Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr. The news this week has been saturated with issues of race, otherness, and problems of identity in a society that's most comfortable drawing boundaries and lines. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a story on Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr., the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama gave a landmark speech on race relations that took the country by storm. We asked documentary filmmaker Lacey Schwartz to weigh in on these two stories by sharing her own parallel experiences as a Black, Jewish woman who is working to incorporate and make sense of her dual identities. Here's what she had to say:

Like any typical upper-middle class Jewish girl growing up in the Eighties, my life revolved around the Bar Mitzvah party circuit, Gap clothing stores, second base, and Madonna. Something was off, though: From a young age, I encountered people who pointed out that I looked different from my white parents because of my darker skin, tightly curled hair and thicker features. From a little boy in nursery school who made me show him my gums because he claimed they determined my race, to my classmates in high school who would verbally accost me in the halls with “What are you?”—an inquiry that they demanded more than asked—questions about my identity were abundant. “Jewish?” I would tentatively respond, afraid of how they might react to my denial of what they saw as my obvious blackness.

My family never seemed to notice or acknowledge the fact that I looked different from them. One overt example of this came at the age of sixteen, when my grandfather strongly encouraged me to break up with my bi-racial boyfriend. Without irony or malice, Grandpa expressed his fear of how people might treat me for being in an interracial relationship. Because of experiences like these, I deeply related when Barack Obama described in a speech earlier this week how he would cringe when his white grandmother uttered racial stereotypes, and yet he could not disown her.

Lacey Schwartz: black, white, jewish? yes, yes, and yes. When I applied to college I left the race/ethnicity box blank and attached a photograph instead. Based on that, I was admitted as a student who was of “Black/Not of Hispanic Origin.” It wasn't until the end of my freshman year that I learned the truth: My biological father was an African-American man who my mother had had an affair with while married to my father. It was quite a shock, but I cherish my university experience as the time and place where my identification with being African-American and my connection to the Black community first began.

Years later, in an attempt to merge my Black identity with my Jewish upbringing, I attended Yom Kippur services at a Black synagogue in Brooklyn. I was skeptical at first: “A group of Black Jews worshipping together?” I thought. On entering the small brownstone converted into a synagogue, I was amazed to find that the entire congregation was Black! I was even more surprised to find the songs, prayers, and Shofar blasts were identical to what I learned growing up. I couldn't help but wonder how someone with two Black parents could possibly be Jewish, but after years of being questioned by strangers about my own identity, I hid my ignorance and didn't ask the questions I so desperately wanted answered.

As featured in last weekend’s NY Times, Rabbi Capers Funnye Jr. embodies both the heart and soul of this community of people. He was one of the first Black rabbis who I came upon in researching other Black Jews, and he has been one of the most inspiring people I have met along the journey. His work, along with others like him, is making the Jewish community more accepting of all Jews and changing the way we all expect Jewish people to look.

For much of my adult life, I have maintained separate cultural identities. Only in the last couple of years, as part of a personal documentary, have I set out to learn what it means to be both Black and Jewish. In recognizing the uniqueness of my situation, I have come to discover that Black Jews are members of a small, but significant minority within a minority: A group of people whose roots are as diverse and dynamic as any other ethnic group or subculture, and who represent the immense complexity of America itself.

This article first appeared on March 21, 2008 and has been republished as part of the series JEWCYEST WEEK EVER.

The vultures are gathering. In the midst of the carnage of the financial meltdown, the anti-semites are starting to circle. Everyone's favorite carrion-picker, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced to the U.N. General Assembly that "aggressors" who hide behind their "financial, political and propaganda powers, not only escape punishment but claim righteousness..." are to blame for the problems of today's markets. Hamas soon dug in its claws too when spokesman Fawzi Barhum analyzed the global financial system and blamed the "Jewish lobby that put the banking system in place."

How can these people say such things? Because we let them. By not engaging in a free and honest debate about Jews and money, we are handing the discussion to our enemies on a silver platter. Instead of greeting them vigorously with facts and solidly-based opinions, we offer them silence. All too often, the rest of the world interprets that as agreement.

Nobody has offered me the podium at the U.N.'s General Assembly to reply to the Iranian president. But Jewcy has offered and encouraged me to respond. So here's what I have to say:

Dear Mahmoud,

Yes, it is true that there are a lot of successful Jews on Wall Street. It's also true that the Jews are disproportionately represented amongst scientists, academics, lawyers, artists and musicians. But that has nothing to do with our DNA or a secret group of our leaders pulling everyone else's strings. The secret to our success was seeded in the desert four thousand years ago when Abraham taught us how to be entrepreneurial and later when Moses taught us the finer points of leadership skills. We honed it later in the streets of Europe when we were banished to the mercantile backwater of money-lending. And then it bloomed when we were given an equal footing in America. Whether or not we, as individuals, are religious doesn't matter. The religion itself taught our forefathers the keys to success, positive thinking, how to recover from failure, and many other lessons. We've absorbed it by osmosis whether we, as individuals, are religious or not. We didn't come to this success because we cheated. We were given tools by our tradition that gave us a smidgen of advantage. I'll be glad to share them with you. If you buy my book.

Sincerely,
Sam Jaffe

Sam Jaffe, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Business Success, is guest-blogging on Jewcy with fellow co-author Rabbi Levi Brackman. He'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Also see: Letters to Ahmadinejad

A good name tells a story and identifies the named in some memorable way. And I needed one. Fast. It was late in the evening one night this past May. I was going to my lawyer’s office the next day to sign the papers for the incorporation of my business and I found, much too late for comfort, that the URL for the name I had chosen was already owned by a popular web portal in Korea.

I did what any God-petitioning Jew should have done in the first place: I picked up a copy of the Torah. Pretty soon, I had zeroed in on the story of Joseph (seven fat years, seven lean years) and was reminded of the name that the Pharaoh gave him after interpreting his dreams: Tzafnat Paneach. I chose the latter half of that name and Anglicized it to Panea. My company, Panea Energy Ltd., is in the field of energy storage, so the Egyptian meaning of the name ("storer of grain") made sense. My success also depends upon successfully anticipating the needs of the utilities industry, so I liked the fact that the name also had a mystical Hebrew connection: "Revealer of Hidden Things".

So Panea Energy was born. Now I not only had a name, but I had a story to tell whenever a potential client asked me what the name meant as they glanced at my business card.

Excavation of Egyptian grain silos at Tell Edfu: University of ChicagoI was advised by several people (all Jews) to not choose a “Jewish” name for my company. “They’ll think you’re a religious nut,” my brother told me, for instance.

I’m probably a nut, but nobody has ever accused me of being a religious one, so the suggestion caused surprise. The Bible, I argued, is as valid a source for a company name as the Iliad (Ajax, Midas, etc.) or tree identification books (Sycamore, Juniper, etc.).

As it turns out, my brother’s fears never materialized. I get lots of questions about Panea Energy’s name, but I’ve never gotten the feeling that someone discounted me or the company because of the religious source. In some cases, I’ve come across devout Christians who know the meaning of the name without my telling them and an instant bond is formed. In most other cases, I sense a recognition of my earnestness and gravitas on the part of the questioner as I tell the story of the name.

I’ve been thinking of the real Tzafnat Paneach a lot recently. If only he had been around in 2001 when George Bush took office. His advice (to store the surplus of the good years and dole out those savings in bad years) would have prevented the current crisis. Instead, we find our government doing the exact opposite: borrowing a few trillion dollars from the good years to come to pay off today’s debts. It’s just another example of a Biblical voice being lost amidst the happy whistling of leaders who were sure they were right.

Vladimir Putin: He's learned to prepare for the worstNot everyone ignored Paneach's advice. Vladimir Putin wrote his doctoral thesis prior to his KGB years on how Russia could save cash from years when oil prices are high (Russia gets most of its foreign reserves from fossil fuel sales) and then spend it in years that the price of oil falls. Thus the economy could be insulated from the peaks and valleys of petroleum pricing. As leader of his country, Putin put more than $190 billion into cash reserves. The Moscow stock exchange has crashed even harder than Wall Street, but the government can now swoop in with savings from years past (not more borrowed money like us) and prop up the economy in the hard times to come.

I’m not recommending a Putin-like leadership for our country. But Putin’s forethought—and his correct interpretation of a Biblical story—is going to serve Russia well. Every time we are reminded over the coming years of America’s declining power and Russia’s more prominent role in world affairs, think of Tzafnat Paneach. And hope that our economic leadership of the future is thinking of him too.

Sam Jaffe, co-author of Jewish Wisdom for Buisness Success, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Between the Jewish establishment's imposition of silence and the loosely coupled throng of Jew-hater's who zealously proclaim conspiracy, the discourse over Jews and money is pure zealotry on either side.  The result is a vacuum of alternative perspectives and the absence of any shred of an enlightened public discussion, which only provides fertile soil for a perpetual harvest of rhetorical hate.

That's why Jewcy feels it's critical to highlight voices like Brackman and Jaffe, as we are doing all week, and it's also  why we're very happy that Time magazine just published an article highlighting two Jewish scholars that are publicly filling the vacuum by putting forth an alternative discourse -- one that cites Jewish law as a basis for criticizing the behavior that led to the current financial crisis. The scholars are Yeshiva University economics professor Aaron Levine and Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary. 

The article draws on Jewish scripture (the Torah, the Talmud, and the Mishna) as well as various rabbinical opinions to extrapolate ancient principles relevant to our current economic times:

•Bamboozling the "Blind"
Much Jewish ethical thought flows out of Leviticus 19:14, which reads "Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind." From an early date, rabbis expanded this into a general prohibition on bad advice. In time, it became part of the language specifically regarding loans, mostly regarding the need for witnesses. But Diamond says it now applies to the whole loan debacle and "any expert who tells someone who probably shouldn't take out a mortgage 'you'll be able to do it, no problem.'" There are a lot of financially "blind" people out there, and a lot of people mis-advised them.

•Hidden Flaws and the "Reasonable Man"
Medieval jurists like Maimonides identified a more specific kind of bad advice. They tackled the idea of the "hidden flaw," which, Levine points out, leads directly to a demand for fiscal disclosure. "If you sell an animal, you had to disclose to the buyer what the hidden flaw is," he explains. Not only that: "the disclosure has to be made so that a 'reasonable,' or average man can decide" whether to buy. Once again, almost the entire chain of transactors in the mortgage crisis is guilty: predatory brokers for not alerting working-class borrowers to the fine print; middle-men selling mortgage debt to investment banks sliced and diced into "tranches" that obscure their riskiness; bankers who used hard-to-fathom financial instruments that leave ultimate responsibility for a loan a mystery even to experts. Like many observers, Levine is particularly exercized about credit default swaps, a largely unregulated field since 2000.) And anyone who willfully ignored the fact that real estate prices must eventually come down.

•The Bath House Rule
An extension of the disclosure concern, Diamond reports, was explored by Jews through the unexpected vehicle of marriage law. The tractate Ketubot in the Mishna dictates that a betrothal is valid only if the bride-to-be has no hidden blemishes that would have disqualified the match, had they been public. However, there is a heavy responsibility on the groom: if he has relatives who could have observed the disfigurement by checking out his fiance in the womens' bath but neglected to do have them do so, he can't complain. This suggests (feminist complaints notwithstanding) that culpability in sub-prime crisis does not lie solely on the mortgage broker who glided over the fact that payments ballooned in the third year; but also on the buyer who happily neglected to read the fine print: : "Ignorance of the facts is no defense," Diamond says.

•Morals of the Mark-Up
Leviticus 25 of the Bible explains that you cannot charge the same price for land that is about to become useless (in this case, by reverting to its original tribal ownership) as for a parcel that still has decades of use left. Rabbinic tradition, says Diamond, interpreted that as a check on price-gouging and ruled that nobody should charge more than one-sixth above market value for anything.

[Time Magazine]

Smith, an artist and former managing editor of GQ magazine, reflects on his youth in 1960s Miami. He wanted a father who mowed the lawn, drank beer, and fell asleep in front of the TV. Instead, his dad, Lew Smith, was a successful interior decorator, who went through a macrobiotic transformation and began tuning into mystical vibrations. Young Philip was introduced to fasting and yogic diets, while Lew explored esoteric spirituality, reincarnation, Bach Flower Remedies and such metaphysical arcana as the akashic records, an ethereal Library of Congress of every soul in human history: [Philip] wasn't sure if this endless invisible database also included reruns of I Love Lucy or Perry Mason, but it probably did. After a 1968 encounter with famed trance medium Arthur Ford, Lew found his true calling as a psychic healer, and overnight our isolated house became Lourdes central. Smith's fine flair for waggish anecdotes is especially evident in his riotous recall of being suckered into Scientology at age 17. He looks back at his father with much affection in this mirthful memoir that bounces between the comic and the cosmic. Smith is a gifted humorist, and readers are certain to request more merriment.

Philip Smith, author of the lauded memoir Walking Through Walls, spent last week guest blogging for Jewcy.  In that time, he wondered about the lasting effects of Jewish name changes at Ellis Island, noted that God probably doesn't have the time (or interest) to worry about issuing tickets for prayer, asked Jewcy readers to discuss the existance (or non-existance) of a common Jewish denominator, explained why the inexplicable should be embraced rather than shunned, and put his two cents in on the Muslim/Jewish conundrum.  Want more?  Pick up a copy of his book.

Earlier this week, our friends at Agriprocessors, America’s largest supplier of glatt kosher meat, were charged with more than 9000 counts of child labor violations. Named in the Iowa affidavit are Aaron Rubashkin, Agriprocessors owner, his son Sholom M. Rubashkin, and Agriprocessors Human Resources director, and its two HR managers. The New York Times reports that fines could total more than $5 million. Jail time could stretch for years. One of the child laborers was 13 years old.

Coincidentally, on the same day and time that Iowa’s charges against Agriprocessors were announced, the two named HR managers, Laura Althouse and Karina Freund, were arrested by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Althouse is charged with aiding and abetting document fraud, aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to harbor undocumented aliens.  Freund was charged with aiding and abetting the harboring of illegal aliens. Two senior Agriprocessors supervisors were previously arrested and both have pleaded guilty. A third fled indictment and is now living in Israel.

These indictments, charges, and pleas all stem from ICE’s May 12 immigration raid at Agriprocessors, then the largest single site immigration raid in US history. On the day of the raid, about 75% of Agriprocessors’ workforce was illegal.  ICE agents found stacks of blank Green Cards in Agriprocessors’ HR office, along with forged Green Cards and other fraudulent documents.

Sources familiar with federal law enforcement tell me the US government is following an established pattern: indict and charge those lower down while using information gleaned from those relatively minor players to help build stronger cases against the bosses. They think it’s reasonable to expect federal charges against senior Agriprocessors management sometime this fall.

But Agriprocessors recent troubles don’t stop there. Last Friday, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) released an undercover videotape showing inhumane slaughter at Agriprocessors. This is the Agriprocessors third undercover video shot by PETA since 2004. All show a variant of the same abuse. The new footage was shot this summer.  In it, a non-Jewish Agriprocessors employee uses a regular carving-style knife to hack inside the gaping throat wounds of still conscious cattle. The USDA cited Agriprocessors for violations of Humane Slaughter law, but called those violations “not egregious.”

Temple Grandin, the noted animal welfare expert who serves as an advisor to the USDA, put it a bit differently.  Dr. Grandin told the New York Times the animals would “definitely” feel pain from those hacking cuts.  She called on the USDA to install 24/7 Internet streaming video monitoring of Agriprocessors in order to stop Agriprocessors from abusing cattle.  You can sign a petition to that effect here.

Agriprocessors claims the procedure shown on PETA’s video is a protected part of the kosher slaughter process. Its spokesman, Menachem Lubinsky, even claims that procedure, known as a “second cut,” is common. When the first PETA video showing this second cut was released in 2004, I asked dozens of Orthodox rabbis about the procedure. Not one of them had ever seen it done. All but a small handful did not even know it could be done.

Grandin, who has consulted for more than 30 different kosher slaughter plants in her long career, has only seen this procedure done by one company – Agriprocessors – which first did it using a meat hook. It was the most horrific violation of Humane Slaughter law Grandin had ever seen.

The furor around that video caused the OU – one of Agriprocessors kosher supervising agencies – to announce that the “procedure” would no longer be done. The head of the OU’s kosher division, Rabbi Menachem Genack, clearly stated in an article he wrote that the second cut is not a part of the shechita (ritual slaughter) process at all.

Yet the only exemption to allow this brutal procedure is that it is a part of the shechita process. If it is not a part of that process, no exemption legally exists.

Last year I sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the USDA. What I found is chilling. In response to requests made by Orthodox rabbis – including Orthodox rabbis from the OU – the USDA had broadened the ritual slaughter exemption to such a degree that even ripping the throat out of live cattle using a meat hook would be considered an exempt, and therefore protected, practice.

In other words, a painful and abusive procedure used only at Agriprocessors and defined by the OU itself as something outside the ritual slaughter process is now embedded in US law as a protected part of that ritual slaughter process. And, as Agriprocessors’ spokespeople have been quick to note, US law defines ritual slaughter as humane. How’s that for doublespeak?

Agriprocesors quietly switched from a meat hook to a smaller boning hook, was again caught by PETA, said it would stop doing the procedure, surreptitiously switched to using a carving-type knife, got caught by PETA, said it would stop doing the procedure – but its spokesman, Menachem Lubinsky, now says the procedure continues unabated.

The OU – the same OU that presides over this second cut that is not a part of the shechita process but still is – now says that Agriprocessors has two weeks to bring in a new management team. If Agriprocessors does not do this, Rabbi Genack says the OU will “suspend” its kosher supervision.

But in mid-May, after the ICE raid, Genack said essentially the same thing: "Bring in new management or we’re out of here."  The OU ‘forced’ Sholom M. Rubashkin to ‘step down’ as Agriprocessors’ CEO.  Problem?  No new CEO was hired and Sholom Rubashkin did not leave Agriprocessors.  To this day, he continues to help manage the plant and is still Agriprocessors’ VP.

The OU did not pull its kosher supervision.

In the aftermath of the ICE raid, Rabbi Genack was asked a tough question. Would the OU remove its supervision if Agriprocessors senior management were charged?  Rabbi Genack said he would, but he hoped new management would be brought in before that time so that decision would not need to be made.

But new management was not brought in, the decision had to be made and Genack parsed it.  Rather than pulling the OU’s supervision, Genack gave Agriprocessors a two week deadline to bring in new management.

And while that new management has to be “independent,” Rabbi Genack told me  the Rubaskins can continue to control the board of this privately owned family corporation.  Sholom M. Rubashkin can still serve as VP; Aaron Rubashkin can still be president.  And Heshy Rubashkin, Sholom’s as yet unindicted younger brother, can continue to serve on the board and can work in the company’s management as well.

Genack, who was once Bill Clinton’s rabbi, dices language finer and faster than a sushi chef on a Red Bull binge.  Was an inhumane procedure stopped?  It depends on what the meanings of “procedure” and “meat hook” are.  Is new management really on Agriprocessors’ horizon?  It depends on how “management” is defined.

If the OU had reacted properly to Agriprocessors’ first violations of Humane Slaughter law, the Jewish community would not be suffering through yet another Agriprocessors scandal. But the OU did not properly react – no matter how that term is parsed or who does the parsing.

For its part, I’m told Agriprocessors has turned down offers to buy the company, one from a group of Japanese investors. Unless the Rubashkins can get what is described as a very high asking price, any ‘sale’ of Agriprocessors may turn out in the end to be a shell game, with the Rubashkins remaining in full control behind the scenes.

I’d like to say that the Jewish community deserves better than this – but we don’t. We stood by silently as Agriprocessors business practices became exponentially more abusive and exploitative.  Having access to kosher meat was more important that how that access was gained or who was hurt as a result.

It wasn’t until we felt public shame that we reacted.

Have we learned our lesson?  I don’t think so.

Two weeks ago the Forward exposed mistreatment of workers at America’s number two glatt kosher meatpacker, Alle Processing. Owned by Satmar hasidim, Alle pays its workers bare minimum wages with no paid sick leave, health insurance, or other benefits, and it engages in what appear to be illegal union-busting tactics. One worker told the Forward that, when seriously injured on the job, Alle punched out his timecard the hour the injury happened. He was paid nothing after that. Worse yet, Alle management told him when he recovers he will be suspended for one month without pay, because he used the machine that injured him improperly. Workers at Alle receive little if any safety training.

So far, the Jewish community has remained silent.

Breastfeeding: now we know God's opinion A series of new public service billboards in California, which tout the importance of breastfeeding, are borrowing heavily from the notorious GodSpeaks campaign.

If you’ve done any long distance driving in America in the last decade, you’re probably familiar with the GodSpeaks billboards. You know, those big black billboards that say things like, What part of “Thou shalt not…” didn’t you understand? and Have you read my #1 best seller? (There will be a test.) The GodSpeaks advertising campaign is an amazing, if somewhat creepy, story:

In 1998, an anonymous donor contacted an advertising agency with an idea for a local billboard campaign that would create a spiritual climate and get people to think about a daily relationship with a loving and relevant God. The agency came up with the idea of creating a series of quotes from God to be placed on billboards.

The billboards would be simple and easy to read—black boards with white type, and all “signed” by God. No logo. No address or phone number. Not religious or condemning. Just straightforward messages that would rightly represent God.

Eighteen sayings were selected to run on billboards in south Florida, ranging from serious to moving to funny; all intended to make the reader smile and think about God—perhaps in a new way. The campaign was scheduled to run for three months.God Speaks: on Route 66?

As the original billboards were coming down, following their planned three-month run, the agency got a call from Eller Media, one of the largest billboard companies in the world. Eller wanted to run the campaign nationwide if the client would donate the sayings.

Then, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA), the trade group made up of all the companies who own and rent billboards, offered to use the sayings as their national public service campaign for 1999. The result was that GodSpeaks sayings appeared on some 10,000 billboards in 200 cities across America—and all free-of-charge! The donated billboard space was valued at $15 million.

Now, the same anonymous, original donor is back with more billboards (As my apprentice, you’re never fired. The real Supreme Court meets up here.)

What Would God Say: to bottle-feeders? I don’t love the idea of advertising agencies marketing God and billing it as a public service. I mean, marketing God to me on billboards, like car insurance and adult bookstores, just seems kind of cheap. Plus, the ads are blatantly Christian, with some saying things like Let’s meet at My house Sunday, before the game and You think it’s hot here?

If something is going to be a public service, I’d like it if it served more than just people who believe in Jesus. You know--like infants who might benefit from breast milk. Which brings us back to the California campaign.

Adfreak offers this analysis:

...as a bottle-feeding parent (who heartily supports breastfeeding), I’d be less annoyed by those graphic ads about how I’m probably giving my kid diabetes or asthma. At least they're backed up by science. These white-on-black billboards, blatantly riffing on the “God Speaks” campaign, just come off as preachy—and scientifically debatable. Some humans were born to have dozens of offspring and die in their 40s. That doesn’t make me want to do that. Still, I admit the goal is a commendable one, and I suppose the space could be used for something far more obnoxious.

The advertising council seems to want us to think that God encourages breastfeeding, which is not exactly a leap of faith, considering breastfeeding is something women's bodies are designed for. But why does it matter if God wants us to breastfeed? It's healthier, easier, and cheaper than buying formula. That's the sell. God's take on what I do with my boobs? Kind of awkward.

Sacha Baron Cohen is loose in Israel, and he's creating some confusion over the thin linguistic line between hummus and Hamas. Posing as his character Bruno, a gay Austrian rock star, Cohen has been interviewing unsuspecting Israeli and Palestinian political experts, leaving them flabbergasted by his "confusion" between chick pea paste and the militant political organization. This delicate differentiation has been dealt with before, most notably in West Bank Story, winner of the 2007 Live Action Short Film Oscar, and an official selection of Sundance Festival.

Hungry for more? Check out this video of Adam Sandler discussing the hummus factor in his recent flick, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

Mo Money Mo Problems: so think about giving some of that phat check awayTax rebates are trickling into American mailboxes. Some of us will be getting a pretty sweet chunk of change back, and with the economy going down the tubes, there are plenty of places we can think of to use that money. But if you don’t absolutely need it to pay rent, put food on the table, or pay off some debt, some people think you should give your rebate (or at least, part of it) to charity. A number of churches have started funds where people can donate their tax rebate money to charities that haven’t been doing so well due to the crappy economy.

"It's an unbelievable amount of cash that people of faith or people of conscience could choose to say, 'You know, we could get along without this. We could put this money to use,' " said Ken Sehested, co-pastor at the Circle of Mercy church in Asheville, N.C.

His congregation of about 50 adults, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and Alliance of Baptists, voted to give at least 10 percent of their checks to charities. He and his wife plan to give their entire $1,200 check to the church's partner congregation in Cuba.

Kiva.org: give to entrepeneurs all over the world and help end poverty You may already have a favorite charity where you’d like to designate your money, but if you’re looking for some suggestions, Low Impact Living has some tips for spending your money in eco-smart ways that will save you money later on, and also happen to be good for the planet. Or how about helping communities in need all over the world—including Darfur, India, and Colombia—by donating to the American Jewish World Service, which funds hundreds of grassroots organizations working to promote health, education, economic development, disaster relief, and social and political change in the developing world.

And here’s our favorite idea for your rebate check: Use it to make a micro-loan to empower an entrepeneur in the developing world to lift him or herself out of poverty. And since you’re only loaning the money, you can even get it back to spend on a night out on the town in a few months, or reinvest in another venture, or donate it. Check out kiva.org to choose the micro-loan you’ll support.

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Passover has taken quite a hit this year: First Manischewitz announced that it wasn’t going to produce any Tam Tams this year, and then Charlton “Moses” Heston passed on to that great gun range in the sky. Luckily, Jewcy’s here to help you cope. We’ve rounded up everything we’ve ever run on Pesach, then salted the mix liberally with some helpful links from outside sources. Need something you don’t see here? Leave a comment, and our readers just might be able to help you out.

THE BASICS

Not totally solid on the whole no-bread thing? Curious about whether having a Iraqi grandmother means you're allowed to eat rice? My Jewish Learning provides all the background information you could possibly need, while Interfaithfamily.com offers resources for Pesach and Easter.

THE SEDER

• How To: Clean For Passover
• Must Have: Laura Cowan's Space Age Seder Plate
• 5 Alternative Seder Styles for a Personalized Passover
• Must Have: The Passover Box of Questions
  
• Ganja is Off the Seder Plate
  

THE TEXT

• We Rate Ten Haggadahs
• Saying Dayenu to the Maxwell House Haggadah
  

• Dozens of Recipes from the Jew York Times
• This Passover, Forget Your Bouillon Cubes
• Manischewitz Screwed Up, Passover's Gonna Suck
• Passover with Martha Stewart

• Passover: The Extra Day is YOUR Day
• Counting the Omer
• Slate Explains Why Easter Doesn't Overshadow Passover
• Slate Looks at What the Passover Seder Reveals About InterfaithCouples

THE REST

• Passover: The Most S&M Jewish Holiday
• Seder Behind Bars
• Hump Day Art: Modern Day Exodus
• Clip of the Week: Jewish Mothers Behaving Badly
• Must Have: Alternative Jewish Grooves for Passover

Max Mosley: discretion, or dehumanization? Henri is a Jew. He operates a semi-private BDSM bar in Berlin. The first night we met, he wept into my camera. We drank shots of Campari and I promised to keep rolling as he kept talking. The bar was loud, had about a half dozen other kinky people in it flirting and drinking, and some details of our conversation were lost in the classic rock soundtrack. Henri told me, "My parents took part in a mapping project. This was right before the war. They knew what it was for. How else were they going to get the money to get me out of Germany? When I came back, in the '60s, no one in the community would speak to me. The perverts were the only people who took me in."

He told me that he doesn't believe there's such a thing as a really dominant woman.

"They're only acting what men tell them to, even bossing the men around."

Would apparent Nazi roleplay fetishist and (soon to be former) Formula One mogul Max Mosley agree? Would he also tease me, the (almost former) professional fetish mistress, the fair-skinned, blue-eyed, passably WASPy blonde who can carry off a whip? Would he want to hire me, too? I very rarely whipped anyone, and of all my clients, only one ever asked me to play the "cold German type"—nervous and novice submissive client code for "Nazi She Wolf."

That client's name was David, and he used to make appointments with me from a number identified on my phone as the Jewish Community Center. I kept the rosary he brought me to wear when we played. He was never one to step back from his fantasy, to dissect it. The intellectual part of me would have wanted to ask him about the death wish implicit in his desire for me to play the role of a calculating gentile woman seeking to overthrow the JCC. To ask that wasn't my job. I would never demand he let me hold his hand as he reckoned with genocide just to make myself feel less complicit—and as anti-Semitic roleplay goes, the JCC seemed the quaintest target he could choose.

David is a submissive, a bottom.  Henri is a top, which means he gets off on being in erotic control.  But Mosely appears to be a switch. Outside of my professional persona, I'm a switch, too. Switches confuse our myths about SM. When someone claims as a part of their sexual identity that they like to be mostly in charge, or mostly overtaken, we understand that. It already fits a neat power law around intercourse, where one person, even in the vanilla sense, is doing the other.

To watch Mosely go from victim to perpetrator in the course of this SM scene (and we can, thanks to the leaked lo-fi video still online) makes no easy sense, especially to a viewer unfamiliar with the cues of sensual power play. There's something in his ability to take both roles that only throws the theatre of historic cruelty in our face.

I wish I could have introduced Henri to one of my lovers, the only man who exclusively topped me. His father was black, and committed suicide after never being able to really make sense of his life after the Vietnam War. His mother's parents are Polish Jews, Holocaust survivors who came to America to start over. My lover told me he knew a little German because, on a long car trip as a kid, his grandfather had taught him a work song. It turned my lover on to sing this. When he gave me an SS pin to wear to a sex party with him, I didn't know whether to thank him for confiding in me about the fantasy, didn't know if I could do right by it without breaking down utterly. We parted ways before I ever found the words for where the sex we had—rough, passionate, brutal, raw, connected to something bigger than we could bear as just two people—took us. Maybe that's why he wanted to see me gangbanged in a uniform. It wasn't only to see me used and on display. The act and what it signified just needed that many witnesses.

If Max Mosely had that kind of trusted access to people who understood and accepted his fantasies, we'd have no reason—other than those demonstrated by history—to call him monstrous. Whatever demons he had to face, be they his family's fascist past or the annoyance of an afternoon hard-on, he made the choice to hire players and a beige-carpeted "torture chamber" in which to enact his sex games. More power to the man for trying to carry out this encounter with an effort towards minimizing real harm to anyone. Mosley thought he was paying for discretion, not dehumanization. Of course, how well or not he treated the sex workers who entertained him isn't the story of dehumanization anyone is interested in telling—maybe because it's clear he was very fair with them. If there's one thing we can fault him for, it's imagining that his "transgressions" weren't a story worth telling anyone but the women he paid to enact them with.

Related: Howard Jacobson on the British Race Car Nazi Sex Scandal

Pay Up: or pull outIsraeli mikvah attendants—the women who supervise dunks into the ritual baths to make sure they’re kosher—haven’t been paid in five months, so Kolech, an Orthodox feminist organization, is working to organize a mikvah boycott until ladies of the bath get paid. Without dunking in the mikvah after her period, a woman isn’t supposed to have sexual relations with her husband, so the boycott would effectively deprive Orthodox couples of intimacy until the issue is worked out.

On the Kolech website (Hebrew) Batia Kahana-Dror writes: "Let's drive them crazy, all those who wait restlessly for the night that their woman goes to the mikvah. All those who make up the majority in the religious councils, the Treasury, the Religious Services Ministry and the Knesset, the rabbis and the leaders. Stop. No more sex."

Kahana-Dror is echoing an ancient theme of women withholding sex for the good of their communities. Here are some examples:

• Lysistrata: First and foremost, we have Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens decide to withhold sex from their husbands until peace is declared—a strategy that proves entirely effective. In that vein, The Lysistrata Project began staging readings of the play in 2002. They sponsor events and encourage activism to seek inventive solutions to violence and economic crises, specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• The Strike of Crossed Legs: In 2006 in Pereira, Colombia, dozens of women took part in the "Strike of Crossed Legs." When gang members weren't handing in their guns, their wives and girlfriends organized and decided to stage a sex strike. They came up with a strike anthem rap song that included the lyrics: "As women we are worth a lot. We don't want to fall for violent men because with them we lose too much."

• Water for Sex: In Sirt, Turkey, women staged a month long sex strike, protesting the lack of accessible running water in their village. After the existing water supply system broke and the women were forced to walk miles and wait in lines for hours to get water for their homes, they came up with the idea of withholding sex from their husbands until the water supply problem was fixed. After what CNN called "frantic lobbying on the part of Sirt's male population" a governmental official was convinced to pipe water into the town.
  

• Lysistrata with a Twist: Bolivian prostitutes went on a hunger strike when the bars and strip joints where they worked were shut down in 2007. In addition to taking over the local AIDS clinic and refusing to eat, the sex workers threatened to parade around naked. A spokesperson said that if the town of El Alto wanted to do away with prostitution, "then the government should give us a hand and take care of our children, and afterward provide us with jobs."

Title: A Tale of Love and Darkness Author: Amos Oz Description: I can think of no better book to introduce a reader into the layered, fragile, complex, and painful truth of what it means to be an Israeli. Amos Oz, already an intellectual hero, taking his own people and his own history to task over the past 30 years, elevates his writing to a level that very few get to experience over centuries of writing. His storytelling is sharp and clear. This beautiful book offers an extraordinary insight into the Israeli psyche, painting it as feverishly idealistic, mortally wounded, and bitterly optimistic. One comes away changed after reading A Tale of Love and Darkness, swearing that the scent of Jerusalem has been seared into their souls forever; knowing Israel in a way never known quite that way before. I feel a sense of tremendous pride and joy that I am part of a nation that gave birth, witnessed, and nourished such a writer, and that has embraced such writing. Recommended By: Born in Israel to American parents, Danny Maseng first came to the United States to star on Broadway in 'Only Fools Are Sad.' A playwright, actor, singer and composer, Danny has served as Evaluator of New American Plays/Opera-Musical Theater for the National Endowment For The Arts. Danny has also been the Director of Hava Nashira for the URJ, the Artisitic Director of the Brandeis-Bardin Instittute in California and the Director of The Spielberg Fellowships for the FJC. Danny has was named the Patron Artist of the Avraham Geiger School for Cantorial Arts in Berlin, Germany, from 2005 - 2007. Danny is also one of the most popular and respected composers of contemporary Liturgical and Synagogue music. He has been the invited guest of the American Conference of Cantors, the Cantor's Assembly, as well as the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. When Danny is not appearing on show's like Law & Order or narrating Wild Discovery, he is a frequent faculty member of The Wexner Heritage Foundation, Synagogue 2000, The Whizin Institute, Limmud and many other national and international institutes and conferences. A much sought after Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Danny travels the world, inspiring, teaching and rekindling the love of Judaism through Torah, Kabbalah, Jewish culture and the arts.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or tips.

Previously: Clayton Swisher's The Truth About Camp David, recommended by M.J. Rosenberg