Vanity Fair: Is George W. Bush a Muslim?

No, they don't really ask that question at Vanity Fair. They do point out that W held no Seders at the White House but he did hold 8 Ramadan dinners, on the excuse that he wanted to promote world peace.

Is George W. Bush a Muslim? We say, Let the record speak for itself.

Vanity Fair says:

Why This Night is Different From All Other Nights

by Juli Weiner

Sunset today marks the first day of this year's celebration of Passover. It is a traditional springtime holiday for the Jewish people, and also for our President, Barack Obama, a non-Jew who has participated in a Seder since 2008, when he walked in on some campaign staffers with Manischewitz and matzo. Reports the New York Times:

"Top aides like David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett will attend, but so will assistants like 24-year-old Herbie Ziskend. White House chefs will prepare Jewish participants' family recipes, even rendering chicken fat-better known as schmaltz-for just the right matzo ball flavor.

If last year is any guide, Malia and Sasha Obama will take on the duties of Jewish children, asking four questions about the night's purpose-along with a few of their own-and scrambling to find matzo hidden in the gleaming antique furniture."

According to the Guardian, Obama is the first American President to hold a Seder in the White House, although George W. Bush "held eight Ramadan dinners in office to stress that America's war with violent extremists was not a war with Islam."

Anyway, tonight's dinner will presumably feature less macabre overtones—plus, matzo balls!

LA Times: Digital Haggadahs and Seder Resources with links

We were just talking yesterday to a writer friend about writing a custom White House Haggadah for the Obamas and wondering out loud why somebody hasn't come up with it yet. Lo and behold, according to the LAT they have. And they have come up with much more online for Passover. Here is the article - we added a few links.

Passover story goes digital
In the long-standing practice of adding to the Exodus tale, the Internet is changing the way some families will be relating the story of Jews' escape from slavery at Seder celebrations Monday.

By Nomi Morris

Thousands of years after Moses led his people out of Egypt, the Passover story is going digital.

At Monday's Seder meal, dozens of families will be reading the traditional tableside ceremony from a Haggadah, a text guiding the Seder, that they have personalized by uploading family photos to replace stock illustrations of Pharaoh and the slaves.

Behrman House, a Jewish educational publisher in Springfield, N.J., has sold more than 100 sets of the cyber-assisted version of its Family Haggadah.

Boston Herald: Pope Benedict XVI Should Resign

It's not just some blogger saying this, it is a serious editorial by a columnist in the Boston Herald.

Why Pope Benedict’s got to go!
By Margery Eagan
The Pope should resign. He should offer himself up to authorities for prosecution, like the sacrificial lamb he’s supposed to represent here on earth.

Long ago he should have opened the secret church books on priestly abuse. He hasn’t. Courts finally forced that in Boston almost a decade ago and, oh, what horrors we found. Remember? The Vatican hierarchy then blamed our scandal on a decadent American culture. Now the same priestly disease has swept Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, on and on across Europe and beyond. So was all the world, from the 1950s on, just one huge, decadent Gomorrah? Or was the Catholic hierarchy, from the ’50s on, run like an international crime organization aiding and abetting child abuse, then covering up its cover-up?

A few years back, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating caused an uproar by comparing secret-keeping American bishops to La Cosa Nostra... more...

Maureen Dowd in the Times argues that the present pope should be replaced with a woman.

We wonder if the church were a business would its supporters claim it is "too big to fail"?

Odds have dropped to 6 to 4 at paddypower.com for those gamblers who want to bet on the pope's resignation.

Times: Obama's White House Seder 2010 - 5770

The Times describes the Obama White House Seder traditions.

...When Passover begins at sunset on Monday evening, Mr. Obama and about 20 others will gather for a ritual that neither the rabbinic sages nor the founding fathers would recognize.

In the Old Family Dining Room, under sparkling chandeliers and portraits of former first ladies, the mostly Jewish and African-American guests will recite prayers and retell the biblical story of slavery and liberation, ending with the traditional declaration “Next year in Jerusalem.” (Never mind the current chill in the administration’s relationship with Israel.)

Top aides like David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett will attend, but so will assistants like 24-year-old Herbie Ziskend. White House chefs will prepare Jewish participants’ family recipes, even rendering chicken fat — better known as schmaltz — for just the right matzo ball flavor.

If last year is any guide, Malia and Sasha Obama will take on the duties of Jewish children, asking four questions about the night’s purpose — along with a few of their own — and scrambling to find matzo hidden in the gleaming antique furniture.

That event was the first presidential Seder, and also probably “the first time in history that gefilte fish had been placed on White House dishware,” said Eric Lesser, the former baggage handler, who organizes each year’s ritual.

As in many Jewish households, the Obama Seder seems to take on new meaning each year, depending on what is happening in the world and in participants’ lives (for this group, the former is often the same as the latter)...more...

New Yorker: Fake Interview with Philip Roth Exposed

It's hard for us to figure this one out. Judith Thurman writes about one Italian journalist who really interviewed Philip Roth who discovered that another had faked an interview with Roth.

... Zanuttini asked Roth why he was so “disappointed” with Barack Obama. She translated, aloud, remarks attributed to him in an article by a freelance journalist, Tommaso Debenedetti, that was published last November in Libero, a tabloid notably sympathetic to Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy (who is embroiled in his own sex scandals with much younger women). “It appears that you find him nasty, vacillating, and mired in the mechanics of power,” Zanuttini said. “But I have never said anything of the kind!” Roth objected. “It is completely contrary to what I think. Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic.” He had never heard of Debenedetti, or of Libero. The interview, with its bitter judgment of Obama’s banality, failure, and empty rhetoric about hope and change, was a complete fabrication...more...

Bizarre. What is the point of making this up?

Is Tina Fey Jewish?

No, Tina Fey, the actress famous for her Sarah Palin imitation, is not a Jew.

Fey was born in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia to a Greek American mother and a father of German and Scottish descent.

Tina Fey is married to Jeff Richmond, a composer on SNL. They married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony on June 3, 2001. They have a daughter, Alice Zenobia Richmond who was born on September 10, 2005.

Did a Hitler-Youth-Pope Enable Child Molesters?

Did a Hitler-Youth-Pope Enable Child Molesters? Is this what religion is all about? Apparently so.

Why is any record at the Vatican a secret? What are they trying to hide? That they were Nazi sympathizers or child-molester-protectors? Apparently so.

The Telegraph reports:

Germany is fighting to keep sealed the Adolf Eichmann files detailing the years the Holocaust chief logistical organiser spent on the run before he was captured by Mossad agents.

Those hoping to have a 50-year secrecy order overturned believe the government is embarrassed by details within that may prove German and Vatican officials colluded in his escape and freedom.

According to the Times:

In an unsigned editorial on Thursday, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, criticized The Times for an article published Thursday on the abuse issue. The Italian editorial said that Benedict had always handled such cases with “transparency, purpose and severity,” and accused the news media of acting “with the clear and ignoble intent of trying to strike Benedict and his closest collaborators at any cost.”

Just show us some real authentic "transparency, purpose and severity" - saying it is not the same as doing it. Open the Vatican records and let us see all the good you have done for the world - if that is what the record will show. Or not.

Is this not full out enabling? Per the Times:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope and archbishop in Munich at the time, was copied on a memo that informed him that a priest, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish.

An initial statement on the matter issued earlier this month by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising placed full responsibility for the decision to allow the priest to resume his duties on Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber. But the memo, whose existence was confirmed by two church officials, shows that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest’s reassignment.

This is the Church that burned our Talmud.  Why we are really big fans of Popes. Per Wikipedia:

In 1242, The French crown burned all Talmud copies in Paris, about 12,000, after the book was "charged" and "found guilty" in the Paris trial sometimes called "the Paris debate". This burnings of Hebrew books were initiated by Pope Gregory IX, who persuaded French King Louis IX to undertake it. He was followed by subsequent popes. The Church and Christian states viewed the Talmud as a book hateful and insulting toward Christ and gentiles. The most ferocious haters of Judaism and Jewish books among them were Innocent IV (1243–1254), Clement IV (1256–1268), John XXII (1316–1334), Paul IV (1555–1559), Pius V (1566–1572) and Clement VIII (1592–1605). They almost succeeded in stamping out Jewish books entirely.

Maybe it is time to burn some other books.

ABC: David Frum says Republicans met their Waterloo and now they work for FOX News

Republicans are in disarray. They lost and are acting like the worst kind of sore losers, poor sports and just plain awful obnoxious people.

Even a few honest people from their own inner circle are willing to admit that the Republicans lost and now they are self-destructing.

David Frum on GOP: Now We Work for Fox

Prominent conservative David Frum, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, has raised some eyebrows in the past 36 hours with an assault on the Republican approach -- particularly on the airwaves -- to fighting health care reform.

It began with this blog post Sunday that declared the historic moment the Republican Waterloo.

Terry Moran interviewed Frum yesterday for last night's report, "Yes, He Can," which is embedded below and looks at the political fallout both parties may face in 2010 -- and beyond.

Among the comments Frum made to "Nightline" was the assertion that "nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents" and that "anger trapped the [Republican] leadership."

But it was this exchange, which you can see starting at the 2:20 mark, that is generating some buzz today:

Moran: "It sounds like you're saying that the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs, hijacked the Republican party and drove it to a defeat?"

Frum: "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party."

Yes we did! And we are not going back!

BAR: Was the Last Supper a Passover Seder?

It's not so simple to answer the question of whether the Last Supper described in the New Testament was a Seder. Jonathan Klawans does a good job of summarizing the state of the question in, "Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?" in the current BAR.

Many people assume that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Seder, a ritual meal held in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Passover. And indeed, according to the Gospel of Mark 14:12, Jesus prepared for the Last Supper on the “first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb.” If Jesus and his disciples gathered together to eat soon after the Passover lamb was sacrificed, what else could they possibly have eaten if not the Passover meal? And if they ate the Passover sacrifice, they must have held a Seder.

Three out of four of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) agree that the Last Supper was held only after the Jewish holiday had begun. Moreover, one of the best known and painstakingly detailed studies of the Last Supper—Joachim Jeremias’s book The Eucharistic Words of Jesus—lists no fewer than 14 distinct parallels between the Last Supper tradition and the Passover Seder...more...

JRB: Ending in Self-Absorption - Hillel Halkin on the Koren Sacks Siddur

How to evaluate a new Jewish journal, The Jewish Review of Books? Ask if it is yet another reactionary monthly? (It is quarterly.) Like they say, read it first. So we do, in search of the, "ideal of the thoughtful essay that illuminates as it entertains."

And in it we read first a review of the recent Koren-Sacks Siddur that turns into a rambling essay by Hillel Halkin about prayer and poetry and religion and then lo and behold, into a disconcerting confession of impiety. Not that unorthodoxy detracts from one's ability to write and think critically. More than likely it helps. But what distresses us is the fullness of ego that intrudes into the article. And the ego is so big it gets broadcast in autobiographical detail that was frozen "midway through adolescence" and then projected across to others. And the Siddur and all its poetry, religion and drama drops from sight. Is this what we do in our public performances: take the center stage and then get full of ourselves? Start with praise and end in Self-Absorption?

Perhaps Halkin is on to something after all, picking up his reflections towards the end,

...Nothing, however, can keep one focused on one’s prayers when one loses faith in the God to whom one has been praying. This happened to me midway through adolescence. Although since then I have attended many synagogues services, I have never really been able to pray. A part of me still yearns for the days when I could. It misses the thrill of the leather straps biting into my arm each morning as I said, “I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, loving-kindness and compassion; I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord.” It misses the soul-throb of God’s bringing on the evening while the last light goes out in the west, the spheres rolling out darkness over the face of the earth. It misses the devotion of bowing low like a servant leaving the room of his master, “the King of all kings, the Holy One blessed be He,” in the concluding aleinu.

There were times when I prayed mechanically then, too. There were times when I didn’t pray at all. But there were times when I felt like a priest in the Temple, binding my soul to the altar and offering the daily sacrifice at its appointed time and place. It was the intensity of that experience that makes me feel like an imposter when I take part in a synagogue service today. Like anyone skilled at playing a role, I alone know I am playing it. I go through the motions of prayer as proficiently as do the men around me. You don’t forget such things any more than you forget how to swim or ride a bicycle.

And yet I sometimes wonder how many of these men are having an experience more intense than my own. Not a large number, to judge by outward appearances. Most seem to be engaged in what they are doing without overly troubling themselves about it. They take pleasure in being together, as people take pleasure in any group activity—folk dancing, say, or a sing-along. I do not say they have no feeling of uplift. Clearly they do. But it is an uplift that could also be mine if I allowed it to be, which may be why I place no great value on it....

And then we turn the page to another review, wherein the writer confesses to reading the book that he reviews in the synagogue during services and discussing it with his neighbor, and the book is about Christian theology. Menachem Kellner starts off, "Reading Saving God in shul, I was asked by the person sitting next to me what it was about." I am glad he didn't include in the review the part about the chapter he read in the bathroom.

Which brings us to a book that informs us about an issue that blows our mind. Shalom Carmy reviews, Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person by Gilbert Meilaender, in which he points out, "The second theme is expressed by the subtitle—the author’s conviction that the concept of human dignity is essential to ethical reflection. This question arose in part from the author’s work with President Bush’s Council on Bioethics."

And yes thankfully, Professor Carmy does not wax full of himself, does not confess the state of his faith, does not recount the places of his reading activities, and does pay close and critical attention to the book at hand and its arguments. But incredibly he does not comment on the literal elephant in the room of this review, to wit, the irony of "ethical reflection" in "President Bush's Council."