New Yorker: Guns in Israel and Gefilte Fish in Brooklyn

New Yorker sometimes is our favorite Jewish magazine. The editors unintentionally juxtapose two articles of interest in the 2012 holiday issue:

A JEWISH GEFILTE CHRISTMAS Posted by Anna Altman

...This year, I appended the Jewish holiday rites with a visit to the kitchen of the Gefilteria, a recently launched food company specializing in old-world Jewish foods. Started by three twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn, the Gefilteria sells gefilte fish with a pink layer of salmon gefilte topping each dun-colored loaf; jars of two types of horseradish, spicy-carrot and sweet-beet; and glass bottles of beet kvass, a probiotic fermented beverage. An Ashkenazi Jew, I was familiar with the idea of these items, but only in degraded factory form...

“A PROGRAM LIKE THEY HAVE IN ISRAEL” Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg, which we find worth reproducing:

According to Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association is demanding “a program like they have in Israel.” On “Meet the Press,” LaPierre, the C.E.O. of the N.R.A., said, “Israel had a whole lot of school shootings until they did one thing: They said, ‘We’re going to stop it,’ and they put armed security in every school and they have not had a problem since then.”

Oh, really?

A piece in Ynetnews.com, the English-language Web site of Yedioth Ahronoth (“Daily News”), Israel’s largest-selling newspaper, explains why Israeli officials were upset by LaPierre’s comments:

The statements were quickly proven to be false. Israeli guards were not placed in schools to tackle mass shootings. Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told the Daily News that the situation in Israel was “fundamentally different” from that in the United States.

“We didn’t have a series of school shootings, and they had nothing to do with the issue at hand in the United States. We had to deal with terrorism,” said Palmor.

“There is no comparison between maniacs with psychological problems opening fire at random to kill innocent people and trained terrorists trying to murder Israeli children,” said Reuven Berko, a retired Israeli Army colonel and senior police officer.

He further remarked that restrictions on gun ownership in Israel have been tightened in recent years, not relaxed.

“Israeli citizens are not allowed to carry guns unless they are serving in the army or working in security-related jobs that require them to use a weapon,” he said.

Tightening restrictions on gun ownership. Not letting people run around carrying guns unless it is in the public interest to have them do so. Now there’s “a program like they have in Israel.”

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