it stars John Cusack as a Jazz Age playwright forced to cast the moll (Jennifer Tilly) of a mobster (Chazz Palminteri) in his play. Dianne Wiest won an Oscar. It comes between Manhattan Murder Mystery and Mighty Aphrodite and near to his one true musical, Everyone Says I Love You, in Woody’s ouevre: the light-hearted but quality post-Mia comedies of middle age. Excepting Everyone and maybe something like Bananas, I can’t think of a Woody movie better suited to the musical treatment.

‘Bullets Over Broadway’ Is Heading There [NYT]
Earlier: The Woodman on Radio Days

Don’t Cry For Me, Ahashuerus [92Y Tribeca]
Earlier: Everything’s Coming Up Moses
Do You Hear The Hebrews Sing?

TV, Guide!

The Irony Lady A sweeping biopic of Hannah Arendt, who, despite writing eloquently and fiercely about fascism, had an affair with Martin Heidegger, a member of the Nazi Party between 1933 and 1945. Co-starring Bill Murray as Heidegger and Nicholas Cage as Arendt’s tortured Jewish friend, the brilliant and mercurial Walter Benjamin.

The I Ran Lady In this sure-fire crowd-pleaser, Meryl plays Tzipi Livni, the Israeli politician who won the popular vote yet proved unable to build a coalition, took a backseat to Benjamin Netanyahu, and spent the past few years watching her own party doing its best to unseat her. Gary Oldman is Netanyahu (it’ll be one of his easier accents) and James Gandolfini is Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

The Iron Man Lady Meryl as Scarlett Johansson! In this nuanced performance in a highly avant-garde movie-within-a-movie directed by original movie director Jon Favreau, Streep brings out the deeper sides of the popular superhero movie franchise startlet, giving us a ScarJo coming to grips with fame, love, and being a Jewish woman. Mandy Patinkin co-stars as Robert Downey, Jr.

The Iran Lady Streep as Queen Esther, whose ancient kingdom covered all of those alleged Iranian nuclear sites that may or may not be bombed soon. Alan Rickman as Haman, Amar’e Stoudemire as King Ahasuerus, and Jennifer Aniston as ex-Queen Vashti.

The IRA Lady Isn’t it time Suze Orman had her own biopic? Obviously with Paul Giamatti as Jim Cramer?

Beat the Clock

His example and his exertions prove that freedom is indissociable—that there’s no such thing as political freedom in the absence of free artistic expression; that freedom involving matters of sex is as central to a just society as the right to ideological expression. Rosset both advanced and embodied, sincerely and bravely, the crucial modern recognition that the personal is political.

Defied Censors, Making Racy a Literary Staple [NYT]
In Memoriam: Barney Rosset [New Yorker Front Row]
Related: Tropical Storm [Tablet Magazine]

Lost in all this are the benefits of contraception. To explain these, I thought I’d bring on a guest, our good friend Woody Allen, to enlighten us:

Romney Says Obama Undermines Religious Freedom [Fox 43]
Earlier: Santorum Makes His Run

House Rules

It would be incredibly silly—and one can sense some succumbing to this comforting silliness—to conclude that just as we were wrong about Iraq’s program, Iran’s, too, is far less severe than we imagine now. The latest U.N. report found pretty overwhelming evidence of the ability to produce a weapon; the last time Iran refused to cooperate with international inspectors was, literally, two days ago. There is evidence that the scientists Israel somebody is assassinating are bent on destroying Israel. And in the context of the anti-Semitic, eliminationist rhetoric routinely emitted by the regime, it feels counterintuitive, to say the least, simply to believe the Supreme Leader when he says the nuclear program is intended purely peacefully. (It’s also worth noting that while the Iraq War was a massive ground invasion intended to change a regime, even the more hawkish talk of striking Iran comprises an air strike—perhaps an “air war”—with the more modest aim of disrupting the nuclear program.)

On the flip side, in the context of the Iraq history, alarmist jeremiads like this Robert Wright post, in which he warns that a ludicrous, non-binding Senate resolution ostensibly banning containment as a U.S. policy toward Iran (doesn’t the executive branch make foreign policy?) may inexorably lead to war, make a little more sense, although I wish Wright were a mite less focused on the specific nefarious influence of AIPAC as opposed to the generally hawkish predilections of generally hawkish politicians representing generally hawkish voters.

Even the best article I’ve read recently on what to do about Iran practically begins with the warning, “the lesson of Iraq, the last preventive war launched by the United States, is that Washington should not choose war when there are still other options.”

Those are the words of Colin Kahl, who just so happens to be recently of the Defense Department. His Foreign Affairs essay provides a relatively succinct brief against war right now, arguing that we would have at least a year between Iran’s political decision to build a bomb, which we would learn of soon after it occurred, and its having a bomb; that an attack would almost surely escalate and involve other countries in the region (not just Israel, also the Gulf states, Lebanon, and perhaps Syria); that Iran is more on the ropes now than ever before, and therefore more amenable than ever before to negotiation; and that a strike may not force all that much of a delay in the development of a weapon.

Ultimately, Kahl argues—as he also did yesterday in a shorter piece—that an attack would actually subsequently necessitate the same sort of containment that hawks now decry, only made more difficult by the yet-more-increased aura of mistrust and enmity birthed by, well, our having just bombed the crap out of them. You get all the negative blowback of an attack (not guaranteed, but very likely) as well as a more difficult task of continuing to head off a bomb … and you haven’t even tried what would actually be the most assured method of prevention: reaching an actual diplomatic solution, the admittedly unlikely eventuality that, if attained, would keep Iran out of the nuclear-weapon club more credibly than any bunker-busting attack would.

In this context, the only rational reason to attack is, ironically, Israel’s. For the following scenario does depend upon the U.S. attacking Iran if its own, more reasonable red line—the decision to build a bomb—is crossed. And if you are Prime Minister Netanyahu—of a hawkish inclination to be sure, but also reasonably mistrustful of the current regime—there is a logic to attacking now to make sure everyone has to turn their cards over. It may be Netanyahu who, as Ari Shavit put it today, “believes solely in the Zionist sword,” but it is President Obama’s responsibility to make sure it stays sheathed. At their meeting next month, Obama must persuade Bibi not to bomb now by assuring him that he himself will bomb later. Of course, we’ve entered Dr. Strangelove territory here, but the point of Dr. Strangelove is that it was all plausible.

Let’s assume the U.S. (and, crucially, Israel) listens to Kahl. What are the best ways to get a diplomatic solution? Step one is clearly to maintain the threat of military action. Step two, argues influential columnist David Ignatius today, is to establish some sort of communication with the regime, offer them an off-ramp, and then convince them there’s “no alternative but a punishing war.” Ignatius writes that history shows that “Iranian leaders aren’t irrational madmen—and also that they drive a hard bargain.” So keep the current sanctions, which are currently squeezing the Iranian economy and currency, in place. And step three, as outlined by Richard Haass and Michael Levi, is to offer Iran—publicly, so that the Iranian public can know what its leaders have for their consideration—a deal that would, effectively, call Iran’s bluff, allowing an extremely intrusively inspected and totally peaceful nuclear program (Haass and Levi are dead-set against an Iranian bomb). It’s notable that Dennis Ross, too, has expressed that he is okay with this.

It’s worth a shot. It’s more of a shot than we gave Saddam Hussein (not that he deserved better; we deserved better). It it fails, Iran itself (and not Netanyahu) will, in effect, have made the decision to be attacked; and Iran’s people and the rest of the world will know it.

In Din Over Iran, Rattling Sabers Echo [NYT]
AIPAC and the Push Toward War [Atlantic]
Not Time to Attack Iran [Foreign Affairs]
The Iran Containment Fallacy [The Hill Congress Blog]
Getting Iran to Back Down on Its Nuclear Program [WP]
How to Talk Down Tehran’s Nuclear Ambitions [WSJ]
If Israel Strikes Iran, It’ll Be Because Obama Didn’t Stop It
Earlier: On Iran, U.S. and Israeli Signals Still Crossed
U.N.: Evidence of Ongoing Iran Bomb Program

• IRAN’S SUPREME LEADER insisted that the nuclear program would continue to “progress,” but totally peacefully. “Owning a nuclear weapon is a big sin,” he said. [WP]

• THE ADMINISTRATION IS EMPHASIZING HUMANITARIAN AID to Syria’s opposition, rather than arms. [WP]

• VIDEO TELLS THE GRIM TALE of the unimaginably brutal bombardment of the city of Homs—it’s “the first YouTube war,” says one analyst. [NYT]

• PRESIDENT PERES BELIEVES ISRAEL SHOULDN’T ATTACK IRAN right now, and will tell President Obama this in person next month. [Haaretz]

• MITT ROMNEY NARROWLY BEAT RICK SANTORUM in last night’s debate, probably. [NYT]

For the past four years, I have been one of the chairs of a joint fundraiser for DC Central Kitchen and Martha’s Table, two institutions that fight hunger and poverty in our nation’s capital. Each January, two chefs from across the country are paired up to cook for 20 people in a private home for each event; there are now 20 such dinners in Washington. Most of the food is donated, and all of the profits go straight to the two organizations. This year, for the first time, two couples who observe kashrut in their homes volunteered to host dinners.

As the person who decides who cooks where, keeping in mind that chefs often like challenges, I selected chefs who had never cooked a kosher meal before. When I telephoned Joe Palma of Eric Ripert’s Westend Bistro and Kaz Okochi of Kaz Sushi Bistro, both located in Washington, D.C., and asked them to cook kosher dinners, each one paused at first. But both of them soon accepted.

Like all good chefs, they accepted my challenge because they were curious. For them it was like being confronted with bizarre ingredients on a Top Chef challenge—which may explain their choice of partners in their respective kitchens. Although I explained the bare basics of kashrut before they accepted, I added that they should really talk to their hosts, as everyone has different rules for their own homes. Since we would not be hiring a mashgiach to make sure the food was kosher and cooked in a kosher manner, it was up to the chefs to follow the laws of kashrut as prescribed in each home.

Okochi, an excellent sushi chef, took his task very seriously and learned which fish were and were not kosher. J.A. Henckels, one of our sponsors, offered him two new sushi knives for the dinner. He also bought new cutting boards, bowls, and sieves to prep the fish at his restaurant. The hosts, Steve Rabinowitz and Laurie Moskowitz, told Okochi that his rice cooker, only used for rice, was fine to use in their home. Rabinowitz, a public-relations specialist, told Okochi that it was easy to make a kosher meal. “All you need to know is what fish and meat you can and cannot use, that you can’t mix milk and meat, information you can get online,” he said. “And then you need to know the rules of the house.”

Okochi, who was very worried that he would do something wrong, looked at the list of acceptable fish carefully, and then staked out his two dishes. He was cooking with Spike Mendelsohn, a former Top Chef contestant whose father is Jewish and who operates a kosher food truck for the Sixth & I Synagogue in downtown D.C. The two agreed that Mendelsohn would make the main dish and dessert: a French roast with a coconut-milk-and-sweet-potato puree and a red-wine demi glace, and a chocolate mousse with olive oil for dessert. Jeff Morgan, hearing about the fundraiser from another chef, donated his Napa Valley kosher Covenant wines to accompany the dinner.

For Okochi, it was easy to figure out the kosher rules and find kosher products. But, when a guest informed him a week before the Jan. 22 dinner that she was allergic to all soy products, Okochi called me in a panic. As a Japanese chef, he was planning to use soy sauce and miso paste in his two dishes. “I was originally going to use salmon with soy sauce for everyone,” he explained. “Then I switched to a crudo-type dish of Tai snapper carpaccio with Asian greens, so as not to do two soy preparations.” For his second course, Okochi was planning an off-the-charts-delicious miso-marinated Chilean sea bass, so for the one guest with the soy allergy, he grilled the fish with a Mexican rub. “I knew that Chilean sea bass was really big and I didn’t want to buy a whole one, but thankfully [the hosts] let me buy a cut of it from a seafood market.”

“If you are hard-core observant, you would buy your fish in a kosher market or buy the whole fish and butcher it yourself,” said Moskowitz, a veteran political organizer. “For us it was OK, we buy cuts of fish.”

In the end, despite their nerves, the chefs tried to abide by their hosts’ specific rules of kashrut and created a successful meal.

“They were both very gracious about everything,” said Moskowitz. “Not knowing which bowl to use, you can’t just grab a spatula. It’s difficult, it’s nerve-wracking.”

For Joe Palma, making his first kosher meal at Roger and Cheri Friedman’s home in Bethesda, Md., was similarly unnerving. “You look at what you do and move back because you are out of your comfort zone,” he said. “It’s nice to be shaken out of your comfort zone every now and then.”

Palma teamed up with another former Top Chef contestant, Jennifer Carroll of Philadelphia. For their dinner, the Friedmans let the chefs do some of the prep in the Ritz-Carlton kitchen before they came. There, Palma showed me how he prepared Grow and Behold’s kosher, pasture-raised, Black Angus French Roast, a cut of meat from the shoulder similar in taste and texture to angler steak and London broil.

“To be honest, I thought the meal would be really bad,” he said while preparing meat sauce in a pan. “But I was really pleased with it.”

For Palma, the difficulty in making a gourmet kosher dinner lay in the butter. “I like to finish off my meat sauce with it,” he said. Instead, he reduced his stock, and would have added pureed vegetables to thicken it if it hadn’t tasted right. He could have also added an arrowroot slurry, using oil to thicken it. “I was extremely impressed with the quality of the meat we tasted,” he added.

Looking for a dessert, Carroll found an olive oil cake on the Internet, first mentioned in Gourmet magazine in 2006. “I loved that cake,” said Palma, a recipe to which they added their chefs’ touch, serving it with black pepper and thyme glace, mountain huckleberry jam, and Seville orange coriander sorbet.

Even the most careful chef can make a mistake in the kitchen, especially when faced with unfamiliar rules. Okochi, who is cooking his second kosher dinner at a hotel later this month, had run the menu by the hosts and me. But none of us caught the ankimo pate wrapped in pickled daikon radish, served as one of the passed hors d’oeuvres: Ankimo, we all learned after the meal, is made from monkfish, which like catfish, wolfish, and dogfish, has no scales and is therefore not kosher. Nobody caught it until it was too late.

“I just have to pay attention a little more,” he said. “It was mental pressure. Usually when I cook, I just have to be careful not to burn myself, but it made me nervous not to make mistakes.”

The squeeze continues: This month, Congress pressured the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which provides tens of thousands of financial institutions with a system for transferring money around the world, to block Iranian institutions from using the service. SWIFT announced last week that it “stands ready to act and discontinue its services to sanctioned Iranian financial institutions as soon as it has clarity on EU legislation currently being drafted.”

From the American point of view, all this is a clear sign, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said recently that “The United States … does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”

But for Israel, this still falls way short of the mark.

If you want to understand how the Jewish state sees the nascent Iranian nuclear arms program, you need to stop thinking like a superpower with vast resources that inhabits a virtual island several thousand miles from the Persian Gulf—and start thinking like a tiny state with limited resources, formed in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and within ballistic missile range of Iran. You’re going to go along with your American patron as far as you can, but in the end, you’re going to keep your own counsel.

***

Last month at the annual Herzliya conference, which brings Israel’s top political, military, and security echelons together with their colleagues from around the world, the majority of Israeli officials and analysts I spoke with said they believe the sanctions have come too late. Perhaps five years ago, economic suffering might have forced the Iranian regime to reconsider its plans. But now with Iran enriching uranium to 20 percent, moving it closer to producing weapons-grade uranium, and even Panetta admitting that the Iranians are a year away from building a nuclear weapon, there are two choices: Either accept that the Islamic Republic has joined the nuclear club, or bomb the country’s nuclear facilities in the hope of setting the program back, at least by a few years. If it’s become increasingly clear to Israel that the Obama Administration is not going to take military action, the question is: When does Israel pull the trigger?

Some experts make the case that Israel’s war against Iran’s nuclear program is already well under way. “Over the last decade Israel has spent a lot of money to prepare for all sorts of options on Iran,” David Wurmser, formerly Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser, told me this week. Such options include computer worms, like Stuxnet, and covert operations, like the assassination of nuclear scientists and sabotaging military installations, as well as possible commando raids and air raids.

Now the head of a consulting group called Delphi, which has a few sensitive projects in Israel, Wurmser says it is crunch time for Israeli leaders. He’s seen a marked shift in Israel’s security establishment over the last few months. Perhaps the surest sign is that President Shimon Peres, not typically perceived as a hawk on Iran, has begun warning that a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to Israel and is “a real danger to humanity as a whole.” Said Wurmser: “It’s not just about Bibi and his historical legacy anymore. He doesn’t need to be a leader in a Churchillian mode, because the consensus on attacking Iran is broad based.”

Continue reading: Covert warfare

The house of Downton, it can no longer be denied, is in disrepair. The British show’s fall from grace is already so widely acknowledged as to have merited an entire essay in the recent edition of that unimpeachable chronicler of pop culture cool, the New York Review of Books. Its author, the poet James Fenton, acknowledged the show’s tremendous appeal, but he also noted that certain recent plot developments, such as a terribly disfigured man claiming to be a long-lost heir or an influenza epidemic that conveniently claims the life of one character and neatly resolves an untidy love triangle, have been enough to send even the most ardent of fans on the first train back to London.

But this isn’t entirely Downton’s fault. Unlike movies or plays, TV shows don’t have the luxury of taking a bow after a few hours spent tying up loose ends. Television shows are serial and perpetual, and their job is to manufacture new stories and new thrills episode after episode, season after season, sometimes decade after decade. These stories have to be mesmerizing but believable, moving but not too obvious, thrilling but never tawdry. Religion ran into the same problem first—and solved it.

Like television, religion has to tell the kind of story that will keep large audiences coming back each week for more. It can never dispense its wisdom in one bright flash; it measures out its truths with coffee spoons. This is why Jesus, for example, speaks largely in parables, short installments that are easy to revisit and that demand eternal interpretation. This is why the Buddha, when asked whether he was a man or a god, answered cryptically, “I am awake.” You can contemplate a rerun of this sentence time and again and still find a new there there.

But whereas Christianity and Islam and Buddhism are all constrained by the inherent demand to write around one central character, Judaism’s narrative logic is different. If you want to understand it, just watch The Simpsons.

There are many reasons for the animated show’s astonishing longevity—it is now the longest-running scripted show broadcast in prime time in American TV history—but none more prevalent than its peculiar storytelling logic, which is simultaneously meticulously detailed and formidably vague. We know, for example, the crazy cat lady’s name, age, and former occupation (Eleanor Abernathy, 40, corporate lawyer), but not the answer to a much more fundamental question like which state Springfield, the Simpsons’ hometown, is in.

It’s this kind of tension between the ephemeral and the exact that keeps us watching. And the show’s writers are well-aware of its existence. In one later episode, Mr. Burns asks who might this pesky employee, Homer Simpson, be. “He thwarted your campaign for governor,” his assistant, Smithers, responds. “You ran over his son, he saved the plant from meltdown, his wife painted you in the nude.” Burns shrugs his shoulders: “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he says. We laugh, and we congratulate the show for its edgy, postmodern reflexivity, but there’s something much deeper going on. If Burns did remember Homer and his antics, he would become, like the hapless Lord Grantham of Downton, no more than the overseer of an increasingly complex narrative that’s hard to follow and harder to believe. The joke works because it reminds us that the essence of television is progression, and that progression, to remain relevant, must move not in straight lines but in circles.

Such is the genius of The Simpsons, where a baby can remain a toddler for two decades and where major, life-defining moments are remembered by all but the characters who lived through them. Is the Hebrew Bible any different? About Abraham, for example, the book tells us nearly everything, except for why this one unremarkable man was singled out by God to begin with. A divine punishment visited on a wayward king in one chapter is forgotten by his son in the very next. The Bible has smiting and wars like The Simpsons has couch gags and vacations in strange locations—the fury of small details keeps us occupied, but the truly big questions are never directly addressed.

In religion and television alike, this gap creates a space for personal introspection. If you try to tell us an ironclad, linear story, we’ll revolt. We’ll ask ourselves, as Fenton does in his essay, if it really makes sense that someone as proper as Lady Edith might rat out her sister Mary for sleeping with the Turkish diplomat Pamuk. We’ll scrutinize each detail and roar at any discrepancy or unlikelihood. But tell us a loose tale, the kind that transcends logic and concentrates instead on some inherent spirit, the kind that knows that details are seasoning but never the stew, and we’ll stay tuned for 500 episodes—or five millennia.

• Bradley Burston supplies the quintessential center-left put-down of the upcoming Israel Apartheid Week and, by extension, of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. [Haaretz]

• Israel is wildly popular in the United States (if not nearly as popular as Canada). [JTA]

• Rick Santorum sees Nazis everywhere, albeit not in the anti- or philo-Semitic way. [WP]

• Sardines are kosher, says Science. [American Museum of Natural History]

• An Iranian soccer team won’t play a Serbian soccer team because the latter’s coach is Israeli. I mean, I’d be scared of losing, too. [JTA]

Otherwise-good article suggests eliminating “Ruben Remus” from The Basement Tapes. Outrageous!

This is also the best context for viewing the candidacy of Rep. Ron Paul. He is not a particularly strong candidate: He has run twice before; he is 76; he does not project the sort of aura we associate with presidents. Kelefa Sanneh’s new New Yorker profile depicts a futile campaign, not a successful one. “He is slowly collecting delegates,” Sanneh writes, shrewdly throwing this hard-money advocate’s principles back in his face, “a particularly unsound form of currency—they are worth something until the last night of the Republican Convention, at which point the market for Republican delegates crashes.”

“There is only one politician whom Paul regularly praises in his speeches—a man he coyly refers to as a ‘senator from Kentucky,’ ” Sanneh reports. The candidate who advocates what Paul advocates but is a better candidate isn’t running this year for the same reason that Christie, Ryan, et al., aren’t. That this candidate is Paul’s son, Sen. Rand Paul, only makes it starker.

The notion that Paul’s power at the polls and through delegates could land his son a spot as the nominee’s vice-presidential candidate has been floated. A story last week about Romney and Paul’s personal friendship—an article whose sources are all on Paul’s side, by the way—only led to further speculation. But if Rand Paul is smart enough not to run for president this year, he is also smart enough not to run for vice president and instead to spend the next several months (and four or eight years) building his own profile.

Meanwhile, from the father’s perspective, the party has your son as a hostage: Run a third-party campaign or even make too big of a dissenting noise at the convention, and your son will be shunned in a later year; go along, and they will owe you (or your son). “Paul can’t accurately claim that he has nothing to lose by breaking with the party that has been his home for all but one of his years in politics,” Sanneh notes. “Hope for his son’s prospects—and a disinclination to put him in an awkward position—might be enough to keep Paul from ending his political career with another third-party campaign.”

Which is to say, the Paul question—Ron or Rand—does not need to be answered this year, and those who tell you otherwise are probably just trying to scare you.

But the Paul question—Rand—probably will need to be answered at a later date. Paul the Younger generally shares his father’s positions, but he does try to be more mainstream; he did, according to Sanneh, refuse to rule out the use of force to halt Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Will a group like the Republican Jewish Coalition, which pointedly did not invite Ron Paul to its candidates confab last December, be open to Rand Paul in four or eight years? It’s not the most urgent of questions, but it’s one of the more interesting ones.

Worry Over Mitt Romney Sparks Talk of Tampa [Politico]
Party Crasher [New Yorker]
Ron Paul Aide Suggests Clout Built in Presidential Race Could Land Son on GOP Ticket [Dallas Morning News]
Amid Rivalry, Friendship Blossoms on the Campaign Trail [NYT]

Two Step

The latest revelation, earlier this week, is that the NYPD was “monitoring” Muslim students at Columbia, Yale, Syracuse, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the northeast. (Tablet contributor David Fine has an excellent op-ed on the subject in the Columbia Spectator: “I was appalled that a fellow student would hold such views,” he writes of one student who defended terrorist tactics, “but I would have been more appalled if that student had left her ideas unexpressed for fear of being filed away as a potential threat by the NYPD.”) At a press conference yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg’s Press Secretary Stu Loeser, compared the NYPD’s actions to earlier such programs that involved watching the Jewish Defense League and groups affiliated with the Irish Republican Army. But of course, the JDL and the IRA were—with some room for nuance—terrorist groups (hell, the JDL may have killed 2pac!). The groups the NYPD has recently been spying on are … just Muslims. Muslims in the land of the free.

Highlights of AP’s Probe Into NYPD Intelligence Operations [AP]
Speak Now for Peace [Columbia Spectator]
Bloomberg Blasts Questions from the Yale President [Capital]

Senator Carl Levin, the grandfatherly Michigan Democrat, approached Mr. Feingold and the late Paul Wellstone on the Senate floor during the 1999 impeachment trial. “I am a little embarrassed to ask you guys this,” Mr. Levin said sheepishly. “But what’s a thong?”

So, four Jews, actually, if you count the wearer of the underwear in question.

Feingold was just named a co-chair of President Obama’s re-election campaign.

In Book, Feingold Offers Insiders’s View of Senate Post-9/11 [NYT The Caucus]
Jews Well Represented Among Obama’s Campaign Chairs [JTA]

They talked about Jack Benny, Woody saying that he’s “still great,” the “t” over-articulated in his style. Insdorf noted that Benny, whose original last name was not Benny, is the only person to have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for work in three different media: film, television, and radio. They talked about Orson Welles. At one point, betraying his formidable learnedness, Woody referred to the “propensity of the medium.” They talked about Bob and Ray, and about Fred Allen—no relation: Allen was not his original last name (it was Sullivan). They talked about the most recognizable voice of them all, Arthur Godfrey, whose radio theme song, they did not mention, was “Seems Like Old Times,” which is sung at the end of Annie Hall.

They also talked of their shared love of magic (shared also by Welles and Cavett’s old boss Johnny Carson). Cavett spoke poignantly of growing up in Nebraska—Lincoln, not Omaha, as he corrected Woody after Woody referred to Omaha for the second time (shades of this)—and getting magic tricks in the mail from Max Holden’s and wondering, “someday, will I be in New York City?” (“I did get to New York: Max was dead, and the shop was closed.”) Cavett recalled listening to the radio drama series Grand Central Station and imagining boarding a train bound for Grand Central Station, and proceeded to take out a piece of paper and read from the introduction to the show:

Drawn by the magnetic force of the fantastic metropolis, day and night great trains rush toward the Hudson River, sweep down its eastern bank for 140 miles, flash briefly by the long red row of tenement houses south of 125th Street, dive with a roar into the two-and-one-half-mile tunnel which burrows beneath the glitter and swank of Park Avenue, and then [and here Cavett paused while some older audience members said the words with him] Grand Central Station! Crossroads of a million private lives! Gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily!

It was a poignant reminder that there actually were more unlikely places from which to shoot to success than middle-class postwar Midwood. Cavett was the better magician; Woody said he practiced for untold hours in front of a three-way mirror but didn’t get good. “I never did anything for anybody,” he remarked, in a line just begging to be yanked out and extrapolated from. “It was the mirror and me.”

People laughed at many of Woody’s not-funny lines, and laughed extremely hard at his somewhat-funny lines. You got the sense that what he always said was true: that his jokes are contrived things; that, yes, he’s incredibly good at them, and can write jokes at will and can improvise and be hilarious at will, but it’s not actually his default setting. For large portions of the discussion, which lasted over an hour, Woody was, in effect, the straight man to Cavett’s funny man. Perhaps the line of Woody’s that got the biggest laugh was when he imagined Cavett’s childhood, “growing up in the dark, Nebraska, Omaha—goyim.” I laughed, but it felt fake, playing to the crowd. You could tell when he was being genuinely funny, as when Cavett recalled a time the two had gone to the Stage Deli and Woody, adopting a Yiddish accent, insisted that Cavett “jus’ try dis sahndveech.” “I know you remember that,” Cavett said to Woody. “I remember the sandwich,” Woody replied. That is Woody humor. It’s when he was trying.

We forget that “Woody Allen” is schtick; that he bought his first pair of thick, black-framed glasses because a guy he wrote jokes for wore them; that Allen is his given first name. At the end of a long day, he is the avuncular man with mostly white hair and rumpled corduroy pants calmly sitting on a stage and, as always, serenading us with the wonderful news that it seems like old times. Great work if you can get it.

Arguing the World

The lazy assumption over the past several weeks has been that Santorum is not appealing to Jews—essentially some version of, “He is just like Romney and Newt Gingrich on Israel and Iran, but he is more socially conservative than they.” Gingrich patron Sheldon Adelson was rumored to be opposed to Santorum for his strongly antiabortion views, even as he pledged to back the eventual GOP nominee (excepting Ron Paul, who will be the fourth participant in tonight’s debate). But Santorum has his Jewish backers, too. JTA’s Ron Kampeas spoke to a couple.

“I am not a political pundit. I don’t know how Michigan is going,” said Alan B. Miller, chair and CEO of Universal Health Services, which is based in Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania, in an interview with Tablet Magazine yesterday. Miller is a prominent Jewish Republican donor who is backing Santorum. “But I know [Santorum] to be a man of character. He prides himself—if he gives you his word, it’s good. He’s the kind of a person who I think should be in a leadership position.”

Of Santorum’s hard-right positions and rhetoric on social issues—most notoriously, several years ago Santorum said that gay marriage could lead to bestiality—Miller argued: “he has never indicated any interest in pushing his ideas or making me or anybody else adhere to what he believes in, religiously or socially.” He added, “People have to grow up. They’re not gonna find anybody who’s perfect. With a person of character and integrity who’s led a fine life, an exemplary life, that’s a man they ought to consider very strongly.” (Taking his own advice, Miller pledged that he will support the eventual Republican nominee.)

While Republican Jewish Coalition head Matt Brooks acknowledged, in an interview with Kampeas, that Santorum could prove vulnerable on social issues like abortion and contraception (which he personally opposes), he argued that the 2012 election will be about the economy and foreign policy.

Over the weekend, prominent Romney backer Fred Zeidman insisted to Tablet Magazine that nominee Santorum would still be a better option than President Obama. “We have checks and balances in government, there’s a limited number of things even a Rick Santorum can actually do—that’s why we have Congress,” he said. “Keep your eyes focused on Israel, and you’ve gotta support Rick Santorum” if it is him versus Obama, he continued. “I won’t have any problems doing it.”

Zeidman added, “His social issues are certainly way to the right of mine. Unfortunately, if you look at the surveys and numbers they all point to the same thing, which is that Jewish vote for the most part considers Israel the number five item, and the reason for that is because they think everyone can take care of Israel. As far as I’m concerned, with Barack Obama, that’s not the case, which is why he’s not our guy.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Jewish Republicans appear to have gravitated more toward Romney. But one could argue that Santorum combines Gingrich’s familiarity with foreign policy (through time served in federal office) with Romney’s ability to sound hawkish notes that aren’t alienating. It’s certainly not difficult to make the case that he has a stronger character than Gingrich. And electoral college-wise, there is a compelling argument that Santorum would more likely put states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, and perhaps Wisconsin, Michigan, and even New Jersey, into play than Romney.

“I would also ask that my co-religionists take this election very seriously and not be persuaded by things that people want to tell them that they want to hear,” Miller said. “They ought to think very seriously about that, about how the Israelis think about the current administration, which is telling the world and the Jews that they should not talk about Iran because the price of oil is going to go up and that will be bad for the world.”

“I will vote for the Republican nominee without question,” Miller added. “I am hopeful that it will be Santorum.”

Gingrich’s Main Backer Plays Two Angles [WSJ]
Shrugging Santorum Has Jewish GOPers Shrugging, Shvitzing and Kvelling [JTA]

• U.N. NUCLEAR INSPECTORS DEPARTED IRAN having failed to negotiate access to a certain facility and to certain scientists due to apparent Iranian intransigence. [WSJ]

• MANY ISRAELIS APPEAR MORE OR LESS RESIGNED to war sometime this year. [WP]

• MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI, THE POPULAR Fatah personality, calls for a nonviolent Palestinian Arab Spring. (Marwan Barghouti is in jail; this item originally referred to Mustafa as jailed.) [NYT]

• ISRAEL MUST CONTRIVE A NEW LAW that does not exempt yeshiva students from military service, the High Court rules. [Haaretz]

• MORMONS BAPTIZED ANNE FRANK for the first time in over a decade, though not for the first time ever. Which I guess means our mothers may no longer approve. [Huff Post]

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I got in trouble for my joke last year. So consider this your public service announcement, that those people intend to have that … whatever there.

The Mendelsohn-Hollinghurst dispute will not make Page Six (as Gore Vidal v. Norman Mailer might have), but it retains a potential for damage in the world of Anglo-American letters. At the center of the dispute is the imputation by Mendelsohn that Hollinghurst has the “unconscious inclination” to “lapse into an old British literary habit”—using Jewish characters as markers of un-Englishness and social decline. Let’s be clear: Nowhere does Mendelsohn overtly accuse Hollinghurst of anti-Semitism or intentional anti-Jewish bias. Instead, he asks, “What, exactly, are we being asked to conclude about the crass ‘new’ England [in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty] when we learn, of one member of [protagonist] Nick Guest’s new circle, that the grand Duchess of Flintshire was once ‘plain Sharon Feingold’?”  Mendelsohn raises a question and lets the reader ruminate on its implications.

That said, Mendelsohn’s overall assessment of Hollinghurst’s career is often generous and complimentary, as when he discusses the author’s debut success from 1988, The Swimming-Pool Library, “in which a plush style, a formidable culture, and a self-confident avoidance of then-fashionable formal tricks were put in the service of a startling direct and unembarrassed treatment of gay desire.” But that Mendelsohn saw fit to raise this Jewish issue at all—late in the review and in no more than a few hundred words—has proven small comfort to Hollinghurst. In the subsequent Dec. 8 issue, Princeton’s Galen Strawson, the British philosopher and literary critic, lodged a vigorous defense, in which he chastised “a usually intelligent critic like Daniel Mendelsohn” for using as evidence against Hollinghurst a series of minor characters with Jewish surnames “to indicate any trace of anti-Semitism” and for “a failure of ear, a narrowness of mind, an ignorance of the world, a capacity for unwarranted insult.” Strawson ended his missive with the stirring prescription that “Mendelsohn should apologize unconditionally for a slur that is as serious as he himself takes it to be.”

In fact, there was no stated slur, yet in Mendelsohn’s original critique there is reference to several Jewish personae in Hollinghurst’s fiction—used, he believes, to symbolize a decline in the halcyon British brand. Thus, Mendelsohn writes “not without dismay” that in The Stranger’s Child “the irritating photographer who plagues the Valances—he represents the distressingly crass ‘modern’ world of publicity and celebrity—is called Jerry Goldblatt.” This, in a footnote. It would wait for the Jan. 12 issue of the New York Review for Hollinghurst himself to weigh in on what he calls Mendelsohn’s “poisonous atmosphere of suggestion.”

***

Certainly, to understand this fracas, we need to understand what “old British literary habit” Mendelsohn is talking about—a habit I expand to include American examples, since English traditions served ours. We are tempted to reach as far back as Shakespeare’s Shylock, the original avaricious Jew, but while the embittered Venetian money-lender makes an indelible impression seeking his “pound of flesh,” at least the Bard allows the old man to voice his grievance against the abusive Christian world in which he is fated to play his part. Still, abusive Shylock became red meat for English actors and audiences over centuries. In Charles Dickens’ early success, Oliver Twist, Fagin the Jew is introduced from the start as a version of the Devil, with his “matted red hair,” a “toasting fork in his hand,” and a “villainous-looking and repulsive face.” He leads adolescent boys down a dirty primrose path toward the rankest thievery. Cunning mixed with a measure of seduction infuses Fagin with a vaguely pedophilic quality—a twist on medieval notions of Jews drinking the blood of Christian children.

After Oliver Twist was published serially from 1837 to 1839, it would take 25 years for Dickens to be called out by a woman of his acquaintance, Mrs. Eliza Davies, for the “great wrong” he had done to a “scattered nation.” Fagin, she fears, “admits of only one interpretation.” Dickens, she proposes, has the opportunity to atone for this great wrong.

Although a Victorian of social sympathies, Dickens could not immediately see her objection; he was portraying a particular criminal type who was “invariably … a Jew.” Yet Dickens made amends in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) with the character of Riah, described by critic John Gross as a “wholly innocent scapegoat … an involuntary front man for his non-Jewish employer, the odious Fledgeby.” More significantly, when Dickens revised Oliver Twist in 1867, he eliminated many references to “the Jew” Fagin, instead using the character’s name or a simple pronoun. Alas, Dickens felt forced to make a non-literary point: Not all Jews were Fagins.

Then there is the opposite case: George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), admired now as a failed masterpiece. Eliot sees Jews not as a “type,” but as people with a complex interior and spiritual life, distinct customs, and, at least in the character of Mordecai, aspirations for nationhood. The novel is divided between Deronda’s attraction to Gwendolen Harleth, the society beauty who ultimately gets trapped into marriage with a loathsome upper-class sadist, Henleigh Grandcourt, and Deronda’s affiliation with a group of London Jews, one of whom, Mirah Lapidoth, he has saved from suicide. The common complaint is that the novel’s Jewish sections are too didactic by half, while the Jewish characters—Mirah and Mordecai especially—are too good by at least as much. Indeed, Mirah is so sentimentally good she is nearly a Christian martyr, an ideal of Victorian feminine virtue. Bad-girl Gwendolen has vastly more energy and psychological depth. From a literary standpoint, Eliot’s Jews haven’t the vitality that could ever replace the fascinating evil energy of the all-too-vivid Fagin. Philo-Semitic in sensibility, Deronda remains the exception to the rule.

But from the high Victorian era onward, the literary Jewish presence is carved from a similar mold by even the most trenchant writers. Anthony Trollope’s Ferdinand Lopez, in The Prime Minister of 1876—the penultimate volume of Trollope’s Palliser series—is a financial adventurer who wins the heart of a proper English girl whose conservative family refers to him as a “foreign cad” and a “greasy Jew adventurer out of the gutter.” In his favor, he is handsome (although swarthy), well-educated, multilingual, and has the external manners of a gentleman. But the narrator refers to Lopez as a “man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew,” which may or may not express Trollope’s own view—especially since the narration begins with the claim: “It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers … and grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society.” Trollope introduces social climbing as a major theme, yet perhaps doing so with critical irony—an irony that could well escape Jewish readers already sensitive but not inured to continuous insult.

Continue reading: Scheming social parvenu

Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of the critically acclaimed Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and a longtime friend of Judt’s, suggested that Judt talk the book out with him, instead. Most Thursdays, for most of 2009, Snyder visited Judt’s apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Square and recorded their conversations. The men worked on the final product until a couple weeks before Judt’s death in August 2010, at the age of 62. The result mixes history and ideas, Judt’s personal journey from a young Zionist to a lapsed Marxist, and current politics. Each chapter—from the first, on Judt’s Jewish upbringing, to the last, in which he makes his argument for a renewed social democracy—begins with an extended biographical section in Judt’s words, followed by a dialogue between him and Snyder, who asks questions and offers his own thoughts.

Judt’s mind and elbows are as sharp as ever. At turns, he is biting about colleagues and ex-wives, the political right, and—no surprise to those who followed his political writing—Israel. Judt gained wide notoriety for a 2003 New York Review of Books essay that argued that to remain a democracy, Israel needs to morph “from a Jewish state into a binational one.” The New Republic subsequently dropped Judt as a contributing editor, and Judt’s career as a Francophonic, British, Jewish, New York public intellectual, so to speak, flourished. I sat down with Snyder last week in New Haven to talk about Judt, their friendship, and their new book.

A “spoken” book comes with its own logistical challenges, but this also must have been emotionally challenging. You befriended Tony Judt, who was 21 years your senior, when you were an undergraduate at Brown. As you note in the foreword, every time you saw him during the course of writing the book, he seemed to deteriorate physically.

The important thing is that it wasn’t primarily a challenge for me. It was primarily a challenge for Tony. He’s the one who’s now in the position that in order to work he has to talk instead of write. He’s the one who instead of being humiliated, chooses to be humble and to accept that working with someone else might be a good idea. That he chose to overcome utterly horrible physical limitations in order to keep working at his ideas, and that he did so extremely well, transcending not only his condition, but in my view some of his previous intellectual limitation—that, for me, is the truly remarkable thing.

This kind of collaborative book is common in Central Europe and France. You call the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz’s interviews with the writer Aleksander Wat, My Century, the best of the “spoken” genre, and the first book that Judt ever read in Czech, which he learned in middle age, was Karl Capek’s conversations with the Czech statesman Tomáš Masaryk. Why is it so rare in America?

It’s a matter of really being able spontaneously to call up the best in yourself, on both sides, over and over and over again, without preparation. It’s harder than it looks. Tony not only had a fantastic memory, but he could recall almost at will what was in that memory. I don’t think Americans are generally that articulate—I say this as an American. I don’t think very many of us could do this sort of thing.

Was it a form of psychological relief?

I think it allowed him to be him, at least for a moment. The Tony who was immobilized and certain of death was in many ways a different person who hadn’t been immobilized and certain of death. But our long conversation was a way for him in his new situation to express himself and to continue to work, and to continue to think, and to continue to progress. I think he really would forget the breathing apparatus, he would forget the immobility, for a time. I think there were moments when, because he was only in his mind, his mind was all that mattered to him.

Judt grew up in a working-class London Jewish home. His academic work was primarily on France. And he spent the last two decades of his life in New York. Yet did Judt have an essentially English mind?

It was a Jewish mind, and Jewish history, recent Jewish history, was always at the back of it. And it was a contestatory mind. He described himself as an outsider, and the default way he could be an outsider was his Jewishness. Even if he didn’t stress it, it was the safe, haimish way of being an outsider.

Continue reading: ‘Dead right’ on Iraq War

We all pile into the car: my mother, my father, my brother Dave, and me. The minute we arrive, Dad and Dave break off from us, heading for the men’s side of the aisle. During the chuppah, there is no physical mechitzah at weddings like these (although there will be during dinner and dancing). Still, there is an invisible mechitzah, and I’m not sure which is stronger: the physical one or the invisible one. My mother and I find seats amid the throng of sheitel-topped, high-heeled, mid-calf-length-suited women. I stow my purse under my chair and look around. I’m trying to get my bearings.

A woman from shul—the mother of a guy I knew in high school—comes over to me and taps me on the shoulder. “In the right hour, to the right man,” she says in Sephardi-accented Hebrew, “may we celebrate at your chuppah, too.”

“Oh!” I blurt out, “thank you!” One marriage blessing and we’re only at the chuppah. How many more before the night is over?

Here’s the thing: This is the third Orthodox wedding I’ve attended in the last month. I don’t dislike weddings, but I have to admit they’re growing a bit tiresome—especially since they’re all the same, give or take a few minor details. Of course, each wedding is completely unique for the bride and groom. No doubt both of them have attended myriad others just like it, but this time it belongs to them. But for the onlooker taking mental notes—a role I can’t help but assume—the wedding is another “big box” event, akin to ordering a Big Mac at McDonald’s. Same burger, same bun, just hold the mayo and add extra onions. Essentially, though: interchangeable parts. These parts come in the form of details like the entree, the bride’s choice of colors, and the melodies played during the chuppah processional. But the venue and room are the same, as is the gemach from which the bride’s family rents their dresses, as is the Russian tailor the women use to “tzniufy” their dresses—making them more modest by extending the above-the-knee hems to mid-calf and inserting a snap to hide cleavage.

Which is why, over the last couple of years, I’ve come to find myself sizing up these affairs as though they’re models in a catalog. I’ll be running around on the dance floor, for instance, watching the bride grin from underneath the mounds of makeup, and realize that I’ve been keeping score in my head all along. I am, in a way, collecting data about the Orthodox community’s social mores and idiosyncrasies, because I want to see which of these idiosyncrasies are grounded in substance—Jewish law or values, scholarship, what-not—and which, in contrast, have evolved over time, their original purposes no longer in anyone’s mind even as people are still caught up with following “the rules” just for the sake of conformity or apathy. I had started to wonder: Are these people, who claim to be motivated by God and Jewish law above all else, just blindly following when it comes to some of life’s most important rites of passage? And why had I started to care so much?

At this particular wedding, something would happen that would finally make me understand.

***

The processional begins, and the room suddenly quiets, pregnant with anticipation. A melody begins softly, then grows quickly louder, drifting over from somewhere behind the chuppah. The words of the song are absent, but most people in the room already know them: Mi adir al hakol, mi baruch al hakol … hu yivarech et hachatan v’et hakallah. He who is mighty above all, He who is blessed above all … may He bless the groom and the bride. The melody is haunting and beautiful, a nod to the seriousness of the occasion. The groom’s parents appear, holding their precious cargo linked in their arms. With their free hands, like bookends, they cup hurricane vases whose glowing candles add a further somber note to the intensity of the room.

And still, mentally, I’m calculating.

Are they even over 50? Is she wearing a rented dress or a purchased one? The $3,000 sheitel, or the $6,000 one? Estimated time at the beauty parlor: five hours.

The band is starting up again, and I know it’s the signal to start a new dance set, so I shovel back the last of the chicken, gulp down some ice water, and look for a weak link in the circle. Sweaty hands part to let me in and I start to jump around like everyone else, in a too-tight circle on a too-tight dance floor. That’s the thing about these weddings: Everyone is expected to dance—it’s a mitzvah to entertain the bride and groom—but because the room is divided by a mechitzah, the dance floors are so small that you end up with this hierarchy of concentric circles. The inner sanctum is the bride and whomever she’s dancing with (you can always tell the nicer brides because they dance with more people), the next ring is the bride’s family and high-school/seminary friends, the third circle is everyone else, and the smaller, floating circles on the edges—each composed of four or five people at most—are the breakaways who got sick of being trampled on.

One thing about the circles: There’s an inverse relationship between the complexity of the dance step and the proximity of the dancer to the bride. For instance, the bride’s dancing partner usually has some fancy footwork going on that will put Ginger Rogers to shame. The friends, in the second circle, have probably been to at least two other weddings in the past month (and are planning on two more), so they know the steps by heart. They also have more energy, because they’re under 23. The third circle, of most everyone else, is both too large and too old to be anything but sluggish. It consists of fake u’shafteh mayim steps, because there isn’t enough room to the do the real u’shafteh mayim step anyway—which is good, because most people wouldn’t know how.

As I shuffle one foot in front of the other and remind myself to keep grinning no matter how sweaty I am, I look around me once more. I can always tell the veterans of Orthodox weddings from the newbies, because the newbies think they’re at a classy event and should therefore dress accordingly. If they’re women, that means nice, fancy, high-heeled shoes. The veterans, on the other hand, wear high-heeled shoes, but only to the chuppah. Somewhere between the breaking of the glass and the hearts-of-palm salad, they ditch the nice shoes and bring out their Keds. (Hint: If you want to avoid your toe getting crushed by a spiky heel, stay in the Keds circle. Another hint? Bring back-up deodorant.)

Around dessert time, the DJ makes an announcement. He has one last dance to play—a special one. It’s called the “Mezinek Tantz.” (Literally, in Yiddish: the Pinky [Finger] Dance.) The Mezinek Tantz, he tells us, is a special Hasidic dance heard only at the wedding of a youngest child—an honor bestowed upon parents who have married off all their children. A reward for making it this far without having lost either their sanity or their life savings.

I wade through the hordes to reach the front of the room, where the mechitzah has been pushed aside. As I’m approaching, I brush shoulders with a frum girl who looks about my age—probably a few years younger, since she’s still single—and she mutters jokingly under her breath: “This chasidishe stuff is just too weird for me.” She brushes past me and disappears into the crowd before I can respond, but I’ve gotten enough of a glimpse to realize I know this girl; she’s a good friend of the bride’s whom I’ve met several times. I wonder if she realizes that I’ve heard her.

Continue reading: The pinky dance

• A Cornell student group, backed by some professors, is protesting the university’s New York City partnership with the Israeli Technion school, arguing that it implicates them in war crimes. Because, y’know, Israel. [Cornell Daily Sun]

• Um, Hitler has surviving grandchildren probably. And they’re French. [The Telegraph]

• Eight Jewish rappers, including Matisyahu and Drake, talk about growing up Jewish. Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg hails from the D.C. ‘burbs. [Grantland]

• The lost … ice-hockey-playing Jews of Germany! (Seriously, though, great piece.) [NYT]

• Excellent story on the very real psychological condition known as the Jerusalem syndrome. [Wired]

TAMIR GOODMAN ON JEREMY LIN. Tamir had mad skillz.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Let me ask you about the religion issue, because Franklin Graham on Morning Joe today was asked about the Mormon question and this is the way he handled it. He basically said that Christians do not view the Mormon faith as a Christian faith. Let me play it for you.

[plays clip]

ANDREA MITCHELL: Do you think this is an issue? Was it an issue in South Carolina? Will it be an issue in Michigan? Will it be an issue on super tuesday in the South?

FRED MALEK: I don’t think it’s a issue at all, and it would be a sad day in America if we’re gonna elect somebody based upon their religion or vote against somebody based on their religion.

As members of a minority faith, many Jews no doubt agree with Malek’s sentiment; and last week in Tablet Magazine, Yair Rosenberg persuasively argued that many anti-Mormon tropes and conspiracy theories have plenty in common with anti-Semitic ones.

Which is why it’s worth remembering that, as The New Republic‘s Timothy Noah has been particularly careful not to let us forget, Fred Malek used to be President Nixon’s Jew-counter: at his boss Nixon’s direction, he compiled a list of Jews (or, rather, people with Jewish names) at the Bureau of Labor Statistics; actively worked to demote or halt the promotion of some of these people; then lied about it; and since has neither corrected his lies nor apologized for his original actions. “I believe that Malek was probably repulsed by what he ended up doing for Nixon,” Noah wrote. “But he did it, and ever since Malek has lied to avoid admitting the depth of his involvement in this grotesque episode.” It didn’t seem to bother Sarah Palin when she had him as an adviser; it somehow feels more troubling that it also apparently does not bother Romney.

Related: Protocols of the Elders [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Nixon’s Jew-Counter Returns to Spotlight

Modern Times

Linked Arms

When I approached Associated Press reporter Romina Ruiz-Goiriena at a press conference in Guatemala City, hoping for some pointers on the city, I had no idea she was a Haaretz veteran, a fluent Hebrew speaker, the daughter of a Cuban Sephardic Jew and a Caracas-raised Basque who converted to Judaism. (Spanish speakers can read her on her Jewish observance here). We probably would have become friends anyway, but Hebrew-Spanish-English patois was a bonus.

Guatemala City is regularly ranked among the most violent cities in the world, and the security levels could exceed even what I was used to in Israel and other Latin American capitals. I was electronically fingerprinted five times to enter one corporate office, and locals warned me not to even bother walking two blocks in the daylight in search of wifi. Romina and I went out to dinner in high-end strip malls reminiscent of her native Miami, only these were mostly empty and surrounded by both armed guards and fortified gates. Each person who walked through the faux-plazas, the “sidewalk” seating or past the fountain, looked like they’d been hired to act as extras in an approximation of a walkable city.

She was on the relentless wire-reporter schedule, and I had been immersed in deportations and human rights abuses, and we both thought it would be nice to get away from the smog-choked city before I went home. A quiet spot nearby seemed like the answer, until we found out that a computer glitch had allowed us to book a room despite the whole place being booked up.

“You’re going to laugh,” Romina promised on the phone. And I did, because the hotel had, in fact, been booked that weekend by a women’s retreat of a Jewish community in Guatemala City. The owner—the Austrian widow of a wealthy Guatemalan—kindly made room for us anyway, which was how I wound up looking over at a volcano at sunset, listening to her tell me about how the Jewish ladies come every year. “They are my friends, and it means a lot to me to say that,” she said meaningfully. “If you know what I mean.” I did.

That was also how Romina and I ended up marking Shabbat with a Crown Heights-hailing Chabad shlicha, sundry wives of Israeli security consultants, and dignified Ashkenazi ladies who had been raised in Guatemala City. They too welcomed us, of course.

Related: Linked Arms [Tablet Magazine]
What It’s Like To Be Shipped Home [Salon]

The bride, now Emily Goldsher-Diamond, is a digital strategist. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence. The groom is a founding editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn, a literary Website, and the editor of Jewcy, a Jewish-interest Website owned by Tablet Magazine. He graduated from Northwestern.

The couple met at the CMJ Music Festival in New York City in 2009, and began to date not long after. For a time, they worked in the same office: Goldsher-Diamond at JDub Records, formerly a nonprofit Jewish music label, and Diamond at Jewcy, then owned by JDub. JDub (and Jewcy) shared an office with Tablet beginning in December 2009.

In a milieu in which it can frequently seem that the first thing people want you to know is how smart and accomplished they are, Goldsher-Diamond instead flashes only a very slight, sly smile and sauna-dry wit, which barely hint at the fact that she is very likely smarter and destined for greater accomplishment than the rest of us. Diamond, who if anything is liable to give his own formidable smarts and accomplishments undue short shrift, is one of the biggest sweethearts in the world. To this friend of the couple’s, anyway, theirs is an easygoing, fun partnership. And his and her attitudes toward their Jewish tradition is similarly, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, pious.

In a speech at the ceremony, a former roommate recalled the first time Diamond told him about Goldsher-Diamond, at the time merely a girl Diamond had met. “I think she’s my best friend,” Diamond had said.

So much mazel tov to the happy couple!!!

In an interview with Tablet Magazine over the weekend, Fred Zeidman, a prominent Jewish Republican donor who has backed Romney for some time and who is friendly with Adelson, confirmed that Adelson is loyal to his friend, Gingrich, but is ultimately concerned with unseating the president. “It’s been his contention that he intended to keep Newt in the race as long as Newt wanted to stay in the race, and so I would expect that he would continue to keep him in the race,” he said. “Sheldon’s primary agenda is to beat Barack Obama, and whoever the candidate is, he would support him. If Santorum is the candidate, what are you gonna do? Cede the race to Obama?”

Zeidman couldn’t speak of Adelson’s immediate plans in terms of funding Gingrich: Adelson spent the weekend in Israel celebrating his son’s bar mitzvah, and he and Zeidman had not spoken recently. But will he really give Gingrich $100 million? “Only if he’s the candidate,” Zeidman emailed this morning.

“I know,” Zeidman added, “that after [Adelson's] family the most important thing is Israel, and he thinks that’s in jeopardy as long as [Obama]’s our leader. That overrides everything. And the rest,” he said, in reference to some of Santorum’s less palatable positions, “we can worry about later.”

Adelson is taking a bit of flak for saying, in the Forbes interview, “I’m against very wealthy people attempting to or influencing elections. But as long as it’s doable I’m going to do it. Because I know that guys like [George] Soros have been doing it for years, if not decades.” Personally, I don’t see this as hypocrisy. He is playing by the rules. This spurt of news is the latest indication that the real story isn’t Adelson’s hawkish views on Israel but the astounding influence the post-Citizens United landscape gives to extremely wealthy individuals.

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Says He Might Give $100M to Newt Gingrich or Other Republican [Forbes]
Gingrich’s Main Backer Plays Two Angles [WSJ]
Adelson To Give $10 Million More to PAC Supporting Gingrich [JTA]
GOP Campaigns Grow More Dependent on ‘Super PAC’ Aid [NYT]
Earlier: ‘Brouhaha’ Provokes a You-Know-What
The Problem With Sheldon Adelson

Among the Insurgents

Meanwhile, Iran keeps tip-toeing closer and closer to Israel’s red line—unless we find out tomorrow that they already passed it. Last time, it was that the underground facility in Fordo was ready to enrich uranium … but uranium wasn’t being enriched there, yet. This past weekend, the Islamic Republic announced that it has readied the Fordo site—whose ample fortification itself makes it threatening to Israel—for advanced centrifuges … but it hasn’t installed the centrifuges there, yet. It’s like poking a snake with a stick to see how firmly you have to poke it before it lashes out. And, as is Iran’s wont, it matched stick with carrot, sending a letter hinting at a willingness to negotiate further. A team of U.N. atomic inspectors is back in the country. If you expect much to come out of either development, you are one of the more optimistic observers.

Yesterday, the New York Times published the thoughts of U.S. defense experts suggesting that Israel may well lack the capacity to pull off a successful air strike of Iran’s nuclear facilities. The article contained numerous interesting details, such as the fact that Israel’s likely flight path would take it over Iraq, whose airspace the United States is conveniently no longer obligated to defend, and Jordan, which perhaps helps explain why the peace process has evolved into a gigantic pro-Hashemite charade over the past couple months. It’s a pretty good tick-tock of how Israel would go about launching a strike, and it doesn’t outright deny the possibility that a strike could achieve Israel’s goals. (Austin Long argued in Tablet Magazine that Israel could pull it off.) Apparently revealing classified information, defense expert Edward Luttwak—whom literary editor David Samuels interviewed last year—argued that a far smaller strike, much more commensurate to Israel’s capabilities, could also do a number on Iran’s alleged weapons program, though I’d feel more comfortable if I saw other people arguing this, too, and if the military hadn’t recommended solely a major air war, and if the argument didn’t rely on Iran’s being likely not to retaliate at all.

But the Times piece, like everything else, is about message-sending: the United States telling Israel (and the public) that it doesn’t think Israel can credibly back up its threats. Indeed, it is one more instance of exactly the sort of thing Netanyahu and company were complaining about.

Of course, intrinsic to the “Israel shouldn’t attack Iran because it probably wouldn’t be successful” argument is the “the U.S. should attack Iran because Israel might not be successful” argument. The layers are dizzying, and ultimately inconclusive, as, for example, this entertaining Politico article on Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s maybe-strategic links about Israeli intentions illustrates. Maybe Panetta wants the public to think Israel is about to attack so other countries agree to further sanctions that head off the attack; maybe Panetta wants the public to think Israel is about to attack so that Israel doesn’t attack; maybe Panetta just doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.

What is clear is that Israel and the United States are not on the same page and perhaps not necessarily even speaking the same language, something that was apparent last week when Dennis Ross was trying to convince Netanyahu and Barak that President Obama would resort to military action if it came down to brass tacks. The next, and perhaps last, best hope for getting the two countries on the same page will come March 5, when Netanyahu, in Washington to address AIPAC, will indeed meet with Obama face-to-face for the first time since at the United Nations last September. Or maybe Bibi will be assured that, by the summer, the Republican primaries will be over and Obama will be facing a unified Republican field hammering him every day for not being tougher on Iran.

The Israeli official who said this public discord strengthens Iran’s position is probably correct. Yet the administration also believes it is correct that now is a really bad time to attack, and may justifiably feel that that opinion will carry little weight unless it is made publicly, where the U.S. and Israeli publics can see it. A closer relationship between these two governments might not be tipping their respective hands, as the Israeli official feels. It might also have given the U.S. greater leverage over Israeli intentions and actions.

AP Exclusive: Iran Poised for Big Nuke Expansion [AP/Yahoo!]
U.S., EU Welcome Iran Nuclear Letter, Suggest Talks [Reuters]
Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets [NYT]
The President Has Been Given a False Choice on Iran [WSJ]
Deciphering Panetta’s Iran Press Dance [Politico]
Israel to U.S.: Disagreement Over Attack on Nuclear Sites Serves Iranian Interests [Haaretz]
Republican Candidates See Opening on Israel and Iran [NYT The Caucus]
Related: Can They? [Tablet Magazine]
Q&A: Edward Luttwak [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Dennis Ross on Iran: The Message Is the Medium