Published by Steven I. Weiss January 30th, 2007
in Main.
In his speech at the University of Georgia, Former President Jimmy Carter revealed a previously-unkown fact about the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. The audio has been made available by the Red and Black. CampusJ has produced a transcript of the relevant portion:
After the third day, I never let Begin and Sadat see each other; they were at each other’s throats. They couldn’t talk harmoniously for ten minutes, and so I separated them, and for ten days I went back and forth. One day, Sadat had a visit from the foreign minister of Israel, Moshe Dayan. And Dayan told sadat that in effect the Israelis were not going to yield on any more points…and when dayan told Sadat that, Sadat decided to go home to Egypt, and he didn’t tell me, but I found out…that Sadat had ordered a helicopter back to Washington to go home. And I was stricken, because Sadat had been my friend, personally. I didn’t know what to do; Sadat was leaving, I couldn’t do anything about it.
And I went in a back room and I knelt down and prayed, and I asked God to help me. And then I walked over to Sadat’s cabin, and he had all of his suitcases out in front, and all of his aides were there ready to load his suitcases into the helicopter.
And I went in to his room, and I told everybody else to get out, and Sadat and I stood with our noses almost touching, and I told Sadat that he had betrayed me, and betrayed his own people, and if he left, our friendship was severed forever, and the proper relationship between the United States and Israel would be dealt a severe blow. And he went over in a corner by himself and he came back and said “I’ll stay.”
Published by Ben Greenberg January 29th, 2007
in Indiana University.
Where: Chabad (513 E 7th Street, across from Dunn Meadow)
When: Saturday, February 3, 2007 at 4:45pm - 5:30pm
Facebook event listing.
The Curious Jew (Stern College student Chana Wiznitzer) attended the YU Medical Ethics Society lecture, Cloning in Jewish Law, and took extensive notes:
“The Birth of Cloning” (headline of an article) is from the 90s- began a long time ago but never made the papers- they took an adult cell from the webbed foot of a frog and put into the frog the egg without a nucleus and tadpoles were born- maturation can be reversed, you know that. How do you deprogram, that is the question, how do you make a cell go backwards, how do you take a diploid adult cell- if I can get it to start behaving like a newly-fertilized cell, I can make a new human being.
The Pope should know that every cell has the ability/ capacity for life. That makes you think twice before cutting your nails too short. (laughter)
Published by Rivka Bukowsky January 29th, 2007
in Main.
Charles Small, founder of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, spoke to JTA’s Toby Axelrod about his background and hopes for the institute, which has mainly hosted lectures so far. Axelrod also took this picture of Small.
Small developed the idea in the summer of 2004 after attending an international meeting on anti-Semitism at the United Nations. There he met scholars who had no institutional home.
“We approached Yale, and they allowed us to do a seminar series. It went well,” he said.
Small then proposed to house an institute there, “like an intellectual home base.” Yale agreed, and the program opened officially in September 2006 under the umbrella of the university’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
“I hope it will become a vibrant center of high-caliber, interdisciplinary research,” said Small, who has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and has taught at the University of London and three universities in Israel.
[…]
After years of involvement in reconciliation projects with Palestinians, he was shocked when after the intifada began, “my anti-racist friends were silent about suicide bombings.”
“From 1996 to 2000, it was a time when there seemed to be a lot of hope and possibilities,” he recalled. “I would actually go to Ramallah regularly” to hear jazz musician Arnie Lawrence, who taught young Israeli and Palestinian kids respect and reconciliation through music.
But even several months before the peace process broke down, “we were told not to go,” Small said. “The Islamists were not happy that Israelis and foreigners were sitting together. So on the ground, things were shifting before it was broken.”
Small says the breakdown of peace talks “affected me profoundly.” Nevertheless, it was “not a mistake” to reach out, Small says.
In the end, hope has to be paired with action.
“I wonder,” he says, “what the next generation is going to say about our generation, about what we did.”
Published by Jill Goldstein January 29th, 2007
in New York University.
Jewish students will participate in the fifth annual HOPE, the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate tonight, Monday, January 29th. Organized by Hillel’s Social Action Chair, Abbe Pick, these students will join other program participants to count the number of men and women living on the streets without homes and conduct surveys as a part of a larger New York City effort.
Some NYU volunteers will be meeting at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life: Hillel at NYU at 7 East 10th Street at 9pm to grab snacks, meet up with other NYU-Hillel team volunteers, and hear from a member of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. Other students who cannot volunteer all night are invited to hear this speaker as well. The event is posted to Facebook.
All teams will gather at 10:30pm and be sent to various locations throughout the city to do their work between midnight and 4am. If staying awake and attending classes all day afterwards isn’t enough, the NYC Department of Homeless Services will be placing paid decoys around the city to help test the effectiveness of the homeless count figures. This will be conducted independently by researchers from Columbia University.
Published by Rivka Bukowsky January 29th, 2007
in Main.
Last week it was Brandeis; this week Stanford is making lots of news. We posted earlier about the Finkelstein controversy and related op-eds; in today’s Stanford Daily junior Mishan Araujo responds with a critical look at pro-Palestinian campus groups.
According to their website, Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) is “dedicated to promoting awareness of current events and instances of human rights violations and injustice in the region.” Yet last quarter their five events were: Ending Apartheid in the Holy Land…, Lebanon, Hezbollah and Israel: What really happened?, Breaking the Silence: An Evening with Former Israeli Soldiers, The Other Side of Israel…, and …South Asian-Arab Solidarity against Israeli Apartheid. It doesn’t appear that the Coalition for Justice in the Middle East is interested in human rights violations in the “region.” It seems they are interested in singling out Israel. If they were truly interested in the region why wouldn’t they have events about the disgraceful way women are treated in many Arab countries, about honor killings, or about the horrific way members of the LGBT community are harassed and often killed in many countries in the Middle East? If, as Tala Al-Ramahi claims in her Jan. 26 Op-Ed, CJME’s “plea and struggle for seeking justice is color-blind, race-blind, religion-blind…” then why is their programming so Israel-centric?
This quarter we’ve seen the birth of SCAI, a group with largely the same membership as CJME, and so far they’ve brought us the launch of their divestment campaign followed by an event about the Jewish people’s exploitation of the Holocaust and misuse of the term anti-Semitism. I guess now that they’ve brought a Jew to campus to explain to us that cries of anti-Semitism are often unfounded, I should shy away from the topic and become reluctant to raise my voice at discrimination when I see it. Well, I won’t. If they don’t want me to use the term “anti-Semitism,” perhaps SCAI and CJME can come up with another word for their practice of singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East. Maybe they will find a word that makes their actions sound less vile. But, if this pattern of behavior continues, Stanford is headed in a very dangerous and hateful direction.
Follow the link for people’s comments on this op-ed.
And here’s a link to the Daily’s coverage of SCAI’s call to selectively divest from companies that support Israel.
Published by Rivka Bukowsky January 29th, 2007
in Main.
We have seen the enemy, and it is us. Stanford graduate students Daniel Kaganovich and Jeremy England issue a scathing condemnation of the Stanford Hillel in The Stanford Review, accusing the group of not standing up to Israel’s attackers on campus.
The writers list various events Hillel has hosted that they say are anti-Israel, and then question Hillel’s commitment to Jewish activities. I am excerpting the article but it should really be read in its totality to get the full force of the writers’ argument.
Hillel’s events are characterized by a severe aversion to anything too overtly Jewish (unless smoking huka in a sukkah can pass for a commemoration of Sukkot). In the new Hillel building [pictured above], which must have cost millions of dollars, there are pictures of some people in Darfur and some children from Honduras, there is a wall-hanging that features a pig, a cross, and four patches (according to our count) referencing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and yet there is not a single Israeli flag in plain view, nor any other physical evidence that anything Jewish goes on there. More importantly, judging from Hillel’s approach to the organization of Jewish events, it does not appear to see anything of autonomous value in Judaism. What is one to conclude from a “Chalah-ween” Shabbat gathering featuring vampire slayers (cum crucifix) and witches, except that Shabbat is not something one should waste any time on unless it’s first hybridized with a pagan holiday? Why must a meal at the end of Yom Kippur be dovetailed with a Ramadan break fast other than to imply that the Day of Atonement is not interesting unless converted into an introduction to Muslim religious traditions? (A similar event entitled “Sukkat Salaam” was put on by Hillel at Harvard a year ago, at which Arab students sporting Arafatesque kefiyas were given a platform to combine Sukkot with Israel bashing). Why is there so much time for social action, and none at all for observing Shmini Atzeret and Simhat Torah (which were excluded from this year’s list of Stanford Hillel-commemorated holidays, presumably because they could not easily be combined with a dialogue session or Catholic saint’s day)? To be sure, those at Stanford Hillel who send students to help the needy in Honduras see this as an expression of Jewish values, and so it may be, but those Hillel organizers who define Judaism as a vaguely articulated affirmation of whichever liberal pieties are currently most in vogue do a tremendous disservice to all Jews when they imply that there is nothing more to their tradition than having the right politics.
So long as more Jewish things happen in Stanford’s gym than at its Hillel house, Hillel has no hope of motivating students to take a strong position in defense of Israel. An organization that gets its moral teachings from a mixture of fashionable liberal values and Arab propaganda rather than from actual Judaism cannot take a morally inspired position on such a “divisive” issue as the Arab war against Israel.
Published by Rivka Bukowsky January 29th, 2007
in Main.
Louisiana State University’s Hillel hosted its largest Shabbat dinner this past weekend, drawing about 30 students. Daily Reveille reporter Rachael Moreau covered the event.
At Friday’s Shabbat dinner, some people came with Jewish friends to fulfill a requirement for a Judaism class while others came to join with friends.
Aharon Varady, an urban planner in Baton Rouge who completed his graduate work at the University, went to the dinner because “the synagogues in Baton Rouge are more family oriented.”
He said he wanted “a more vibrant experience.”
The event included a performance by comedian Michael “Ziggy” Danziger, who even had the Union catering staff laughing.
“He gets better every time you hear him,” [freshman Ann] Jacobson said.
During some of the service’s songs, some members broke into dance, and a Beatles song was recited for words to meditate.
Now I’m curious…which Beatles song?
The above picture, taken by Megan Casey, shows LSU student Jerod Bracklin praying at Shabbat dinner.
Published by Rivka Bukowsky January 29th, 2007
in Main.
Northwestern’s a cappella group is looking for a few good men - and non-Jews are welcome, too. Joseph Lyons interviews members of ShireiNU in The Daily Northwestern. He focuses on Angelica Gonzalez, a Plano, Texas native who sang in her Catholic church’s choir before joining ShireiNU.
This year, the group is facing new challenges - a lack of male voices.
[Senior Randi] Heller said the group had 11 members until Jan. 18, when it held auditions and admitted another male singer. She said the group needed more male voices because the ratio was nine women to two men. This year, three freshmen joined in the fall - all women.
Gonzalez said more men would make a difference because performances are difficult if any of the men can’t make it. She said men who tried out for other a cappella groups on campus but were turned down should consider auditioning and the group is “always looking for males.”
Heller said the singing in Hebrew deters some people who would consider joining, and combining Judaism and a cappella scares people away. While most members can read Hebrew, few of the members can understand the language.
“I’ve never been much into the religious aspect of (ShireiNU),” Heller said.
“I just like the music a lot,” she said, adding that some songs resonate from her childhood.
“We like to have fun about how I’m the only non-Jewish member,” Gonzalez said.
During December concerts, Gonzalez’ fellow members poked fun at her status. In an adaptation of Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song,” they altered the lyrics so they sang: “Angelica Gonzalez: not a Jew. But guess who is: all the rest of ShireiNU.”
The group hopes more non-Jewish students will join the group because “it’s not really a religious thing,” Heller said.
“If you are in a high school choir or something like that, you sing in German, you sing in Italian, you sing in all these different languages. So I don’t think it makes too much of a difference.”
Published by Rivka Bukowsky January 29th, 2007
in Main.
The Nobel Laureate is speaking at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles on Wednesday, and the school is going all out in preparation for the lecture. Natalie Minev writes in The Loyolan that the Elie Wiesel Event Planning Committee has distributed 500 copies of Night, 2,500 red wristbands bearing the message “LMU: No Home for Hate,” and 1,000 bookmarks.
Dr. Holli Levitsky, an associate professor of English and member of the planning committee, called the campaign a “guerilla act” which encouraged students not only to attend Wiesel’s lecture but also to take his work, read it and pass it on to others. The bookmark, which serves as an insert for “Night,” urges students to “fulfill LMU’s mission to advocate for social justice, peace and tolerance.”
The bracelets, which have been seen on student and faculty wrists alike and are reminiscent of Lance Armstrong’s “Livestrong” wristbands, serve as a symbol of collective support for tolerance on campus, according to Levitsky, who took a handful of wristbands and threw them up in the air during one of her classes for students in the room to catch.
[…]
Elie Wiesel’s visit also coincides with the emergence of a new Jewish Studies program at LMU, which is in the early stages of development. Levitsky, who is chair of the committee to organize the program, said that hopefully a Jewish Studies minor will be available for students to pursue by the fall of 2008.
Fr. Michael Engh, dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and chair of the Elie Wiesel planning committee, said he oversaw from the start the possibility of bringing Elie Wiesel to campus along with Dr. Jeff Siker, chair of the theological studies department. Especially in light of prejudice-driven graffiti that has been reported on campus numerous times this academic year, Engh said the LMU community could benefit greatly from Wiesel’s visit.
“I hope Mr. Wiesel inspires students to respond to instances of hate and prejudice, no matter what form it takes,” Engh said. “Evil thrives most readily in the world when good people do nothing. We need to be involved, aware, active and in connection with other people who share our values and our commitment to act.”
Photo credit: Faiza Mokhtar
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