Category Archives: News

Through Jewish Eyes

Maybe you know the old Yiddish joke? Back in pre-war Minsk, Shmerel and Berel are having a conversation. During a pause, Shmerel suddenly remembers a bit of bad news he has to relate.

“Did you hear about Yankel the barber in Pinsk?”

“No,” Berel says haltingly, having picked up an ominous signal from the way the question had been asked.

“He’s not here anymore,” Shmerel says, using a Yiddish euphemism for someone recently deceased.

“Oy!” exclaims Berel, “You mean Yankel, with the huge round nose?”

Shmerel nods a sad yes.

“Yankel who has only one eye?” Again, a confirmation.

“Yankel with that big scar across his cheek and the pimples?!” Another sad nod.

“Ay, yai, yai,” moans Berel. “Azah sheineh Yid!” (“What a beautiful Jew!”)

The story came back to me at the Siyum HaShas. Let me explain.

When people, as so many did, came over to me in various places to congratulate me, a veteran Agudath Israel staff member for a quarter of a century, for the amazing event, I responded, entirely honestly, that my main role was standing out of the way of the many unbelievably dedicated and talented people who did the real work, like the Agudah’s executive staff, the young women who spent days and late nights taking orders and processing tickets, the devoted community askanim and technical facilitators.

(Actually, I do take credit for offering the idea, a year or so before the Siyum, of including chemical hand warmers in the swag bags. You’re welcome.)

I wasn’t even really at the Siyum, at least not as part of the crowd. My perch was in the press box, high above the gathering, a floor dedicated to members of the media, with whom I was charged to interact.

I answered many questions but mostly just steered representatives of the Fourth Estate to members of the tzibbur whom they could interview about Daf Yomi and the Siyum.

One of my few on-camera moments, as it happened, was responding to a German television crew’s question, born of recent events, about what the Siyum means in the context of all the recent anti-Semitic violence. I straightforwardly pointed out that Jews are long accustomed to hatred and adversaries, and are long trained in perseverance. I wonder how that played in Munich.

It was, though, when I watched several reporters intone into their microphones about how so many Jews “read a page of Talmud” daily that Shmerel and Berel appeared before my mind’s eye.

Because the joke about them, of course, is a pointed one. And its point is that we Jews see things differently from other people. To us, beauty is truly anything but skin deep.

And so, when we look at a true Daf Yomi talmid, we don’t see someone “reading a page” of a text. We see someone who, for 2711 days straight, has engaged not only with very complex material, but with holiness itself.

Where a reporter saw “reading,” we saw reverence.

Many journalists wanted to tie their stories about the Siyum into a narrative about the aforementioned violence against Jews we’ve endured of late. They saw “a flare up of anti-Semitism.”

Jewish eyes, though, saw the latest manifestation of “Esav sonei l’Yaakov,” the wages of galus and a message that we need to improve our avodas Hashem.

During a particularly poignant part of the Siyum program, tribute was paid to a man named Mendy Rosenberg, who, despite being severely limited by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), successfully undertook to complete a full Daf Yomi cycle despite a prognosis that didn’t allow him anywhere near the time needed, and, despite eventually having to communicate with his chavrusa through eye movements alone. Reporters saw a broken man doing the best he could. Jewish eyes saw an amazing hero, a gibor chayil and powerful role model for mesirus nefesh.

And when a group of Holocaust survivors were introduced to the approximately 90,000 people at MetLife Stadium and to countless others in myriad venues linked to the proceedings, the media saw the last human vestiges of a world that once was. Jewish eyes, though, saw superhuman connections to our mesorah, which they carried out with them to us from the furnace of Churban Europa.

When the camera was aimed at the Masmidei HaSiyum youngsters, who had participated in the Siyum by undertaking limudim of Gemara, Mishnayos or Chumash, the reporters saw lovable little boys. We saw nothing less than the Jewish future, a, be”H, bright one.

And, finally, when the observers from the outside saw, and dutifully reported on, the “record crowd” in the stadium – not only were the stands fairly full, but the playing field held many more people, including the Rabbanim on the dais, Daf Yomi Maggidei Shiur and many others – Jewish eyes saw, well, Klal Yisrael.

No, not all of it, but enough of it to perceive something else invisible to many observers: the vibrancy, dedication and passion of the collective Jewish neshamah.

Berel would understand.

© 2020 Hamodia

Abhorrent Action at a Distance

Direct physical attacks on Jews have, and for good reason, unfortunately, dominated the news in recent weeks. But there have been other kinds of attacks on innocent people who are perceived to be Jewish. Like the one committed against Kurt Eichenwald.

Mr. Eichenwald is an award-winning journalist who has written for the New York Times, Newsweek and other major media, and is the author as well of several books. He is also an epileptic, something he has compellingly addressed in some of his writings. And he has been critical of President Trump. Those last two facts dovetailed, regrettably, in a bad way.

After writing in 2016 about what he considered looming improper conflicts of interest in the then-president elect’s international business affairs, the Dallas-based Mr. Eichenwald experienced a flood of online vitriol and threats from people who felt that his criticism of Mr. Trump merited such reaction. It wasn’t the first time he had experienced such internet “trolling.” But spleen venting, while always ugly, is usually harmless.

It wasn’t, though, on the evening of December 15, 2016. One of Mr. Eichenwald’s less constrained critics, using “@jew goldstein” as a moniker and aware of Mr. Eichenwald’s medical condition, sent the writer an electronic graphics interchange format file (or GIF), an animated image. GIFs are usually intended to amuse, but this one, which loaded automatically, had a less benign objective.

The GIF, whose sender added his judgment that Mr. Eichenwald “deserved a seizure,” consisted of a series of bright flashes in quick succession, something that is known to trigger epileptic attacks in those, like Mr. Eichenwald, who are vulnerable to them.

The alleged culprit is one John Rayne Rivello, a Marine Corps veteran from Salisbury, Maryland. A search warrant turned up an internet account he maintained that featured, among other things, a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for his alleged victim, which had been altered to show a fake obituary with the date of Mr. Eichenwald’s death listed as Dec. 16, 2016.

Investigators also found that Mr. Rivello had sent a message to likeminded friends, outlining his plans and stating “I hope this sends him into a seizure” and “let’s see if he dies.”

Mr. Eichenwald didn’t die that day, but the previous evening, when he received the GIF, “he slumped over in his chair,” according to his attorney, Steven Lieberman. “He was unresponsive, and he probably would have died but for the fact that his wife heard a noise – she’s a physician – and she pulled him away from the screen and got him onto the floor.”

Mrs. Eichenwald called 911, took a picture of the strobing light on her husband’s computer and called the police.

Mr. Rivello was originally charged in Maryland for “assault with a deadly weapon” and, briefly, by the Northern District of Texas, under a federal cyberstalking statute.

First Amendment concerns were raised about the possibility that Mr. Rivello was being improperly targeted just for being a bigoted dimwit, which isn’t itself illegal. So the cyberstalking charge was dropped and he was re-indicted in Texas on lesser assault charges.

Mr. Rivello and his lawyer are reportedly still planning on mounting a defense on First Amendment grounds.

That claim is, or should be, easily rejected. The fact that the harm he inflicted was an expression of a political position is no more a defense of the assault than it would be had he punched Mr. Eichenwald in the face. The punch may communicate a message, but it isn’t protected by the First Amendment.

The larger, and novel, question is: Can an “assault” be committed at a distance?

From a Torah perspective, it most certainly can. It isn’t mere rhetoric or poetic license when Chazal refer to things like lashon hara or publicly embarrassing someone as damaging, even killing. Assault needn’t leave any physical trace at all. Such non-contact assaults aren’t halachically actionable, but they are considered criminal all the same.

Damage inflicted on a person by fire, though, even when the fire resulted from negligence – all the more so when set maliciously – is indeed actionable (see Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Nizkei Mammon 14:15). I don’t profess to be a posek, but it certainly seems at the very least arguable that sending an electronic signal may constitute something analogous.

In any event, Mr. Rivello’s case will of course be adjudicated by American, not Jewish, law.

It has been clear for some time now that contemporary secular law needs to evolve to meet challenges posed by new technologies like the internet.

Mr. Rivello’s next hearing is scheduled for January 31. Unless he decides to just plead guilty, his case might prove a good opportunity to rein in some cyberspace miscreancy.

© 2020 Hamodia (in an edited form)

Not-So-Good People

Like many identifiably Jewish Jews, I’ve caught my share of catcalls, Nazi salutes and threats. And read the rantings of people like Louis Farrakhan, David Duke and Richard Spencer. I can’t say I’m nonchalant about such idiocies, but a certain jadedness, for better or worse, eventually kicks in.

There are times, though, when even I am astonished by a particularly outrageous demonstration of mindless Jew-animus. Like Jersey City school board member Joan Terrell-Paige’s now-deleted Facebook comment, posted mere days after the murderous December 10 attack on the kosher market in her locale by two terrorists, one of whom had shown interest in a Jew-disparaging black sect. (One of the murderer’s favorite videos shows a Black Hebrew Israelite preacher telling a Jewish man, “The messiah, who is a black man, is going to kill you.”)

Ms. Terrell-Paige implied that, in effect, the killings had been brought about by “brutes in the Jewish community” themselves.

She charged that Chassidic newcomers to Jersey City had “waved bags of money” before black residents in order to buy their homes.

Leave aside that the Chassidim who have relocated from Brooklyn to Jersey City are decidedly not well-to-do; and leave aside, too, that asking a homeowner if he’s interested in selling a house isn’t illegal or oppressive. Leave aside as well the fact that the city enacted, with the support of its Chassidic residents, a prohibition of door-to-door solicitation.

Consider only the utter asininity of blaming innocent victims for the hate-driven actions of the racists who murdered them.

As if the arson of her words wasn’t sufficiently destructive, Ms. Terrell-Paige added fuel to her fire, too. “What is the message they were sending?” she asked, referring to the murderers. “Are we brave enough to explore the answer to their message? Are we brave enough to stop the assault on the Black communities of America?”

One wonders how the valiant lady would have reacted had someone asked her, in the wake of the violence perpetrated by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, to be “brave enough” to consider what message those haters were sending by punching and kicking peaceful protesters (and injuring several and killing one with a car). If someone had suggested that she be “brave enough to stop the assault on White communities of America?”

Nearly as tone-deaf as the school board member’s post was the reaction to her mindlessness by a group that includes local and state legislators and calls itself the Hudson County Democratic Black Caucus.

“While we do not agree with the delivery of the statement made by Ms. Terrell-Paige,” the group announced judiciously, “we believe that her statement has heightened awareness around issues that must be addressed.”

No, dear Caucus, the only issue that must be addressed is black anti-Semitism.

That phrase, of course, isn’t intended to implicate the larger African-American community, any more than the phrase “white anti-Semitism” implicates all Caucasians.

It simply acknowledges the sad reality that Jew-hatred exists not only in the fever dreams of racists who hate blacks but also in the delusions of some of those they hate.

The group of legislators and community leaders of color did pay proper homage to the need to maintain good relations between “two communities that have already and must always continue to coexist harmoniously.” But that sentiment is belied by the rest of its statement’s cluelessness.

What the group needed to do after reading Ms. Terrell-Paige’s obnoxious words was not to speak of “issues” to be addressed but rather join Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, Jersey City Education Association President Ron Greco, Ward E Councilman James Solomon, New Jersey State Democratic Committee Chair John Currie, Board of Education Trustee Mussab Ali, and Assemblymen Nick Chiaravalloti, Raj Mukherji and Gary Schaer in their call for Ms. Terrell-Paige’s resignation.

As to the “issues” that the Hudson County Democratic Black Caucus says “must be addressed” – presumably those posed by the influx of Chassidim into Jersey City – let’s indeed address them.

Among the freedoms Americans are afforded is the right to live where they wish. The arrival of Jewish residents to a depressed neighborhood, moreover, is likely to contribute to the good of longer-term residents. There will be healthful food available (like some of that sold in the grocery that was turned into a scene of carnage), crime will likely decrease and property values rise.

Back in 2017, the New York Times featured an article about demographic changes, including those in Jersey City. It quoted a Jewish woman, identified only as Gitti, who expressed appreciation for her non-Jewish neighbors.

“They told us when we have to put out our garbage, and they introduced us to their pets so we shouldn’t be afraid of them,” she said. “They’re nice people.”

Eddie Sumpter, a black neighbor around the corner from Gitti’s home, who was able to buy a bigger house by selling his previous home to a Chassidic family, said he welcomed the newcomers.

“We live among Chinese. We live among Spanish,’’ said Mr. Sumpter, who works as a cook. “It don’t matter. People is people. If you’re good people, you’re good people.”

Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear, not everyone is.

© 2020 Hamodia

Anti-Anti Semitism

The well-known British doctor and pundit Jonathan Miller, who died last month, felt he had the solution to anti-Semitism.

He was quoted in a 1985 book as asserting that, to end Jew-hatred, “the Jew must constantly re-adventure and re-venture himself into assimilation.”

“I just think,” he continued, “it’s the nobler thing to do, unless in fact you happen to be a believer in Orthodoxy, in which case there are self-evident reasons to keep [living Jewish lives]. But, if it’s done for the sole purpose of making sure that in the future you’ll be able to say the prayers for the dead when the Holocaust is finally inflicted again, then I think it is a [cursed] device.”

The good doctor really should have realized that among the most assimilated Jews in modern times were much of German Jewry in the 1800s and the early part of last century, Jews who, in headstrong manner, adopted many of the practices and attitudes of their non-Jewish neighbors. And we all know how, despite those efforts to become “just Germans,” they were cruelly reminded of who in fact they were.

We “believers in Orthodoxy” could have explained to Dr. Miller that, au contraire, assimilation doesn’t prevent Jew hatred; it breeds it. We Jews are meant to be a people apart, and when we try to forget who we are, Hashem allows others to help us remember.

There is much talk these days, for good reason, about what practical steps can be taken to deal with anti-Semitism. In the wake of countless vandalisms of Jewish sites and cemeteries, physical attacks on Jews in Europe and here in America, and vicious verbal ones on the internet, various means of addressing the idiocy of Jew hatred are being put forward.

They are not without merit. Even though Chazal have revealed the law of nature that “Esav hates Yaakov,” there are efforts that can be made to counter both anti-Semitic acts and anti-Semitism itself.

Advocacy for security funding and increased police patrols are examples of the former. And educational efforts in public schools, of the latter.

There are, of course, chassidei umos ha’olam, people with an appreciation of Klal Yisrael; and then there are the aforementioned heirs of Esav. But there are also many people in our current (we hope final) outpost of galus who have as yet unformed attitudes about Jews. And so, educational efforts can be worthy means of fostering sanity and knowledge in young minds.

Another area in which our hishtadlus can help influence open-minded people to reject haters’ libels and imaginings is “upping our game” in our interactions with others.

All of us “visibly Jewish” Jews are aware that eyes are always on us; hopefully, we take pains to not act in any way that might be seen as uncaring or rude. We avoid cutting others off in traffic or raising our voices in public. We try to project the true image of a Torah-faithful Jew: modest, courteous and civil.

Sometimes, though – through no fault of our own – even our entirely proper restraint and reticence are misconstrued. Not only by people looking for anything they can “interpret” negatively, but even by “pareve” citizens who lack any pre-existing animus for us. Being reserved can be misunderstood as being “stand-offish”; avoiding eye contact can be misinterpreted as condescension.

Many of us who move among non-Jews during our commutes, or who work in non-Jewish environments, have found that being “proactive” in interactions with others can yield much good will.

An obviously observant Jew who enters a building and holds the door open for anyone behind him has likely, with that almost effortless act, left an impression.

An unsolicited “Good morning” to a fellow elevator passenger does the same. We have here nothing less than the testimony of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, that no one ever beat him to a greeting, as he was always first to offer one, “even [to] a non-Jew in the marketplace” (Brachos 17a).

Eye contact, when appropriate, is a statement of respect. And its lack, fairly or not, may be taken as the opposite. And a smile should be part of our faces too. Shammai tells us as much: “Receive every person with a pleasant countenance” (Avos 1:15).

Not long ago, a middle-aged African-American woman was waiting, as was I, for a bus that didn’t come. I phoned my wife to ask if she was free to pick me up at the bus stop, and she was. When she arrived, I offered the other would-be bus passenger a ride to her destination, a public housing project. Surprised but overjoyed, she accepted, and we took her home.

A few weeks later, waiting (I do a lot of waiting) for a ferry, I heard a loud, happy “Hi, Rabbi!” from behind me. It was she. And with her were her adult son and several grandchildren in tow. I returned her greeting (with a smile) and said hello to her family members.

End of unremarkable story. But it made me think about how the lady must have described my wife and me to her progeny. And how it might have influenced their picture of “Jews.”

Just as important – perhaps more so – than increasing security measures, police presence and educational programs is strengthening our efforts to show others who we really are.

© 2019 Hamodia

The Lesson of London Bridge

At the time of this writing – and, hopefully, of its reading – the most recent domestic terror attack was the shooting in Jersey City that left three civilians, including two Jews, and a police officer dead.

Less than a week earlier, there was the fatal shooting of three sailors at a Navy training center in Pensacola, Florida, by a seemingly well-adjusted Saudi trainee, Mohammed Alshamrani.

It seems that the Jersey City killers were motivated by “Black Hebrew Israelite” ideology. And, while authorities to date have offered no official conclusions about the Saudi murderer, it is not unlikely that Islamist radicalism played a part in his action.

It definitely did in a terror attack in another Western country, Britain, a mere week before the Pensacola massacre.

In that stabbing spree, which has come to be known as the “London Bridge Attack,” Usman Khan, a 28-year-old British citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, attacked five people, leaving three injured and two dead, before he was killed by British police.

Incredibly, the attacker was, at the time of his rampage, on probation from prison, where he had been serving a reduced sentence for having been part of a plan to bomb, among other targets, the London Stock Exchange, the Houses of Parliament, the U.S. embassy, two synagogues, and the home of then London Mayor Boris Johnson. The plan also included building a terrorist training camp on land the stabber’s family owns in Kashmir.

What had reduced his sentence and allowed for his furlough was his renunciation of terrorism.

In one letter to probation officers, he had written: “At the time [of my terrorist plottings] I was immature and now I am much more mature and want to live my life as a good Muslim and also a good citizen of Britain.”

In another, he asserted that “I have learnt [sic] that many of my past beliefs came from my misinterpretations of Islam. There were many gaps in my knowledge but now I am on [a] new path and am learning to become a good Muslim. I would like a chance to prove to you that I will not cause harm to nobody [sic] in our society.”

He got the chance, and decisively proved the opposite.

The lesson lies in the fact that, while people can change, they can also claim to have changed and be lying.

While there is no reason to believe that many American or British Muslims are hiding murderous plans, there is no reason, either, to imagine that there aren’t other Muslims in Western countries who see the world as he did, and who present a threat like he was.

You may not have noticed, but we are in the throes of a presidential campaign.

And an American group, Muslim Advocates, took the opportunity of Michael Bloomberg’s joining the Democratic presidential candidacy pool to demand that the ex-New York mayor renounce the New York Police Department’s “Muslim surveillance” program instituted in 2002 under his administration. (The program was abandoned in 2014 by then-police Commissioner William J. Bratton.)

The Council on American-Islamic Relations joined the cause, asking Mr. Bloomberg to “see the error of his ways and apologize to the Muslim community for his long-term support for illegal surveillance and targeting of Muslim New Yorkers.”

The legality of the program was never negated, but I sympathize all the same with law-abiding Muslims of good will discomfited by the erstwhile police effort to keep tabs on Muslim communities and houses of worship. I understand how the effort struck some as religious discrimination. And I know that the data show that right-wing domestic terrorist acts have both been attempted and occurred more often than Islamist attacks.

But it can’t be denied that Islamic terrorists, inspired or directed by groups like IS and al-Qaida, pose a clear threat to American citizens – as the Pensacola attack and the 2017 Hudson River Park truck ramming and the 2016 Ohio State University attack and the 2015 San Bernardino attack, among others, well illustrate.

Sadly, all Muslims are adversely affected. Both by the way they are regarded by some others and by efforts to prevent future attacks. The NYPD’s surveillance program was, especially in the years directly following 2001, not unreasonable.

Suspicion of Muslims is often called “Islamophobia.” Merriam-Webster defines the word as “an irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against Islam or people who practice Islam.”

The key word there is “irrational.”

Thus, we have arachnophobia, the fear of spiders; mysophobia, the fear of germs; and any of a long list of other unreasonable anxieties. Is Islamophobia irrational? It depends.

None of us, in our religiously pluralistic and free society, should ever disdain, or discriminate against, any Muslim simply because of his or her faith.

But, unfortunately, it’s impossibly hard to not harbor entirely rational fear of people like Mohammed Alshamrani and Usman Khan.

© 2019 Hamodia

Oy, Such Soros!

Last week saw the launch of an initiative born of a strange shidduch – between the foundation of famously progressive philanthropist George Soros and that of libertarian donor Charles Koch.

The “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft” was introduced as a “transpartisan” think tank whose focus will be on promoting diplomatic agreement instead of military solutions.

The new enterprise takes its name from John Quincy Adams, the sixth American president, who, as Secretary of State in 1821, made a speech warning against the U.S. going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.”

There are, however, in fact, a number of fearsome monsters out there, some of whom threaten our allies and our own country. It’s nice to imagine that diplomacy might contain them but, alas, sometimes military action is really the only effective course.

The hope for a pre-Moshiach peaceful world, unrealistic though it is, is vintage George Soros. The Jewish Hungarian-American investor (original name: Schwartz) has spent billions to spread democratic values and human rights worldwide.

He also has expressed some repugnant attitudes.

He revoltingly likened President George W. Bush and his administration to Nazis. Asked once about his thoughts on Israel, he replied: “I don’t deny the Jews to a right to a national existence – but I don’t want anything to do with it,” and he has blamed anti-Semitism on Israel’s policies.

At the same time, Soros has himself become a favorite bugaboo of anti-Semites, like Turkish President Recep Erdogan, who denounced him as “the famous Hungarian Jew Soros.”

His status as a prime target of haters came up during the House Intelligence Committee hearings last month.

Former top National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill delivered what was to many the most riveting testimony of the hearings. She told of a smear campaign against former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

Ms. Hill pointed out that a conspiracy theory associating Ms. Yovanovitch with the much-vilified Mr. Soros was at the heart of a smear campaign against the respected ambassador, who was fired from her position by the president.

“When I saw this happening to Ambassador Yovanovitch…,” Ms. Hill said, calmly but forcefully, “I was furious, because this is, again, just this whipping up of what is frankly an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about George Soros to basically target nonpartisan career officials.”

“This is the longest-running anti-Semitic trope that we have in history…” she continued, “the new Protocols of The Elders of Zion.” That reference, of course, was to the 19th-century forgery created by the Russian czar’s secret police that cast Jews as evil, all-controlling plotters against mankind, a book that is still published and cherished by anti-Semites to this day.

Some commentators, like Dinesh D’Souza, Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, have portrayed Soros as a Nazi collaborator.

For all his faults, that charge is silliness. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, the future financier was a 13-year-old who, with the help of his father, who feared for his son’s life, assumed a false identity as the godson of a Hungarian official. That foster-father functionary was tasked with taking inventory at the homes of Jewish families so that their possessions could be taken by the Nazi authorities. Witnessing his protector taking notes was the extent of young George’s “collaboration.”

Nor is Mr. Soros a global puppet master intent on bending world powers to his will, as charged by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (he of the “the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren was staged” claim), convicted felon Roger Stone and attorney Joe DiGenova.

The latter (who, incidentally, led the prosecution of Jonathan Pollard) told Fox News, “There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service at the United States State Department. He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas.”

No evidence of those assertions, however, was offered.

In October, 2018, Fox even banned one of its regular guests, Chris Farrell, of Judicial Watch, from the network, for falsely suggesting that Soros had funded a migrant caravan traveling through Central America.

Despite Mr. Soros’ “progressive” values and his (at best) ambivalence about Israel, it’s important to not buy into the utter vilification of the man – to realize that casting him as a fabulously wealthy aspirant to world domination is unadulterated anti-Semitism, a contemporary take on the portrayal of Jews as controlling the wealth, and thus the destiny, of the world. As it happens and just for the record, Christians hold the largest amount of world wealth (55%), followed by Muslims (5.8%) and Hindus (3.3%). Jews come in at 1.1%.

And so, Ms. Hill’s claim that making false assertions of Soros connections to smear people is thinly veiled anti-Semitism was, as they say in her native Great Britain (she became a U.S. citizen in 2002), spot-on.

Part of the bane of galus is that Jew haters will always seek Jewish malefactors to portray as emblematic of a nefarious pan-Jewish plot. And when they come up empty, they simply create demonic Jewish plotters out of thin air, like the “Elders of Zion.”

Or their version of George Soros.

Even with our own justified criticisms of the investor, we should take care to not buy into the Jew haters’ narrative and inadvertently aid those who spread libels and wish all of us only ill.

© 2019 Hamodia

Disinformation Please

The ad accuses President Trump of having paid a $2 million bribe to a Vermont prosecutor for the latter to fabricate a larceny charge against Senator Bernie Sanders.

Despite the president’s vociferous objection to the promotion of an entirely fictitious accusation against him, the social media giant Facebook refused to remove the ad.

Likewise fictitious, as you may have guessed, is the existence of any such ad, whose crafting and publicizing any right-minded person would consider akin to a crime.

Entirely real, though, is an actual video ad Facebook ran that falsely accused former Vice President Joe Biden of having blackmailed Ukrainian officials to halt an investigation of his son, Hunter. “Send Quid Pro Joe Biden into retirement,” the voice-over intoned.

In 2016, Mr. Biden did indeed urge Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, with the threat of withholding U.S. aid. But, as numerous fact-checkers have pointed out, that was the official U.S. government position, not his personal decision, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Hunter Biden.

The video making the bogus accusation was the work of a “super PAC,” or deep-pocketed political action committee. Facebook explained that, although disseminating false information violates the social network’s policies on misinformation, a political leader’s claims, even if they are lies, are inherently newsworthy, and thus immune to removal.

The Biden campaign objected that the falsehood was not made by a politician but rather by a political committee, and thus should have been rejected.

Which, of course, entirely misses the larger point: We are at (or over) the cusp of a presidential campaign that appears bound to be saturated with deceit and disinformation. Voters, beware.

Six versions of the “Quid Pro Joe” ad were targeted to Facebook users in South Carolina, Iowa and Massachusetts, according to Facebook’s ad library. The ad is no longer active, but, in a recent speech to students at Washington’s Georgetown University in Washington, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his treatment of political ads containing falsehoods on grounds of freedom of expression.

“People having the power to express themselves,” he said, “is a new kind of force in the world – a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society.”

The phrase “power structure” put me in mind of something we read about in shul two Shabbosos ago – the Tower of Bavel. Not all power structures are good ones.

And using the power of mass communication to empower falsehoods would seem to fall in the not-so-good category.

Interestingly, there have been numerous political ads rejected by Facebook. The global media and technology company Buzzfeed’s news division found 160 vetoed spots, submitted by candidates Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer and President Trump.

Not one, though, was rejected for containing an untruth, only for things like offensive language and “fake buttons” – nonfunctioning “yes” and “no” click-options, something Facebook, for some reason, doesn’t allow on paid content.

So, as far as Facebook is concerned: Fake buttons, no way; fake facts, no problem.

I’m not naïve. Political ads have, of course, always sought to mislead, at least in the sense of presenting one side of an issue without acknowledging the argument for the other side. That’s the prerogative of parties and PACS, which, after all, pay good money to present their cases. Critical thinking will always be an essential part of citizens’ weighing of arguments.

But asserting that Medicare for all or universal gun registration or building a border wall is a good idea or a bad one is one thing. Contending falsely that a president bribed a prosecutor or that a former vice-president used his power of office to block prosecution of his son, or that “the Jews” were behind the 9/11 attacks is in another category altogether.

To its credit, Facebook recently removed from its platform four foreign-based networks – including one linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the group indicted for interference in the 2016 presidential election – that were targeting Mr. Biden’s current quest for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

But shouldn’t domestic shenanigans by candidates of any stripe be subject to similar treatment?

In defense of Facebook’s “lies by politicians are acceptable” policy, the company’s vice president of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg compares the social media platform with its more than 2 billion global users to a tennis court.

“Our job is to make sure the court is ready – the surface is flat, the lines painted, the net at the correct height,” he explained. “How the players play the game is up to them, not us.”

No, Mr. Clegg: If you’re providing the court and broadcasting the game, you need to make clear to the players that smashing your opponent over the head with your racket simply isn’t an acceptable move.

© 2019 Hamodia

No Escape

“We used to spend a good two hours here… chaos,” Palestinian construction worker Imad Khalil explained to National Public Radio’s Daniel Estrin. “Today we arrive and we immediately pass.”

The worker was marveling at the efficiency of “Speed Gate,” a facial recognition technology that has done away with crowds and individual inspections by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints through which Arab day laborers must pass from Yehudah and Shomron to work in Israel proper. Nearly 100,000 Palestinian laborers cross such checkpoints daily.

Where the technology is in place, the workers now need only place electronic ID cards on a sensor and stare at a camera. Panels then open to let them through.

Palestinians wishing to work in Israel have for many years been photographed and fingerprinted, in order to ascertain that they have nothing in their records to indicate they’re a threat to anyone.

Having soldiers ascertain identities of crossing workers created long lines and frustrated people. The new facial recognition software allows workers’ ID cards to immediately connect to a biometric database and confirm their identities in an instant.

Israel is also building a database of its own citizens, and already uses similar facial recognition technology for passport control at Ben Gurion airport.

As might be expected, human rights advocates are upset by the effort, seeing it as helping perpetuate the current political status quo and as a violation of individuals’ privacy.

Omer Laviv of Mer Security and Communications Systems, an Israeli company that markets the technology to law enforcement agencies internationally, had four words in response to such anxieties: “Security concerns override privacy.”

Several thousands of miles to the west, in New York City, the city’s police department use of identification technology is likewise being criticized by privacy advocates.

The department has not only built a giant facial recognition database and loaded thousands of arrest photographs, including of children and teenagers, into it, but was recently revealed to have accelerated the collection and storage of criminals’ and suspects’ DNA, obtained from cheek swabs or even from coffee cups, water bottles or cigarette butts harboring trace amounts of suspects’ saliva.

There are currently more than 80,000 genetic profiles in the city database, begun in 2009, an increase of 28 percent over the past two years. Scores of violent crimes have been successfully prosecuted based on collected DNA.

The criticism, from groups like the Legal Aid Society, has focused on the fact that some 30,000 of the profiles are of people, including minors, who were only suspected of crimes, but never convicted.

Some civil liberties lawyers contend that taking someone’s DNA without probable cause to suspect that they did something illegal violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The legitimacy of that assertion depends on the meaning of “searches and seizures.” DNA and facial recognition technology were things unimagined, likely unimaginable, to the Constitution’s crafters.

But is there anything qualitatively different between fingerprinting a suspect – or just photographing him – and recording the patterns of his DNA? While DNA identification is not, in many cases, at all as indisputable as most people assume – there are a number of issues that can render it less than conclusive – it is certainly a most useful tool in better focusing investigations that can lead to more decisive evidence.

And there can be little doubt that not only does “searches and seizures” in the Fourth Amendment need a modern definition; so does the word “unreasonable.

There may well be activists who maintain that street cameras should be considered unlawful, or who shun EZ-Pass or GPS technology because they consider such things, which identify users’ locations and movements, dangers to individual privacy. But, justified in their fears or not, they are blowing hard at a hurricane.

Because, like it or not, we no longer have private lives, at least not in the sense of being invisible to a plethora of commercial, governmental or law enforcement entities. Cameras on the sides of buildings, and inside them, abound. Anyone with a driver’s license or passport has surrendered information to authorities, and anyone who uses the internet is shedding dribs and drabs of facts about himself to untold numbers of commercial and other interests.

That might dismay some people, but it is, in the end, a simple fact of modern life. And leveraging technology to fight crime – as long as it is done responsibly and with recognition of new tools’ limits – doesn’t strike me as unreasonable. Even if a youngster’s DNA is on file in a police database, well, youngsters grow up, after all, some of them, sadly, into violent criminals. And a means of identifying a perpetrator of a crime is something beneficial to society.

For Jews who recognize the truth of the Jewish mesorah, the new technologies can serve to remind us that, as Rabi Yehudah Hanasi stresses in Avos (2:1): “An eye sees and an ear hears…”

And, particularly apt, with the Yamim Nora’im still fresh in our memories, “…all of your actions are in the record written.”

© 2019 Hamodia

Save the Mustard Seed

A Nordic effort reminds us of a mitzvah for our time.As Jews the world over listened to Krias HaTorah on Shabbos morning parashas Shoftim, someone at the New York Times was preparing to post a news story quite pertinent to a passuk in the parasha, although he or she was likely oblivious to the connection.

The passuk (Devarim 20:19) forbids the destruction of a fruit tree even during a war, and is the source for the prohibition of bal tashchis, the wanton destruction of anything useful.

The story, which appeared the very next day, was datelined Helsinki, Finland, and described “Happy Hour” at one of a supermarket chain’s 900 stores, all of which steeply discount hundreds of items about to run afoul of their expiration dates. Finns crowd the stores to buy the goods.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, close to a third of the food produced and packaged for human consumption is lost or wasted. Here in the United States, nine out of ten supermarket chains assessed last year by a nonprofit group, the Center for Biological Diversity, were given a C grade or lower on food-waste issues.

We citizens of industrialized western countries live, baruch Hashem, in a world of plenty. Suffering poverty might tempt someone to steal or cheat. But swimming in a sea of abundance presents its own challenges – like the temptation to overindulge, with resultant obesity and other health risks. And, for Klal Yisrael, the inadvertent flouting of bal tashchis.

I know from speaking with others that I am not the only one whose parents rinsed out plastic cups instead of throwing them away, or who refrigerated even small amounts of a meal’s leftovers rather than consigning them to the garbage. Or who opted to darn holey socks instead of just tossing them out and buying a new pair.

And I know, too, that I’m not the only one who tries – even if very imperfectly – to maintain the mindset that yields such practices. It is, after all, a very Jewish mindset.

Some stereotypes are outright falsehoods. Mexicans may take siestas (as do many Israelis) during the hottest time of the day, but all the workers from south of the border whom I’ve observed have been anything but lazy; in fact they are exceedingly hard-working.

The stereotype of Jews as penny-pinching, however, isn’t necessarily false, only mischaracterized.  While there may be people who are stingy for selfish reasons, frugality can – and in Yiddishkeit is meant to – bespeak a deep appreciation for the worth of every single resource with which Hashem has gifted us.

We are enjoined by the Torah to not waste material or money. “Each and every penny,” Rabi Elazar is famously quoted as saying, “adds up to a fortune” (Bava Basra 9b). And fortunes, we all know, can be put to very worthy and effective use. Those same Yidden from previous generations who sewed up holes in clothing and reused disposable utensils were impressively generous with their resources when it came to helping others.

There are, to be sure, situations where destroying or discarding a useful item is permitted, as when a greater good is thereby accomplished, or where there is some special need. Here is not the place to enter the realm of the halachic implications of our throw-away society. But that there exist actual such concerns with common contemporary practices is something that deserves our consideration.

The Finnish effort was spurred by the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and the effects of climate change. Still and all, it might serve to stimulate us to take bal tashchis more seriously in this era of abundance and this annual time of teshuvah. Whatever our thoughts about carbon footprints, we are enjoined to recognize that wasting any resource debases it, and us.

Every year on Shabbos parashas Shoftim, I reread the words of the Sefer HaChinuch (mitzvah 529). He explains that the bal tashchis prohibition aims to “teach our souls to love what is good and useful, and to then cleave to it,” adding that “through this, the good will cleave to us and we will distance ourselves from every evil thing and every destruction. This is the way of exemplary Jews, who love peace, rejoice in the good of creation and bring everyone close to the Torah.

“They do not destroy anything – even a mustard seed – and it pains them to encounter any destruction or harm. If they can act to save anything from destruction, they use all their strength to do so.”

“Not so,” he adds by contrast, is the way of resha’im, “the cohorts of mazikim [destructive forces], who rejoice in destroying the world.”

That attitudinal polarization is well evident in our world. Broken windows, smashed bottles and graffiti-marred walls are the yield of one end of the spectrum.

And rinsed-out plastic cups in dish drainers, with filled-to-their-brims tzedakah boxes on nearby kitchen window sills, the other.

© 2019 Hamodia