http://www.jweekly.com en Copyright 2010 2010-03-18T21:25:30+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41367/china-gets-kosher-milk-we-all-laugh-at-first http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41367/china-gets-kosher-milk-we-all-laugh-at-first#When:19:19:11Z by rachel leibold | Drink up, my droogs. China is known for a lot of things: Pandas. Mao. Jackie Chan. That totally-awesome-slash-mildly-frightening drumming display at the Beijing Olympics. What China is not known for is Jews. Actually, that's not entirely true - during the Holocaust, many Jews fled Europe for China (the term "Shanghailanders" may ring a bell), and for centuries Kaifeng (the ancient capital of China) was the home to a small but thriving Jewish community. But the Kaifeng Jews eventually assimilated and forgot their heritage, and most Shanghailanders ended up immigrating elsewhere (like the Bay Area) after the war.Today there are around 10,000 Jews in the People's Republic. So let's be honest. In a country of 1.3 billion people, 10,000 of anything is, well, nothing. In fact, the percentage of China's population that is Jewish is so infinitesimal that I don't even have a calculator that will tell me what it is.Which is why I was so surprised when I saw a story on JTA about kosher milk coming to the PRC. A dairy in Beijing is now distributing the milk, which is both cholov Yisroel (the strict kosher standard for dairy products) and organic.At first glance, this story seems pretty friggin' ridiculous. In a country of 1.29999 billion people who aren't Jewish and 10,000 who are, establishing a kosher dairy industry seems a little bit, um, stupid? I mean, of those 10,000 Jews, how many probably keep kosher? Sure, there are 10 Chabad Houses in China whose inhabitants need certified milk, but that still doesn't seem like enough to necessitate a full-on kosher dairy industry.But then I remembered: melamine. In 2008, batches of melamine-tainted baby formula sickened more than 300,000 Chinese babies, and some even died. JTA reports that in the wake of that incident, "public distrust of the dairy industry remains strong."Studies of who is buying kosher food in the U.S. has revealed that in fact, a very significant number - up to 80 percent, according to some reports - of people who buy kosher products aren't doing it for religious reasons. They're doing it because they feel that kosher food is healthier, thanks to the strict supervision process. This has been a boon to companies like Manischewitz and Streit's, which might otherwise have tanked thanks to the dwindling number of Jews keeping kosher.So there's actually a very good likelihood that kosher milk will really take off in China, not just with Jews.Perhaps this move, while seemingly a bit odd on the outside, is actually genius. Even if only 5 percent of China's population could be convinced that kosher is better, that's still 65 million people - think the entire population of France.So to the person who thought this up, I raise my glass (of milk) to you. May the New Year see you prosper. 恭喜发财! blogs 2010-02-12T19:19:11+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41235/my-encounter-with-people-who-hold-signs-that-read-god-hates-jews http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41235/my-encounter-with-people-who-hold-signs-that-read-god-hates-jews#When:19:04:38Z by stacey palevsky | Last week, a crowd gathered outside of my office building to gawk and shout at -- and be shocked by -- the posse of Midwesterners holding signs that said "God hates fags" and "Jews killed Jesus." Ah, Westboro Baptist Church. These are the people from Fred Phelps' Topeka, Kan. church who think they're doing God's work by protesting at soldiers' funerals and shouting hate speech about gays, Jews, blacks — anyone who doesn't look like they grew up on a white bread shelf at a Fareway market. They're so crazy but they think they're totally sane, and this makes them appear even more crazy! They really believe that the hateful words they shout at crowds and print on signs are words divined from God. (Even though they're classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.) Anyway, I decided to approach one of the young women protesting in front of our offices last week. She (I later found out it was the church founder's granddaughter Megan) told me they all work full-time jobs "so that we can do this around the country." While in the Bay Area, they visited day schools, synagogues, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and Stanford Hillel. It's almost laughable that they've dedicated so much time and money to traveling around the country holding such inflammatory signs that insult so many Americans and human brings in general. In speaking with Megan, I was surprised by how normal she appears, until you listen closely to what she's saying and realize she's out of her head. Oh my. What. Are. They. Thinking. blogs 2010-02-04T19:04:38+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41147/maori-or-israeli-same-diff-says-one-kiwi http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41147/maori-or-israeli-same-diff-says-one-kiwi#When:00:02:46Z by rachel leibold | The New Zealand Herald (and about a bazillion other news orgs) reports that New Zealand tour operator Discovery Heritage Group has been banned from the port of Tauranga, in the North Island's Bay of Plenty region, for hiring Israelis and Europeans to pose as Maori (New Zealand's indigenous Polynesian population) and take photos and perform for tourists. To make matters worse, Terina Puriri, the (Maori) director of Discovery Heritage Group, was quoted as saying that she had to do it because "some of our Maori are too lazy to get out of bed." The group has been banned from the port, which Ms. Puriri blamed on Tauranga not "[wanting] culture on their port."  Ooookay… In any event, at least the Israelis tried hard to act Maori - wearing Maori dress, learning Maori customs and some of the language (Te Reo), and performing haka (the traditional Maori dance best known to the rest of the world as the beginning to any All Blacks rugby match). blogs 2010-01-27T00:02:46+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/40879/auschwitz-death-camp-sign-stolen http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/40879/auschwitz-death-camp-sign-stolen#When:16:47:28Z by emily savage | Auschwitz death camp sign stolen: BBC News is reporting that The infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland has been stolen. Click here for full story.   * UPDATE: The Jewish Daily Forward reports the sign has been recovered. blogs 2009-12-18T16:47:28+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/40606/whats-east-of-siberia-the-jewish-autonomous-region-of-course http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/40606/whats-east-of-siberia-the-jewish-autonomous-region-of-course#When:19:42:41Z by stacey palevsky | I had no idea Jews ever lived east of Siberia (okay, actually, I had no idea anyone lived east of Siberia given that the term has an end-of-the-earth-like connotation). I began reading about the history of this part of the world, known as the Jewish Autonomous Region, in a Slate Dispatches article published this week. This Far East town not too far from the China border is called Birobidzhan, and though it has a Chabad and a synagogue and a Jewish Museum, there are very few Jews living a religious life today. The reporter, Masha Gessen, will be reporting from Birobidzhan all week, and her writing is clever, blunt and detailed. The history of the place is something like this: After Russian Jews endured starvation and high unemployment in western Russia, not to mention an effective propoganda campaign, 41,000 Soviet Jews relocated to Birobidzhan in the late 1920s and '30s. By 1938, 28,000 had fled due to the unbearable conditions:harsh winters, swamply land and nonexistant roads or communication infrastructure. Gessen writes that settlers trickled in — never more than 10,000 per year — and many turned back within months of arriving. Two waves of purges in 1937 and 1949 decimated the Jewish population there. Today, "the Jewish Autonomous Region retains its ethnic identity today (it never had much of a religious character), but, bizarrely, a search for Jewish history in Birobidzhan is much like an attempt to locate Jewish history in a European city: a tour of the invisible," Gessen writes. To read more about this little-known Jewish corner of the world, click here. View Larger Map blogs 2009-11-24T19:42:41+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39953/jerusalemites-opine-about-obama http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39953/jerusalemites-opine-about-obama#When:23:31:05Z by stacey palevsky | While reading Jewschool today, I happened upon two very interesting/compelling videos in which journalists interivew citizens of Jerusalem about their thoughts on President Obama and the settlements. Most don't like the former, but like the latter. They're particularly interesting now, as Obama is getting ready to host Israeli and Palestinian leaders for a meeting to jumpstart peace talks. The first video is more recent: The second one is from the summer. Please note that in the last minute of this video, there are a few expletives, so stop the video if you do not want to hear them. blogs 2009-09-23T23:31:05+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39805/malcolm-gladwells-outliers-poignant-social-science-or-racist-pseudoscience http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39805/malcolm-gladwells-outliers-poignant-social-science-or-racist-pseudoscience#When:21:36:19Z by samuel raphael franco | After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I found his theories on culture, race, and class to be equally fascinating and demoralizing. In Gladwell’s latest book, he details a number of cases of financially or intellectually successful individuals such as Bill Gates, Joe Flom, the Beatles, and Andrew Carnegie. The author looks at their success outside of what they did as individuals, and instead focuses his analysis on factor’s beyond their control: the time they were born, their cultural backgrounds, and occasions of sheer luck.   Gladwell is a brilliant author. His analysis is precise, his prose is strikingly efficient, and at many points the reader is left thinking that Gladwell is an all-knowing modern day prophet, able to provide a thorough cultural and analytical analysis of any major trend. His first two books: Blink and the Tipping Point, were also well endowed in this avenue.   He begins the book with a brilliant concept, the 10,000-hour rule. The rule states that 10,000 hours of labor are a necessary precondition for the mastery of a trade, craft, or discipline. He cites the Beatles run of all night gigs at a club in Hamburg as essential to forming a tight band and learning harmony, Bill Gates’ training in a high school computer club, and larger amounts of ice time for the more skilled Canadian Junior hockey players as examples.   However, this 10,000-hour rule is the only human controlled element of the equation to success, but the ability to achieve 10,000 hours is often determined by forces outside of an individual’s control. Hockey Players with a birthday closer to the Jan 1, age group cut off are more likely to succeed and get extra practice time because they are already physically mature, which leads to teams with 90% of their players born on before April. Bill Gates became a computer Genius, and made billions, because he was one of the only teenagers in America who attended a high school with a computer club, where he could put in these thousand hours. But all this hard work is glossed over, there is little human control in Gladwell’s formula for success, and skills such as good study habits and effective communication are largely ignored.   Gladwell’s definition of success was problematic for my tastes, as a non-Billionaire. I found it to be reductive, and morally bankrupt. In outliers, in order to be successful, one had to be a billionaire, star athlete, head of a major legal firm, or industrial baron. There is no mention of morality, artistic merit, or personal fulfillment when determining success.   Gladwell is also handcuffed by his rhetorical dependence on using individual case studies as a means to jump to sweeping generalizations on race and class status. This troubled me more than anything with Outliers. Class background, affluence, and ‘cultural context,’ were deemed the most important parts of the equation for Gladwell’s version of success. It seemed to me, in Gladwell’s vision of the world, humans have little autonomy over their fates- they are bound to the norms of their culture. In his analysis of 19th century Appalachian honor killings essentially said, that the people of the hills were privy to gun violence, because they descended from a region in Britain where the people were territorial shepherds, and subsequently, more violent by nature because of their trade. This involves too many jumps of logic, without any solid empirical or statistical evidence. It is a bogus sweeping racial socioeconomic generalization that Gladwell deems an inescapable scientific fact.   For this reason, I found Gladwell’s book disheartening.  His socio-economic analyses often swerve into the area of racist pseudoscience. While it’s by no means a social Darwinist or Eugenicist work, Gladwell treats ethnic generalizations as if they were proven facts. For example, when Gladwell equates Asian success at Math with the intensive labor required for the maintenance of a rice paddy, centuries ago, there is little science to back his theories. His linguistic idea, that numbers in the Chinese languages are phonetically simpler, which allows Asians to succeed in math, is also questionable. This line is also approached while discussing communication issues in Korean Airline crashes, in the most enlightening and horrifying chapter of the book, which at will teach people to think twice before using a mitigated inflection in conversation.   In conclusion, Gladwell’s book was like a three-legged dog, I was repulsed by all of the unfounded racial generalizations that were euphemized under the term ‘cultural context,’ but I was equally convinced, and could not stop staring. It’s tough to think of our cultural backgrounds as Gladwell does, something that can tie us to the status quo, barring an intervention of blind luck. But still, Gladwell is on to something special here, and maybe he has a right to be a little bit racist, because frankly, any ruminations on cultural differences is inherently racist, by definition, but we don’t go around calling cultural and social anthropologists professional racists, even though it is technically their trade.   Despite the occasional uneasiness, Gladwell is a brilliant writer, and a social prophet, it would be foolish to sleep on him. In order to have staying power as a social scientist, Gladwell will need to tweak his narrow-minded definitions of success and avoid empirically unfounded generalizations about race.   I’d really love to see Gladwell put his analytical genius and knack for sociology to work with Levitt and Dubner, the authors of Freakonomics. If he does this, his glaring weakness of using the case study as an axiom for all of human behavior will be mollified. If Gladwell can back his theories with harder science, then his portrait of society will be much easier pill for the reader to swallow, even if it defends the unfortunate realities of privilege & racism, and exposes our own lack of autonomy to forge our future. What ever happened to hard work and determination as a factor that determines ‘success?’ If anything, Outliers reinforces the old adage that it is always better to be lucky than to be good.  blogs 2009-09-04T21:36:19+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39743/what-israel-can-learn-from-armenia http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39743/what-israel-can-learn-from-armenia#When:22:55:45Z by samuel raphael franco | The opening of the Turkish-Armenian border this week is something of a historical landmark. Israel would be wise to follow learn from this case of diplomatic reconciliation, as the cultural and historical similarities between Armenia and Israel are strikingly similar. Armenia, like Israel, is supported by a large diaspora whose politics were shaped by the wars of the early 20th century. Armenia once had hostile relations on every front with their Islamic neighbors. Like Israel, Armenia holds claim to a so-called occupied territory Nagorno-Karabagh, which it won through warfare, and claims as a part of historic Armenia. Unlike Israel, however, the majority of the Nagorno-Karabagh is, in fact, ethnically Armenian. Armenia’s 20th century national identity was shaped in the wake of genocide. During the First World War, the ultranationalist triumvirate of Talaat, Djemal, and Enver Pasha slaughtered more than one million Armenians. The Armenians posed no threat to the Turkish State, yet were forced out of their homes, marched out into the desert and slaughtered systematically by Turkish soldiers. Those who survived the first few waves of attacks were left out to die in the middle of the desert. The Armenia Diaspora has been hostile to the resumption of any relations with Turkey. Turkey still officially denies the genocide, and this point will presumably block any legitimate attempt by Turkey at joining the European Union. The Armenian Diaspora is rightfully irritated by this fact, and funds a number of publicity campaigns to get the genocide recognized on a global scale. Israel, like Armenia, faces a major point of contention with the genocide denial by its neighbors. Following the Second World War, extensive rhetorical de-Nazification campaigns occurred across Europe. However, these efforts were expanded to include Hitler’s allies in the Middle East and waves of virulent anti-Semitism continued, following the war. Massive forced migrations and evictions of Jews across the Middle East ensued and the Jewish communities of Iran, Iraq, and Yemen became targets. But Iranians, Yemenis and Iraqis are not anti-Semitic by nature. The people of these regimes were coerced into the national policy of anti-Semitism. No power took the time to reverse this course of lies, and these states continued this pattern because it made political sense. Because of continued warfare with Israel and its neighbors, there was never a reason for their leadership to pursue a path of truth, when it was in their best interest to direct the frustrations of the masses at a foreign, intangible concept. In Iran, Ahminejad, is a well-educated man, however he is a staunch holocaust denier because it is politically pragmatic. Hamas is incensed that their textbooks must now make mention of the Holocaust, because it would create an avenue for sympathy to their sworn enemy. Neither of these regimes will have a reason to propagate truth and tolerance unless peace were to occur first. This idea of peace before historical truth is what Israel should learn from this watershed date in Turco-Armenian relations. I do not, by any means advocate genocide denial, it is an insulting and absolutely abhorrent policy.  But a resumption of peaceful relations is a necessary precondition before the issue of genocide denial is resolved. On a much grander scale, we can learn that normative diplomacy cannot be used in lieu of positive diplomacy when dealing with heavily indoctrinated or fundamentalist parties. By engaging Turkey through the recent round of soccer diplomacy and reopening the border without resolving the issue of the unrecognized genocide, Yerevan bolstered its chances of having the genocide recognized in the long run. As relations continue to warm between the states, antipathy will be replaced by truth. Hopefully the more hawkish Israeli politicians notice these similarities from the case of Armenia. By momentarily swallowing their pride, Armenia and Turkey have both triumphed. There is a lesson to be learned here for all the squabbling states of the world. Israel should learn from this watershed event, and engage its neighbors through positive diplomacy based on the facts on the ground. The hawkish elements of the Knesset are acting on how it thinks its neighbors should act, and where it thinks its borders should end, which can only hasten the prospects of a fair resolution. Israel’s neighbors are equally incensed and indoctrinated, so an attempt at promoting peace must come before any attempt at promoting historical truth. Israel must stick to positive, rather than normative political thinking, if it wants to do its part in ending the cycle of violence that has endured far too long. blogs 2009-09-02T22:55:45+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39674/deborah-peagler-to-be-released-from-prison-after-27-years http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39674/deborah-peagler-to-be-released-from-prison-after-27-years#When:20:17:28Z by stacey palevsky | After 27 years in prison, Deborah Peagler will be released next week. The news came late afternoon Aug. 20, when the governor announced he would not review or overturn the parole board's decision to recommend Peagler for parole. (See the governor's letter at below.) It was a tremendous victory for Joshua Safran, a modern Orthodox Jew from Berkeley, who for seven years has worked on Peagler's case on a pro bono basis. "I'm ecstatic," he wrote in an email. In 2007, Safran told j., "This case might be something I work on for the rest of my life," he said. "But it will all be worth it when Debbie gets out." That day is finally around the corner. Peagler's release is expected next week. Stay tuned for the Aug. 28 issue of J. for the full story           blogs 2009-08-21T20:17:28+00:00 http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39590/update-deborah-peagler http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39590/update-deborah-peagler#When:17:58:04Z by stacey palevsky | As I type this, people are rallying in Los Angeles to advocate Deborah Peagler's release. Peagler has served 27 years in prison and was finally found suitable for release on July 10 by the California Board of Parole Hearings. And yet she's still in jail. In three days — by Friday — Governor Schwarzenegger must decide whether to allow her release or deny Deborah her freedom. And so Debbie's supporters rally. They are right now standing outside of the Los Angeles Office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. They hope to put pressure on the governor so that when he decides what to do with the parole board's suggestions, he chooses to release the woman who has spent nearly three decades of her life in prison for her connection to the murder of her husband — a man who abused her, forced her into prostitution and molested her daughter. Evidence of this abuse was never presented in court when Deborah was sentenced. Had it been included in the trial, it's likely she would have served fewer than six years in prison, if any time at all. I have written about Debbie twice. First, in 2007, I wrote about her crusading lawyer, Joshua Safran, an Orthodox Jew who has worked on the case for seven years. I wrote about her again in April of this year, shortly after Deborah was diagnosed with lung cancer. Doctors have predicted that she will not live to see 2010. If you want to support Peagler's release, call or write to the governor and urge him to allow Peagler to spend her final days with her family outside of the prison walls. Contact the Governor here or by writing to him at: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger State Capitol Building Sacramento, CA 95814 Phone: 916-445-2841 Fax: 916-558-3160 For more information, check http://www.freedebbie.org. blogs 2009-08-18T17:58:04+00:00