This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

“One has a harder time understanding what the cease-fire brings to Israel. Certainly the interruption of rockets landing on Sederot and other nearby towns is not to be minimized. But the Arabic press is full of commentary to the effect that the cease-fire is intended only as a period of calm (a tactical tahdiya until Hamas is ready to begin the next round of terror and violence). Plainly, having acknowledged the efficacy of Hamas’s rocket-launching strategy, Israel will have to confront it again, but at what is sure to be a far higher cost.” – Our editorial on the latest Israel-Hamas cease-fire.

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“Franco felt no personal affinity for either Hitler or Mussolini. Franco was a devout Catholic. Hitler despised Christianity and was in thrall to pagan Teutonic religions, while Mussolini was an atheist. Franco accepted their aid only because no one else would help him – much the way Israel accepted arms from the Soviet bloc during its War of Independence because the United States and the Western European democracies had imposed a strict arms embargo.” – Aharon Lapid on Franco and the Jews

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“We are the generation that was destined to witness the most cataclysmic catastrophe to befall our people – the decimation of European Jewry, the crown and glory of our nation. We are the generation that has been destined to witness our greatest Torah institutions consumed in flames, our most esteemed Torah scholars and rabbis slaughtered, and over a million of our little ones – “Tinokos Shel Beis Rabban” – precious little children, students of Torah tortured and their lives snuffed out.” – Rebbetzin Jungreis final column on the “Working Boy Shidduch Problem”.
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“On the other hand, there are perpetrators who do not display or possess these characteristics. He may enter treatment only to use it as an excuse or a cover, frequently missing sessions or disrupting group meetings. He may actively resist treatment, oppose demands for accountability, and not be open and truthful. He may refuse to actively participate in certain specialized evaluations. And worst of all, he may continue to molest children while he is in treatment. These child molesters, perpetrators, predators are dangerous and must be stopped and our communities protected by any means.” – David Mandel reminds us of the importance of protecting our children
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“They sat side by side in the sanctuary of the Young Israel Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and listened to the rabbi’s New Year sermon. Stanley had resigned his chair in the Philharmonic because of the many Saturday performances, but he had little time for regrets now. He spent every day studying with the young rabbi to learn to read the portion for his bar mitzvah – the bar mitzvah that he never had. “Only 50 years late,” he thought wryly.” - Rabbi Hanoch Teller and the conclusion of Return of the Fiddler

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Plus Book Reviews, Bearers of Good Tidings, and Jews of Ritual

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands, calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344 or by clicking here): A Dating Primer, Grape Expectations, and the final Points for Education Coupon

A Visit to Nixonland

Rick Perlstein, an unabashed man of the left, first attracted wide notice seven years ago with the release of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, his engagingly written and fair-minded study of the rise of the American conservative movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Last month brought the much-awaited publication of the second volume of Perlstein’s projected trilogy on American conservatism. Nixonland (Scribner), as should be obvious from the title, focuses on American politics from the mid-1960’s to the early 1970’s, a time and an era dominated by Richard Nixon.

I recently asked Perlstein about the book and his perceptions of Nixon.

Monitor: Were you more sympathetic to Nixon or less so after writing the book?

Perlstein: Here I have to exercise the intellectual’s classic cop-out and say: both. We all know about Nixon’s reputation for iniquity. I kept finding myself yet more astonished at how bottomless this quality in him truly was. The example I keep coming back to is the revelation by Leonard Garment, in his 1997 memoir Crazy Rhythm, that as early as 1966 Nixon didn’t believe the Vietnam War could be won militarily – even as, for the next seven years, he ruthlessly savaged any political opponent who dared say the same thing, even as 50,000 more American soldiers went to their deaths for this war he thought couldn’t be won.

But on the other hand, there was rarely a week that went by when I didn’t discover some hidden store of nobility in the man – in his courage, coolness under pressure, and especially, his refusal to back down under adversity.

My favorite example is his famous visit [as vice president] to Peru in 1958. He was set upon by a mob chanting calls for his death. What did he do? He waded into the mob, and managed to talk them down! Later on the same trip, the mob wielded stones, and attacked his limousine. Secret Service agents were ready to fire, but Nixon ordered them to holster their weapons, realizing that shots would only make the chaos worse.

As I point out in the book, that’s “the kind of presence of mind for which battlefield commanders win medals.” Not a bad quality for a commander-in-chief – until, that is, that same quality was turned to iniquity, as it so often was.

A few reviewers, while praising the book, were surprised that you neglected to look at the growth of conservatism as an intellectual force in the 1960’s.

It wasn’t intentional. The conservative movement, both intellectually and politically, formed the core of my first book. It drops out of the story in Nixonland. That’s because Nixon was such a commanding presence in the Republican Party – much more a classic “great man” than Goldwater ever was – that he sucked the oxygen out of any other contender for its institutional control, whether conservative, liberal, or whatever.

I treat conservative Republicans, in the book, as Nixon did – just another constituency to be managed, neutralized, and bent to his will. They’ll be back, though, in volume III, which will focus on the rise of Ronald Reagan.

How do you respond to reviewers who take issue with your thesis that the divisions of the late 1960’s are still a salient fact of life in America some 40 years later?

It's a misunderstanding. Which is to say, it's my own fault: it's the author's responsibility to make himself understood, and I didn't do a good job making myself understood in the very short conclusion in which I make the claim that Nixonland "has not ended yet." I certainly don't mean the violence of the chaos dividing society now is as great as was the case in the 1960's; the opposite holds true, in fact.

I mean that the violence and chaos then were so great -- and so skillfully manipulated by Richard Nixon in devising his core electoral appeal -- that they forged the language we still use to understand our own moment, even as those words no longer describe the reality on the ground. It has given Republican politics an ethereal, ghostly quality, as if Woodstock and Vietnam were the day before yesterday, and indeed, John McCain even ran a commercial contrasting Hillary Clinton's support of a Woodstock museum with his own wartime service in Vietnam!

Given what you know of Nixon and his times, had he won the presidency in 1960, would he have governed differently? Would he have been a better match for a relatively more placid and less jaded country, or, because character is destiny, would his demons eventually have emerged and destroyed his presidency?

Nixon ran a radically different campaign in 1960 than he did in 1968: it was middle-of-the-road and accommodationalist, with none of the law-and-order hullabaloo of 1968. If anything, he was derivative of Senator Kennedy, who outflanked Nixon to the right on foreign policy. The notion that he would have better been able to master his demons in, if you will, a less demonic time is certainly a notion I'd entertain. But as a historian, I try to stay alive to the radical complexity and contingency, so I hate counterfactuals.

As a historian who’s been praised across the spectrum for giving a fair hearing to those whose politics differ from your own, would you care to speak to the double standard at play in the way Nixon and John Kennedy have been portrayed by most historians? Most Americans can recite Nixon’s lies, quirks and malfeasances backward and forward, but Kennedy’s derelictions and failures are usually glossed over, rationalized, placed “in context,” etc.

I think forty-five years after the gauzy sentimentalities of "Camelot," have no problem reciting Kennedy's derelictions, be they sexual, tactical, or geostrategic. But I'd have to say his malfeasances, to estimate it quantitatively, are perhaps a tenth as serious as Nixon's, all told. It would be succumbing to a dangerous moral relativism to equate them.

As a man of the left, has your close study of the conservative movement - - more directly with the Goldwater book and now as sort of cultural backdrop to the Nixon book – changed your view of conservative ideas and politics? If so, how?

I see today's Republican Party, even though led by conservatives definitely ideologically to the right of Nixon, as much more the heir of Watergate than of Goldwater. It's fascinating to see how many of Nixon's unsavory henchmen—Fred Malek, who gladly counted up the number of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics; Kenneth Rietz, who was in charge of passing on stolen documents from Edmund Muskie's 1972 campaign to the White House; Roger Stone, one of the Nixon campaign's notorious [operatives] went on to thrive in Republican politics up to the present. Malek is John McCain's finance co-chair; Rietz was fired from the RNC after his name came up in the Watergate hearings, then was hired by Ronald Regan in 1976 to run his presidential campaign in California, and went on to become a key advisor to Fred Thompson's presidential run last year; Stone, of course, remains a valued Republican jack-of-all-trades consultant.

Even more fascinating to me was the way Nixon, when he needed someone to lie and cheat for him, would often go first to a veteran of the conservative movement, because they were more likely to sympathize with his ends-justifies-the-means morality. It's a puzzlement conservatives need to confront, and haven't. Once, when I outlined these connections, a leading conservative activist and author going back to the early 1960s, M. Stanton Evans, proudly proclaimed, "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate!"

What do you make of Nixon’s strong support of Israel – James Rosen in his new biography of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell notes that “Nixon may have been the first presidential candidate [in 1968] to call for the U.S. to guarantee Israeli military superiority” – and his appointment of several key Jewish advisers, given what we know of his anti-Semitic feelings?

Nixon’s presidency was driven, of course, by an abiding obsession with foreign policy – by the dream of re-ordering the world into a more stable system of alliances that transcended the simple Cold War categories of good and evil. He was very unsentimental about this; to take one particularly disturbing example, he decided to look the other way in 1971 as Pakistan’s dictator General Yahya Khan perpetrated a genocide in Bangladesh, because Kahn was Nixon’s crucial go-between with China. I’m certain he saw Israel as just another chess piece in this grand geo-strategic game.

Noch A Mall

As I emerged from the Modiin Central train station this past Tuesday evening, my eyes focused on the glittering fireworks display over the new Azrieli Mall, overrun with curious youngsters waiting to invade the 80 plus stores in the massive complex.

For the past six months, residents of Modiin were promised that the $100 million dollar mall-movie-apartment-office complex would open "on time." For the average Modiin resident who purchased an apartment or home, an "on time" statement from the builder meant at least a six month to one year delay. Canadian-Israeli building mogul David Azrieli was the only mall magnate who believed in investing in the so-called "city of the future." While he is to be commended for creating a modern central city hub in this fast-growing region, one wonders how long it will take for him to turn a profit on his investment or if the rushed construction will hold up over the long haul.

The mall was literally built with cheap labor from nearby Palestinian villages and in a "fire drill" manner. No doubt there will be many " do overs" -- from plumbing, wiring & sidewalk bricking -- once the first rain falls in September/October. The work was so rushed that only 60% of the malls stores were ready for the Grand Opening. The food court, coffee shop and restaurant owners were told point blank by Modiin's Chief Rabbi, David Lau, that no one would be issued a kashrut certificate if they intended to be open on Shabbat. The mall is located in a quiet neighborhood, across from a park that is packed with religiously observant families on Saturday afternoon. There were strong indications that almost all of the stores would actually be closed on Shabbat.

On a positive note, Modiin's Azrieli Mall/Israel Railways complex represents the country's first TIMES SQUARE like shopping-transportation venue, where residents no longer have to schlep to Tel Aviv, Rishon Lezion or Jerusalem by car, in order to enjoy first-rate shopping, entertainment and even a "train-to-the-plane" (the Modiin train goes direct to Ben-Gurion Airport in less than 25 minutes)!

Now if they would only build a Madison Square Garden like arena on an adjacent piece of land, Modiin's fast-growing North American immigrant population would truly believe that they
could have their cake and eat it too.

Ludicrously Liable

Here’s the story: In 2004 an 18 year-old high school senior traveled to Hawaii as part of a cheerleading event. The day after they arrive she is found dead, having plunged from the balcony of a room that was not hers. She was legally drunk at the time of her death. No one was ever charged with a crime. However, the mother of another girl who was acting as a chaperone of sorts was just recently found liable in the amount of $690,000.

I think this is ludicrous. The girl was a legal adult – 18. She was drinking – against the law. She fell off the balcony from a room not her own – it had been occupied by two men – no need to say more.

How is this mother liable for this person’s actions? And what does it say to other parents who maybe considering chaperoning a trip? Would it affect your decision? I know it would make me think twice.

Pat's Back

Pat Buchanan is back in the news with the release of his new book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, which argues that World War II, with all its death and destruction, was ultimately the fault of the Allies, particularly Winston Churchill. When considering Buchanan’s thesis, it’s important to recall his previous statements and writings.

Buchanan’s strange concern for former Nazis (Alan A. Ryan, Jr., a former Justice Department prosecutor, once characterized Buchanan as “the spokesman for Nazi war criminals in America”) is coupled with a disdain for Holocaust survivors, whom he’s described as suffering from “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.”

A constant critic of the late Kurt Waldheim during the latter’s tenure as UN secretary general, Buchanan suddenly became supportive when the nature of Waldheim’s wartime activities was made public. The ostracism of Waldheim by the U.S. and other countries, wrote Buchanan, had to it “an aspect of moral bullying and the singular stench of selective indignation.”

Buchanan actively lobbied then-Attorney General Edwin Meese on behalf of Karl Linnas, who had headed a Nazi concentration camp in Estonia (Meese ignored Buchanan’s entreaties and Linnas was deported to the Soviet Union), and made his unhappiness known when the U.S. apologized to France for having sheltered the “Butcher of Lyons,” Klaus Barbie. (“To what end,” Buchanan asked rhetorically in a column on the Barbie matter, “all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime...”)

Buchanan, who in his autobiography describes being brought up in a milieu of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism by a father whose “sympathies had been with the isolationists, with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee,” seems always to be spoiling for a religious war, particularly when he feels that his church has been slighted or trumped by Jews or Jewish interests.

His deep-seated resentments are perhaps best summed up in his complaint about what he calls “the caustic, cutting cracks about my church and my popes from both Israel and its amen corner in the United States.”

The controversy that erupted in the late 1980’s over the desire of some Carmelite nuns to erect a permanent convent at Auschwitz was made to order for Buchanan. Upset with conciliatory statements made by the late Cardinal John O’Connor and other church leaders, he sneered: “If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken.

“When Cardinal O’Connor of New York ... declares this ‘is not a fight between Catholics and Jews,’ he speaks for himself. Be not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith.”

Although he likes to say that he was at one time an “uncritical apologist for Israel,” Buchanan was already on record as early as the mid-1970’s imploring Congress not to listen “to the counsel of the Jewish lobby” and criticizing legislation designed to counter the Arab boycott of Israel.

In 1982, Buchanan referred to the mass killing of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as the “Rosh Hashanah massacre,” and opined that “the Israeli army is looking toward a blackening of its name to rival what happened to the French army in the Dreyfus Affair.”

And so Buchanan already had a history when he gained notoriety, shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, by describing the U.S. Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory” and claiming that “There are only two groups that are beating the drums...for war in the Middle East: the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

As international-affairs scholar Joshua Muravchik wrote some years ago in Commentary, Buchanan “is hostile to Israel....sprinkles his columns with taunting remarks about things Jewish...rallies to the defense of Nazi war criminals, not only those who protest their innocence but also those who confess their guilt ... [and] implies that the generally accepted interpretation of the Holocaust might be a serious exaggeration.”

When confronted with a man who does all these things, suggested Muravchik, a fair conclusion would be that his actions are consistent with the succinct definition of anti-Semitism – “an embedded hatred of Jewish people, manifest in writing and conduct” – given, in a 1990 column, by none other than Patrick J. Buchanan himself.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

“This side of the Wall swears in the recruits of the most humane army that has ever existed in the history of conflict – the only army that takes a human rights lawyer into battle against its enemies. Perhaps more important, this side of the Wall is home to citizens whose compassion and humanity are second to none in the world. A people who have not known a day free of terrorism in the 60 years since their state was formed and yet are daily healing the ailments of their enemies.” – From an essay about Jerusalem by Zlami Unsdorfer
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“I was raised on milk and honey and grew up humming strains from “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” and “HaKotel.” My love for the Holy Land was heightened by my two years at seminary in Israel. That incredible experience preceded the first Intifada by a year, when walking the streets of the Arab shuk unaccompanied was imprudent rather than perilous. I remember taking the Egged bus through Arab villages in the Shomron. I marveled at the blue and green Arab doorposts, which I viewed clearly through plain glass windows. The fruit vendors in Jericho laid out their lush wares under palm trees, and we Jews were looked upon strictly as potential consumers through the eyes of hopeful Arab merchants. “ – Sara Lehmann laments a generation that is gone.
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“Where are the Jewish Federations? They are allegedly the central community charity chests in every local community. There is not one Jewish Federation in the United Sates that has stated in its written policy, and backed it up with an enormous financial commitment, that every local constituent community will ensure that every Jewish child can attend a Jewish day school at no charge regardless of their religious affiliation or family financial condition. Why?” – An op-ed on the lack of funding for education by George D. Hanus
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“Therefore one must recommend to every current and former Israeli soldier: if you are about to get entangled in some matter and fear you will need assistance, better you should remove your ranks, badges and ornaments and sell them to the highest bidder. With the money you receive, buy yourself a beautiful shtreimel and kapota and become a member of the chassidic community. The chassidim have proved themselves to be faithful to the causes of their Jewish brethren, wherever they might be.” – Mordechai Tzivin on the importance of pidyon shivuyim
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“But despite the problems from the Arabs, the media, the Israeli and international left, and many Israeli politicians, Hebron’s Jewish community still exists. Not only does it exist. It thrives. It grows and expands. My wife and I have two daughters and seven grandchildren living in Hebron, with a son and his family a few miles away in the southern Hebron Hills community of Beit Haggai. Many of Hebron’s children have stayed, wanting to bring up their children in the shadow of Abraham and Sarah, just as they grew up. What could be more heartening and encouraging than to see “the younger generation” following in the footsteps of their parents, both their immediate parents and their ‘grandma and grandpa,’ the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, King David, and all the other illustrious residents Hebron has been home to. How could one not celebrate these fantastic facts?!” – David Wilder - Hebron 2008
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Plus Chasing Tzedakah, Chabad Teen, and Christian Pop Culture

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands, calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344 or by clicking here): Life Changing Experiences in Israel, Not Barack or Barak, and Becoming a Father.

Happy Browsing!

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

“The newly ordained Methodist clergyman from Danville, Virginia, and his wife, a German native and daughter of a Lutheran minister, were overcome by a loathing for their surroundings, a recognition that they stepped daily on ground once stained with the blood of innocents slain solely for reason of their Jewishness. With much determination and little commotion, the couple mounted a private research campaign that exposed inconsistencies in the logic of their religion’s teachings and led them to a gradual awareness that Torah Judaism made sense in every sense – spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.” – Rachel Weiss reminds us of the beauty and sweetness of yiddishkeit.
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“To be sure, Rev. Hagee’s was an odd formulation that deviated from even those Jewish religious authorities who have argued that the Holocaust perforce has to be understood in terms of God’s Divine Plan for His chosen people and religious notions of free will, sin and punishment. Yet viewing John Hagee as anti-Semitic is a great stretch and the successful effort to so depict him seems to us a function of the electrified partisan political atmosphere. Plainly, it is part of an effort to saddle Sen. McCain with a Rev. Wright-like albatross of his own and to intimate that Rev. Hagee was somehow blaming the Holocaust on its victims.”- From our lead editorial
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“To that end, Obama is already reimagining himself as a Zionist thanks to a Jewish sixth-grade camp counselor and speaking of his love for the novels of Leon Uris and Philip Roth. While it’s safe to assume that Obama won’t be giving any readings of Uris’s The Haj, a book that captures with unnerving accuracy the psychological fault lines of Arab culture, he is displaying a talent more worthy of the literary works of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser – the gift of the true con artist, an ability to recreate himself into what people most want to see.” - Daniel Greenfield on the remaking of Barack Obama
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These deals are never simple. This one is even more complex. When the sides refuse to negotiate directly, when conversations are conducted through third parties, the risk of miscommunication is obvious. In this type of sensitive negotiation the possibility for misunderstanding and the probability of misinterpretation is great. – Michah Halpern explains that 1+1 doesn’t always = 2.
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“As the days passed, the situation became more and more desperate. The refugees were infested with lice, and were forced to sell their last meager possessions for food. They were stuck, and in danger of being shipped to Siberia. My mother decided to take action. And here starts her courageous story”. – Lessons in Emunah
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“Although the raid accomplished little with respect to tactical gains—it didn’t impact Japanese production nor did it stem the Japanese military onslaught—it did achieve a major psychological victory. The American public’s morale was uplifted. The United States’ military had actually accomplished something against the Japanese. The Japanese morale was weakened because the Japanese people had been guaranteed that their home islands were safe from American retaliation. But the bombs that fell on April 18 proved that guarantee invalid.” – Rabbi David Hertzberg with Parsha Perspectives
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Plus Phyllis Chesler, Truth from the land of Israel and Rebbetzin Jungreis

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands, calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344 or by clicking here): Important ads from Ohr Naava, Informed Sources and our monthly Crossworld Puzzle.

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Hillary's answer to Rev Wright

The whole world is talking about the "theological" crackpots with whom Barack Obama has long hung out. The worst of them, the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright, is a vulgar Afrofascist, arguable worse than the Rev Al. As it turns out, Wright went to the same high school as me, an academic magnet school in Philadelphia that admitted lots of qualified black students long before "affirmative action apartheid" dumbed down standards. Since Wright had such a nice generous start in life from Central High School, where he no doubt was treated wonderfully and with respect by the 70% of the student body that was Jewish, you might have expected better from him.

And while Rev Wright is foaming at the mouth against Dem Joos and America, it is worth keeping in mind for balance that Hillary Clinton also has a long track record of hanging about with lunatic pseudo-theologians. We recall how in the first Clinton Administration, Hillary chose as her guru the pseudo-rabbi Michael Lerner, the Sixties fossilized pro-LSD editor of Tikkun Magazine and proponent of the silly "Politics of Meaning" form of pseudo-religion, in which all religion is transformed into pursuit of the political fads of the Left. Lerner of course is not a rabbi, and was never ordained by any terrestrial rabbinic seminary.

Would a President Hillary invite Mikey Lerner over to the Oval Office to blow dope with her?