Baruch Obama

As an Hebraic-American, it always gives me joy when someone points out how Jewish our President can be. Per Jeffrey Goldberg, an ardent Israel supporter who interviewed Obama on related issues last week:

When I handed him the Haggadah, President Obama, who famously stages his own seders at the White House (which is a very nice philo-Semitic thing to do, IMHO), spent a moment leafing through it and making approving noises. Then he said (as I told the Times): "Does this mean we can't use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?"

George W. Bush was, in his own way, a philo-Semite, but he never would have made such an M.O.T. kind of joke (see the end of this post if you're not sure what M.O.T. means). Once again, Barack Obama was riffing off the cosmic joke that he is somehow anti-Semitic, when in fact, as many people understand, he is the most Jewish president we've ever had (except for Rutherford B. Hayes). No president, not even Bill Clinton, has traveled so widely in Jewish circles, been taught by so many Jewish law professors, and had so many Jewish mentors, colleagues, and friends, and advisers as Barack Obama (though it is true that every so often he appoints a gentile to serve as White House chief of staff). And so no president, I'm guessing, would know that the Maxwell House Haggadah -- the flimsy, wine-stained, rote, anti-intellectual Haggadah you get when you buy a can of coffee at Shoprite) -- is the target, alternatively, of great derision and veneration among American Jews (at least, I'm told there are people who venerate it).

Let's hope he can bring some permanent shalom to the Middle East.

It's That Time Again

Yes:



Happy Holidays!

A'Courting We Shall Go

Per the top-notch blogging by Andrew Pincus on Talking Points Memo, on her first day responding to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan did just fine. She actually had a great line that I heard replayed on the radio, to which I laughed out loud:

...during her discussion of terrorism-related legal issues with Senator Graham, he began a series of questions about the failed Christmas Day bombing of the plane headed for Detroit by asking where Kagan was on Christmas Day. Kagan: "like all Jews I was probably at a Chinese restaurant."

I have to say I was prepared to hear her remark that like all Jews she was at the movies, but now that everyone of all religions seems to go to the movies on Christmas, her answer was funnier.

Meanwhile, after slamming deceased Supreme Court Justice and Civil Rights giant Thurgood Marshall yesterday, it appears the GOP Senators who did so can't name a single decision of his as an example of the "activism" they alleged.

Pesach It

Very little news on the White House Seder last night, just a single pic in brief news stories like this, plus word that Sasha answered The Four Questions and found the afikomen.

Meanwhile, California Republican Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina stepped in the gefilte fish:

California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R) sent a letter to her supporters yesterday in honor of the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which she described as a time where "we break bread and spend time with our families and friends."

Add this to the annals of unfortunate metaphors, since Passover is actually a time when most Jews abstain from eating any bread at all.

Her campaign's attempt to spin the faux pas:

We meant all bread, leavened and unleavened, and matzo is just unleavened bread so that's what we meant by that.

A case of matzoh and Manischewitz to Ms. Fiorina to cover her for the next seven days.

Next year right back in Silicon Valley, Carly.

D'jew eat?

Without getting into spoilers, I have the pleasure of recommending the new Coen Bros movie, A Serious Man. It's clearly their most personal film, and not just because it's about growing up Jewish in the the late 1960's in suburban Minneapolis, but because with God as a theme and the commensurate inability to discern his or her plan, it's the most clear utterance yet of the theme that runs through all their work: there is no justice.

What makes the Coens so unusual is their success with that theme. They still get to make the movies they want to make after all these years, and the box office clunkers here and there don't slow them down, usually because they bring their movies in on time and budget (thanks to their end-to-end storyboarding process). While virtually every other fictional film and about 99.9% of all Hollywood movies revolve around a morality where, no matter the second act obstacles, good is somehow rewarded and evil punished, in the Coen's world (or their take on our world) the only time that happens is by absurd accident, and usually followed by some ironic reversal, even if small.

What drew them to Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men besides the massive opportunity for suspense was undoubtedly this premise, leading to the part that seems to even disappoint some of the movie's fans, the ending with Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff recalling a dream that might as well be his fantasy of an ultimately just afterworld, but which ends with the Coen's leaving him hanging, i.e. him and the belief he clings to hung out to dry.

Likewise, in A Serious Man, for pre-tenure professor Larry Gopnick, no good deed goes unpunished. Taking their cue for centuries of internecine Jewish persecution, the Coens have even incorporated classic themes of Yiddish drama in s movie that I've already heard one non-Jew viewer refer to as "anti-Semitic," and it's easy to understand why. This film makes the Jewish satires of Woody Allen appear benign and playful. With freakish recall they paint perfectly cast pictures of the various characters reminiscent of those from my own youth in the Albany, NY Jewish community, giving the film a kind of ethnic specificity that often leads to successful crossover of an ethnic family comedy -- think Moonlighting or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The Coens, however, have little interest in cute or endearing. I mean, has there ever been a villain as terrifyingly unctuous as Sy Adelman in movie history?

A line often repeated in our faith when faced with personal trauma: "It could be worse." In A Serious Man, it always is, hilariously so. Larry is on the verge of losing his wife, his job, his home, his sanity. Larry's narrative counterpart is his pot-smoking son, preparing for his Bar Mitzvah while trying to avoid the big kid down the street to whom he owes $20 for weed. But it's Larry who awakes from the routine of his life as he's forced to look for answers, most specifically to the meaning of God's will. And one wonders by the end if God is, in fact, a serious being, or perhaps enjoys screwing around with us.

While The Book of Job from the Torah may be seen as the inspiration for the tale, this is also a classic tale of a modern (1967) day schlimazel, i.e. born loser. This is as distinct for a schlemiel, which is a bumbling or inept person. The best way to understand the relationship between the two terms:

A schlemiel is one who always spills his soup, schlimazel is the one on whom it always lands.

Don't worry, there's a schlemiel pouring it on Larry in the form of his crackpot genius brother, but I'll leave that discovery for you to see for yourself.

In the meantime, enjoy the trailer, which gives a sense of Larry's journey and quest for understanding, if not justice:



Apocalypse coming.

It's God's will.

My Peeps!

Always excited to see my people getting credit for doing good things:

Two Republican party chairmen from South Carolina, in trying to defend Sen. Jim DeMint's (R-SC) practice of not using earmarks, said DeMint "is watching our nation's pennies," just like "the Jews who are wealthy."

Edwin O. Merwin and James S. Ulmer, chairs of the Bamberg County Republican Party and the Orangeburg County Republican Party, respectively, wrote an op-ed in the Times and Democrat this Sunday.

"There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves," they wrote. "By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation's pennies and trying to preserve our country's wealth and our economy's viability to give all an opportunity to succeed."

Nothing like having my peeps compared to a rightwing moron from South Carolina by two other morons within the context of penny-pinching.

Thanks, goyim!

37 in 5770

L'shana tova tikatevu to all Nettertainment readers, regular, occasional or new. In case you're wondering, it's now the year 5770. I know, I expect to forget and keep writing 5769 on my checks for the next few weeks, too.

By the way, it may be 5770, but the U.S. is #37 in 2009:



Better luck this year.

Extraordinary Week...Again

Maybe more than usual:



Bottom lines. Calls to action:

Obama's speech was not a collection of empty rhetoric. Before the entire world, he put his signature to a bunch of checks that have deadlines for being cashed. In his talks with his aides in recent weeks, a consensus has emerged that November 2010 - the date of the next congressional elections - should be the target date for realizing the two-state solution. By then, we will know how much of an impression Obama's speech made on Iran's president. Who knows: Perhaps Iranian voters will be convinced that they have before them a U.S. president who is genuinely interested in reconciliation with Islam, and will use their upcoming election to replace their current president with a more conciliatory one. By then, we will also know whom Benjamin Netanyahu is more afraid of - the U.S. president or the chairman of the Yesha Council of settlements, Benny Begin or Tzipi Livni.

Checks to be cashed.

Holocaust

This afternoon I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which documents the Nazi genocide of the European Jewish population, along with some important documentation of the same treatment of homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped, some Slavic peoples (Russian, Polish), Roma (gypsies), Jenovah's Witnesses, Communists and other political dissidents.

The experience is, I believe for almost all who visit, a very emotional one, as it certainly was for me. The self-guided tour starts on the fourth floor and winds down to the first, in a building designed to replicate the look and feel of the concentration camp crematoriums. It begins with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 (the party never received more than roughly 1/3 of the German electorate vote), with anti-Jewish action happening extremely quickly, the new Chancellor and his party consolidating power in "shock doctrine" fashion must more quickly than anyone imagined. The feeling moving through the fourth floor is somewhat claustrophobic, as the exhibits are mounted facing each other across a relatively narrow hall.

Without going into great detail, the generally feeling welling up inside of me was one of mounting, righteous anger, but as the history progresses down a floor and into the ghettoizing, internment, enslavement, and both mass and mechanized execution of innocent Jewish men, women and children, the anger gives way to horror. The museum wisely puts walls between the visitors and the most disturbing video exhibits so that only adults can look over them -- nightmarish Nazi "medical" experiments and the most graphic concentration camp liberation footage -- but you pass chillingly through a cattle car and Auschwitz barracks along the way.

The stuff that get my tear ducts going is always when, in the face of personal danger, someone who might just as easily look the other way or participate in the evil reaches out to help, and the latter portion of the museum devoted to such heroes as an oppositional Protestant church in the South of France that saved kids, the great people of Denmark who hid Jews in coastal towns and smuggled them to Sweden, the great but doomed Raoul Wallenberg, the brave Sophie and brother Hans Scholl, among a documented (and still added to) list of those who worked against the Nazi genocide, it had the same effect on me.

By the time we get to the liberation and Nuremberg Trials it's all a bit late, not quite enough relief and certainly not enough justice, considering all the declined trials and commuted sentences thanks to both German and American governmental bureaus. A section near the end on the child victims serves as a reminder that the young and old (and pregnant) were taken away and killed right off the cattle cars at most camps. Pure hell on earth.

As a Jew I get into a bit of mental role-playing whenever delving into Holocaust history, imagining if I would have grabbed my family and left at the first sign of trouble, or the second, of the tenth. The problem is that as the 1930's progressed, no matter your means, there was less and less opportunity to go anywhere. You had to pay increasing fees to the Nazi government to get out, you had less and less means as your business was restricted and then confiscated, and worst of all you had a dwindling (to zero) number of places to go. A big shame in our U.S. history is that our State Department was Anti-Semitic -- we didn't even allow our designated quota of Europeans into the country during some of these years. The "ship of fools" boat from Germany tried many ports including Havana and Miami, only to be turned back (more horror). And you would have needed to get far away, as Hitler took over the neighboring countries, none being safe.

My conclusion upon leaving this essential museum is two-fold.

For one, I believe America has taken a huge step towards avoiding a similar situation here with the election of Barack Obama as President. It is by no means a guarantee of backsliding, especially if we get hit with the kind of economic depression that powered such a development of inherent racism in Germany at the Nazi takeover, but it certainly speaks greatly of our nation's values as enshrined in our Constitution, especially after an unsettling consolidation of single party power from which we've just emerged.

The other notion is that we need more museums like this, for other holocausts, like the Turkish genocide against Armenians that Hitler uses to justify his belief that the world would ignore and forget whatever Germany did to the Jews, like the Serbian genocidal program of the 1990's, and the current genocide in Sudan.

The one that's still going on, as I write this.

McSinner

There's that commandment prohibiting bearing false witness against your neighbor. For which John McCain, Sarah Palin and now Cindy McCain should all beg forgiveness from their deity, which would be today if they shared the same faith as me.

Happy Yom Kippur.

Joe Biden is telling them to repent. Campbell Brown is honestly exposing the racism of their tactics. The undecided voters are clearly telling them not to do it.

But they're stirring up their base. That's the "energy" Gov. Palin injects into the race, similarly corrupt Spiro Agnew-style. The base that just smashed windows at an Obama headquarters in Denver.

To paraphrase John McCain the night Obama cinched the nomination, "Now that's a Kristallnacht we can believe in!"

Think I'm exagerating? Then take a look at the base their inciting, the mob that McCain so desperately hired Palin to motivate, and leave a light on while you sleep tonight:



The McCain campaign says it has a newsmaker to surprise us with tomorrow morning. What new lie, smear or spurious guilt-by-association are they going to distract with this time? And distract they must -- the first official Alaska Troopergate report comes out on Friday. Oh, and McCain let slip that he's made us all prisoners (of his campaign, of his dirtiness, of his bucket list):



I just love the look on Palin's face when he calls us all prisoners. She's a mean, narcissistic, shallow but insatiably ambitious woman and every few days she thinks they might win the election, but the rest of the time knows she just has to make it alive to hopscotch over McCain's electoral corpse to a lucrative life on the Ultra-Right Tour and maybe a run at the GOP nomination in 2012, convictions-depending.

McCain spent the debate lying (repent!) about an overpriced "overhead projector" (remember those, Boomers?) that turns out to have been a planetarium projector, and making up a new late-inning economic ploy, lurching like both he and Hillary Clinton did to the desperation-reeking "gas tax holiday" back in the Primaries. Hey, as I remember, it didn't work for her (strategy, John, or haven't you learned the difference from tactics?) and this mortgage-buying jamboree tries to top the greased pander pole. Please give me a news cycle, please! pleads the wicked McCain, even as he scrambles his plan overnight and still manages to alienate fiscal Republicans.

Lurch!

So while McCain lurches from desperation rock to rock on the short road to Hades, Obama's countering with her very moving and relateable life story, like when he spoke of his mother's battle with the health insurance industry while dying of cancer, an American story.

Oh, and calling McCain out plainly as a coward for not saying his evil shit to his face Tuesday night.

Atone, McCoward. Lose with dignity. You know, put your country, not you sinning ambition, first.