Jewy News

Peggy Shapiro writes about Israels Disproportionate Response for the Amercian Thinker Blog:

Two jumbo jets carrying more than 220 doctors, nurses, civil engineers, and other Israeli army personnel, including a rescue team and field hospital, were among the first rescue teams to arrive in Haiti. In fact, they were the first foreign backup team to set up medical treatment at the partially collapsed main hospital in Port-au-Prince…

[By way of comparison] The U.S. has pledged 100 million and sent supplies and personnel. The U.K. pledged $10 million and sent 64 firemen and 8 volunteers.China, a country with a population of 1,325,639,982 compared to Israel’s 7.5 million sent 50 rescuers and seven journalists. The 25 Arab League nations sent nothing.

The BBC News website tells the story of Bogomila, a Polish woman who just made a shocking discovery about her own past:

This summer, her 67-year-old mother Barbara finally revealed her secret. She is a Jewish child of the Holocaust. Suddenly, at the age of 37, Bogomila realised she was Jewish, too.

Believe it or not, stories like this aren’t so uncommon in Poland. Even today, many Jewish survivors continue to hide their Jewishness. Why? Let’s just say that the Polish people aren’t exactly full of love for their Jewish fellow citizens.  But at least one Jew thinks it’s not so bad:

“I wouldn’t call it anti-semitism,” says the President of the Union of Jewish communities of Poland Piotr Kadlcik. “It’s more a broad dislike of Jews.

Does Mr. Kadlcik realize how funny that sounds? I can easily imagine some ignorant bigot (say, Archie Bunker) saying, “I ain’t no anti-Semite; I just don’t like Jews.”

Am I the only one who thinks Mr. Kadlcik is in denial?

The Los Angeles Times has published a story that seems to confirm something every Jewish mother believes: Jews are smarter than average because of superior genes. What’s particularly interesting is that the proponents of this theory aren’t Jewish:

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.

It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”

The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

Israel’s leavened food law forbids, during Passover, the sale of chometz (leavened food) in a public place. Israeli courts have taken an extremely narrow view as to what constitutes a public place. One man has devised a clever strategy to protest those rulings, as ynetnews reports:

Arieh Yerushalmi of Bat Yam arrived at the non-kosher supermarket branch on Tel Aviv’s Nahalat Binyamin Street on Sunday afternoon, and startled unsuspecting shoppers when he stripped down to nothing but a sock covering his private parts.

Mr. Yerushalmi was arrested, but has not, as yet, been charged with a crime. Indeed, it’s not clear that he committed any crime. The obvious charge would be lewd conduct in public, but according to the court’s interpretation of the leavened food law, a supermarket is not considered a public place.

While Jewy News can’t endorse his tactics, we can’t help but admire his cleverness.

Mr. Yerushalmi: “This isn’t public???”

Wafa Younis, an Arab women living in the disputed territories on the West Bank, thought it would be a nice gesture for the youth orchestra she conducted to play a concert for a group of group of Holocaust survivors in Israel. Haaretz covered the story last week:

The choir burst into songs for peace, bringing surprised smiles from the audience…

The 13 musicians, aged 11 to 18, belong to Strings of Freedom, a modest orchestra from the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank…

[Younis] said the main mission of the orchestra, formed seven years ago to help Palestinian children overcome war trauma, was to bring people together.   “I’m here to raise spirits,” Younis said. “These are poor, old people.”  

Whatever you think of politics, certainly everyone can agree this is commendable, right? Well, not everyone. The political leaders in Jenin responded by disbanding the orchestra and boarding up the apartment where they rehearsed!

In a follow-up story, Haaretz quotes Adnan Hindi, a politico from the refugee camp where Younis lives:

“She exploited the children,” said Hindi, the head of the camp’s popular committee, which takes on municipal duties. “She will be forbidden from doing any activities…. We have to protect our children and our community.”

Jewy knews wonder, who will protect their children from the likes of Adnan Hindi?

We’re not regular TV watchers here at Jewy News, but one of our readers pointed out that a recent episode of My Name is Earl features an interesting plot twist.

One of the regular characters, Joy, enters the witness protection program and given a new identity as a conspicuously Jewish woman named Phyllis Rosenstein. She’s trained to pass as Jewish, and then tested. This 60-second clip shows the results:

Okay, we’re a little late on this one, too.  It’s from the anti-Israel protest in New York late last month. It was uploaded to the webshots.com website by a user calling himself redsquirrel08.

Feel free to write your own caption.

An online petition asks the Israeli government immediately stop all visits to Hamas prisoners held in Israeli jails until  such time as Gilad Shalit is released, or  allowed visits.

The petition text is in both Hebrew & English, but the part where you enter your name is only in Hebrew. Here’s what you need to know:

There are four boxes. Enter your:

1. Name
2. Age
3. City 
4. Comments (optional)

Then click the big red button at the bottom.

Click here (link) to see the original Hebrew petition.  You can view Google’s English translation of that web page here (link).

We occasionally make fun of celebrities converts (or potential converts). In almost all cases, the motivating factor seems to be a Jewish romantic partner, as opposed to a sincere interest in Judaism.

Which is why we are so pleased to have learned about Mare Winningham, who underwent a conversion to Conservative Judaism in 2003. (Yes, we’re a bit late to this story.) She didn’t do it because she was dating a Jew or engaged to one, or married to one. She did it because she thought it was the right thing for her to do.

Naomi Pfefferman, writing for the Jewish Journal (Los Angeles), explains how it happened:

It wasn’t until her children were nearly grown that Winningham found herself reading works by Jung, Joseph Campbell and others in an attempt to sort out nagging religious and psychological questions. In summer 2001, she visited a “creation of the world” exhibit at a science museum and made an announcement to herself: “I don’t think I believe in God.”

“But that night, I had the most remarkable dream, which told me, ‘If you’re going to reject something, at least find out what it is you are rejecting,’” she says. When a friend told her about the UJ’s Introduction to Judaism class, Winningham thought, “OK, I’ll begin by studying the Jews, since they started the one-God thing.”

While she intended to approach the class from a historical, intellectual perspective, the epiphanies began the day she stepped into Rabbi Neal Weinberg’s UJ class in November 2001.

“There I was, struggling with God, and one of the first things he said was, ‘Israel means struggle with God,’” she says…

Her observance has been “a real conversation starter,” especially among fellow Jews. Larry Miller, her co-star from CBS’ short-lived “Brotherhood of Poland, N.H.,” recalls his surprise upon learning that Winningham rushed home to bake challah one Friday afternoon.

“It was like having Grace Kelly say, ‘By the way, what time is Mincha?’” he says, referring to afternoon prayers.

From Haaretz comes the fascinating story of a humble hero, Charles Winters,  pardoned last month by President Bush. In 1948 Winters was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined $5,000 for violating the Neutrality Act of 1939 when he flew a bomber to Czechoslovakia for later delivery to Israel:

His son Jimmy, 44… learned about his father’s past only after his death, from an obituary in The Miami Herald in 1984 with the headline, “Charles Winters, 71, Aided Birth of Israel.”

The blue-and-white flowers sent to the funeral by the Israeli government were another clue.