Recently in Judaism Category

The Christian Science Monitor has an insightful read today on Sen. Barack Obama's lackluster start courting the much needed "Jewish vote" in his quest for the presidency. (I put that in quotes because, despite the relevance of garnering the votes of Jews, God's people do not vote as one.)

Washington - For a candidate intent on courting the Jewish vote, some of the headlines for Sen. Barack Obama in recent weeks have been less than heartening.

"Obama comment draws fire from Jews," the Des Moines Register declared after the senator's unscripted remark at an Iowa campaign stop in March that "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" from stalled peace efforts with the Israelis.

"Obama on the Mideast: Not quite comfortable," The Chicago Jewish Star said after his first major policy speech on the Middle East, to a pro-Israel group in his hometown.

And at last week's Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina, Senator Obama's omission of Israel in response to a question about America's top allies gave moderator Brian Williams an opening to revisit the Iowa flap in front of a television audience of more than 2 million.

No mention was made of Obama Christ.

The Forward has a biting piece tomorrow about the newfound friendship between "John Hagee, the firebrand evangelical Christian minister from San Antonio, Texas," who stole the show at Aipac's convention in March, and a growing number of Jewish federations:

“If you search through Jewish stories around the U.S., a lot of us have pieces of personal memory where non-Jews were there for us — not because they had a hidden agenda, but because they believed it was the right thing to do,” said Michal Kohane, the Israeli-born executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region. “There is a strong aspect of CUFI in which they are the descendants of that ideological concept.”

Just as liberals have criticized Aipac for giving Hagee the dais, they are now speaking out against the pastor’s grass-roots fundraising dinners. Most recently, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, Betty McCollum, declined an invitation to attend an April 29 “Night To Honor Israel” in Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, citing what she called “Hagee’s extremism, bigotry and intolerance.”

Employees at LA Councilman Jack Weiss' district office in Sherman Oaks found three red-and-black swastikas taped to the front of the building and a "short manifesto," via LA Times:

"We have no time to listen to Jewish American children!!! If you don't believe us, just try talking to us." Then there is an obscene reference to "a homoerotic cop" and what that cop should do to Weiss. It concludes "Heil Weiss!"

Weiss, who is Jewish, plans to run for city attorney in 2009. He has been under fire for his pro-development policies (not that I am drawing any parallels between that and the vandalism).

The Samaritan's place in history is cemented in Jesus' famous parable. But their existence is on the brink. They believe they are the true followers of the Israelites religion, and only 700 of the "keepers of the law," as their name translates, remain. Today the Samaritans, "dressed in white and spattered in blood," celebrated the Passover in Mt. Gerizim, where most of the sect live. From AP, via Haaretz:

The sect's high priest opened the ceremony with a prayer in the Samaritan tongue, a dialect of ancient Hebrew. Then ritual slaughterers killed sheep, skinned them, and roasted them in large ovens. According to tradition, the meat must be ready in the middle of the night - the time that the Angel of Death killed the Egyptian firstborn in the biblical story - and the Samaritans eat it in haste along with unleavened bread, emulating the ancient Israelites.

I've become a big fan of Jerome Groopman, the Harvard professor of medicine who writes about health care for the New Yorker. A excerpt of his new book, How Doctors Think, that ran in the New Yorker recently offered elegantly written insight into what leads doctors to the wrong medical conclusion. Included in that piece was an introspective reflection that took the reader to Groopman's time as a fellow at UCLA, which means he must be cool.

In tomorrow's Forward, Zachary Sholem Berger has a Q & A with the good doctor that asks not how doctors think, but how Groopman does.

"Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

Hitler reportedly asked that question of his commanding generals in 1939, as he prepared to rid the world of Jews. Holocaust historians site this quotation when trying to explain Hitler's rational for how his acts would escape world condemnation. And yet, Jews -- who have so much in common with Armenians -- have struggled to embrace Armenians as true kindred spirits, diaspora people like Jews, who, though they did not suffer the Holocaust, suffered a holocaust.

Today marks the 92nd anniversary of the beginning of what most historians call the Armenian Genocide. And though most Western countries have recognized the acts as genocide, the United States and Israel have not. The U.S. has not wanted to offend an important military ally, and Israel has been hard pressed to condemn the founding fathers of the best friend in the Muslim world.

But the tide has shifted.

The LA Times today joined the inevitable chorus of newspapers asking "Why?" in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. (Christianity Today, for which I regularly freelance, has a great round-up.) These stories are both knee-jerk and necessary because seemingly senseless bloodshed is one of the most difficult circumstances to reconcile with a benevolent Creator.