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Whether admitting he didn't know anything about the National Intelligence Estimate that reported that Iran had not had a program to develop nuclear weapons since 2003 after it had been plastered all over the media for days, or describing his ideal foreign policy as a triangulation between Thomas Friedman and Frank Gaffney, Mike Huckabee has had a difficult time faking expertise on foreign policy issues. Still, good Christian that he is, Huckabee soldiers on -- on to the pages of the Jerusalem Post, to offer his sophisticated understanding of the Holocaust and to accuse Barack Obama of being an appeasenik.

On the first count, Huckabee uses his daughter's trip to Yad Vashem as his proxy:

At the end of our visit, Sarah went to the guest book and wrote simple words that I will never forget: "Why didn't somebody do something?"

That is all she wrote, but with those words, I knew that, in her own way, she "got it."

She sure did. "Why didn't somebody do something?" is all you need to know about the Holocaust -- and also the historical roots of anti-Semitism, the nineteenth century nationalism that led to the unifications of Germany and Italy and persisted into various right wing clubs and societies, the rise of mass ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the widespread success of the Dolchstosslegende in Germany, the fear of revolutionary communism that disposed the remnants of Europe's anciens regimes to ally with right-wing populism, the Catholic Church's embrace of Franco and the western powers' fecklessness during the Spanish Civil War, the unpunished genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey, and the overall sense of the impotence of democracy during the thirties -- but except for all that, Sarah got it.

But of course, Huckabee isn't just interested in teaching Israelis Holocaust history; he's also got an axe to grind. To wit, he finds deeply troubling "Senator Obama's desire to 'hold a summit in the Muslim world' and "to listen to the 'concerns' of these nations." And rightly so. The first step to negotiating any long-term middle-Eastern peace is a blanket refusal to negotiate with any middle-Eastern countries.

Incidentally, Huckabee may be in better company than he knows. The folks at Commentary incisively noted Barack Obama's sinister commitment to an "even-handed approach" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sweet Odin's raven, the man has clearly not absorbed the lessons of Yad Vashem.

As for the underlying question of why Huckabee would bother to write an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in the middle of a presidential campaign --- my guess is he had some recollection of evangelicals' support for Israelis, but managed to get the order wrong.

Last week I appeared on MSNBC to discuss political humor. Apparently I was supposed to analyze campaign bloopers instead of making jokes. The segment turned into something of a train wreck. (At least I looked terrific!)

By the way, the second McCain joke was unplanned, uncalled for and I actually feel bad about it. Seriously, I've lost sleep. Senator John McCain is an American hero and I am a sissy, spoiled bitch who deserves to get his ass kicked. Please, sir, punch me in the face -- it would be an honor.

In our previous installment, we criticized right-wing blowhard Michelle Malkin for suggesting that poor college students should refrain from sex if they can't afford to raise children. (But if they're poor and married, they should go crazy?) To be fair, let's find a smart conservative quote and a dumb liberal quote today.

Best:

"Talking about a strong border is one thing. It's when you get into enforcing the law—which means deport—that you lose people's votes. Oddly enough, people resent the idea that you might throw their mother out of the country."
—Grover Norquist in Rolling Stone

Worst:

"Republicans, to their shame, will trumpet McCain's experience over Obama's..."
—Alec Baldwin in Huffington Post

(To their shame? Isn't that a legitimate talking point?)

Our Tour Guide Shows Us What Masada Used to Look LikeWe wake at 4:45 to climb Masada for sunrise. It’s a bit cloudy so the sun isn’t as spectacular as I'd hoped, but it's spectacular enough to inspire me to snap about 7,000 pictures of it. I’m supremely irked by the fact that our counselors choose the exact 30 minutes during which the sun slowly emerges into blazing glory as the perfect time to lead songs and prayers. I routinely tune them out and am one of two or three people who completely ignore their request to put cameras away at the start of the service. I just can’t help myself: Here I am, standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth, and the Judean desert—the likes of which I’ve only seen in nature documentaries. The sunlight is coloring the cliff faces rich shades of red and orange, and I’m supposed to turn my back and listen to singing I don’t understand or give a shit about? I don’t think so.

We spend about three hours on top of Masada. Though I can’t adjust to the beauty of these surreal surroundings, it’s our tour guide Offer’s lecture that really makes my visit memorable. He tells us the story of Masada in cliff-hanging detail (no pun intended) as he leads us through the ruins. I'm surrounded by remnants of a fabulous palace inhabited by a group of Jews called the Zealots 2,000 years ago. Descending Into the Zealots Ancient Water SystemPositioned at the edge of a cliff in the middle of the desert, the palace offered views of approaching enemies, a sophisticated water system, glorious balconies, and even a sauna. Life was dandy here until the Romans came and set up twelve camps at the bottom of the cliff, surrounding the Zealots, ready to conquer. The Zealots could either fight or surrender. They talked it over and reasoned if they fought, they’d lose and die. If they surrendered, they’d watch their wives get raped, be enslaved, and die. Since death was inevitable, they decided to die with dignity by committing mass suicide. They killed the women first, since the worst thing for a woman is to watch her child die. Then they killed the children, and then the men killed each other.

The account is probably an inflated, idealized version of history, but I’m not really thinking about that, because it was a good-ass story and I’m in awe of it. I recognize that I will never forget Offer’s final point, partly because he asked us to remember, and partly because of the natural phenomenon he demonstrates at the last stop on the mountain. We’re overlooking the valley where many Zealots supposedly plunged to their death. We face a smooth cliffside that looks like a paintbrush has freshly streaked it with burnt oranges and grayish browns.

Echoing Cliffs Around Masada“I’m going to tell you a phrase in Hebrew I never want you to forget,” Offer says. He teaches us the phrase. “Now, we’re going to shout these words as loudly as we can over this valley.” We face out and shout with all our might. Even I join in. A few seconds later our words echo back per-fect-ly. It’s like a Bizarro Birthright group is shouting back at us. We do it again. And again. “It means: Masada shall never fall again,” Offer says. “I want you to remember it because it means let us never have to choose between death and death. Let Israel never have to choose between death and death.”

At the end of the day, I want this place to be my “homeland” because I’m so amazed by what I've seen. Though I can’t say I feel a connection yet, I can say I’m finally thrilled and delighted to be here.

Previously: Day 3, or Judaism Vs. Feminism At The Western Wall 

Ronna and Beverly are loud, opinionated, and wear too much lipstick. Watch as they harass an innocent bookstore employee while publicizing their new book for Jewish singles, "You'll Do a Little Better Next Time." Yes, these yentas are fictional (yet eerily reminiscent of my mom's friends), and if you love them as much as I do, there are many more chapters in the Ronna and Beverly saga to enjoy. Here is one of the best.

Best:

"This was the worst movie I've ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a 'movie' and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. [The directors] do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline..."
—Josh Levin on Meet the Spartans

Worst:

"How about trying self-restraint? It’s free."
—Michelle Malkin on college students who can't afford birth control

Related: Premature Education

The Kissers: John Currin's paintings spark controversy The artist John Currin is striving to bring sexy back, and he believes that the future of civilization depends on it.

The New Yorker profiled the artist's career last week, focusing on his recent pornography-inspired paintings. (A small portion of the article with artwork is online.)

Through "painting porn," Currin says that he seeks to challenge liberal, western societies that have disavowed -- and refused to defend -- artists who critique and attack puritanical, anti-sex ideologies, or offend the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists. His interest was piqued by the controversy over cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers:

"That the Times decided it was not going to show the cartoons-O.K., they're terrible-ass cartoons from a quality standpoint, but the idea that those thugs get offended and we just acquiesce, that was the most astonishing display of cowardice. And the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam-all of a sudden the most liberal societies in the world were having intimidation murders happen. That's when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing-not the Iraq war but the larger struggle." ... Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture...

Will Currin succeed in politicizing porn? Will his reaction-provoking paintings, such as "The Danes" and "Women of Franklin Street" inspire liberal societies to rise up against the forces of violent religiosity?

Maybe, but Currin fails to address an ominous paradox: He wants to spark resistance to censorship, but he's using a medium that has lost its ability to shock anyone. The pornography industry is suffering at the creatively destructive hands of the market. Sex has been sold, sold and sold. Consumers are past the point of saturation. The corporate extensions of the biz are in crisis due to Internet piracy and amateur video. High definition is "ruining" the "quality" of porn because every blemish becomes magnified, reducing those perfect bodies to flawed flesh with wrinkles and surgical scars.

Even the definition of pornography has been lost. The hyper-publicized paparazzi trophies of 2007 -- crotch-shots of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan -- blurred the line between pornography and celebrity gossip-mongering.

The label "pornographic" no longer elicits major outrage. The majority of our population would no longer hold book burnings to purify the world of sinful material. Instead pornography simply bores us.

Unless the mullahs of London and Amsterdam subscribe to the New Yorker or take a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery, Currin's jabs at sexually repressed extremists might very well go unnoticed. (Will the same newspapers that were afraid to run the Mohammed cartoons decide to spotlight Currin's provocations?)

Nevertheless, Currin's intermingling of Hustlerian voyeurism with "Mannerist compositions echoing Old Masters from Baldung to Parmigianino" makes his work striking. Even if no political mobilization arises, Currin's "elegy to liberal culture" is a solace for those who are disgusted with flaccid western complacency.

Related: Arabs Hot For Israeli Porn  

Y-Love, over at Jewlicious, calls attention to a crazy new trend in the ultra-Orthodox community. A small group of women in Israel, intent on being as uber-modest as possible, have started voluntarily wearing burkas and hijabs. Y-Love links to and quotes from Muqata blog, which has translated part of the Haaretz article about the new fashion move:

Appropriate for Synagogue: and mosque, too.

A group of Ultra-Orthodox chareidi women in Ramat Beit Shemesh have hyperbolated tznius [laws of modesty] to the extreme and now wear burkas whenever they go outside their home. Not advocated by any known rabbi, the burka fad is apparently a radical ultra-Orthodox feminist "invention", and many are wary of this custom being adopted or repudiated. The radical Beit Shemesh tznius patrol is even scratching it's head whether someone managed to out do them, and leave them in the dust with the liberal left.

The husband of one such woman took his wife to Beit Din (religious court) to request from her to remove the burka due to shalom bayit (a peaceful home). The court ordered a religious divorce even though the husband didn't even request one -- because the court found her behaviour to be so bizarre.

Mother in Israel posts some truly unbelievable pictures, and the issue is being discussed everywhere from the Forward’s Bintel Brief to the Lilith blog where Friend of Jewcy Rebecca Honig Friedman writes:

 

They are adopting the ideal of modesty that to some extent has been ingrained in them by male religious authority (and no doubt by female authorities, too), but they are doing so on their own terms. They are taking the power of dictating women’s dress away from the male religious authorities in their community, deciding for themselves what modesty means and, in classic fashion, being persecuted for it.

These women have the right to wear whatever they want, but we should also question the values that have led them to such extreme decisions, and the society that perpetuates those values.

I’ll be the first to admit it: there are days when I would happily put on a burka so as not to have to spend half an hour blow-drying my hair and putting on makeup in order to be presentable. And I think the visceral negative reaction to burkas has more to do with the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries than with the burka itself (and anyway, all of the pictures I’ve seen so far are not of women in burkas, they’re of women wearing jilbab). Do I think the women in Ramat Beit Shemesh are going overboard? Absolutely. But though I find it all pretty strange, it’s not as offensive as if they were being told to wear jilbab by their rabbis, which, no doubt, is just round the bend.

The Southern WallIn Europe you see 500 year-old shit. In Israel you see 2,000 year-old shit. Today we’re at such a spot: The Western Wall in Jerusalem. Our tour guide Offer calls it the place “closest to God on Earth” and “the holy of holies.” We visit the Southern Wall first, probably because it’s less crowded and allows us to have time to hold hands and sing, which Offer has us do while ascending the steps to the Southern Wall. I don’t sing because I don’t know these prayers, melodies, or any Hebrew. And I don’t even pretend or try to participate because I don’t see the point. So when prayers and singing happen, which are all in Hebrew, I zone out.

After we touch the Southern Wall, we write notes to put in the Western Wall. Offer tells us it should be our greatest wish in life. Now I don’t believe this is going to affect my life but I figure it can’t hurt so I jot something down. It goes something like:

Dear Wall:
My greatest wish is to be as happy as possible. I hope you’re feeling well with all these people feeling you up all day.
Best,
Amy

Yes, it’s business-like, but that’s what comes out without me thinking about it. I don’t believe in God and don’t know the wall personally so a colon seems most appropriate.

I do, finally, have one surreal moment standing at the Southern Wall. (The way people talk about Israel you expect to have surreal moments all day long, but this hasn’t been the case for me.) My surreal moment occurs while hearing the Muslim prayer call, which originates from somewhere right above our heads and echoes over the whole city. I’ve never heard anything like it, and it seems so mystically appropriate to my surroundings. Finally I feel like I’m in a very foreign land, standing on a 2,000 year old fortress (or at least, the reconstructed version of it).

The Western Wall: men on the left, women on the rightOffer explains the story behind the wall so nicely that I don’t even mind that I have to listen to it while standing in the rain all day. I hardly even mind that it’s biblical rather than historical, and am even thinking the pointless exercise of sticking my stupid note in the wall will be kind of fun.

My note is neatly folded in my hand as I approach the Holy of Holies, and suddenly I realize I’m up against a partition. Men are on the other side. Division of the sexes always pisses me off, but noticing how much larger the men’s side is infuriates me. I immediately exit to get a better view of this appalling relic of sexism. With my view of both sides, I easily see that the men enjoy about four times as much wall as the women. They can spread out comfortably. Little boys chase pigeons in big circles and kick shit around on the ground. Meanwhile, the women huddle seven deep against their wall section. They have no room to run. No gleeful children are visible.

All the other women in my group are fine with this. “That’s how it is,” they all agree. Right, that’s how it is. But it’s like that because y’all don’t give a shit, which is really sad and you should feel sorry for yourselves, I think. Religion is no excuse for sexism. This is 2008. Get with it.

When everyone finishes praying, or whatever it is you do at the wall, I ask Offer about the partition. He explains that men have more space because they daven three times a week—way more than women. I ask why. He says that women are supposed to be home doing other things. They don’t need to daven because they are considered to be innately pure. Men need to make themselves pure, so they need to pray more. OK. But why shouldn’t there be equal space? Aren’t most visitors to the wall tourists, anyway? If the men really needed the extra space, wouldn’t the women’s side be comparable in crowdedness rather than looking like a refugee camp?

No, these answers are not satisfying. They are bullshit.

I am more of a feminist than a Jew and refuse to approach the wall.

Previously: Day 2, or Is This Really My Homeland?

Next up: Day 4, Falling in Love with Israel at Masada

Last night the 92nd Street Y hosted a debate between Mr. "Shalom in the Home" Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and the inimitable Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God, something so wholly unprovable that the only guaranteed outcomes were bruised egos and hangover scars from all the ecclesiastical elbowing and bad kosher wine. The buzz around the sold-out event was louder than a book-selling rabbi's shrill or a drunk Englishman's demand for another drink. (Just speaking stereotypically of course.)

The 92Y Blog has a video excerpt from the evening, and we asked bloggers in attendance for feedback. Looks like God took a beating of Biblical proportions:

Felix Salmon: "I can't recall ever seeing such a lopsided debate -- if 'debate' is the mot juste, which it really isn't. Boteach didn't even attempt to defend his side of the motion, preferring instead to bash Hitchens's book; he ignored substantially everything that Hitchens said. His logorrhea was an embarrassment, especially when it became obvious that he had no strategy at all: all of his points about evolution, for instance, even if they had hit their mark (which they didn't) did nothing to bolster his purported cause. In any case, he was disqualified on account of Godwin's Law so many times that Hitchens would have won by default even if he didn't win overwhelmingly on the merits."

Rex Sorgatz: "Rabbi Shmuley Boteach proved, once and for all, that god is not dead. He's just exceptionally boring."

Neal Ungerleider: "Here's the thing... despite both Hitchens and Boteach being annoying, self-righteous egomaniacs, there's a difference between the two. Last night's debate taught me that Hitchens is an intelligent, annoying, self-righteous egomaniac. I wish I could say the same for Boteach. However, he still didn't convince me on the non-existence of God. Sorry, Hitch."

Lilit Marcus: "Thanks, Shmuley Boteach, for caring more about selling copies of your latest book than about making people who believe in God not come off like complete morons."

Phoebe Maltz: "I found myself wishing the rabbi could make one coherent point, not just evoke the Holocaust every two seconds, only to call Hitchens 'not a Nazi, but.'"

Sara Ivry: "Boteach’s repeated use of the name 'Christoper Hitchens' really made me think of the Bill Murray segment of Coffee and Cigarettes where RZA and GZA keep calling Bill Murray 'BillMurray,' as if one word. It made the whole debate seem particularly absurd, but at least brought back the good days of Wu Tang."

Daniel Radosh: After the way Hitchens treated Boteach, it was a little hypocritical of him to chastise God for condoning bloodbaths. To see the rabbi reduced literally to incoherent sputtering was almost sad, but then again, he had no one to blame by himself. Declaring that Steven Jay Gould, author of the classic essay 'Evolution as Theory and Fact,' did not believe in evolution, was probably not the wisest strategic gambit. I think the exchange that best captured the evening came when Boteach accused Hitchens of 'character assassination,' and Hitchens retorted, 'you should be more concerned that your character is committing suicide right here in front of everyone.'"

David Kelsey: "In a strange twist demonstrating that this debate was not personal in the least, both men argued that the other’s moral decency proved his own point. Boteach argued that morality came from religion generally, and Judaism’s influence specifically. 'It’s our morality he is embracing,' insisted Boteach. But Hitchins countered that, 'Religion borrows its morality from us, not us from religion.'”

Jeff Bercovici: "Hitchens wiped the floor with Boteach to such an extent that it was actually Hitchens who lost, in a sense, just by showing up. Lost stature, that is. He should be debating his equals, not publicity-hungry TV rabbis."

Rachel Sklar: "In the cab on the way home, we coined a new phrase: 'To Shmuley,' denoting the making of pathetic, unsupported non-sequitur arguments and the taking of flailingly weak intellectual positions, with a dash of name-dropping bluster thrown in for good measure. Excruciating. Christopher Hitchens could Bo-teach him a few things about theology!"

Emily Gordon: "Is God a mystical force or a conscious mind (I liked the moderator's vision of 'a New Yorker cartoon kind of God'), a present parent or a deadbeat dad, the same idea in many forms (including nonreligious ones) or accessible only by secret red phone? How can people be born moral, or inherently moved by religion or the Golden Rule, given all the baddies that both Hitchens and Boteach included in their survey of humanity, and how do you account for their nasty behavior? There are countless questions that could have made for a spirited and genuinely intellectual debate instead of the ping-pong of statistics, political arcana, and smooth putdowns--all of which I enjoyed, of course--that stood in for it. I would have liked to have heard how humanism can transcend the question altogether, or account for both points of view in a civilized and meaningful way, but it was not to be. I admire the Y for holding the debate, though, and perhaps it can be reprised with different and more fruitful combinations."