Swiss banks Aren't the Only Ones Holding Out

Le Monde published an interesting article today regarding the payment of 25 million Shekels ($6.7 million dollars) by three Israeli banks to The Company for Restitution of Holocaust Victims Assets (an organization set up to oversee reparations to Holocaust survivors and their descendants). Apparently, goods belonging to Holocaust survivors (including land, furniture, etc...) have been held by 5 Israeli banks for the past sixty years. Only recently have 3 of these 5 banks agreed to find the survivors (and their families) and give them their financial due.

What the article doesn't address however, is how or why Israeli banks have these goods and how they acquired them. From the survivors themselves? From Swiss banks? From relatives? Interestingly, I haven't found any other articles about this issue in Israeli or Jewish papers.

Gaza Examined

I highly recommend the New Yorker article in this week's issue examining the events that led up to the recent Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Gaza.

J Street Redux

There has been so much written about last week's 1st annual J Street conference that I feel pretty superfluous. This posting could essentially just be a bunch of links to other articles. But I will ignore that feeling and post a few original thoughts of my own.


1) The opening night of the conference, I had a conversation with a guy who works at the U.A.E. embassy and who grew up in Dubai. He told me that he had just arrived in DC a few weeks ago and spent part of his first pay check on the conference fee. When I pointed out to him that this was quite a gesture, he said that growing up in Dubai he never learned about the Holocaust or heard Jews spoken about in a positive way. It wasn't until he was at college in Australia did he learn about the Holocaust and was overwhelmed by how much he didn't know about Jews and Jewish history. Since then, he has been a strong supporter of real peace in the region and was excited by what J Street is trying to do. He didn't, however, tell his colleagues at the embassy that he was attending the conference.

2) I also met a junior member of the Swiss Embassy who was there officially. I didn't realize how engaged the Swiss government is in the Middle East and how it tries to provide a neutral ground for many of the parties involved. The ambassador told me that the Embassy likes to keep up to date on the various movements within the American Jewish community and so he was there to get a sense of what J Street was all about from the inside. They didn't spring for the gala dinner though...

3) One of the best breakout sessions I went to was a theater performance sponsored by TheaterJ. It was a one woman show performed by Noa Baum, an Israeli who now lives in the DC area. She took her years-long friendship with a Palestinian woman and wove their conversations into an incredibly moving mediation on friendship, war, and family. Through her show, Noa was able to vividly bring to life the real people behind the 'Israeli' or 'Palestinian' label and demonstrate how often they have much more in common than they imagine.

I'll post a longer piece soon on one of the major debates of the conference: what it means to be 'pro-Israel.' Stay tuned.

Fun Times with Google

Little fun fact via the NYTimes: The co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, is a) Jewish and b) was brought over to the US from the Soviet Union with the help of HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). I also love the little dig at philanthropies later on in the article, "He has already learned enough about philanthropy to add immediately: 'Our foundation is not soliciting proposals. Please make sure to include that.'

I guess I'd better scrap that grant proposal I was working on.

So what do you get

when you put together pork, Schindler's List and a mohawk-wearing, football-playing Jew from Ohio? Glee! This new TV show that focuses on a group of outcast high school singing and dancing Broadway hopefulls turns out to be pretty good at satirizing stereotypes of all kinds and last night, its lens honed in on the Jews.

I can't quite put my finger on why the confluence of treif, the Holocaust, Simchas Torah, and the female lead wafting through the window in a white nightgown with a star of David around her neck like in a modern-day Chagall painting is so amusing--but it really is!

Call me tasteless if you want...

But I am kinda tickled by the description of this book created by Alloy Entertainment, a production house for teen-girl themed books and other products:

"You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!," an account of the coming-0f-age trials of Stacy Friedman and her misplaced affection for one Andy Goldfarb-a classmate who speaks in hip-hop slang, and whose belt buckle reads "G-Farb..." (The New Yorker, October 19, 2009)

Anyone know a tween girl I can borrow this from?

Inaction is not Always the Right Action

Earlier this year, I got several emails from the Manhattan JCC, as well as from other Jewish orgs., warning me that a hateful and offensive (they put it more diplomatically) church based in Topeka, Kansas would be picketing them and advised visitors to simply ignore the group on their way into and out of the JCC. "Although you are entitled to your right to free speech" the email read, "we ask that you calmly pass these protesters and walk directly into our building without incident."

I can certainly understand why these orgs. would not want to draw additional attention to this group, but I didn't feel entirely comfortable with the idea of just doing nothing. Even if it wouldn't change their mind (they are obviously too far-gone for that to happen), it would demonstrate that their views are repugnant to the average New Yorker. So, I was thrilled open my local paper this morning and discover that when the group came to Beth Elohim, one of Park Slope's largest synagogues, on the day before Yom Kippur, a crowd of a hundred or more were there to greet them and drowned out the hate speech with calls for tolerance and unity. And despite a local synagogue's email which asked for people to ignore them, the synagogue's Rabbi climbed on the roof of the synagogue and defiantly blew the shofar.

And what ultimately happened? Yes, the incident got publicity. But the story was not that the church protested in Park Slope, but rather that the community rose up against them, outnumbered them and ultimately drowned them out. Now that is absolutely the kind of coverage that I can get behind.