Spy-loving-Agudah-rabbis want a criminal released

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard has had many opportunities to express remorse. He never does. He just militantly demands release because he says he's getting more time than other criminals in his category.

Pollard speaks of himself as if he was a hero. I don't know the "real reasons" they won't let him out. I only know the common sense side of things from the standpoint of any country governed by the rule of law. Arrogance + lack of remorse = throw away the key.

It galls me to hear the gabbai/beadle intone a mesheberach/blessing for him every shabbos in the CBY synagogue in Teaneck. It's a disgrace to ask G-d to act on behalf of a criminal who has not even evinced the slightest teshuvah/atonement for his crimes, for his sins.

That said, it appears that some very Orthodox Agudah rabbis have no sense of the hypocritical nature of their own actions. They preach against gays and Conservative Jews and Women's rights but they plead for clemency for a remorseless convicted criminal spy. Go figure.

Agudah rabbis call for Pollard’s release

Agudath Israel of America’s rabbinical councils called on “all caring Jews” to appeal to President Bush to free convicted spy Jonathan Pollard.

“Mr. Pollard’s life sentence — a penalty far more severe than that imposed upon others who committed similar or even more serious crimes — is difficult to comprehend,” said the statement issued Monday by the fervently Orthodox group’s Council of Torah Sages, Rabbinic Presidium and nearly 100 signatories from its Conference of Synagogue Rabbis.

“At this time, it appears that all legal avenues through the judicial system have been shut off. Only the president of the United States, by granting Mr. Pollard executive clemency, can save him from spending the rest of his life behind bars.”

Pollard was sentenced to life in 1987 for spying for Israel.

Agudath Israel says it will join other Jewish organizations in asking its members to phone the White House daily between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. EST until Passover.

The phone-in is primarily organized by the National Council of Young Israel.

Update: Check out what Circus Tent has to say, Why now? And he's got the flyer posted where Agudah proclaims this crusade to be a mitzvah. Wow, are they screwy.

Disgraced minister certified sexually kosher

Day is night. Black is white. Up is down. Haggard is heterosexual. Religious leaders are honest. Via the NYTimes.com site:

Haggard Pronounced ‘Completely Heterosexual’
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 6, 2007; Filed at 9:59 a.m. ET

DENVER (AP) -- One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is ''completely heterosexual.''

Haggard also said his sexual contact with men was limited to the former male prostitute who came forward with sexual allegations, the Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur told The Denver Post for a story in Tuesday's edition.

''He is completely heterosexual,'' Ralph said. ''That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing.'' ...

Princeton Allows Google to Scan its Library

The value that this project brings to the world is beyond calculation. Scanning the libraries of the great universities and making them available to anyone will advance human knowledge by a factor of googolplex. The company name Google was an obvious allusion to Googolplex, the name given to the large number . The Google headquarters in Montain View in fact is called the Googleplex.

Princeton libraries join Google book-scan project

Mon Feb 5, 8:28 PM ET

Princeton University has become the 12th major library system to join Google's ambitious, sometimes-controversial project to scan the world's great literary works and make them searchable over the Web.

The Web search leader said on Monday Princeton had agreed to work with it to digitize about 1 million public domain books -- works no longer covered by copyright protections.

The combined collections of the university's libraries total more than 6 million printed works, 5 million manuscripts and 2 million nonprint items.

A Google spokeswoman said her company and the 250-year-old Princeton library system would work together to determine which portions of the collection would be digitized.

Two years ago, Google Inc. began the book-scanning project with a core group including the New York Public Library and academic libraries at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and the University of Michigan.

Six months ago, the University of California became the first of a second round of libraries to join, followed by the University Complutense of Madrid, the National Library of Catalonia and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of Virginia, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Only the Michigan and Texas libraries agreed to scan works that are still under copyright. The rest have said they are focusing on public domain works or are still considering whether to scan copyrighted works.

More details can be found at http://books.google.com/.

In October 2005, five big U.S. publishers, together with the Association of American Publishers, sued Google seeking to block its plans to make libraries' works searchable online.

The case has yet to come to trial.

Blockbuster Rabbi Movie Opens to Throngs

From the famed Yeshiva University PR Department comes news of a new film that is rocking the Modern Orthodox world. Blogs are abuzz with debates. Is this a "distortion" of the Rav's life as one disciple has been whispering?

Some naive viewers don't recognize the inherent heresy and uncleanness of using film - the same medium that brought to the world "I am Curious Yellow" and "Last Tango in Paris" - to present an account of the life of a sainted holy rabbi. Those are probably the same folks who innocently use the Internet to look up the weather - without caring that on another web page - lurking nearby - is the uncleanness of naked photographs. How sadly uninformed are the householders of this day and age.

But have no fear. This film is replete with the comments and insights of pure and wholesome rabbis.

NY Premiere Screening of Lonely Man of Faith Draws Capacity Crowd

Feb 5, 2007 -- Nathan Lamport Auditorium in Zysman Hall on the Wilf Campus was filled to capacity for New York premiere screening of Lonely Man of Faith: The Life and Legacy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, a documentary about the renowned Talmud scholar and Rosh haYeshiva at Yeshiva University’s affiliated Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) from 1941 to 1985. Almost 1,100 people—including students, alumni, faculty, and friends—attended the event on Saturday night, Feb. 3.

The documentary was made by first-time New York City filmmaker Ethan Isenberg with the input and advice of many people connected with YU.

“Making this movie appealed to me because it shows the development of modern Orthodoxy and American Judaism and how we got to where we are today,” said Mr. Isenberg. “I was also fascinated by the Rav as a lonely individual, who prized independent thinking and creativity.”

Featuring historic footage and interviews with people who knew the famous rabbi, the documentary traces Rav Soloveitchik’s life from the small Byelorussian shtetl where his parents lived, to his family’s escape to Warsaw after the Communist revolution, to his studies in philosophy in pre-WWII Berlin, to his life in the United States.

The screening was followed by a conversation among four of the Rav’s students: Rabbi Kenneth Brander, Dean of the Center for the Jewish Future; Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO of OU Kosher and rosh yeshiva at RIETS; Rabbi Hershel Schachter, rosh kollel at RIETS; and Rabbi Mayer Twersky, rosh yeshiva at RIETS. The rabbis discussed the legacy of the Rav as “a giant in Torah and a towering presence,” said Rabbi Twersky, the Rav’s grandson. Rabbi Genack posited that the Rav preserved Orthodoxy and was responsible for rebuilding American Jewry.

During his 45 years as head of RIETS, the Rav ordained some 2,000 rabbis—a distinction that no sage in Jewish history is believed to have attained.

Google will "scan every book ever published"

The New Yorker's Annals of Law column has an article that describes the tribulations that Google faces in reaching its no-longer-unimaginable goal of digitizing every book ever published.

I've said before that Google's plans were quite transparent. They started out planning to copy and index every page on the Internet. Now they are doing the same for printed books. The will do the same for images, maps, email, data. Copy everything and index it.

But is that legal? Here is the beginning of the article:

GOOGLE’S MOON SHOT: The quest for the universal library

by JEFFREY TOOBIN

Issue of 2007-02-05; Posted 2007-01-29

Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s custom-made scanning equipment.

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel. Clicking on “Moby-Dick, or The Whale” calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won’t say how many books are in its database, but the site’s value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen’s letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from 1919.

No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. “We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. “It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot....”

When is a rabbi not a rabbi? When it is a season or a name

The hazards of a google word search.

The Pak Tribune reports:

Enough water available for Rabbi crops: Liaquat Jatoi

ISLAMABAD: Enough water is available for Rabbi season and the provinces will get adequate supplies for maturity of the crops.

Little known factoids. Let's not be oblivious to how the same words are used by different people.

In Pakistan and India there are rabbi crops and there is rabbi season. No. You can't grow the little spiritual leaders or hunt them. The rabbi season in the Himalyas:

Rabbi season generally occurs from Nov.~Dec. to Mar.~Apr. But in the high altitude, it is observed from Dec.~Jan. to May~Jun. The main crops during the Rabbi season are, wheat, barley, ray, sarson (mustered), pea, gram, and masur. Almost, all the crops are grown in the entire region, but their intensity and yield vary from one district to other. Whereas, in the plains of Tarai, Bhabar, Doon and Dwar, particularly in some parts of Dehradun district, Pauri district, Haridwar district, and Udhamsingh Nagar district, wheat, gram and pea are grown extensively. In the elevated regions, barley, mustered oil, rai, and masur (a local variety of pulses) along with wheat, gram and pea are grown, but their yields are lower than those of the crops grown in the plains.

Another source:

Rabbi crops

Jowar, wheat and gram are grown in the district during Rabbi season. Jowar is common in almost all the talukas. However, in Yeole, Dindori, Sinnar and Kalvan talukas, it is grown on a larger scale. Wheat is grown in Dindori, Niphad, Baglan, Yeola and Nashik talukas. Gram is grown in all the talukas.

And then there is this one new age Rabbi (first name, after the season no doubt, not title) Shergil, a Punjabi pop singer:

Other Side of Rabbi Shergill
Joe Athialy

A United States of Earth, with Dalai Lama as its head is an idea that Rabbi Shergill is toying with for sometime now. If you know him only as an accomplished Punjabi pop singer, whose life went for a toss in 1989, when he saw Bruce Springsteen at a live concert and decided to have a guitar and be like Springsteen; and who went through, now a legendry, difficult phase to get recognition, ended up getting laurels from the likes of Amitabh Bachchan and Sir V S Naipaul, he tells us about his other side...

Google makes life so much more complex.

Update: Rabbi Shergill is going Bollywood!

Sliding to the Right or turning to the Left?

I'm confused.

A new book by one professor claims that Judaism is Sliding to the Right.

A new article by another professor claims that Jews are turning sharply to the left.

Which one is correct? In theory both can be right. Orthodox Jews can be moving in one direction and liberal Jews can be moving in another.

But then that means that the Jewish people is being torn apart. Alarming if true.

What does the Forward care about the Minnesota Senate race?

We've already endorsed Al Franken for Senate in Minnesota.

Barak (not Obama, yes Zahavy) has tipped us off to this article on the senate race in the land of the frozen chosen: With Minnesota’s ‘Jewish Seat’ Up for Grabs, Comic Eyes Run and GOPer Runs From Bush.

Al quips (oh no, not again), according to the writer, "If he runs, he would be the only New York Jew in the race who grew up in Minnesota."

He has resigned now from his radio job. And his announcement of candidacy is imminent. I know Boschwitz and have met Franken. I went way back when to solicit Rudy for a donation to our Jewish Studies program at the University of Minnesota. He turned us down flat. Why? He said he was getting ready to run for the senate and needed all his money. What a jerk.

I've met Al a while back in the locker room of the Northwest Tennis club in Minnetonka. He's easy to recognize and not a bad guy to meet in person.

So will he win? It depends on who runs against him. Doh! I think he has a lot to offer us in the senate. But.... he is a comedian and that does not necessarily qualify him to serve as a member of the legislative body of the United States.

Nevertheless we endorse him because he stands for liberalism and is an all-around great guy.

American Jewish Committee: Wrong Answer!

Wrong answer! This is not how you ought to respond to valid criticism.

AJC Statement on Professor Rosenfeld Essay

On January 31, the New York Times featured an article on a recent American Jewish Committee publication entitled "Progressive" Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, authored by Professor Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University.

The article has generated a groundswell of queries and comments. Thousands of visitors to our website have downloaded Rosenfeld's essay and it currently ranks among the most frequently emailed pieces from the newspaper's site.

We are immensely pleased by the interest generated and hope it will spark serious discussion on the important issues raised by Professor Rosenfeld.

At the same time, inexplicably, the paper, in the article's opening sentence, described AJC as a "conservative advocacy group." This is preposterous. AJC is a strictly nonpartisan organization long viewed as centrist in its orientation. As our members know, we welcome a wide range of viewpoints in the AJC "tent" and pride ourselves on a deliberative style of discussion and debate on policy matters....

No other nation faces the same daunting challenges to its very right to exist, 58 years after its establishment, than Israel. No other nation faces enemies, from Iran to Hamas and Hezbollah, who openly call for its annihilation and seek the military means to achieve that objective. And yet, even under these trying circumstances, Israel is home to a vibrant political debate about the best course of action to secure its future as a democratic and Jewish state living in peace with its neighbors.

"No other nation faces the same daunting challenges to its very right to exist." What? Listen. The Islamic militants are after the USA too.

You indeed are an not a "conservative advocacy group." You are a "gibberish advocacy group." The article in question (see previous post) is complete and utter gibberish.

Pull this article and apologize for your lapse in judgment!

Award Announcement: The worst article about antiSemitism ever written

The worst article about antiSemitism ever written:

“Progressive” Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism by Alvin Rosenfeld

Here we will look at one of the worst sentences in what is - far and away - the worst essay I have ever read. Now mind you I have read many essays in my career. I've read essays by students - one or more by some 6,000 students in the past 30 years. And add to that the thousands of scholarly books and essays that I have read. And add to that the popular essays in newspapers and magazines that I've perused and critically assessed.

And yes, this is the worst.

I actually could write a book discussing the errors of rhetoric, reasoning and fact in this article. But why would I squander my time on that?

Let's take a look at just one sentence from page eight of this travesty. Let's stop to imbibe just a sample of the idiocy of this calumny:

"Anti-Zionism, in fact, is the form that much of today’s anti-Semitism takes, so much so that some now see earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews finding a parallel in present day desires to get rid of the Jewish state."

"in fact" - the only "fact" here is that the author has a meshuggene opaque opinion that he wants to foist on us.

"the form that" - throughout the fog of this screed the author mixes up rhetoric with ideology with actions with terrorist attacks with anything negative about the Jews. His lack of clarity about terms is surpassed only by his obfuscation of logic.

"much of today's anti-Semitism" - Rosenfeld cherry-picks examples from the books and news reports he has scanned. "Much of" is a weasel term. "today's" is another. When did today start? After WW II? After 9/11? After midnight this morning?

"so much so that some now see" - who is the some, other than Rosenfeld and his awed compatriots at the AJC?

"earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews" - is that what antiSemitism is? Not discrimination? Not those activities that were sanctioned by formal policies? Just "attempts"? And what if they don't rise up to the "rid the world" threshold? Are they then not pernicious? This is the low point to be sure of any rhetoric I have ever witnessed.

"finding a parallel in present day desires" - so now we are talking about desires. Not arguments, not laws, not cultures, not terrorist acts, not political parties, but yes, "desires". Rosenfeld. Did you think that we were not going to read the words that you wrote and published? And "parallel"! Do you mean that in some sort of geometric, metaphoric, philosophic or perhaps in a kabbalistic sense?

"to get rid of the Jewish state" - the state, but not the Jews? Or is antiSemitismZionism the "desire" to "get rid of" the Jews that reside there? Or do you care that everything you say is beyond gibberish?

So that is one sentence. The article is twenty-two pages long. Every single sentence fails the test of critical reading and can be questioned in the same way.

Accordingly, and with due fanfare, this blogger presents to this essay by Herr Professor Doctor Rosenfeld the dubious award, "Worst article about antiSemitism ever written."

And I am pretty sure that this is among the world's worst articles about anything ever written.