Charles Blow enjoys his fair share of making up fake, misleading, and otherwise nonexistent “trends” to fill up space around the advertisements and obituaries in the NYT. (In a past weird column, he asserted that hooking up is an entirely new phenomena only done by people under age 30.) One such trend that doesn’t exist in the natural world is the current media meme in which President Obama is quickly losing steam amongst American Jews.

Aside from the general weirdness of specifically singling out Jews, this isn’t really happening at all:

From January to July 2010, Jews gave Obama a 61 percent approval rating, down from 66 percent from July to December 2009. Muslims gave him a 78 percent approval rating during the first half of 2010, and Mormons a 24 percent rating. The overall approval rating is 48 percent, down 15 points from the first half of 2009.

Obama received average job approval ratings from Catholics, and below-average ratings from Protestants.

Despite drops in the overall job approval rating from January 2009 to July 2010, Muslims have consistently given Obama the highest rating and Mormons the lowest. Jews’ approval ratings have remained above average.

Most important is the fact that this isn’t the Orthodox vs liberal Judaism battle that some people are trying to make it out to be, it is a power-grab by the Haredi minority. As such, the silence and shrugs by people who don’t seem to understand it (either willfully or not) are just as frustrating as the attempts to purposely misrepresent the intent behind the bill.

Last week, there was an op-ed in New York Times by Alana Newhouse (of Tablet) that does a really great job at explaining what is going on and what is at stake:

[...] The problem is not simply that some of these rabbinical functionaries, who are paid by the state and courted by politicians, are demonstrably corrupt. (To take the most salacious of a slew of examples, an American Haredi rabbi who had become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion resigned from his organization in December after accusations that he solicited phone sex from a hopeful female convert.) Rather, it is that the beliefs of a tiny minority of the world’s Jews are on the verge of becoming the Israeli government’s definition of Judaism, for all Jews.

It is hard to exaggerate the possible ramifications, first and foremost for Jewish Israelis. Rivkah Lubitch, an Orthodox woman who is a lawyer in Israel’s rabbinic court system, painted a harrowing picture of the future in a recent column on the Israeli Web site Ynet.

“Even if you didn’t go to register for marriage, and even if you didn’t go to a rabbinic court for any reason, and even if you didn’t pass by a rabbinic court when you walked down the street — the rabbinic court can summon you, conduct a hearing about your Jewishness and revoke it,” she wrote. “In effect, the entire nation of Israel is presumed to be Not-Jewish — until proven otherwise.”

Why are the rabbis doing this? The process is not being driven, as some say, by a suspicion of new converts — they’re simply a wedge issue. Nor is it, as others argue, a reaction to the influx of Russian Jews, who when they seek permission to wed in Israel are often asked for evidence that their families were registered as Jews in the old Soviet Union.

No, what is driving this process is the desire of a small group of rabbis to expand their authority from narrow questions of conversion to larger questions of Jewish identity. Since what goes for conversion also goes for all other clerical acts, only a few anointed rabbis will be able to determine the authenticity of one’s marriage, divorce, birth, death — and every rite in between.

And lest one imagine that this is just another battle between the more progressive Reform and Conservative denominations and the more observant Orthodox, it must be noted that the criteria used by the rabbinate are driven by internal Haredi politics, not observance. According to the Jewish Week, at one point the number of American rabbis who were officially authorized by the Israeli rabbinate to perform conversions was down to a few dozen. Even if you are Orthodox — and especially if you are Modern Orthodox — your rabbi probably doesn’t make the cut. (Don’t believe it? Go ask him.)

Given that the conversion bill is the latest in a series of similarly motivated efforts, it seems almost useless to note that the stringent approach to Jewish law that the Israeli rabbinate promotes bears little connection to the historical experience and religious practice of the majority of Jewish people over the past two millenniums. It will do little good, too, to point out that it is well outside the consensus established by Hillel — arguably the greatest rabbi in all of rabbinic Judaism and whom, as Joseph Telushkin argues in a forthcoming book, was willing to convert a pagan on the spot, simply because he’d asked.

And it doesn’t help to argue that giving the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate total control over Jewish practice will destroy religious life in Israel just as surely as clerical control hurt the Church of England and the Catholic Church in Spain and France. Or that the Zionist founders, from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben-Gurion, all believed passionately in the unity of the Jewish people and the need for a secular state. [...]

—
Modern Tribe has some great Jewish Gifts for all occasions

It is depicted in the mostly-factual film The Last King of Scotland, which itself is haunting. It is a cerebral horror movie. It makes you wish you weren’t watching it and when it’s over, you can’t go back to living until it has worn off.

A year later, Uganda was appointed to the late United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Current membership of the United Nations Human Rights Council includes various countries with distinguished human rights records such as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Pakistan.

• How a girl named Yomaira became Yehudit: “Yehudit Tamayo’s path to Judaism began when she was a ten-year-old Roman Catholic by the name of Yomaira.”
• Following their true paths: “The journey to one’s Jewish soul may have several bumps along the way, but those who choose Judaism for genuine reasons often find that they were on that path long before they themselves had the revelation that, at their core, they were already Jewish.”
• When I told my family I wanted to be Jewish: “I was 14 the first time I told my mother I wanted to be Jewish. She reeled her arm back like a baseball player (she is Dominican) and she smacked me across the face.”
• Tired of living in fear: “The issue is not who my mother is, but rather who I am. The question for all of us is – what have you done today? Are you a Jew by birth and an idol worshiper by practice? (Insert the name of your favorite idol, be it stone, drugs, money or physical pleasure.) Or are you a Jew by practice? By conversion, I am a Jew. By practice, I am a Jew.”

[Photograph of Synagogue Etz Haim (Tree of Life), circa 1700 in Izmir, Turkey & links via Aliza Hausman]

I hit up Shmarya after finding a post he made on the exact same thing, but he said that no rabbis seem concerned about it.

I had figured it was either a deliberate attempt at faking a kosher certification where there was none, or simply trying to poorly explain what “halal” is to people either too sheltered or too stupid to Google it for themselves, but assumed it was the latter.

Just recently, I noticed that the little symbol has changed from saying “equivalent to kosher” around it, to “certified since 1987.” I wonder if someone complained?

There follows a most peculiar statement: “A hermaphrodite can perform a religious duty for a fellow hermaphrodite, but not for any one else.”

Some folks are shocked to find the rabbis even mentioning hermaphrodites, what the Gemara calls androgynus, but the truth is that this being of unusual gender shows up all over Talmudic discourse. Perhaps in the days before the “medical miracle,” when a procedure on the birthing table, a kind of grotesque circumcision, purports to solve this riddle of nature forever, the alternately-sexed were simply more present in everyday life. But what the rabbis lack in surgical technique, they make up for in the rigidity of their intellectual categorization. In every discussion, it is determined whether the androgynus will be treated as a man or a woman, depending on circumstance. Only one sage, the forward-thinking Rabbi Jose (pronounced Yo-si,) offers the suggestion that a hermaphrodite “is a creature unto itself.”

Whenever I pass some “black hebrews” on Nicollet Mall, I keep thinking of the MaNishtana post:

Please direct me to where it says “Behold, and thou shalt dress in a manner as if thou art the bastard offspring of a threesome between the Power Rangers, the Village People, and Lawrence of Arabia.”

and so G said: “imma tell y’all straight up right now: y’all can do the damn thing and we be cool or y’all can drop ship and we got beef. when y’all get up in the club, it’s on with them next g haters. let em know we up in this ish. smoke them fools and they fake a$$ g’s. i run israel…don’t be tryna switch up my flow, ya heard me? my verses be tight already, i don’t need yall messing with my bars. now if some next cat comes along tryna kick knowledge that i aint never co-signed on, then that cat is tryna clown y’all cuz he don’t run with me. don’t let him gas you up with some walking across water ish…when you up in my crib, break me off with some of that paper, cuz y’all need a reminder that I run this ish. i get money. now y’all better come through and holler at me at me in club. you know how we get crunk on the trifecta.”

“hey, when something is really, truly, internally yours? you can have a lot of fun with it.”

For those who don’t remember, Torossian’s firm was hired by Agriprocessors after the May 2008 immigration raid. In its capacity as Agriprocessors PR agency, it impersonated Rabbi Morris Allen and other Agriprocessors critics online – starting right here on FailedMessiah.com.

Yes, that would be THAT Rabbi Allen, of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights.

You know, I’d love to do Birthright once I finish my conversion. This just should not have happened. Birthright should have known better. It’s disappointing. As long as Birthright is being represented by that trashy firm, I can’t find a reason for anyone to support them, refer young Jews to them, or to sign up to take a trip with them.

You can read more about everything 5WPR and Agriprocessors over at FailedMessiah, or everything sleazy and 5WPR at Gawker.

"The Hypaethral Temple, Philae" by Francis Frith, 1857

One of my favorite blogs, Borei Hoshech, focuses on Jewish prayer in light of mental illness. It sounds like that could be a pretty narrow niche, but like most things in Judaism (at least for me), it is bottomless. Particularly insightful are the entries from around Passover, specifically from Missing Egypt:

I thought that once I left Egypt, which pretty much happened several years ago, things would be easy. The Promised Land glimmered hopefully in the not-too-distant distance. The Promised Land of being able to go to sleep at night, get up in the morning, and do something useful, fulfilling, and interesting with my day in between. The Promised Land of a husband, children, and a full professional and communal life. But it turns out that there is a vast desert between slavery and the Promised Land. I am traversing that desert right now.

As for me, I don’t even know whether I am still in Egypt or if I have made it to the desert. Maybe thinking about it means I’m in the desert? Years from now, I’ll have the time and perspective to be able to look back and pinpoint where exactly I was as I wrote this, and see how far I’ve come.