In recognition of his strange rhetoric and bizarre opinions we are giving a Travis Bickle Award to Professor Alvin Rosenfeld.The occasional award is given to the person who best personifies the Travis Bickle character in the movie Taxi Driver.
In the movie Taxi Driver the plain-man-hero Travis Bickel laments the filth and pornography that he sees all around him. His real desire is to confront a powerful patrician politician whom, he believes, is responsible for that decay.In the case of Rosenfeld, the professor trained and prepared to take on a powerful outside foe -- worldwide antiSemitism and the Holocaust. But then, instead of pursuing the real enemy, the professor now has turned to go after a smaller, more familiar enemy -- in this case a handful of progressive Jewish intellectuals.
The real Bickel is not heroic enough to go after the big gangster, though he certainly prepares and trains to do so. Instead he ends up killing a small time bad-guy - an ordinary lowlife like Bickel himself - and therby saves two girls from suffering.
The newspapers and parents praise Bickel as a hero.
This story encapsulates the Travis Bickel Complex. You prepare all your life for a confrontation with a powerful and alien evil foe. But in the end you take on a small time enemy who is just like you. And you come out acclaimed as a hero.
Should we acclaim him a hero? I don't know. But I do know that he merits this latest Travis Bickle Award.
Links to the professor's essay and the NY Times story:
Essay Linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor
By PATRICIA COHEN
The American Jewish Committee, an ardent defender of Israel, is known for speaking out against anti-Semitism, but this conservative advocacy group has recently stirred up a bitter and emotional debate with a new target: liberal Jews.
An essay the committee features on its Web site, ajc.org, titled “ ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” says a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.
In an introduction to the essay, David A. Harris, the executive director of the committee, writes, “Perhaps the most surprising — and distressing — feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish State.” Those who oppose Israel’s basic right to exist, he continues, “whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted.”
The essay comes at a time of high anxiety among many Jews, who are seeing not only a surge in attacks from familiar antagonists, but also gloves-off condemnations of Israel from onetime allies and respected figures, like former President Jimmy Carter, who titled his new book on the Mideast “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.” By spotlighting the touchy issue of whether Jews are contributing to anti-Semitism, both admirers and detractors of the essay agree that it aggravates an already heated dispute over where legitimate criticism of Israel and its defenders ends and anti-Semitic statements begin.
The essay, written by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, an English professor and the director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington, castigates a number of people by name, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, the historian Tony Judt, the poet Adrienne Rich and the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, in addition to a number of academics....
Here is an ironic example of a Time headline writer slapping on a clever headline that has no direct reference to it's story.
Vista Shmista! The new Microsoft operating system is getting all the attention this week.
The ruling was issued in response to questions by hareidi religious travel agencies that rent out hotels in Antalya, Turkey as well as Eilat and make them kosher for Passover vacation packages catering to the Jewish observant population.
Pornographer Oren Cohen has manged to use Kof-K Kosher Supervision to publicize his new Hebrew porno DVD with an all-Israeli cast, called 
Riddle: How many highly paid assistant college football coaches does it take to get into the Texas Bowl?
The printed book is nearly dead. The print newspaper is dying. The Internet delivers words and images everywhere to every device at any time.
Just saw a skit from the show tonight - taped in Teaneck on Cedar Lane right across from Veggie Heaven.
A nice article about the Teaneck Clergy Council today in the 
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My early morning chuckle came via a 
[In this never-aired Monty Python skit a professor tries to return the Rebbe to 770. The segment concludes with this outburst by the professor.]
In 1999 this was my op-ed take on the rebbe and the messiah. I agree with it today.
A Murder in Lemberg. This new book is best-seller material. Hat tip to Mimi.
Every now and then we look at where our readers come from. Here are three sources from today - an odd assortment of links to our blog.
Shalom Auslander, you are a funny writer. In his "Personal History" called "Playoffs" in this week's New Yorker Magazine he describes his typical struggle with Orthodoxy and life in general. "Things you can’t do on the Sabbath," is the subtitle. I don't want to spoil it for you. But I guarantee that some frum people will cry out about the agenda of the magazine. And people from Monsey and Teaneck will decry his depiction of them. He covers the bases in a charming way, from theodicy to the taboos of the Torah.
Yes the business school professor's real name is Dr. Lie (pronounced Lee - Norwegian). He studied corporate executive stock options and was not satisfied with the prevalent grant timing theory that executives granted themselves options before releasing good news.