Norman Mailer Of Blessed Memory at Yeshiva College in 1969

Anecdote: In 1969 I was president of the Young Democrats Club at Yeshiva College. We had chutzpah in our club and invited all the candidates running form mayor of New York City to address our student body. We had acceptances and speeches from Mario Proccacino, Bill Vanden Heuval, and of course Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin.

I remember the Mailer speech for one question that he answered after his address to a large student audience in Furst Hall. In predictable self-centered YU fashion, a student asked Norman if he had studied any Talmud. In absolutely the straightest face I can visualize, Mailer answered that indeed he had studied and continued to study the Talmud. In fact, he told his pious and naive audience, he kept the Talmud on his nightstand and read from it before retiring at night. After that answer, I adjourned the event.

Needless to say, Reb Norman Mailer's razor sharp ironic wit and honesty will be missed by us all.

NY1: Lubavitchers Gather for Rabbi Powwow

The Chabad corporation managers meet in NY to plot out the strategy for the coming year.

Thousands Of Rabbis Gather To Pay Tribute To Former Leader

Thousands of rabbis came into town Friday to strategize on how to draw more members to their group and to pay tribute to one of their former leaders. NY1’s Ruschell Boone filed the following report.

Rabbis have come from all over the world to exchange ideas on how to expand the Jewish faith and connect with non-observant Jews.

The rabbis from the Chabad Lubavitch Movement and their families say they look forward to this event every year. The city, especially Brooklyn, is a major center for the group, one of the largest branches of Hasidic Judaism in the world.

“It acts as an ongoing source of inspiration for us when we leave here and go back to our own communities,” said Yisrael Deren, regional director of the Chabad Lubavitch of Connecticut.

While in New York, the group made a stop in Cambria Heights Friday to visit the grave of Rabbi Manachem Schneerson – one of the group's former leader – and a man some followers believe is the messiah. Organizers were quick to say that's the belief of only a small group of people and the rabbis came here only to pay their respects and pray that Schneerson will appeal to God on their behalf.

“Our rebbe means much to us,” said Rabbi Tuvia Teldon of Chabad Lubavitch of Long Island. “His message and everything he represents is really the motivating force behind what we do.”

The group runs thousands of Jewish community centers, synagogues, and schools all around the world as a way to reach out to the Jewish community as a whole. They are located in 72 countries.

“We are focusing on the individual,” said Rabbi Eliezer Zalmanov of Indiana. “How every single person is important, every Jew is important, and going back home, especially in small communities like mine, it's important to remember that the one person that we meet, the extra person that we find, that we have an influence on, is why we are there.”

The conference is scheduled to run through the weekend and it will end with a banquet on Sunday at Pier 94 in Manhattan.

- Ruschell Boone

Every Fall, The Biggest Problem in America is, What Should We Do About College Football?

Michael Lewis wrote a decent op-ed in the Times today called, "Serfs of the Turf." He bemoans the exploitation of college football players in the big money programs. Bottom line - he thinks they should be paid.

Every year we hear some opinions like this from the sportswriter side. From the professors of course we hear cries of a different sort. It sometimes sound like the teachers are saying, Let's do away with the anti-intellectual waste of time altogether.

I'm not so happy about the state of affairs in the college sport. But I cannot go along with the criticisms that I read because they are wrong. College football is not professional football. They are different enterprises entirely.

The major cognitive error of confusion of the two stems from the wonders of TV. TV has made college football look a very much like professional football. After a few beers, and because they look alike on the screen, pundits start to blur together the two enterprises. Gridiron. Oblate spheroidal ball. Eleven players. Coach. Ticket scalpers. Beer commercials. These must be the same sports events. College is Pro is college.

But of course not. It should not be and it never will be. For better or worse college football is entwined with the educational system of our country. Take that away and the colleges and universities will lose a big dimension. And the football played by the minor league non-university teams divorced from universities would fall from our consciousness into the shadows, much like minor league baseball. Let's not even think about it.

This is my long-winded way of saying that I disagree with Lewis because I see two distinct enterprises with different histories, purposes and values. Coaches may move from pro-football to college football. But players don't, and never will.

These sports will continue to look more and more alike to the distant viewers.

They are not the same sport. One is for amateurs and it is embedded in our educational non-profit structures. The other is for professionals and it is flourishing in our competitive profit making economy.

That Lewis does not recognize and respect this black and white distinction shows the overpowering influence of TV production. Or perhaps it indicates that Lewis is more than an avid viewer of the beer industry advertisements.

Anyhow. He is wrong. We ought not pay our amateur athletes.

Times Review: Do you believe in God?

Peter Steinfels is at it again. He's reviewing a book that surveys celebrities about their beliefs.

Beliefs

Q. Do You Believe in God? A. Yes, No and Well . . .

By PETER STEINFELS

Published: November 10, 2007

Do you believe in God? What will happen to you at death? Do you pray? Do you think religious believers are deluded?

Many people would hesitate to raise these questions at dinner. Antonio Monda, on the other hand, has been posing them for several years to cultural eminences like Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Daniel Libeskind, Derek Walcott, Spike Lee, Jonathan Franzen, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese. more...

One celebrity feller who professed a lot of belief was Billy Graham. His legacy has now been condensed into a Museum Review.

At Billy Graham Library, Man and Message Are One and the Same

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 10, 2007

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When the Billy Graham Library opened here last spring, its 88-year-old namesake, who had preached the Gospel to more than 210 million people on six continents, who had prayed in the Oval Office with 11 consecutive presidents and who had brought evangelical Christianity into the heart of American political life, had one main complaint: “It was too much Billy Graham.”

He had envisioned the $27 million library, with its 40,000-square-foot exhibition space, as an extension of his ministry, whose purpose was “to please the Lord and to honor Jesus, not to see me or to think of me.”

But one of the unusual things about both this place and Mr. Graham’s ministry is that it is impossible to think of either without thinking of the man behind them. That may even be their greatest strength, though it also raises other questions. more...

New Yorker Bestows Sainthood on Jewish Billionaire Sam Zell

If you're really rich, you can buy yourself a big ad in the New Yorker.

Rough Rider
Where will Sam Zell take the struggling Tribune Company?
by Connie Bruck [November 12, 2007]

In April, 2005, Sam Zell travelled to Abu Dhabi to meet Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Zell is best known as a real-estate magnate, whose reputation has been enhanced by the sale, last February, for thirty-nine billion dollars, of Equity Office Properties Trust, the largest collection of office buildings in the country. Zell, who is sixty-six, delights in claiming that at the time the sale—to Blackstone, the private-equity firm—was “the largest single transaction that has ever been done.” But for decades his appetite for economic opportunity has lured him beyond real estate into investments in oil and gas, barges, insurance, wineries, cruise ships, department stores, waste-to-energy power projects, and radio stations. In April, he signed an $8.2-billion deal that would effectively give him control of Tribune Company, the giant media conglomerate, whose assets include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. For about a dozen years, he has also invested aggressively abroad, most recently in the Middle East. He spends about twelve hundred hours a year on his plane—the equivalent of flying from New York to London every few days. “I want to see everybody in their habitat,” he told me, in a low, rasping voice. “When these people see me come halfway around the world to meet them and spend time with them, it creates a level of confidence that translates into other things”—by which he means, he says, “successful business.”

[Warning: The article is fascinating but when you are finished it's sorta like you just ate a whole box of candy and you feel real sick....here>>]

Donate Half of Your Car to Help Kids Learn Torah?

50% rake off to the $ raisers in Lakewood. Shady and misleading ads. Sketchy web site.

This is not the high standard we expect from a Torah organization.

Car donations must be vetted
By LIZ WOLGEMUTH

It seems so simple. As the radio jingle says, call 1-877-Kars4kids, and “donate your car today.”

Not only will you get a tax deduction and a voucher for a two-night hotel stay, you also get the satisfaction of knowing that all the proceeds of your donation will help provide food, clothing, education and guidance to children between 6 and 18 years old, as the Kars4Kids Web site says.

Cars donated through Kars4Kids actually go to the Lakewood, N.J.-based nonprofit JOY for Our Youth, which uses the catchier Kars4Kids name in its fundraising efforts.

And the vast majority of JOY’s program services dollars go to another organization that shares its same New Jersey address and devotes its efforts to orthodox Jewish education.

The confusing chain of charities behind the simple radio ad highlights a problem for many donors who want to better understand where their contribution is going, particularly when it comes to car donations.

“Sadly, the onus is really on the donor,” said Sandra Miniutti, vice president of marketing for Charity Navigator, which evaluates and rates the country’s largest nonprofits.

Car donations lately have drawn the attention of the Internal Revenue Service. A tax law instituted in 2005 requires that taxpayers receive a charity’s written confirmation of their donation before they claim a tax deduction, and it limits the deduction to the gross proceeds from the sale of the vehicle by the charity.

Many donors approach car donations in the wrong way, Miniutti said.

Rather than simply handing over a car for the benefit of the deduction – or the two-night hotel stay – donors should look at what the charity does with the proceeds of the car’s sale, she said.

Plenty of Illinois charities accept car donations through intermediary organizations, many of which are for-profit, but Miniutti recommends finding a charity that accepts them directly.

The nonprofit Marklund at Mill Creek in Geneva accepts cars directly, as well as riding lawn mowers, golf carts, airplanes, boats and RVs.

Mutual Ground, a nonprofit shelter for domestic abuse victims in Aurora, also accepts car donations, according to its Web site.

In 2005, $2.8 million of JOY’s $3.1 million total program services expenses went to an organization called Oorah, according to JOY’s 501 (c)3 tax form for 2005.

Phone calls to JOY for Our Youth and Oorah were not immediately returned.

Oorah’s goal, according to its Web site, is to awaken Jewish children and their families to their heritage, by sending them to Jewish day schools, or yeshivos, or even helping pay for their airfare to, or education in, Israel.

“While the children learn and grow, we bring adult education opportunities to the parents, as well as all the ritual objects and support they need to live a full Jewish life,” the organization reports.

Although Oorah’s goal might be admirable, its evasive marketing efforts are not, said Rabbi Maralee Gordon of the McHenry County Jewish Congregation.

“Jewish education of children is of utmost importance in Judaism,” Gordon said. But any deception in the organization’s marketing would be strongly against Jewish ethics, she said.

The Better Business Bureau has said the charity did not meet four of its 20 standards for charity accountability. JOY just missed the BBB’s standard that 65 percent of its total expenses go to program service activities, as it spent 64 percent on programs.

Oorah spent 52 percent of its expenses on program services and 32 percent on fundraising. Miniutti said the typical organization evaluated by Charity Navigator spends 75 percent on program services and 10 percent on advertising.

JOY also does not meet the BBB’s standard for including a detailed functional breakdown of expenses, for making detailed information available on its Web site, and also for providing information on how it protects the personal information of donors.

Tips on donating your car

– Donate to a charity that accepts cars directly

– Drive a usable car to the charity yourself, to lower its costs

– Make sure the organization is a non-profit to ensure the donation is tax deductible

– Be sure to formally sign the car over and reassign its ownership

– Value the car correctly for the deduction. Visit www.irs.gov for guidelines.

Source: www.CharityNavigator.org

Yes, this was vetted on the blog Canonist in 2005, but they are still at it.

Yes West Virginia. Colleges are Promoting Paganism

What many neocons have been claiming for years - colleges promote paganism - is now official policy in West Virginia.

November 4, 2007
At a University in West Virginia, New Protections for Pagans
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHARLESTON, W.Va., Nov. 3 (AP) — At Marshall University, pagan students are now allowed to miss classes to observe religious holidays or festivals.

A new policy makes the university in Huntington, W.Va., with an enrollment of about 14,000, possibly the only college in the country to protect pagans formally from being penalized for missing classes, although many institutions have policies intended to protect students of every faith.

One Marshall student, George Fain, took advantage of the policy on Thursday, missing class in observance of Samhain, a pagan and Wiccan holiday honoring the dead.

“I think we may have opened a door,” Ms. Fain said of the policy. “Now that we know we can be protected, that the government will stand behind us and we feel safe, it’s going to be more prevalent.”

The decision to allow pagan students to make up missed work is an extension of existing policy toward members of other religious groups, said Steve Hensley, the dean of student affairs at Marshall.

“I don’t think there are a lot of students here who have those beliefs,” Mr. Hensley said, “but we want to respect them. It was really just a matter of looking into it, and deciding what was the right thing.”

Students are responsible for establishing that they are religious believers and that the holiday in question is important to their faith by filing a written request with Mr. Hensley.

Paganism experts say they are not aware of any other university with such a policy.

Some universities have blanket policies that allow students to be excused for any religious holiday. Lehigh University in Pennsylvania has had such a policy for about eight years, said Lloyd Steffen, a religion professor and the university’s chaplain.

Such an accommodation for pagan students is rare even in Britain, the birthplace of modern paganism.

“Nobody yet gets any holiday for pagan festivals in the United Kingdom,” said Ronald Hutton, a history professor at the University of Bristol. “It seems to be an American original.”

Marty Laubach, a sociology professor at Marshall and an adviser to a group of pagan students, said he had seen fliers advertising pagan meetings ripped down by others.

But actions like the university’s decision on absences encourage pagans to be more vocal, he said.

“You’ll have more people now who are willing to say, ‘These are my beliefs,’” Professor Laubach said. “The American neopagan movement is a lot stronger than you think.”

Nothing New: The Internet is an Easy to Use Subversive Medium

We have known this from day one of the Internet. We can't stop radical subversives from using the Web, or the mail or the telephone for that matter.

Experts say West can't stop Web radicalization By Michael Holden

From behind a computer keyboard at his London home, student Younes Tsouli used the Internet to spread al Qaeda propaganda, recruit suicide bombers and promote Web sites that encouraged the killing of non-Muslims.

The Moroccan-born student and two accomplices, one of whom he had never met in person, went on to become the first to be jailed in Britain for inciting terrorism over the Internet.

In September, a Scottish student described as a "wannabe suicide bomber" was imprisoned for eight years for owning terrorism material and distributing it via Web sites.

The two cases are examples of what Western authorities believe is the dangerous and growing role the Internet plays in spreading extremist propaganda and recruiting sympathizers to Islamist militant causes.

But can the West censor radical Web sites and, indeed, is it morally right to do so?

The perceived threat has prompted much talk from governments of the need for action. On Tuesday, the European Commission urged the EU's 27 states to crack down on militant sites.

"The Internet serves ... as one of the principal boosters of the processes of radicalization and recruitment and also serves as a source of information on terrorist means and methods, thus functioning as a virtual training camp," the Commission's proposal said.

New York's police chief described the Internet as "the new Afghanistan" in August. That echoed the views of U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who said last year potential recruits no longer needed to travel to al Qaeda camps.

"They can train themselves over the Internet," he said.

However, many governments disagree about what should actually be done and experts express serious doubts about what would be effective, saying little research has been carried out.

Johnny Ryan, Senior Researcher at Dublin's Institute of International and European Affairs, said users could easily circumvent any restrictions imposed by the authorities.

"A workable Internet censorship system, even if one were desirable, is not possible within the EU, or anywhere else in the world with a comparable infrastructure or legal norms," he told Reuters.

Web sites could relocate from one country to another unless there was international agreement, while the controversial content was often distributed through services that are hard to block, such as legitimate chat rooms.

"In China, where censorship is a more serious business, users have developed a series of tools to break through government Internet blocks," said Ryan, author of the book "Countering Militant Islamist radicalization on the Internet."

Dr Akil Awan, of the Royal Holloway, University of London, another of the few academics to have studied the issue, agrees.

"The virtual jihadists are very net-savvy and generally are always two steps ahead of the authorities," he told Reuters, adding it would be morally questionable to censor jihadist Web sites that presented an alternative world view.

"These accounts may be skewed, tendentious and indoctrinating, but then so is a lot of other material on the Internet," he said.

Radical preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed, banned from Britain after the government ruled that he was not "conducive to the public good" in the aftermath of the July 2005 London bombings, said banning radical sites would be counter-productive.

Syrian-born Bakri, who has been named at several British terrorism trials as a leading influence on young militants, said it would be seen as part of a campaign against Islam.

"I don't think what they are doing is going to stop the Islamists or the Muslims from conveying the Islamic message," Bakri told Reuters by phone from his home in Lebanon.

"They should open debate, discussions, dialogue with the Islamists. There is no need to censor. If you think it is bad, why do you not debate it and destroy it in national media?"

Despite his exile, Bakri, who gained notoriety by calling the September 11 hijackers the "Magnificent 19," has continued to communicate with followers in Britain via Internet chat rooms.

"I don't preach much on the Internet like before. But I know very well Muslims worldwide are succeeding in using ... the Internet and I think they are doing very well," he said.

A simple search of the Internet shows how easy it is to find material that could concern the authorities, from speeches by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda leaders to inflammatory videos.

Reuters found a blog supposedly used by prisoners in London's Belmarsh top security jail, including those convicted of soliciting murder at protests in February 2006 outside the Danish Embassy in the British capital.

"This blog is dedicated to those Muslim activists who have been held captive for various reasons -- many of them for demonstrating against the Danish cartoons depicting the Messenger Mohammad," said the blog.

However, it is also not clear whether messages, videos or sermons on the Internet alone can radicalize individuals.

"It is only the means through which individuals can become aligned with jihadist ideologies and causes. Other factors are equally important," the Royal Holloway's Awan said, adding it is estimated there are more than 5,000 extremist Web sites.

Meetings with committed jihadists in the flesh remains an important factor and Awan said even cases of apparent "self-radicalization" via the Internet quickly became conventional when plots were actually planned.

"It is also clear that militant Islamists dedicate significant resources to getting their message out online," Ryan said. "It is, of course, virtually impossible to determine the extent to which one is more important than the other."

Rabbis Opposing Peace Talks Doomed to Suffer Horrible Fate

Eh, Rabbis? Doesn't it work both ways fellas? Aren't you risking your lives by opposing God's plan for peace? Better buckle up your seat belts, lock your doors and don't eat any fish with bones in it...

Rabbis urge Bush to cancel peace talks, or else
AFP
November 5, 2007

JERUSALEM -- A fringe group of ultranationalist rabbis petitioned US President George W. Bush this week to cancel a Middle East peace meeting, saying that if he does not his country will face mass calamity.

"We wrote to President Bush, a man who believes in the Bible, to warn him against the terrible danger to which he is exposing his country by hosting such a conference," Rabbi Meir Druckman, one of eight signatories, told army radio.

"The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. God punishes anyone who wants to force Israel to give up its land," he said, alluding to Biblical Israel, which incorporates the modern-day Gaza Strip and West Bank.

"There is no doubt the New Orleans flood from the Katrina hurricane was God's punishment for dismantling the settlements," he said of the August 2005 catastrophe that hit the southern United States.

Israel withdrew all troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005 with wide US and other international support.

"The recent fires in California should be considered the last warning," added Rabbi Druckman.

On Sunday, some 2,000 people, many of them Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank, protested against the international peace meeting expected to be held in the United States later this year.

It was the first significant Israeli demonstration against the negotiations aimed at reviving full Israeli-Palestinian peace talks after seven years of stalemate.

The Sabbatical Year circus and its rabbinic clowns

In the Cross-Currents blog and other places we can read an article, Much Ado About Shmittah, by Avi Shafran, that starts, "Those Ultra-Orthodox in Israel are at it again, inventing new stringencies, coercing other Jews, trying to make a dishonest buck and generally making life unlivable for everybody else." Yup you got it right Avi (although he goes on to defend said rabbis as if they were saints who had been wronged by an evil media cabal, the classic Shafran theme).

My POV: If the rabbis came along and said, during our exile of 2000 years we lost count and we don't know when is the biblically enjoined seventh year wherein the land must lie fallow, the shmitta, and so we can't observe it, but we don't want to forget it, so let's do something symbolic to make sure we remember it, then I would stand up and salute.

But to say let's take food out of the mouths of millions of people on the basis of a doubt, and to cause a chillul hashem - a desecration of the religion - in public on account of that, to make Judaism look like a farce, like a circus sideshow where some rabbis eat the produce, some don't, some sell their land to Arabs, some condemn them, some act like Karaites, utter fundamentalists, who pretend that a doubt is a certainty and say, damn you sinners if you don't agree with us, no no no, this is a great chillul hashem berabbim - a desecration of Judaism in public.

HENCE: It's not a media cabal, Avi. To put it in terms that I hope you understand, these antics of the rabbis make us Orthodox Jews look like clowns.