Category Archives: Anti-Semitism

The Devil’s In The Daydreams

One would be forgiven, especially were one an optimist, for imagining that recent reports of the government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s donation of $400,000 to a Teheran Jewish hospital might signal something positive about Iran’s current leadership. With Purim within sight, the idea of good news coming out of Persia is an enticing one.

Our theoretical optimist would also likely have been gratified by the words of the hospital’s director, Dr. Ciamak Morsadegh, who said the Iranian leader “is showing that we [Jews], as a religious minority, are part of this country, too.”

But the Iranian leader’s smiles, largesse and (to flashback several months) Rosh Hashana good wishes to the world’s Jews were lopsidedly outweighed by another recent report, this one provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

(MEMRI, the single most valuable news source for happenings in the Arab and Muslim worlds, does not profess or evidence any political stance; it simply translates and makes available speeches, media reports and other information, positive and negative alike, that aren’t otherwise accessible to the English-reading public.)

The report included a video clip and transcript of a broadcast aired on Iran television’s Channel 1 on February 6. It is remarkable.

The video consists of a simulation – not quite up to the latest Hollywood special effects standards but which might hold its own against a 1980s disaster film – of Iranian planes and missiles attacking civilian and military targets in Israel.

Footage of ostensible missile-equipped “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or drones, in flight are accompanied by voice-over comments like “Iranian UAVs entering stealth mode in order to evade enemy radar” and “Iranian UAVs passing over the Iron Dome systems of Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

The planes are shown bombing target after target (bulls-eyes all, of course): Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli “missile bases in Jericho,” an Israeli Defense Ministry “emergency meeting,” the Dimona nuclear reactor and Haifa’s airport and refineries. Missiles streak forth, spectacular explosions ensue and, presumably, large numbers of people are incinerated. Actual news footage is interspersed here and there from what seem to be terrorist attacks in Israel, with wounded people staggering about and emergency personnel frantically trying to help.

Nor is America spared in the Iranian blood-lust fantasy. Attacks on the mainland aren’t portrayed – the producers apparently wished to keep things within the realm of believability – but an American aircraft carrier stood in for the country.

“The USS Abraham Lincoln” is shown in the Straits of Hormuz and its commander is sternly warned by an Iranian official by radio.

“Commander of Abraham Lincoln, Navy,” he intones. “You have entered the Islamic Republic of Iran’s marine borders. Immediately leave this zone. I say again: Immediately leave this zone. Otherwise, we will have to defend our territory.”

After which Iranian missiles are fired, and the American ship is destroyed in a succession of fireballs.

It’s all primitive and risible propaganda, to be sure, intended for internal Iranian consumption. But what does it say, in the end, about the Rouhani regime if that is what it feeds the country’s populace, if it is seeking to prepare them not for détente but for war?

The current “Geneva Agreement” between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., consists of a short-term freeze of crucial portions of Iran’s nuclear program and its daily monitoring by international inspectors, in exchange for decreased economic sanctions; and it is intended as a time-buyer as the countries work toward forging a permanent agreement.

No one can know whether that strategy will bear fruit in the long term. But what the world powers need to know, even as they pursue diplomatic solutions to the threat that is Iran, is that they are dealing with a government that may occasionally present a reasonable face but whose internal fantasies are dark and destructive, a leadership whose sociable smiles are belied by its devilish daydreams

A snake can seem to smile, too, and can even, with skill, be rendered docile, at least for a time. But it’s always necessary to remember that, however quiescent and cooperative the creature might seem, it’s still, in the end, a snake.

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The Road to Heil

If ever there were a question to inspire ambivalence it might be whether the current push in Israel to outlaw the word “Nazi” and Holocaust-era German symbols is a good idea.

On the one hand, the word and symbols are often used these days to score political points, to just insult someone with whom the user disagrees or in the ostensible service of humor. Placards of Yitzchak Rabin’s image in a Nazi uniform were brandished in demonstrations before his assassination; and, more recently, religious Jewish children were dressed in concentration camp garb to protest government budget cuts. A long-into-reruns popular American television show included a character, the irascible owner of a food stand, who nom de tv was “the soup Nazi.” Talk about trivialization.

But there’s another hand, too, at least to many minds: Outlawing speech is not something to undertake lightly. And just where does one draw the line between speech that’s just impolite or crude, and speech that is so depraved as to merit being criminalized? Forbidding the shouting of “fire!” in a crowded theater is understandably worthy of penalization; calling someone a soup Nazi, well, somewhat less so.

And then there is the question of whether criminalizing even clearly outrageous use of words like “Nazi” would in fact in the end help curb the misuse of the metaphor, or, perhaps, empower it, making it even more enticing to those who seek to shock, not enlighten.

The sponsor of the Israeli bill, the Yisrael Beitenu party’s Shimon Ohayon, said that “We want to prevent disrespect of the Holocaust,” and contends that “we have too many freedoms.” Free speech advocates, as might be expected, do not agree. (To their credit, though, they seem to have avoided comparing the proposed legislation with the Nuremberg laws.)

The pending bill would impose a fine of 100,000 shekels (nearly $29,000) and six months in jail for anybody using the word or symbols of the Third Reich in a “wrong or inappropriate way.”

Whatever one feels about the wisdom of the legislation, though, what exactly will define “inappropriate”? Oy, there’s the rub.

Is likening Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the designs Nazi Germany had on the world in the 1930s inappropriate? Most of us would say it’s no stretch at all. Dov Hanin, however, a member of an Arab party in the Knesset, feels otherwise, and has suggested that, had the pending law been enacted a year or two ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would deserve jail for having compared former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.

And what about people who, as has happened in the U.S., falsely accuse a community – say, the charedi one – or one of its organizations of being part of a sordid conspiracy to enable the harming of children? Would it be inappropriate, in light of such a law, to compare the accusers to Nazi propagandists who insinuated that Jews as a group killed Christian children for their blood? There is certainly a difference between the two propagandas; the contemporary accusers don’t seek (one hopes) to kill their fellow Jews. Is it a difference, though, that makes a difference?

I recently dared to write an essay that suggested that the animus some Orthodox Jews display toward President Obama is misconceived, and unjustified in light of the facts. Most of the responses I received were positive ones; there are many observant Jews, it seems, who have harbored that realization quietly and who were happy to see it actually expressed in a public medium.

Then there were responses that took issue with my point, and pointed out things – some of them loosely pertinent to Israel, many of them in entirely unrelated realms – that the writers felt justified their anti-Obama attitudes. Even though I was unmoved by the arguments, that’s fine. People don’t see things, or have to see things, the same way.

But then there were the crazed reactions, among them that of a gentleman who posted his take on a blog. I had begun my piece with an anecdote about a Mi Sheberach prayer made for President Obama; the blog-poster, clever fellow that (he thinks) he is, attempted to show how wrongheaded that was – by suggesting a parallel prayer being made in a German synagogue in 1938 on behalf of… you guessed it, Adolf Hitler. The rest of his piece was similarly unhinged, reaching far and wide to change the subject, preaching the talk-show tropes of Benghazi and Obamacare, and berating me for my criticism of “Open Orthodoxy.”

In the end, I remain of two minds regarding the proposed Israeli law. I fully understand the desire to enact such legislation, and recognize the bill’s sponsors’ good intentions; yet part of me feels that things would best be left alone.

For two reasons: First, because legislating civility is likely a futile endeavor. And, second, because, all said and done, the wild misapplication of words like “Nazi” and “Hitler” ultimately says something only about the person who misuses them.

The Way We Are

While those of us here south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) were focused on our own local elections, a Chassidic woman candidate in a Montreal borough was busy making history.

Mindy Pollak, a chassidic woman (from the Vizhnitz community) was elected – the first chassidic person to do so – to the Montreal borough council of Outremont, where there have been running tensions for years between non-Jewish residents and the growing number of Orthodox Jews living there. Her opponent, journalist Pierre Lacerte, had supported a borough councilor widely considered anti-chassidic (if not anti-Semitic) in the latter’s attempt to undermine the construction of an eruv and new shuls in the neighborhood. According to one report, supporters of Mr. Lacerte went knocking on doors without mezuzahs, distributing flyers and announcing that “We’re here to talk about the Jews.”

Ms. Pollak’s political ally and friend was, and is, Leila Marshy, a filmmaker of Arab ancestry who describes herself as a “militant Palestinian.”

An article in the Globe and Mail before the recent election quoted Ms. Pollak as saying that “if we focus on what we have in common rather than what divides us, then we can work toward solutions.”

So begins this week’s roundup of heartening Orthodox Jewish news. Unfortunately, the media tend to go for the negative or scandalous And so it’s good every now and then to highlight what, in a bad pun referencing one of the New York tabloids that see their role as highlighting real or exaggerated bad behavior, I call the “Daily Jews.” That is to say, the vast majority of observant Jews who live their lives in consonance with their religious convictions.

Exhibit B is the “subway guy,” the middle-aged man wearing a yarmulkeh whose shoulder became the makeshift pillow of a young black man in a hoodie who dozed off sitting next to him on the Q train. Someone snapped a photo of the pair and posted it on the web, where, within days, it garnered over one million “likes” and nearly 200,000 “shares” on Facebook.

Providing that courtesy to a fellow passenger on New York city transit shouldn’t be as surprising as it apparently was to so many. I remember once when my own shoulder served to provide a fellow citizen the same service, on a bus. And I’m glad no one had thought to aim a phone then at the sight of the dozing lady and slightly befuddled but unmoving bearded rabbi. But I’m glad the subway guy was snapped in action (or, better, inaction); I suppose that even doing something simple and decent, it seems, is impressive in our selfish, rude times.

And then we have the finally ended saga of Sarah Shapiro, a respected Orthodox writer in Israel, whose work had been shamelessly plagiarized by another writer, Naomi Ragen.

In December 2011, a district court judge in Jerusalem ruled that, in a novel she wrote, Ms. Ragen had intentionally used passages, often copied word for word, from a book written by Ms. Shapiro, ordering Ms. Ragen to pay Ms. Shapiro damages and court costs, and to omit the copied sections from future editions of her book.

Ms. Ragen appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week brokered an agreement that requires her to abide by the lower court’s order that she remove the plagiarized material from any new editions and translations of the novel; and stipulates that 97,000 shekels of the 233,000 shekels in damages and court costs awarded to Mrs. Shapiro be donated to charity.

Ms. Ragen’s response was to claim victory at that “compromise,” wish herself mazel tov, and rail against “people like Mrs. Shapiro.” For good measure, she also accuses the woman she plagiarized of plagiarism of her own (for including in a character’s ruminations the words of a well-known popular song from the 1970s, clearly assuming that readers would recognize them).

And Sarah Shapiro’s reaction to the closing of the case? She offered “a profoundly felt thank you” to the justices “for protecting my work” and called their “peaceful resolution” of the case “quintessentially Jewish.” She had words for her adversary too, embracing her “fellow American immigrant to the Land of our Fathers” as someone who “has done so much, with passion… to defend this country with her power of words…”

“I look forward to meeting you again someday, G-d willing,” her statement concluded, “as fellow writers.” And she quoted Dovid Hamelech in Tehillim:”Then we will be as dreamers… May we reap in joy what was sown in tears.”

And that wraps up our survey of this week’s “Daily Jews.”

Al Jazeera And The Jews

Even as Al Jazeera America – the new offshoot of the Qatar-based news organization – was making its broadcast debut recently on cable carriers in the United States, its parent organization back on the Arabian peninsula featured a commentary by former Muslim Brotherhood official Gamal Nassar, in which he claimed that the Egyptian military (and currently political) leader Abdel Fattah Al Sisi is a Jew. He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Mr. Nassar cited an Algerian newspaper (“All the slander that’s fit to sling”?) to the effect that Mr. Al Sisi’s uncle was “a member of the Jewish Haganah organization” and that the nephew “is implementing a Zionist plan to divide Egypt.”

The Al Jazeera commentator helpfully added that “Whoever reads The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the writings of [the Jews], including those who were writing in the U.S., realizes that this plot was premeditated.”

Maybe it’s not fair to visit the sins of the father – Al Jazeera in Arabia – so to speak, onto the son – Al Jazeera America. The latter organization claims to be “a completely different channel from… all of the other channels in the Al Jazeera Media Network” and has its “own board and advisory board.” And the American operation asserts that it will be delivering “unbiased, fact-based and in-depth journalism,” which, if true, will become apparent in time. But, with the baggage of its family name’s reputation, “AJAM”’s battle will be uphill.

As it happens, not long ago, in my capacity as Agudath Israel’s public affairs director, I was contacted by a reporter for Al Jazeera – the original, Qatar operation. He worked for its English-language version, which is no longer accessible in the US, and was helping produce a television segment for the network, about the religious-secular divide in Israel.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to become involved, even as a mere resource, with an Arab-centered, less-than-sympathetic-to-Israel operation. A good friend of mine who also deals with media advised me to demur. But I decided to interact with the reporter (who turned out to be very friendly, and Jewish, to boot) all the same, and offered him some background information about the topic he wouldn’t likely glean from most Jewish media, and some suggestions for whom he might wish to feature as guests on the segment.

A few weeks later, he sent me a link to a recording of the program, which I watched carefully. The guests included a religious Israeli politician and an American proponent of dismantling the rabbinate and creating a more “democratic” state that didn’t favor Orthodox Judaism.

The segment, I had to admit, was excellent. Both sides made their cases, of course, but the moderator was outstanding, asking informed, probing questions not only of the politician but of the activist too, and letting her guests know when they didn’t address what had been asked. Another journalist on the program was monitoring personal media in real time, and the tweets and postings she shared with the audience were balanced, representing both sides of each issue.

Afterward, I sat back and pondered the contrast between mainstream Jewish media’s reportage of Jewish religious issues and what I had witnessed on Al Jazeera’s program. When it comes to things like the segment’s subject, many media, including some major Jewish media, are transparently biased against Jewish Orthodoxy. That’s not surprising, as most journalists, as a Pew poll several years back revealed, are less than sympathetic to religion. And most Jewish journalists are non-Orthodox Jews with, by their profession, an interest in the Jewish community; hence they bring some personal baggage to their keyboards. Al Jazeera, however, lacks any dog in the race, and so it addressed the subject in a refreshingly objective way.

That it did so recalled to me something I had said before an audience of my own, at the 92^nd St. Y a few months ago. In an offhand comment that drew some gasps (and, surprisingly, some applause), I asserted that the reporters most qualified to write for Jewish newspapers are non-Jews. They, I explained, are less likely to be burdened by preconceptions or guided, even subconsciously, by agendas.

I know Al Jazeera – the parent, that is – well enough to not expect it to report objectively on Israel. It doesn’t expend the effort to see beyond the Jewish state’s real or imagined warts, to its human face. Nor would I expect it to feature – although it should – opinion pieces defending Israel against the libels regularly hurled at her by much of the Arab world.

But, optimist that I am, I wonder whether Al Jazeera America, which aims to focus mainly on American news, might prove itself, at least in the realm of reportage on Jewish religious issues, to be a breath of unpolluted air. Time will tell.

How disturbing, though, to have to be looking to an Arab news network for balance in Jewish issues.

Black Peril, White Knights

A lengthy piece in the New Republic asserts – or, more accurately, hopes – that “an unlikely alliance between Orthodox and progressive women will save Israel from fundamentalism.” The latter word, of course, is intended to refer to traditional Orthodox Judaism.

Heavy on anecdotes about charedi crazies harassing sympathetic women, the piece, titled “The Feminists of Zion,” details how demographic changes in Israel have brought the decades-old peaceful co-existence of secular and charedi Jews to something of a head. The “once-tiny minority” of charedim “now comprises more than 10% of the population,” it informs. And it warns that “as their numbers have increased, so has their sway over political and civil life.”

That sway has resulted in things like “an increase in modesty signs on public boulevards and gender-segregated sidewalks in Haredi neighborhoods,” not to mention “gender-separated office hours in government-funded medical clinics and de facto gender segregation on publicly subsidized buses,” among other affronts.

In 19^th century America, there was much anxiety about the “Yellow Peril,” the pernicious effect that Chinese immigrants were imagined to have on the culture of the union. During the Second World War, the phrase was applied to Japanese Americans (iceberg, Goldberg, what difference does it make?…). The New Republic writers, Haaretz’s Allison Kaplan Sommer and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, seem to perceive what they might call (although they don’t) a Black Peril in Israel. And the White Knight on the horizon who might vanquish the monster is the Jewish state’s “fighting feminist spirit.”

That spirit, the writers say, is championed by the Israeli Reform movement (and its legal arm, the Israel Religious Action Center, or IRAC) and by “modern-Orthodox” women in Israel who are fed up with charedim. One group of such Orthodox feminists, Kolech, the article notes, has begun to work with IRAC on “a host of issues.”

The “highest profile example of the renewed fighting feminist spirit in Israel,” the writers assert, may be “the stunning success this year of Women of the Wall,” (WOW), the group of feminists that has made a point of gathering monthly at the Western Wall, or Kotel Maaravi, to hold vocal services while wearing religious garb and items traditionally worn by men, which offends the charedi men and women who regularly pray at the site around the clock.

Mss. Sommer and Lithwick, hopelessly hopeful, posit the possibility that “the rising tide of feminist activism… will ultimately engage Haredi women as well.” Evidence for the unlikelihood of such cross-cultural contagiousness, however, lies no farther than the Kotel plaza itself.

For the past several Jewish Rosh Chodesh, or “new month,” morning prayer services, when WOW holds its untraditional services, the group and its supporters were outnumbered on the order of 1:100 by charedi women, young and old, who quietly prayed in a passive but striking assertion of their own convictions, those of the millennia-old Jewish religious tradition. (Unsurprisingly, the media, dutifully summoned by WOW’s leaders to boost its public profile among non-Orthodox American Jews, focused on handfuls of idiotic, inexcusable and uncouth young men who jeered and even threw things at the successful provocateurs.)

The many thousands of women quietly praying at the Wall, while they made no sound, spoke loudly. About who truly cares about the Kotel and the Holy Temple that once stood on its other side, and about true empowerment of women. They know the inestimable value of their roles as wives and mothers and future mothers, as teachers of their children and of other Jews, as women like those at the time of the exodus from Egypt, the “righteous women” in whose merit, the Talmud teaches, the Jewish People were able to leave the land of their enslavement.

So yes, as the article states, there is indeed a challenge to Jewish “fundamentalism” – the Judaism of the ages – in Israel these days. The challengers are the American movement called Reform and its small but militant Israeli counterpart, comprised of American immigrants and a smattering of “progressive” native women. And the challengers have indeed made some headway in Israel’s secular courts, and will likely make further gains as they file new lawsuits against charedim and their practices.

What is lost on many observers, though, is the fact that Israel’s charedim seek only to maintain their fealty to the Jewish religious tradition that, in the end, is the heritage of all Jews. They have made no moves to change the religious status quo that has been in effect in Israel since its inception. The lawsuits and public campaigns have all been initiated by IRAC and its allies.

And so, while Israel’s secular courts, perhaps with subconscious envy of (or conscious aiming at) American-style religion/state separation, may well look favorably on the demands of the self-styled White Knights, one thing is certain: those “progressives” are the antagonists here.

And by mischaracterizing charedim as intent on trying to change other Israelis’ lives, by painting religious Jews as a sinister, growing Black Peril that must be arrested before it is too late, the modern-day crusaders miss a terrible irony: They are engaging in the very same sort of vilification that has been, at times similarly successfully, employed over centuries by enemies of all Jews.

Musing: They’ve Uncovered Our Secret Weapon

Mehdi Taeb, who is close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently revealed that the Jews are the most powerful sorcerers in the world today, and that they have used their powers to attack Iran. While Iran has so far prevailed, he explained, the full force of Jewish sorcery has not yet been brought to bear.

“The [Jewish] people,” he confided, “believe that it is possible to… even… control G-d’s decisions, by using sorcery methods… ”

Don’t know about sorcery, but prayer and repentance have indeed long demonstrated the potential to merit Divine assistance.

Musing: When Hatred Deserves the Worst Label

The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles recently posted the offering of one Liami Lawrence, in which he celebrates the new Israeli government’s lack of “fat men in their black coats” who “write out blank checks for their rabbis and yeshivas” – yeshivas, he continues, whose students “sit back and pretend to study… and make babies.” He insinuates that charedim in Israel don’t pay taxes, that they “force” women to sit in the back of the bus in charedi neighborhoods and that their behavior can be characterized as “schnorring, lying and cheating.”

Often, and rightly, bemoaned is the use of terms evocative of Klal Yisrael’s worst enemies in personal or political discourse where it has no place. Taking a hard line on defense or the budget should not render anyone open to being called a Cossack or a Nazi.

But then there are cases where, were a word replaced with “Jew,” the yield would be something recognizably Streicherian.

Mr. Lawrence’s eruption qualifies, I think, for that distinction. And the Jewish Journal bears responsibility for spreading the hatred here.

Dos Yiddishe Mensch

If you’ve noticed a little less dignity, geniality and nobility in the world of late, it may be because we no longer have Reb Yosef Friedenson here with us.

Reb Yosef’s humble bearing, good will and astuteness would have been remarkable in any man. But for a veteran of the Warsaw ghetto and a clutch of concentration camps to have emerged from the cauldron of the Holocaust as so shining a model of calm, forbearance and fortitude is little short of amazing – and something that deeply impressed all who had the privilege of knowing him.

I am among those fortunate souls, and I had the additional honor of working in the same offices as he, at Agudath Israel of America. There were times here and there when he would ask me to do some minor research for him. I tend to overschedule my days and, especially if I’m in a cranky mood, I sometimes feel put upon when asked to do something I hadn’t included on my day’s agenda. But when the asker was Reb Yosef, no matter how grumpy I might have been a moment before, the very sound of his voice, which transmitted his modesty and eidelkeit (sorry, there’s no English word that can do the job), melted any cantankerousness I might have been nursing. I was happy and honored to help him in any way I could. Because of the person he was.

He was known as “Mr. Friedenson” but in fact was a wiser man and more of a rabbi by far than most who coddle that title. He was not into titles but into work, on behalf of the Jewish people.

For more than a half-century – beginning in the Displaced Persons camps after the war’s end – Reb Yosef edited a Yiddish publication, which became the monthly “Dos Yiddishe Vort” – “The Yiddish [or Jewish] Word” – produced under Agudath Israel’s auspices. Even as the periodical’s readership dwindled with the loss of Holocaust survivors over the years, he forged ahead and, until virtually the last day of his life, worked hard to produce the glossy monthly that regularly offered Orthodox commentary on current events, historical articles and rare photographs from the pre-Holocaust Jewish era and the Holocaust itself. He approached his editing duties carefully and professionally, in the beginning of the venture recruiting top-notch writers and doing his own top-notch writing. He once said about his father, Eliezer Gershon Friedenson, who edited the pre-war Agudath Israel newspaper in Europe, that he was “bristling with energy and ideas.” It was an apt description of himself.

During his final years, Reb Yosef did much of the writing for Dos Yiddishe Vort himself, often under pseudonyms that were transparent to most everyone who read the publication. (No one cared; his own recollections and writings were deeply appreciated by readers.) And the issues increasingly focused on rabbinical figures who perished during the Holocaust, and on pre-war Jewish communities. Special editions were devoted to the Jews of Lodz or Lublin, to the Gerer rebbe or the Chazon Ish. And throughout, there were personal recollections of the war years and accounts of spiritual heroism during that terrible time.

That, in fact, was Reb Yosef’s overriding life-mandate: to connect new American generations with the world of Jewish Eastern Europe. He didn’t harp on Nazism or anti-Semitism. That there are always people who hate Jews was, to him, just an unfortunate given. It didn’t merit any particular examination.

What did, though, was the decimation itself of European Jewry and the horrifying toll taken by the upheaval of the Jewish people on the Jewish dedication to Torah. When he would reference the Germans it was usually to note their perceptive realization that Torah is the lifeblood of the Jewish nation. They tried to drain that figurative lifeblood along with their pouring of so much actual Jewish blood. But – and this was what yielded Reb Yosef’s victory smile – they failed. He saw the ultimate revenge on the Nazis and their henchmen in the reestablishment and thriving of observant Jewish life, yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs on these shores and others.

He would sometimes call attention to a line from a prayer said on Mondays and Thursdays, the long version of Tachanun. “We [Jews] are like sheep led to slaughter,” he would quote, and know well how true that has been over the course of history. But, Reb Yosef would continue, the operative words, the secret to Jewish survival and Jewish identity, lie in the supplication’s subsequent phrase: “And despite all that, we have never forgotten Your name.”

Reb Yosef never forgot G-d’s name, not in the ghettos, not in the camps, not in the office where he toiled for decades to remind others of the Jewish world that was, and that can be again.

And we, for our part, will never forget either him or his message.

Lies, Statistics and News Reports

It’s rare for light to be cast on the origins of a rumor. But a recent revelation about a charge made against Chuck Hagel before his confirmation as Secretary of Defense does that – and might provide us all some illumination too.

(Contrary to what some have surmised, I didn’t and don’t feel there is enough hard information about the now confirmed Defense Secretary on which to make a judgment of his attitude toward Israel. As attacks mounted on nominee Hagel, though, I suggested that Jews should think twice and thrice before attacking a public figure for animus to the Jewish state on the basis of pickings as slim as those gathered to criticize him.

Several people, including some pseudonymic letter-writers to a magazine that published my article, took my suggestion that bandwagons are best inspected before being leaped onto as support of Mr. Hagel. I explicitly wrote, however, that he might well not make a good Defense Secretary, and that I can’t claim to know one way or the other. All that I pointed out was that, despite a maladroit phrase Mr. Hagel once used – for which he apologized – and unsubstantiated claims of a similar sin, there was no actual evidence for the charge made by some that the man is “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic.” I pointed out, too, that a Secretary of Defense does not make U.S. foreign policy, and that it behooves us American Jews, in a world containing all too many all too real enemies of Jews, to not imagine, or inadvertently create, new ones.)

An edifying postscript to the Hagel hubbub emerged this week. In the midst of all the sturm und drang over the nomination, a conservative website (a “news source,” as it happens, that the angry letters to the editor suggested I consult for my education) reported suspicions that Mr. Hagel had received foreign funding from a group called “Friends of Hamas.” The story, of course, spread across the blogosphere with the speed of a brazen lie, which is precisely what it was. There is no such group.

And this week, the tale of how the charge came about was told – by the fellow who originated it, albeit unwittingly.

New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman explained how, digging for a story, he had asked a Republican aide on Capitol Hill if Mr. Hagel’s Senate critics knew of any controversial groups that he may have addressed. Had the nominee perhaps “given a speech to, say, the ‘Junior League of Hezbollah’… or the ‘Friends of Hamas’?” the journalist jocularly queried.

Not realizing that politicians and their aides can be humor-impaired, Mr. Friedman compounded his little pre-Purim joke with a follow-up e-mail to the aide, asking if anything had turned up about that “$25K speaking fee from Friends of Hamas?”

Before Mr. Friedman could say mishenichnas Adar, the website had its scoop.

“Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively,” the report, by one Ben Shapiro, informed its readers, “that they have been informed one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called ‘Friends of Hamas.’”

And so, other websites immediately ran with the fiction. For good measure, Mr. Shapiro tweeted the link to his nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Countless inboxes welcomed the “news”; countless heads nodded knowingly.

Whether or not Mr. Hagel turns out to be a happy surprise or great disappointment, one thing is undeniable: Anyone who values truth – the “signature” of the Divine, in the Talmud’s description – must make painstaking efforts to be objective, and eschew the siren-call (to mangle a metaphor) of the bandwagon.

Lies, overt and subtle, large and small, are, unfortunately, the fertilizer (in both senses of the word) of politics today. They are regularly foisted upon us all from every political corner and by both major parties’ “activists.” We are being gently misled and manipulated whether our source of information is right-wing talk radio or NPR, Rush Limbaugh or Diane Rehm. True objectivity and fair-minded discussion are as rare as Yangtze River dolphins.

And so, if we really insist on having opinions about political matters, we do well to absorb different perspectives, to weigh them fairly and to realize, constantly and deeply, that not everything portrayed as obvious or fact is necessarily either.

Iron and Irony

A typical offering included a close-up of the deformed face of a Jewish man above the legend “The Scum of Humanity: This Jew says that he is a member of God’s chosen people.” Another displayed a cartoon of a vampire bat with a grotesquely exaggerated nose and a Jewish star on its chest. In yet another, a Jewish butcher was depicted snidely dropping a rat into his meat grinder and, elsewhere in the issue, the punctured necks of handsome German youths were shown bleeding into a bowl held by a Jew more gargoyle than human. At its peak in 1938, print runs of Hitler henchman Julius Streicher’s vile tabloid Der Sturmer ran as high as 2,000,000.

“All our struggles are in vain,” Streicher told a Nazi student organization in 1935, “if the battle against the Jews is not fought to the finish. It is not enough to get the Jews out of Germany. No, they must be destroyed throughout the entire world so that humanity will be free of them.”

We approach the Jewish holiday focused on the blessedly ill-fated plans of a Jew-hater of old, the Amalekite whose name we will greet with raucous noise each time it’s read from Megillas Esther on Purim. Even a passing familiarity with the Purim story is sufficient to know that its villain’s downfall is saturated with what seem to be chance ironies; Haman turns up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all that he so carefully plans eventually comes to backfire on him in an almost comical way – a theme Megillas Esther characterizes with the words v’nahafoch hu, “ and it was turned upside down!”

Such “chance” happenings are the hallmark of the defeat of Amalek, the would-be nemesis of the Jewish People – a fact reflected in the “casting of lots” from which “Purim” takes its name. Chance, Esther teaches us, is an illusion; G-d is in charge. Amalek may fight with iron, but he is defeated with… irony.

As was Julius Streicher. In the days after Germany’s final defeat, an American major, Henry Plitt, received a tip about a high-ranking Nazi living in an Austrian town. He accosted a short, bearded artist, who he thought might be SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, and asked him his name.

“Joseph Sailer,” came the reply from the man, who was painting a canvas on an easel.

Plitt later recounted: “I don’t know why I said [it, but] I said, ‘And what about Julius Streicher?’”

“Ya, der bin ich,” the man with the paintbrush responded. “Yes, that is me.”

When Major Plitt brought his serendipitous catch to Berchtesgaden, he later recounted, a reporter told him that he had “killed the greatest story of the war.” When he asked how, the reporter responded “Can you imagine if a guy named Cohen or Goldberg or Levy had captured this arch-anti-Semite, what a great story it would be?”

Major Plitt recalled telling the reporter “I’m Jewish” and how “that’s when the microphones came into my face and the cameras started clicking.”

Another happy irony in Streicher’s life involved the fate of his estate. As reported in Stars and Stripes in late 1945, his considerable possessions were converted to cash and used to create an agricultural training school for Jews intending to settle in Palestine. Just as Haman’s riches, as recorded in Megillas Esther, were bestowed upon his nemesis Mordechai.

There is a good deal more of interest in the life of Julius Streicher to associate him with Jewish traditions about Amalek. But one of the most shocking narratives about him concerns his death. Streicher was of one of the Nazis tried, convicted, and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

During the trial, Streicher remained true to ugly form. When the prosecution showed a film of the concentration camps, a spotlight was left on the defendants’ box for security reasons. Few of the defendants could bear to watch the film for long. Goering nervously wiped his sweaty palms. Schacht turned away; Ribbentrop buried his face in his hands. Keitel wiped his reddened eyes with a handkerchief. Only Streicher leaned forward throughout, looking anxiously at the film and excitedly nodding his head.

Although no proof was found that Streicher had ever killed a Jew by his own hand, the tribunal decided that his clear-cut incitement of others to the task constituted a war crime; and so he was sentenced, along with ten other defendants, to hang.

And hang he did. But not before taking the opportunity to share a few final words with the journalists present at the gallows. Just before the trap sprang open, he blurted out: “Purim Feast 1946!” – an odd thing to say in any event, but especially on an October morning.

The “Amalek-irony” of the Nuremberg executions doesn’t end there, either. The Book of Esther recounts how Haman’s ten sons were hanged in Shushan. An eleventh child, a daughter, committed suicide earlier, according to an account in the Talmud. At Nuremberg, while eleven men were condemned to execution by hanging, only ten were actually hanged. The eleventh, the foppish Goering, died in his cell hours before the execution; he ingested a cyanide capsule he had hidden on his person.

Even more striking is something reportedly noted by, among others, the late Belzer Rebbe, the Kedushas Aharon. In the Megilla, the names of Haman’s sons are written in two columns, an unusual configuration. Odder still, three letters in the list are written very small, and one very large. The large letter is the Hebrew character corresponding to the number six; the small letters yield the number 707. If the large letter is taken to refer to the millennium and 707 to the year in the millennium, something striking emerges. According to Jewish reckoning, the present year is 5773. The year 5707 – the 707^th year in the sixth millennium – was the year we know as 1946, when ten sworn enemies of the Jewish people were hanged in Nuremberg, like ten others in Shushan more than two thousand years earlier.

What’s more, the Megilla inexplicably refers to the hanging of Haman’s sons in the future tense, as if to presage some hanging… yet to happen.

The Holocaust was the tip of an unimaginable iceberg of evil, stretching far and deep into the past. The evil, of course, persists today. But a time will come when Divine irony will end it forever.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life