Glick does not click - writer ignorant of Zionist Idea

Caroline Glick simply never read the writings of the classical Zionist thinkers. If she had, she'd know that diversity of thought was the essence of the strength of formative Zionism.

In "Our World: Telling friend from foe" in the jpost, Glick seems to think that Hamas and Fatah and her friends and the progressive Jews fall into one of two categories - friend or foe.

Too many cowboy westerns? Black hat badguys or white hat good guys?

I wish she'd just read some Zionist writings. She might find out that the Zionism that gave birth to the State of Israel and the ideology that nurtures that miracle down to the present - is far from black or white. It is complex, thoughtful, contradictory, self-critical, grand and dramatic. But it is not a system that seeks to order the world into two fundamentalist categories - friend or foe.

Pity the fool - as one Mr. T used to say on TV - pity the fool who sees the world in black and white - when now we have 42 inch plasma high definition color.

NY Times: Schizoid Geoscientist Getting PhD?

You have to ask yourself, does this make any sense at all? Ross, a Bible thumper works for his scientific geology PhD? Something is not right here. Look at the professors in the photo to the right -"David E. Fastovsky, left, and Jon C. Boothroyd, professors at the University of Rhode Island, defend the science done by Marcus R. Ross." Their expression is absolutely, "Something is not right here."

The Times tells us in their article today, "Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules":

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”

Whoa there! I've studied some science and I've studied some religion. These are not just alternative paradigms. These are completely distinct social, cultural and intellectual systems. Rabbis and priests and ministers are not separated from scientists by "paradigms". The live, work and think in different worlds and in different ways with wildly incomparable systems of rules.

Paleontology and religion do not intersect in any substantive way. True, both ask about and explain the age of the universe. But the religious stories are naive, contradictory, lacking provenance, arbitrary and fanciful. Science derives from study, classification and collegial verification of material evidence.

How can a university give a student a PhD when the student thinks that another totally separate realm of learning and knowledge is part of his discipline? Can a university certify an engineer who thinks that artistic renderings of bridges are just another paradigm of calculated blueprints and plans? Woe is he who drives over that engineer's spans.

As my teacher and mentor the Rav used to say about matters that he found not even worthy of discussion, "It's absurd!"

Study says Israel Ranks Among Worst Software Pirates

Reported today, Israel lives up to its old adage - am echad, disk echad - one nation, one disk.

That reputation reflects poorly on both the religious communities - who violate a core commandment when they steal software - and the secular Zionists - who certainly are no light to the nations of the world when they infringe on other people's intellectual property.

Where are the militant rabbis and their vociferous protests and demonstrations against this desecration of the Torah? Where is the Knesset and its moral indignance?

Here is the beginning of the story:

Antipiracy group makes list of worst-offender nations

By John Letzing, MarketWatch
Last Update: 3:50 PM ET Feb 12, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A coalition of companies including technology giants Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. on Monday filed recommendations with the U.S. trade representative of countries deemed worst at protecting intellectual property.
The coalition, the International Intellectual Property Alliance, said in the filing that countries including China and Russia are among the worst offenders when it comes to allowing the reproduction of protected intellectual property, with a majority of the resulting losses affecting the software industry.

In all, the coalition recommends that 60 countries "lagging in their obligations to provide adequate and effective intellectual-property protection" be placed under varying degrees of monitoring. See the filing.

In addition to China and Russia, other countries considered the worst and recommended to be placed on a "Priority Watch List" include Mexico, Venezuela, Israel and Canada...

One Rabbi Unchaining Jewish Women

One rabbi is doing something other than yapping about the agunah problem.

From this rabbi you can run, but you can't hide

By Ari Rabinovitch
Reuters Sunday, February 11, 2007; 7:55 PM

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - When Jewish husbands skip out on their wives and refuse to grant them a divorce, a 58-year-old rabbi assembles a team of investigators to track them down anywhere in the world and untie the bonds of matrimony.

According to Orthodox Jewish ritual law, a woman abandoned by her husband is considered single and free to marry again only if he gives her a bill of divorce, known in Hebrew as a "Get."

Israel's Rabbinical Court, which oversees Jewish marriages in the country, said that each year, dozens of husbands maliciously refuse to sign the decree, leaving their wives "agunot," or "anchored" to their previous marriage.

Some of the men also leave the country: that is when Rabbi Yehuda Gordon, 58, and his small team of investigators step in.

He makes about five trips a year overseas, all of them sponsored by the Israeli government, to find "fugitive" husbands and persuade them to divorce their wives.

"It can take years to track each husband down," Gordon said from behind his desk at the Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem.

"A lot of (the husbands) turn out to be criminals with ties to the underworld. Each one demands a unique approach," said the rabbi, who wears traditional, ultra-Orthodox Jewish clothing and has a gray beard that reaches down to his chest.

While a husband is still in Israel, the Rabbinical Court can pressure him to grant a divorce by having his bank account frozen and driver's license and passport revoked. In some cases, the man can be arrested and jailed.

But once a husband goes overseas, it is up to Gordon and his team to persuade him to sign a "Get."

"Once we find them, we need to be smart and good psychologists. Our target is not to rat them out or take their money. We never actually become violent," Gordon said.

"We use delicate threats," he said, declining to elaborate.

DELICATE THREATS

Gordon, who said he speaks six languages fluently, works mostly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia where he has connections with local politicians and law enforcement.

Although hesitant to reveal his network of contacts, he hinted that it often begins with bribing the right official.

Gordon also arranges for a safety "umbrella," usually a local rabbi and armed guards, to meet him at the airport. When he shows up at a husband's front door, many times he finds the man remarried and with a new family.

"I talk to the man, for hours at a time. I'm always smiling and I try to reason with him," Gordan said.

It may take days, he said, but usually they reach an agreement. Sometimes money changes hands or local authorities get involved.

In 1998, Gordon flew to Siberia on a "Get" mission. After being threatened by police and spending three days in jail, he returned to Israel with a signed document allowing the man's wife to remarry.

Gordon said he once convinced a drug-smuggler living in Grozny, Chechnya to sign his Israeli wife's divorce papers in return for teaching the man how to pray.

BARGAINING CARD

But for some women, the Rabbinical Court is not doing enough to help them break free.

Linda Rasooly, 42, from Jerusalem, said her husband left Israel for the United States almost nine years ago without granting her a "Get."

"For seven years he forced me to be married simply because he wanted to punish me," she said.

Rasooly said it took several years before the Rabbinical Court formally accepted her case as an "Aguna" and began exerting pressure on her ex-husband, who agreed to sign a "Get" just last year.

"I was 33 when we separated but 41 when we divorced. I lost eight years waiting for a 'Get'," Rasooly said.

One advocacy group called Mavoi Satum, or Dead End, said it opens about 100 files each year for women whose husbands refuse to divorce them.

"The 'Get' becomes a bargaining card that the husband can use to extort his wife in order to get what he wants out of the divorce," said Reut Una-Tsameret, the group's public activities coordinator.

Jewish law gives the husband a lot of the power, and wives remain at their mercy, she said.

The Israeli government spends a few million shekels each year on the hundreds of cases of agunot, said the Rabbinical Court's spokeswoman Efrat Orbach.

"In 2006 alone we helped 71 agunot women, most of them with their husbands abroad," Orbach said.

Kaddish for the University of Phoenix

Would you buy a used car from UoP President William J. Pepicello (right)?

When the NY Times does a front page expose of a sketchy enterprise, the echoes resound around the world.

The University of Phoenix (sponsor of a sports stadium) has been written up as news in the paper of record.

The Times titles the story, "Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits."

I've said before that these are the guys who took the "non" out of "non-profit education." And just what is wrong with that? It is a scam of mammoth proportions.

We in the industry knew for years that adult-ed courses can make a profit because self-styled literacy is an ego trip. Continuing-ed at a distance is even more alluring. You just pay up and you are an esteemed student of higher learning. And if you drop out after paying up - that is where the real profit margin kicks in.

Until the house of cards falls down. Read the story. The Times does a good job of poking into all the questions about UoP.

The Guardian Worships Tony Judt

We wrote about an awful essay by Rosenfeld that attacked progressive Jews for their antiZionism. Now Gaby Wood as the Observer in the Guardian shows what happens when the backlash begins. In "The new Jewish question" he focused on Judt because he is British-born. Remember this is an article about Judt, one of the notorious progressives. When the progressives themselves answer the lightweight attacks by Rosenfeld and others - that is when the proverbial caca will hit the fan.

I'll cite just a few short excerpts.

A furious row has been raging in the international Jewish community over the rights and wrongs of criticising Israel. At its centre is a British historian who accuses his fellow Jews in the US of stifling any debate about Israel. His opponents say his views give succour to anti-Semites. One thing's for sure: any appearance of consensus over the Middle East has been shattered. ...

Judt was born in London in 1948. Growing up Jewish in 1950s Britain, as he has said, he came to know a thing or two about anti-Semitism. His mother was from London and his father, who was born in Belgium, had come there as a stateless person. Judt was brought up in what he describes as 'a fairly standard left-wing Jewish secular political environment', but with close links to his Yiddish-speaking grandparents, all of whom were eastern European Jews, from Romania and Russia and Lithuania and Poland. As a teenager, he joined a left-wing Zionist organisation and became very active in the kibbutz movement, living in Israel on and off for a large part of the early 1960s.

'What changed for me,' he says now, 'was that in 1967 I went out as a volunteer at the time of the Six Day War; after the war was finished I volunteered for auxiliary military service and I ended up as a sort of informal translator for other volunteers up on the Golan Heights. And there for the first time I began to see another face of Israel that had been camouflaged from me by my enthusiasm for the idealism of the kibbutz movement.' He became, he recalls, quickly very detached from Israel. 'And in fact when I was a student in Paris I became involved in 1970 with Palestinians and young Israelis, trying to organise groups to talk about peace settlements and ending the conflict.'

We call on new Jewess blog to start sex boycott

Our first comment on the new Jewess blog is about the JOFA conference that focuses on the Agunah issue - Orthodox husbands who divorce their wives but don't give them a get. We say, "All talk no action. How about a boycott? Rebbetzins say - no sex with their husbands until they resolve this issue."

Good luck, new blog! Here is the PR:

"Jewess: The Tribe's Better Half"
http://jewess.canonist.com

Jewess is a new Jewish women’s issues blogs launching tonight, the newest member of the Canonist network. Led by Senior Writer Rebecca Honig Friedman, the blog will contain daily news and blog roundups, as well as original reporting, insightful analysis, and much more.
Joining Friedman are several writers focusing on more specific areas, and who will be posting on scheduled days of the week. These contributors include Amy Odell on health, OrthoMom on family issues, and Delly Hayward as “The Shiksa.”
The blog is launching with a fair amount of content already in place, and an interview with Devorah Zlochower appropriate to this weekend’s JOFA Conference.

Shanghai Synagogues

Hat tip: NEWS FOR MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE

In 1991 we visited these sites with an official government guide.

Shanghai Restores Historic Synagogue
Friday February 9, 2007 1:46 PM
By CHRISTOHER BODEEN
Associated Press Writer

SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Shanghai has started restoration work on one of its two remaining synagogues as part of China's effort to revive Jewish heritage in a city that provided refuge to tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.

In another sign of the new interest, a rabbi ministering to the city's Jewish community said Thursday he believes officials will eventually turn over the other synagogue for regular worship services.

The restoration of the Ohel Moishe synagogue, now a Jewish history museum, is due to take five months. The budget hasn't been revealed, although reports said the government has already spent $1.3 million on fixing up the surrounding area and promoting it as a tourist site.

``Shanghai is a great memory for the Jewish people and it's so much better to have this history in the shape of a building than to simply read about it in a book,'' said Rabbi Shalom Greenberg, who moved to Shanghai in 1998. He is a representative of the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters, an Orthodox Jewish organization based in New York.

Efforts to salvage Shanghai's Jewish history have been driven by both domestic and overseas scholarly interest, as well as by the growing numbers of Jewish expatriates in the booming city.

That trend in turn has been embraced by city leaders, who are eager to cast Shanghai as cosmopolitan and welcoming to foreigners.

China's largest city with a population of 20 million, including more than 100,000 foreigners, Shanghai is also a major industrial and commercial center, home to China's largest stock exchange and other financial markets.

Before World War II, the city boasted a large and influential Jewish community with its own schools, newspapers and at least seven synagogues. Most Jews left after World War II and their synagogues were turned to secular uses or torn down.

After several decades of dormancy, the community is growing again, with about 2,000 Jewish foreign residents in the city. Most worship in private homes due to a lack of access to synagogues. China's communist government, which strictly controls religious activities, does not list Judaism among its five officially recognized religions.

Work began last month on Ohel Moishe, which housed offices and a bookshop before it was converted into a museum of Jewish history in 1996. The project aims to expand its exhibits and restore the brick collonaded building to its original appearance, removing added structures and repainting its white masonry.

While Ohel Moishe will remain a museum, city officials appear to be moving toward allowing regular services at Shanghai's other surviving synagogue, the Ohel Rachel, Greenberg said. Its current owners, the city education bureau, now open it for Jewish services only a few times a year.

``The government understands and I'm sure, hopefully sooner than later, that it will allow it to be used for its original purpose,'' Greenberg said.

Shanghai's Jewish community got its start when the city, one of the world's great seaports, was opened to foreign trade in 1842. Concessions were granted to Britain, the United States and France, leaving the city carved up between Western powers.

The Jewish community, whose leading members were Iraqi immigrants and their descendants, was thriving by the time Jews fleeing the Nazis began arriving a century later. Typical of its success was the real estate tycoon Jacob Elias Sassoon, who built the grander, neoclassical Ohel Rachel in 1920.

Constructed in 1928 by Russian immigrants, Ohel Moishe was the center of a less wealthy but equally cosmopolitan community in the Tilanqiao neighborhood north of the center. The area became even more heavily Jewish during World War II when Shanghai's Japanese overlords, under pressure from their German allies, forced German and Austrian Jews to live there exclusively.

About 30,000 European Jews sought refuge in Shanghai from the Nazi genocide.

The city was restored to China at the end of the war, with Western powers renouncing their claims.

Along with synagogues, Shanghai also boasts scores of Protestant and Catholic churches, most of which were closed for decades after the 1949 communist takeover but have since been reopened. However, while missionaries converted millions of Chinese to Christianity, the Jewish community was almost exclusively foreign.

Officially China is atheistic. Christians, Buddhists, Taoists and Muslims are allowed to worship but only in churches, temples and mosques run by state-monitored groups. Christians who attend underground churches - and most do in China - are often jailed and harassed.

Good News for Most American Jewish Families

Sliding to the left...

Jewish population on the rise
Friday, February 9, 2007
SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- America is home to almost 20 percent more Jews than previously estimated, according to a new study by Brandeis University.

There are 6 million to 6.4 million American Jews, rather than the 5.2 million counted by the 2000-01 National Jewish Population Survey. Children, young adults and non-Orthodox Jews came in at higher percentages in the study, done by the Massachusetts university's Steinhardt Social Research Institute.

"American Judaism is expanding," said Len Saxe, director of the institute. "The texture may be different, but it's not a melting ice cube, as some have said. Larger numbers identify with their Judaism than had been thought."

Still another million Americans were raised in Jewish homes, mostly where one parent was Jewish, "and could be considered Jewish," the study said.

Most of the new numbers are non-Orthodox Jews, so that the Orthodox are a smaller percentage of the total: 6 percent to 8 percent, versus the usual guess of 8 percent to 10 percent. The result points up the growth of less-traditional Judaism, Saxe said.

The Brandeis study reanalyzed the earlier study and data from almost three dozen government and foundation studies, and included answers to questions on ethnic, cultural and religious identity.

Among the errors of the earlier study was the use of after-hours phone surveys, the Brandeis study said. Orthodox families were home more often than non-Orthodox young people, who are "highly mobile and rely on cellular phones," the study concluded.

The Brandeis numbers got a nod from the University of Miami's Ira Sheskin, a national figure in Jewish demographics. A study he co-authored, announced in the American Jewish Year Book in December, added up local community figures to 6 million to 6.4 million American Jews.

"I'm amazed that the two of us used different methods and got the basic same answer," he said.

Bad News for One Tenafly Jewish Family

Sliding into prison...

Father, 2 sons, friend plead guilty, face prison for insider trading
Friday, February 9, 2007

By KEVIN G. DeMARRAIS
STAFF WRITER

Four onetime Tenafly residents, including the former vice president of a pharmaceutical company and two of his sons, each face up to five years in prison after pleading guilty in federal court Thursday to insider trading that netted them more than $3.7 million over four years.

The pleas, in what the Securities and Exchange Commission called "a brazen scheme of insider trading" of the company's stock, came in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

The family patriarch, 62-year-old Zvi Rosenthal, stood red-eyed and barely able to speak as he pleaded guilty to a conspiracy count before U.S. District Judge John Gleeson.

He was preceded by his son Amir and followed by his son Ayal in admitting the conspiracy. A fourth defendant, Amir's childhood friend, David Heyman, also pleaded guilty during the 90-minute hearing. Zvi still lives in Tenafly, while the other three now live in New York City.

The four, along with a third son, Oren; Amir's father-in-law, Bahram Delshad, 56, of Englewood Cliffs; and Amir's supervisor at a large Manhattan law firm, Young Kim, 34, of Union City, also were charged in a related civil complaint filed Thursday in Manhattan by the SEC.

"This is a very sad chapter for a good family," said Paul Shechtman, attorney for Amir Rosenthal. "A lot of hard-earned human capital was lost today."

This is Zvi Rosenthal's second guilty plea to fraud. In 1998, while serving as production manager of Isratex Inc., a Brooklyn clothing company, Rosenthal defrauded the Pentagon of millions of dollars by using defective cloth in coveralls and combat uniforms. The company, which had $30 million in federal contracts, allegedly rigged inspections at its plant in Puerto Rico.

He pleaded guilty to giving false information and was sentenced to three years' probation and fined $20,000.

Zvi Rosenthal -- a vice president at Israel-based Taro Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. from 1994 until January 2006 -- was the center of the fraud unveiled on Thursday, offering his sons 13 tips on announcements from his company, beginning in 2001, the SEC said.

In the first case, he tipped off Amir that the Food and Drug Administration was about to approve the company's new generic drug, allowing the son to make a quick $100,000 through stock options, authorities said.

The biggest hit came in 2004, when Zvi informed Amir that Taro's quarterly sales would be worse than expected.

The two, plus Heyman, made $1.5 million by trading on the advance information, the government said.

Heyman, who worked at Ernst & Young, and Ayal Rosenthal, an accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, also shared with the others confidential information about pending mergers they learned through their jobs. In one case, Rosenthal received word that an expected merger had been put off, allowing his brother Amir to liquidate his stock in the company involved. "I am deeply sorry," Heyman, 29, said after admitting his role in the case.

The guilty pleas involved allegedly illicit gains of $2 million, but the SEC said in its suit that the defendants netted more than $3.7 million in profits and losses avoided.

A defense attorney said the actual amount of money made was less than $2.5 million.

The SEC said that Amir Rosenthal created a hedge fund, Aragon Partners, in 2003 to pool money from the family to trade in Taro securities. In later stages of the scheme, Ayal Rosenthal and Heyman passed on information that they picked up at work while Amir traded on it, the SEC said.

"This case is particularly troubling, not just because this appears to have been a 'family business' built on insider trading, but also because the defendants include accountants and lawyers at prominent firms," said Mark K. Schonfeld, director of the SEC's Northeast regional office.

Amir's attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, said the insider-trading charges were an aberration. "He's a very, very decent upstanding person," Lefcourt said after his client entered a plea.

"I'm sure he wants to put this all behind him and get on with his life."

Sentencing is scheduled for May 18. Because of his previous conviction, Zvi Rosenthal faces up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Amir, 29, faces up to 41 months in prison; Heyman up to 27 months, and Ayal, 26, up to six months.

The government's case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Paul Weinstein and Sean Casey.