Not So Fast, You Two: You've still got some hoops to jump through Here at Jewcy, Izzy has been keeping us in tune with all the gruesome details of wedding planning, from how to not look like a total square in front of your Indie-rock loving hipster guests and how to pick up a dress that gives you a Jewish amount of cleavage.

However, it wasn’t until this article was released by the New York Times that we realized an additional check box must be added to every Israeli’s wedding to do list: prove that you and your spouse-to-be are both Jewish. Okay, so it’s a little unusual, but totally doable, right? As it turns out, not so much – especially if your mother is American.

In his essay “How to Prove You’re a Jew?” reporter Gershom Gorenberg documents one woman’s struggle to get married in Israel, her country of origin. Even though the woman, a thirty-something named Sharon, was raised on a kibbutz, has a Jewish mother, and has “Jewish” printed on her birth certificate, it was not enough to satisfy the demands of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Before any wedding was to take place, the rabbinate wanted some proof that Sharon’s (Jewish) mother was actually Jewish.

The problem? The Israeli Chief Rabbinate expected Sharon to produce her mother’s birth and marriage certificates as evidence for her membership to the tribe. But since Sharon’s mom was born in America, where nationalities are not printed on birth certificates and people can be married by a court official rather than a rabbi, Sharon and her hubby were left royally screwed. They were told no ketubah, no dice.

So Close, Yet So Far: All that stands between these two is a ketubah

Lucky for Sharon, a few phone calls led her to Seth Farber, the Veronica Mars of Israeli marriage. Seth, rabbi and founder of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization dedicated to making Judaism as accessible to all Jews as possible, worked his magic on Sharon’s case and came through in the clutch, digging up (literally) an acceptable link to Orthodox Judaism for Sharon’s mother.

But the article definitely raises questions, and eyebrows. Between the old-world mentality of the Israeli rabbinate, growing rifts within the Orthodox movement, and increased skepticism as a cause of people falsely claiming to be Jewish, it seems that without a change in policy, it will be impossible for many Jewish couples to be married in the holy land. As Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary points out, this situation is especially discouraging for young American Jews, who will not be able to ever develop a passion for Israel when, if they ever decide to live there, will be treated with discriminatory and insulting policy.

So save your ketubahs and start lobbying. The future of your children may depend on it.

My first thought when Keith Olbermann broke into a taped replay of Hardball on Wednesday night to announce that the New York Times was reporting an affair between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman, was that McCain had come so close to the Republican nomination only to flush his presidential ambitions down the toilet of the S.S. Monkey Business. Or to put it another way, Mike Huckabee's belief in miracles over math had been vindicated.

On closer review, though, the Times' sensational lede was backed up by reporting more worthy of a supermarket tabloid than the Paper of Record. So former chief of staff John Weaver and two anonymous, disgruntled ex-aides claimed to have spoken to McCain and Iseman to keep them apart? Nine years ago? Aside from a semen sample, you couldn't ask for more rock-solid proof. (To be sure, John and Cindy McCain's insistence that it isHow can you tell he's lying?: His lips are moving to deliver a pompous lecture about declining morality all around him a priori inconceivable that he would be unfaithful is a bit rich, considering that McCain serially cheated on his first wife, and his second wife was originally his mistress. But he's a maverick, so never mind.)

The actual story, which appeared in far more responsible form in the Washington Post, is the story of John McCain's long, continuing history of corrupt and corrupting relationships with lobbyists. This isn't breaking news, in the sense that it dates back to the beginning of McCain's legislative career 26 years ago, but it certainly is news to the vast majority of Americans, who are acquainted almost exclusively with the media-created character "John McCain, anti-corruption crusader," and not the actor who plays that role, a senator of middling accomplishment whose major contribution to American political life was his borderline-criminal facilitation of one of the greatest financial scandals of the last 50 years.

Those interested in judging McCain's reputation by his actions, rather than the other way around, should consult McCain: The Myth of a Maverick by Reason editor Matt Welch, easily the most worthwhile book purchase a political junkie could make this year. Here is Welch with a capsule summary of almost everything you need to know about the McCain-Iseman scandal.

 

The other important angle to Isemangate is the McCain campaign's pushback against it, a kind of anti-Clintonite sweeping denial that makes for optimal PR in the short term, but leaves no margin for lawyerly evasion should McCain's assertions later be disproved. Hours after the Times story went online, McCain's communications director Jill Hazelbaker averred that McCain "has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists." As Welch says, McCain's own memoirs contradict this claim.

In his press conference the following morning, in addition to denying an affair with Iseman, McCain repeatedly gainsaid the Times' much more credibly-reported account of meetings between McCain's staffers and the candidate, and between the same aides and Iseman, to put a stop to whatever relationship they had:

Q (Off mike) -- confirm again. The New York Times is pretty explicit in quoting a couple of former aides, they say --

SENATOR MCCAIN: Yes.

Q -- saying that some of your aides intervened and confronted not just Ms. Iseman, but you in particular, saying: Stop seeing her, don’t have a relationship with her, because this is going to hurt you. Are you saying that did not happen?

SENATOR MCCAIN: I don’t know if it happened at their level. It certainly didn’t happen to me.

[...snip...]

Q So none of them, nobody in your campaign said, "Senator, she’s a problem, don’t deal with her"?

SENATOR MCCAIN: No. No.

Perhaps McCain's relationship with the press is so cozy that he is justified in expecting that no lie of his, no matter how bold-faced, will gain mainstream currency. For what it's worth, though, McCain's blanket denials are already coming undone. Michael Isikoff, the best investigative journalist in Washington, reports that McCain's claim that Paxson Communications (one of the firms Iseman represents) never lobbied McCain to intervene on their behalf with the FCC, is patently false. Isikoff's source? John McCain's 2002 deposition on the matter. Following on Isikoff's heels, Bud Paxson, head of the eponymous firm, contradicts McCain as well.

There is scarcely a figure in public life whose popular persona and actual political record are as wildly divergent as John McCain's, so it could be that Mr. Straight-Talk will weather the storm, and perhaps even finally consolidate his support among conservatives who hate the liberal media even more than they hate "Aztlan Juan" McCain.

In the real world, as opposed to the fact-free fantasyland in which most reporters on the McCain beat reside, John McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis is a lobbyist, his senior advisor Charlie Black does his lobbying business aboard the Straight-Talk Express, and most of his top aides are --- wait for it --- lobbyists. Meanwhile, the paladin of campaign finance reform took public financing when it appeared that his campaign was on life-support, then tried to opt out of the public financing system by putting potential future public money up as collateral for a private loan (this is probably illegal), now refuses to recognize the FEC's authority over the public or private financial status of his campaign, and best of all, took it upon himself to deliver a lecture to Barack Obama on the categorical imperative to uphold one's commitments to public financing.

When the general election gets going in earnest, expect to see McCain scold his opponent's backsliding mores on a daily basis. Dare we have the audacity to hope that this time around, McCain will finally be called out as a transparently hypocritical bullshit-artist?

 

Iran ranks 18th in the New York Times' round up of the top travel destinations of 2008. Find out which place made it to number one on this list of vacation favorites and newcomers.

The NY Times has an article about Indie Jewish communities that’s very popular, and pretty interesting.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 — There are no pews at Tikkun Leil Shabbat, no rabbis, no one with children or gray hair.

Shabbat Happens: even in Colorado and Kansas

Instead, one rainy Friday night, the young worshipers sat in concentric circles in the basement of an office building, damp stragglers four deep against the walls. In the middle, Megan Brudney and Rob Levy played guitar, drums and sang, leading about 120 people through the full Shabbat liturgy in Hebrew.

Without a building and budget, Tikkun Leil Shabbat is one of the independent prayer groups, or minyanim, that Jews in their 20s and 30s have organized in the last five years in at least 27 cities around the country. They are challenging traditional Jewish notions of prayer, community and identity.

In places like Atlanta; Brookline, Mass.; Chico, Calif.; and Manhattan the minyanim have shrugged off what many participants see as the passive, rabbi-led worship of their parents’ generation to join services led by their peers, with music sung by all, and where the full Hebrew liturgy and full inclusion of men and women, gay or straight, seem to be equal priorities.

I think the best part of the article is a brief mention of an indie minyan in Denver, and the end of the article, which talks about a group that meets in Kansas City, MO.

The minyanim are noticing that some of their worshipers are getting older, and it is unclear how they might evolve as participants have children and move to the suburbs, said members and experts on the movement.

The answer may be found in the likes of Shabbat in the Hood, a minyan that draws 55 to 70 worshipers to peoples’ homes once a month in Leawood, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo. Worshipers belong to local synagogues. This is “the soccer mom set,” with lots of children around, many of them encouraged to lead prayers, said Marla Brockman, the lay coordinator of the minyan.

“It has been a spiritual hit for our families,” Ms. Brockman said. “We were all looking to go back to Jewish summer camp — the ease of community, this feeling of ‘go ahead and try it, try a reading’ — and we found it.”

Full Story

I just want to emphasize that you don’t have to live in NY, LA or Chicago to be a part of a strong and innovative Jewish community. You want to daven egalitarian, and hang out with non-for-profit workers, hip mamas, and a handful of corporate types? There are places for you outside the biggest communities. And same goes for people with kids. If you don’t want to live in Brooklyn, you don’t have to. But if you do, there’s always Brooklyn Jews.

Granted, I didn't read the New York Times op-ed page during the Times Select era --- heckuvah job, Pinchy --- so I don't know what intellectual atrocities might have been committed there over the past couple of years. Granted, further, I don't have a very detailed sense of what the NYT op-ed page looked like more than a couple of decades ago. Granted, finally, that for all I know she may have been a fine editorial page editor. Still, Gail Collins' Thanksgiving Day Massacre of an op-ed is surely a contender for the title of most inane, shallow, self-obsessed, puerile, half-baked, insulting to readers, and downright unnecessary column ever to appear in the pages of the Grey Lady. And this is the paper that publishes Maureen Dowd.

Collins, you see, has two criteria by which she will judge the fitness of presidential candidates of any party for the office they seek, both arrived at upon reflection on the missteps of the Bush Administration.

Criterion #1: Candidates should not value loyalty over competence in their subordinates. So far, so good; it's certainly true that Bush let Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld et al. stay in the cabinet long past their expiration dates, not to mention Bush's staffing of important executive branch agencies and foreign affairs posts with Republican party hacks and graduates of Pat Robertson's "law school." Collins devotes her first graf to criterion #1. The rest is given over to:

Criterion #2: Candidates should not exercise too much, and if they do exercise, they shouldn't enjoy it. Seriously. That's what she believes. Or pretends to believe, and wastes column inches in the most influential broadsheet in the country doing so. Because Bush exercised a lot, and seemed to like it. And we don't want another Bush. Ergo, Hillary, who doesn't go for much more than an occasional walk, would be an ideal president. Obama and Romney, on the other hand, are alarmingly fit. Therefore they'd be disasters.

Similarly, Hitler was a vegetarian painter. So we definitely don't want to elect any vegetarians or painters. Also, Kim Jong-Il claims to be a highly skilled jet pilot, opera composer, movie producer, and probably the greatest golf talent the world has ever seen. And though his claims can't be verified, we need to be extra-cautious in a post-9/11 environment (one percent doctrine and all that), so any presidential candidates who have partaken in any of these hobbies have an obligation to drop out of the race for the good of the country. (Bush was a jet pilot too, so that's double trouble.)

I'm really at a loss to excerpt anything. You'll have to read the whole thing --- and preferably from a distance, with your eyes crossed like with those 3-D puzzle books from the 90s --- to fully appreciate it. But beware, if you gaze for long into an abyss, Gail Collins gazes also into you. I won't be held responsible if reading the op-ed pulls down your IQ. One thing I'm very thankful for this Feast of Thanksgiving is that I took the GRE before reading Collins. 

Today’s New York Times print edition ran a cover story on Iraq accompanied by the kind of ample photo spread the paper usually fills with a buffet of limp corpses, weeping mothers, and soldiers in prosthetic rehabilitation. But today’s photos captured a joyous Baghdad wedding, an amiable Baghdad restaurant scene, and a busy Baghdad marketplace. The piece was about increased security and an emergent sense of normalcy in Iraq.

 

 From The New York Times:

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.

 

If you’ve followed The Iraq War using The New York Times as your only source, you’re pretty confused right now. The narrative would run as follows: for four and half years American imperialists visited Armageddon on the innocent people of Mesopotamia. Then for four months the same foul forces employed a military shill and delivered a more attenuated version of hell-on-earth. Then on November 20, 2007, in some kind of Hawkingesque spacetime singularity, there was sudden hope and progress in Baghdad. And that’s just from the reporting side of the paper. If you’ve chanced to peek over the much touted “firewall” dividing the reportage on the front page from the analysis in the editorial and op-ed sections you’re really lost at sea. Because as Dowd, Kristoff, Rich and co. will tell you, this was not only an oil grab, a power grab, an Oedipal psychodrama, and a neoconservative delusion all at once, but it was also lost before it began.

 

So, why the change in The New York Times? Things have simply reached a saturation point. If credibility is a concern at all, you can only go so long saying black is white and white is black. With the flood of good news coming from Iraq, The Times knew the game was up.

 

I don’t think I’m alone in sensing a moment here. Christopher Hitchens’ Slate piece this week was a circumspect expression of thanks for the apparent turn of events in Baghdad. Hitch has, in the past, fallen prey to a small degree of premature triumphalism in regards to the war and it seems that genuine promise demands something a little more humble. He writes:

 

To have savaged and discredited al-Qaida in an open fight and to have taken down a fascist Baath Party, which betrayed its pseudosecularism by forging an alliance with al-Qaida, is to have scored an impressive victory on any terms. However, the price of this achievement was often the indulgence of some excessive conduct on the part of the Shiite parties and militias. The next stage must be the reining-in of the Sadrists and the discouragement of Iranian support for such groups. Again, one hardly dares to hope, but there are some promising signs.

Whether or not one is very hopeful (as am I) about Iraq it pays not to invite hubris. Anything can happen. But one thing needs to be mentioned more: to whatever extent normalcy prevails in today’s Iraq it cannot be called a “return” to that condition. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi normalcy meant a 24hour fear state and unimaginable misery. If things proceed satisfactorily in Iraq no one should say that the U.S. managed to stabilize a nation it destroyed. Rather, coalition forces succeeded in nurturing the growth of consensual government in a region that had never known anything like it.

 

I’m never not moved when Hitchens describes the American Revolution as the last revolution that’s still kicking. It’s with hope for Iraq that I refer to Mark Steyn’s recent syndicated piece about Thanksgiving and the blessings of the nation state. Steyn writes:

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they've been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The last time I was in LA I scanned the cover of the Los Angeles Times and saw that the death of Spencer Tracy's son was front page news. So I had to laugh when I spotted an editorial in yesterday's edition of that paper titled "Have We Turned The Corner In Iraq?" They mean well, but they're a little slow out there. I for one knew that the Iraq War had turned a corner after reading that landmark piece in The New York Times. No, not the O’Hanlon/Pollack editorial: the front-page report from July 27. I must reproduce the lead here, complete with dateline, because I’m incapable of describing the silliness of the cartoon noir brought to bare in this story about. . .ice.

BAGHDAD, July 27 — Each day before the midsummer sun rises high enough to bake blood on concrete, Baghdad’s underclass lines up outside Dickensian ice factories.

Yep, I thought, mission accomplished.

When all The New York Times has to report about what is supposedly the greatest blunder in modern U.S. foreign policy is that it’s made ice scarce you know plates are shifting beneath your feet. Three days later, O’Hanlon and Pollack’s “A War We Just Might Win” set off shrill fits from coast to coast. It’s worth reproducing their opening line as well: "Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal."

Not as surreal as cover stories in New York, but their point was made. Talk of withdrawal had reached a fever pitch just as coalition forces found a measure of success.

In the wake of the O’Hanlon/Pollack piece the mainstream media shifted their approach, but made sure to keep Iraq negatively in the spotlight. One can almost now forget the month-long period during which newspapers, networks (and Democrats) worked us into a panic over the sluggishness and ineffectiveness of the al-Maliki government. Sure, there’s been military progress, they said, but it’s meaningless without a centralized Iraqi government that can move forward. What they all failed to realize was that the military achievements were allowing political progress to occur on an organic bottom-up basis. To withdraw troops while that’s happening would be more than surreal, it would be criminal.

I have a friend who keeps telling me that by the time we have two presidential front-runners in 2008 the Iraq war will no longer be a hot button issue. I’ve gone from doubting him, to believing him, to realizing we’re already there. Look at how the front page of The New York Times covers Iraq these days. It’s a succession of stories that snicker in the margins of actual battle. Supply problems, thefts, red tape. In short, the difficulties suffered by all countries either at war, or in peacetime. Especially in that region. One has to mention the very important exception that is the conflict affecting Turkey, the PKK, and the Kurdish people in general. But having seen the citizens of Iraq proper stamp out extremists of the Ba’athist, al Qaeda, and Mahdi Army variety, it would be shocking if the Kurds didn’t eliminate their own radicals in shorter order. And, in any case, it’s not exactly a story about the war.

So, what happened to the stories about the war? There’s a saying: happiness shows up white on paper. I’m not so flippant as to describe present-day Iraq as a portrait of happiness, but if the main story is a positive one no one’s going to read it. Lt. Col. David Kilcullen is a man with whom many more Americans should be familiar. He’s a counterinsurgency guru on loan to us from Australia, a major architect of the Petreus plan, and a reason none of us should ever scoff at the idea of this being a true coalition. Speaking some months back about the new counterinsurgency strategy, he said the following:

This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.

“This was supposed to be the good war,” goes the current liberal meme on Afghanistan. The implication being that Iraq was catastrophic from the get go, but now American hubris has turned the righteous battle in Afghanistan sour as well.

The thing is, if you check the old liberal memes you’ll have a doozy of a time figuring out when they considered Afghanistan the good war.

In October of 2001 I found myself in Greenwich Village having to maneuver through a thousand-strong herd of marchers with fake gashes and grim reaper outfits. The season, the costumes, and the neighborhood suggested New York’s annual Halloween parade. The placards about secret oil pipelines, Israel, and impeachment tipped me off that this was something genuinely spooky. I was in the middle of the first wave of liberal response to the good war.

Here’s a sort of "human interest" piece from The New York Times on the Afghan campaign 24 hours after it began:

Many people expressed a passionate worry that American soldiers were about to become bogged down in an endless pursuit, even though they supported that effort. And others grieved openly for the inevitable deaths of innocent men, women and children beneath the bombers, as if their losses would only compound the thousands of American deaths.

[ . . .]

Some even took to the streets to parade their concerns, joining previously scheduled peace marches in several cities. At a march in Philadelphia sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, Bal Pinguel, the group's coordinator of peace building, said the bombing would only add to the number of innocent people killed in the entire event. But, Mr. Pinguel added, ''I believe that bin Laden should be brought to justice.'

Hundreds of protesters also joined a candlelight march in Chicago against the bombings, saying war was not the proper response to terrorism.

Well, okay. They’re just reporting what they see. But this is from a New York Times opinion piece the same day:

Never before has the United States launched a military campaign against such an elusive and hydra-headed foe, with so little clarity about precisely how it will prevail.

[. . .]

The word ''war'' has been widely used in the last three weeks, by ordinary folk as well as politicians. War, whether conventional or unconventional, is an enterprise in which one side kills members of the other, and the other side does likewise, until one cannot continue, but it is by no means clear that the country has thought this through in its first reaction to Sept. 11.

Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist leader, made it clear once again, on videotape, that he would not back off. The tape, date uncertain, was broadcast on Arabic satellite television. He challenged the allied efforts to picture him as a renegade who has corrupted the teaching of his faith, describing the American war against him as a war against Afghanistan and Islam. As long as it continues, he promised, Americans ''will never taste security.

And then, what I assume counts as support: “Still, the coalition is remarkable, and in certain ways it seems to have the makings of the New World Order about which George Bush the elder used to speak.”

Remarkable indeed.

We know where the coverage and commentary has gone since. Every spring we’re told the Taliban is “bigger than ever,” and then, when the rag-tag group of mountain fighters is taken out by the end of each summer we don’t hear a word about it. We were told that Hamid Karzai is merely the mayor of Kabul, but when Afghans elected they’re first female governor silence reigned.

You’d have no idea that there are many reasons to be encouraged about the continuing struggle for freedom in Afghanistan. There is much good news about the good war, and much of it has nothing to do with war itself. Here are some choice examples:

Criminal Justice
When an Afghan Christian convert faces death for apostasy it’s front page news. Here’s something that’s not. Since 2003, the New York based International Legal Foundation has established six offices throughout Afghanistan. The ILF has made slow if steady headway mentoring Afghan lawyers, and progressing toward the establishment of a viable judicial system in the country.

Technology
Hate your cellular service? Try Afghan Wireless. Just a few days ago the company announced ”the completion of a 2,500km STM1 microwave ring, which passes through 18 provinces. The new backbone connects cities including Mazar, Takhar, Badakshan, Kunduz, Kabul, Kandahar and Spinboldak.” This gets rid of the formidably high cost of satellite time. Widespread cheap cellular service is a massive step toward modernity.

Natural Resources
One enormous hurdle facing Afghanistan is that its main natural resource, poppy seeds, has been outlawed. Well, what if the country had another? It does. Nature News reports that a copper deposit, called Aynak has resources worth an estimated $30 billion dollars. “What happens at Aynak could eventually serve as a model for developing Afghanistan's other natural resources, ranging from mineral wealth to reserves of coal and petroleum.” The World Bank is now involved in the potential bidding process.

A sober, but hopeful, must-read by Ann Marlowe in The Wall Street Journal details several other signs of progress.

Jalalabad, the largest city of eastern Afghanistan, with 400,000 people, is now just a three-hour drive to Kabul on a good road recently built by the European Union. Another hour's drive brings you to Mehtar Lam, capital of Afghanistan's Laghman province, on another good road funded by USAID.

Free and easy passage between cities undercuts warlords’ abilities to control great swaths of secluded land. Many more blacktop roads are in the works.

For those who speak of Kabul as an illusory exception to larger Afghan barbarism, Marlowe has interesting news to report:

Further south is Khost, a province that received little help from the central government in recent decades. Now construction cranes hover over Khost City, with modern five- and six-story office buildings and shopping centers rising amid grimy two-story concrete bazaars. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently finished building a new university in the city. And this month the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, an investment-facilitating agency, is inviting 300 overseas Khostis to come discuss building an industrial park.

Both Kabul Bank and Azizi Bank opened their Khost branches in the summer of 2006, and each have about 3,000 accounts. Both branch managers expect their numbers to double this year. The numbers are low because some local residents view even non-interest bearing accounts as un-Islamic. (Competing fatwas have been issued by various mullahs on the topic.) About 65,000 people have mobile phones in the province.

Technological advancement, investment, and construction are well underway in Afghanistan. Such enterprises have a momentum of their own and transform societies in exciting ways. But perhaps the biggest development in Afghanistan is the freeing-up and influx of human capital. Since 2002 nearly 5 million Afghans have returned from neighboring countries. This reverse exodus is not without its problems. Available resources, chief among them. But the bottom line is we’re talking about millions of people who’ve come home with some sense of things being better and a suspicion that the future consists of more than coffee breaks between occupiers and fanatics. Combined with continued international support, an organically enthusiastic population like that could deliver Afghanistan into unprecedented territory. I’ll put those 5 million up against the Greenwich Village thousand any day.

The most emailed article in the New York Times right now is Jon Meachem’s Op-Ed “A Nation of Christians Is Not A Christian Nation.” Here’s a nice little excerpt:

Jesus: Is so patriotic

The only acknowledgment of God in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated “in the year of our Lord 1787.” Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith. The Connecticut ratifying convention debated rewriting the preamble to take note of God’s authority, but the effort failed.

A pseudonymous opponent of the Connecticut proposal had some fun with the notion of a deity who would, in a sense, be checking the index for his name: “A low mind may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think himself slighted and dishonored if he is not complimented with a seat or a prologue of recognition in the Constitution.” Instead, the framers, the opponent wrote in The American Mercury, “come to us in the plain language of common sense and propose to our understanding a system of government as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, not a God appears in a dream to propose any part of it.”

Full Story

The rest of the article is all kinds of other examples of how the US of A isn’t a Christian nation, (this in response to John McCain’s statement that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation”).

Legally, I’m certain Meachem is right, and I love the article. But as an American who grew up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood I have to report that I’m sometimes annoyed at just how Christian my life is. We’ve got the National Day of Prayer (which is entirely Christian) and the War on Christmas courtesy of the uber-American Fox News, plus the fact that I attended more than a decade of Jewish day school but had the Lord’s Prayer memorized before the Amidah… Sadly, with Bush in the White House I don’t think McCain was too far off the mark. It may not have been set up in the Constitution, but most days it seems like the unspoken eleventh ammendment in the Bill of Rights.

As a Trotskyist, he should be used to fighting losing struggles. As an architect, he demands order, cohesion, discipline. A bundle of contradictions, perhaps, but this profile of Kanan Makiya is the saddest thing I've read in a long time: 

Makiya is a brilliant and fearless thinker; he dissected a brutal dictatorship and, later, exploded the pieties of his own intellectual culture. And so it is the very shakiness of his answers that suggest that they are, in the end, not about his intellect at all. They’re about his heart. In this case, it seems, Makiya’s heart — his passion to destroy Hussein, his passion to bring freedom to Iraq — does not want him to go where his intellect would take him.

And where would it go? What would it say? Possibly something like this: You exposed a terrible dictatorship, and for the noblest of motives you signed on to an invasion that ended in catastrophe. You misjudged your native country, and your adopted one too.

Last Sunday, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman made a bold declaration, further solidifying his reputation as the edgiest and most provocative writer on global affairs today, the same man who brought us The World is Flat. His latest pearl of wisdom: "9/11 has made us stupid."

Why is this the case? First up:

You may think Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp in Cuba for Al Qaeda terrorists. A lot of the world thinks it’s a place we send visitors who don’t give the right answers at immigration. I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans."

This is no doubt true, and it doesn't take a major newspaper columnist the majority of whose reporting is done in the First Class Lounges of Shanghai, Qatar and London airports to tell us. And never mind his total lack of actually engaging the fact that Guantanamo Bay actually is a prison camp for Al Qaeda terrorists and not the gulag imagined by Guardian editorial writers. Moving on.

The Moustache of Understanding next drops some heavy, heavy knowledge:

Look at our infrastructure. It’s not just the bridge that fell in my hometown, Minneapolis. Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. I still can’t get uninterrupted cellphone service between my home in Bethesda and my office in D.C. But I recently bought a pocket cellphone at the Beijing airport and immediately called my wife in Bethesda — crystal clear.

Well, it can't be a Thomas L. Friedman column without a chintzy analogy like "flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones." And goddamnit if the 'stache of sagacity can't hear the missus on his Nokia while sitting in his chaffeur-driven Town Car to the "office" he allegedly works in. It's all the Bush administration's fault anyway, or not-so-thinly-veiled "9/11 candidate" Rudy Giuliani's. Next we get this:

"If Disney World can remain an open, welcoming place, with increased but invisible security, why can’t America?"

Maybe it's because Disney World has Captain Hook to protect it (and High School Musical's Zac Efron is dreamy enough to subdue any of the repressed homosexuals who compose about half of Al Qaeda's ranks).

I don't know what's a bigger disgrace to the practice of American opinion journalism: Maureen Dowd’s continuing presence on the New York Times op-ed page or Tom Friedman’s. Friedman's latest missive confirms his status not as a peerless interpreter of world events, but as the the wise man of Walt Disney, the Bard of Hanna-Barbara.

This morning I was reading an article in the New York Times about women who don’t like dating men who make much less money than they do because it makes for an awkward--or at the very least unromantic--dynamic. The article ends with the following little date anecdote:
So....: How do you keep kosher?

Unyi Agba, 27, an advertising executive with a small firm in Boston, almost always dates professional men, but when she goes out with someone earning less money, there is tension. “This is a topic that’s traveled in my own female circles a lot in the last year,” she said. Across a restaurant table with a man who earns less, “it’s never explicitly said, but there are nuances,” she said. “Things are said like, ‘Boy I’m going to be really broke after this dinner.’ "
And her response?
“Silence.”

Full story

I was thinking about this because in my dating life it’s generally not the income that’s an issue so much as the particular level of religiosity or observance. The awkward silences that happen on my dates aren’t because of financial discrepancies, they’ll be because he’ll say something like, “I’m so excited to go to the Titans game on Saturday morning,” and I’ll have nothing add, since I’m going to spending Saturday morning at shul.

This is something that doesn’t get discussed much, but that is a real and frustrating issue for most singles I know. The pressure is on to find a Nice Jewish Partner, and everyone acts like it’s as easy as joining JDate, but the truth is that even a Nice Jewish Boy from the Upper West Side might not be a good match for me if he’s particularly invested in going to a lot of Big Ten football games, or even if he just hates ever going to synagogue. And a superfrum black hat guy from Monsey probably wouldn’t be happy with me and my jeans and non shomer-negiah lifestyle.

People like to downplay this as an issue, but the more time I spend in the dating circuit the more I notice how tough it is, especially for people who really are engaged with Jewish life in any substantial way, to find someone who even approaches their level of observancy. And honestly if you find someone who you really like but who doesn’t jive with the standards you’ve set for yourself, I don’t know of any resources or groups you can join to help figure out how to deal with that situation, even though it can be as challenging for you and your partner as it would be if one of you wasn’t Jewish. I’d say it even has potential to be more problematic than dating a non-Jew, because I think a lot of times in those situations the non-Jewish person doesn’t feel like they could be being judged or ridiculed for not participating in a ritual or joining an organization. As a goy, they’re exempt. But if I was dating a Jewish guy and he saw that I was keeping Shabbat, and wouldn’t eat meat in non kosher restaurants, he would be justified in being annoyed that I’m ruining his plans for crazy nights at the bars downtown, or forcing him to change reservations so we don’t eat at a steak house. I mean, he's Jewish and he's not staying in. And I would be justified in being annoyed that he doesn’t want to come to shul with me.

I don’t know what the solution to this is, other than only dating people whose religious lives are already really similar to yours, and I know that in any relationship there are going to be some discrepancies between how observant the two parties are and are willing to become. I’m just saying, no one ever talks about how hard it can be¬--even when you’re only dating Jews—to find someone who is really on the same spiritual and religious plane as you are. I’ve dated nonJews and never missed Shacharit, and I’ve dated Jews and had them convince me to come with them to a bar on Shabbat and they would just pay for my drinks. I’m not saying either of those were good relationships to begin with, I just think that if we’re going to push Jewish dating so hard we should have some contingency plans for couples that don’t belong to the same movement.

The New York Times' editors reply to Gen. Petraeus's report:

The headline out of General Petraeus’s testimony was a prediction that the United States should be able to reduce its forces from 160,000 to 130,000 by next summer. That sounds like a big number, but it would only bring American troops to the level that were in Iraq when Mr. Bush announced his “surge” last January. And it’s the rough equivalent of dropping an object and taking credit for gravity.

Oh, please. The surge was always defined as a temporary escalation of military forces -- allied with a completely new strategy for waging counterinsurgency operations -- to bring the violence in Iraq to a more manageable level; i.e., to quell the civil war that's been raging since the Golden Mosque bombing. Announcing that, with some measurable improvements in on-the-ground conditions, the U.S. is now ready to withdraw some of those military forces is by no means a shambolic trophy claim of the surge, as the editors sneeringly describe it. It's what the surge was about all along. More NYT bilge:

The main success General Petraeus cited was in the previously all-but-lost Anbar Province where local sheiks, having decided that they hate Al Qaeda more than they hate the United States, have joined forces with American troops to combat insurgents. That development — which may be ephemeral — was not a goal of the surge and surprised American officials. To claim it as a success of the troop buildup is, to be generous, disingenuous.

In this language, a positive unintended consequence of the surge is to be downplayed because it's good news the war strategists failed to anticipate! No accounting in here for the fact that the dramatic about-face in Anbar happened after the infusion an entire Military Regiment into the region.

And actually, it's disingenuous to suggest that turning popular opinion against Al Qaeda was never part of the plan. Here is Gen. Petraeus in his Counterinsurgency Manual, explaining why it is typically so difficult for a country like the U.S. to earn the good faith of an occupied citizenry:

Americans start with an automatic disadvantage because of their reputation for accomplishment, what some call the “man on the moon syndrome.” This refers to the expressed disbelief that a nation that can put a man on the moon cannot quickly restore basic services. U.S. agencies trying to fan enthusiasm for their efforts should also avoid making exorbitant promises. In some cultures, failure to deliver promised results is automatically interpreted as deliberate deception, not good intentions gone awry. In other cultures, exorbitant promises are the norm, and people do not expect them to be kept. So counterinsurgents must understand these local norms and employ locally tailored approaches to ensure expectations are controlled. Managing expectations also involves demonstrating economic and political progress to show the populace how life is improving. Increasing the number of people who feel they have a stake in the success of the state and its government is a key to successful COIN. In the final judgment, victory comes by convincing the people that their life will be better under the government than under the insurgent. [Italics added.]

One could argue that the Marines had absolutely nothing to do with the sheiks' newfound loathing of Al Qaeda, which is its own advertisement in misery and subjugation. (Though, again, the timing of their about-face is curious.) However, if the one force those sheiks are willing to turn to in getting rid of the jihadist nasties is the government-backed Marines, then clearly, life under the government has proven, at least for the short term, to be better than life under the insurgent.

Tonight is the beginning of a major fast in commemoration of the destruction of the first and second temples (plus a bunch of other bad things). First the Jews were kicked out by the Assyrians and shipped off to Babylonia. Then, after seventy years Jews were allowed back in Israel to rebuild the Temple, only to have it destroyed again by the Romans.

Living in exile is a notoriously difficult experience for Jews. (Over Shabbat I learned of a custom of removing all the knives from the table before saying birkat hamazon, because when we read the part about our exile we might be tempted to stab ourselves). On the one hand, we’re supposed to feel incomplete and forlorn without Zion, on the other hand, we’ve gotten pretty good at this whole galut thing (and, frankly, pretty bad at this whole having our own state thing). It can be hard for me to sympathize with a tradition that thinks I might want to stab myself just because I don’t live in Israel. I simply don’t connect with a sense of national/ethnic exile. This was put into profound relief this weekend as I read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which was great, but felt ideologically distant to me.
Noah Feldman: he was a Rhodes AND a Truman scholar, and we want to kick him out of the fold?
On the other hand, the article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend about intermarriage and the unnecessary alienation that it causes seemed very relevant and relatable. If you haven’t read the article yet (though chances are you have--it’s currently number two on the ‘Most E-Mailed’ list) I highly suggest you give it a once-over. The gist is that a graduate of the Maimonides School of Brookline, a man to whom Jewish life is obviously very important, has been effectively ignored and even erased from alumni photos because he’s married to a non-Jew. Noah Feldman, the article’s author, has struggled with his Modern Orthodox upbringing because it seems unprepared to deal with his own choices. He writes with a consistently positive tone about Judaism and Jewish life, and yet he feels as if he’s been pushed away from it, as if his there is a gulf between himself and the community he clearly loves. His article is one of the most potent descriptions of exile I’ve ever read.

Partially as a result of Feldman’s article, I spent much of my Shabbat meals discussing intermarriage with friends, and heard yet again the damn doomsday prediction about the future of the Jewish people. We can’t intermarry, because then who will have the Jewish babies? If that is really the argument, if all we really need is Jewish babies, then I guess it’s no problem for me to inter-date. I don’t want kids, so it shouldn’t matter whom I end up with, right? No. Of course not. I should date Jews because I spend all day being Jewish. I lay tefillin in the morning, and say kriat shma before I close my eyes at night, and in between I learn text, give tzedakah, read Torah and try to build an inspiring and exciting Jewish community for myself and my friends. I want to share all those things with someone I love. And frankly, if that person can’t read Hebrew, or thinks the Torah is stupid and outdated, I’d having trouble imagining myself with him in the long term anyway.

Last night I read Shmuley Boteach’s fantastic response to Feldman’s article. Boteach gave his editorial the simple title, Stop Ostracizing the Intermarried, and it contains one of the most sensible and mature responses to intermarriage that I’ve ever seen:

Of course I had wanted Noah to marry Jewish, and I took pride in the fact that I had helped to sustain his observance during his two years at Oxford. But the choice of whom he would marry was not mine to make. Before his wedding I wrote him a note that said, in essence, that we were friends and my affection for him would never change.

I told him that he was a prince of the Jewish nation, that his obligations to his people were eternal and unchanging, that whether or not his wife, or indeed his children, were Jewish, he would never change his own personal status as a Jew. I added that I knew he would do great things with his life as a scholar of world standing, and that he would always put the needs of the Jewish people first.

In this response Boteach seems to be exhibiting Ahavat Israel, the practice of loving and respecting fellow Jews. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook is famous for saying that the second temple was destroyed as a result of gratuitous hatred, and the third will be constructed as a result of ahavat Israel.

So maybe I don’t connect with national exile. It turns out the personal exile that I see and feel deeply in the Jewish community stipulates that my response be the same as the person stabbing himself with the challah knife during birkat hamazon.

Tonight, maybe you’ll sit in a dark room with other Jews, reading the book of Lamentations, and crying for the loss of Zion. I hope that in those moments of grief you’ll remember the grief of members of our own community, and you’ll join me in committing to practicing more ahavat Israel every day.

Ed. note: This request for questions is now closed. The interview with Noah Feldman has now been published, here.

 

Dearest Jewcers,

I'm in the middle of an e-mail interview with Noah Feldman, Harvard law professor and author of Orthodox Paradox, a first-person in today's NY Times Mag that is already ascending to the top of the Times's most e-mailed list and generating much online chatter, offended and otherwise.

I could ask Feldman questions endlessly, and am prepared to do so until his stamina gives out--however, if any of you have read the article and have a question you'd like him to answer, please post it in comments below and I'll try to get it in there.

Thanks!

I'm sure the leader writers of the New York Times have waited as patiently as they claim for signs of real improvement in the administration's war strategy. But this last lapsed deadline for "milestones" -- all of which have failed to be achieved -- has got them throwing up their hands in terminal frustration. It's time to leave Iraq and let the skies fall, if they must.

Am I the only one who gets the impression the Times editorial board isn't terribly concerned about the bloody aftermath of their bring-them-home-now proposal, judging by this sentence? "At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq." It's almost as if stability and unification were the only elements missing from Mesopotamia prior to 2003.

Setting a firm date might, according to this editorial, force "Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — [to] be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes." That "perhaps" does more work than the absence of any mention of how ethnic and religious cleansing would be redoubled in the event of our army's departure, or fall-back to permanent but scattered garrisons in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Shia-dominant south.

No biggie. This much-discussed op-ed, given the sententious and misleading Cormac McCarthyesque title "The Road Home" (it's to be airlifts all the way), arrives too late and with no new information to be of great moment. Joe Klein has recently written in Time that a de facto deadline for troop withdrawal -- or rather the declaration of U.S. military defeat, has long been established, whether or not an incompetent president acknowledges it or not:

There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters — but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.

As the matter stands, the actual "surge" hasn't yet begun. We've only just imported the sufficient number of troops for Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine to be put into full effect, and his Operation Phantom Thunder is only just beginning. As Frederick Kagan, the main articulator the surge policy, puts it like this in the Weekly Standard:

[P]revious clearing operations in Iraq were not part of a coherent plan to establish security in a wide area, but rather reactions to violence in particular places. Thus, U.S. commanders made no extensive efforts to contain the accelerants to violence--vehicle-bomb factories, insurgent safe houses, training grounds, smuggling routes, and weapons caches--located outside the cities being cleared. By contrast, the current strategy aims to establish security across greater Baghdad, and Petraeus and Odierno have added a phase between the preparation phase and the major clearing. This is Operation Phantom Thunder, which aims to disrupt enemy networks for many miles beyond the capital, as far away as Baquba and Falluja. What's more, Phantom Thunder is striking the enemy in almost all of its major bases at once--something Coalition forces have never before attempted in Iraq.

And John Burns, whose own newspaper doesn't really deserve him, has a cautious but encouraging article about the success of turning Sunni tribal networks against Al Qaeda in areas like Ramadi, the Amariya district in Baghdad, and the notorious Triangle of Death.

When I first investigated in this magazine Gen. Petraeus and his plan for revolutionizing the nature of combat in Iraq, I said that the full measure of his success would not be evident, if at all, for at least a year. It has been five months so far. This strikes me as preferable to the Times' fingers-crossed endorsement of the worst colonial exit strategy for the Middle East, or anywhere: divide and quit.

The best thing that could happen to evangelical Christianity -- not to mention orthodox Judaism or, deo volente, radical Islam -- would be the arrival of an ironical and winning antagonist of evolution. Listening to the faithful grow ever more insecure, make a complete hash of science, and furiously try to Brillo away the color and brilliance of 300 years of Enlightenment thinking, has got me wishing that some charismatic rabbi, the one from Northern Exposure, say, will infilitrate the op-ed pages and cable news channels to argue from wit as much from design.

Instead, what we get are photos of serene beachscapes, turning foliage, righteous white noise read as wisdom, and essays like this one from Sen. Sam Brownback:

It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

A theory developed according to the scientific method has no philosophical presupposition; philosophy follows from the aggregration of determined fact. Steven Pinker may say that evolutionary psychology is actually an uplifting explanation for human behavior, but he'd be a bad scientist if it were not uplifting and for that reason alone he discounted it as an explanation.

Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

Reason says that human beings are conceived through sexual intercourse and birthed after about a 9-month gestation period in the womb of a post-pubescent female. Faith says a winged apparition descended from the sky and implanted a human fetus inside the virgin womb of a bronze age Jewess. Here's what the word "supplement" means:

1 a : something that completes or makes an addition b : DIETARY SUPPLEMENT
2 : a part added to or issued as a continuation of a book or periodical to correct errors or make additions
3 : an angle or arc that when added to a given angle or arc equals 180°

I need a vitamin supplement after this graph:

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.

The number one film at the box office this weekend is likely to be about how man is repeatedly an accident, brought on by alcohol, low inhibitions and even lower feminine standards. And Brownback has enough physiological attributes in common with a Silverback gorilla that even the most fanciful definition of "likeness" cannot disqualify them.

Free association time at ye olde Jewcy. The New York Times on Martini mania:

The gin category has exploded in the last decade, with distillers offering unusual riffs on the classic theme. Some of these make for striking gins, although they struck out as martinis. Our task was to sort out which gins produced classic martinis, which added welcome nuances and which really ought to seek another line of cocktail.

Ogden Nash on same:

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth--
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

Benny Hinn: Is not a religious studies expertI just read this story at the New York Times, about the growing popularity of faith and spirituality on campus... and while that there may be a religion trend right now, and while I'm all for faith and spirituality... 

when I read this bit:

A survey on the spiritual lives of college students, the first of its kind, showed in 2004 that more than two-thirds of 112,000 freshmen surveyed said they prayed, and that almost 80 percent believed in God. Nearly half of the freshmen said they were seeking opportunities to grow spiritually, according to the survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

I couldn't help thinking, "Whoa!  I think that's a load of crap..."   

I don't mean that kids don't believe in God, I just do NOT believe that 80% of college kids believe in God.  Not really.   Though maybe they think it's kind of neat to be thinking about God, or thinking they might someday want to pray to God.

Think about this... if 80% believe in God, and only 66% pray, why don't the other 14% pray?  Do they HATE God, or do they all belong to some religion I've never heard of where God doesn't want you to pray?

 My gut tells me they answer "yes" to the question because they aren't atheists.  Because they God is a neat idea.  Because they wernt to Sunday School when they were 5.  And because, as we all know, there's a trned... and kids are trendy.  Of course, my reaction is not academic... or based in ANYTHING, really. It's just my reaction, but I'm not sure I'm wrong. 

See, the story goes on to explore the "WHY?" of such numbers.  It mentions a rise in religious studies enrollment, a rise in evangelical attendance at secular schools, and a rise in Christian student groups on campus.   

And that's all true.  But are these very differen types of numbers actually realted to one another directly?  There's more beneath the surface, and what I really want to know is what we're pointing to when we acknowledge this trend.  What are we saying?  It seems pretty general to look at all of this as, "Campus is just more religious."

For instance... What do we think is the nature of claiming an evangelical  religious belief system... or an academic religious interest?  I'm not sure these two things  are related.

In the world today, surrounded by religious evangelical extremism and violence related to that kind of faith, it makes complete sense that secular-ish students are trying to understand religion.  But I don't see what those "religious studies" numbers necessarily have to do with the simultaneous rise in the number of kids attending Campus Crusade for Christ meetings. Faith is a trend right now.  But the kids studying faith in the world, and the kids devoting themselves to worship... do they have to be the same kids?  Do we have to merge these populations in the study of faith?  Do they describe one trend, or several different reactions to a set of events?

I'm not sure I'm making myself clear, and I'm not sure I can divorce my strong reaction from my own personal experiences as a college kid.  But somewhere in my gut, I have to say I think 80% seems awfully high.

Depending on how we're defining "God" of course.  And "pray".  And "believe". 

Do you "believe" in God?  Do you pray? 

I don't, not really, though I'm reaching toward such things. 

But I don't think, as someone "interested in faith and prayer", that  I would answer a survey in the affirmative if I were asked such questions...

Though I'm not 18 and living in a climate, a trend, a "rising tide" of faith.

Ethics: Why ask a rabbi, when you’ve got a readership of millions?This week, as I was trying to read the NYTimes Magazine (while my son ate the rest of the paper around me), I noticed that someone had written this letter to the Ethicist:

My wife’s sister and her husband keep kosher, so we have a special pot for their visits. Recently my wife caught me using the pot for my traif soup. She insists we must buy another pot, but I say as long as my in-laws believe it’s kosher, they won’t violate their faith by using it. Would I be unethical to keep this secret or simply cheap? — Paul Kramer, Montclair, N.J.

Now, from an ethical standpoint (according to Laurel) this is a no-brainer. What kind of person would knowingly trayf up a dish someone else needed to eat out of, and then be too cheap to replace it? I have no problem calling Paul Kramer a sleazy-cheapo.

But from a religious standpoint, I wasn’t sure what the answer would be. It’s an interesting question. I remember once I asked a rabbi about what happens when a Jew accidentally eats a bug in some kosher potato salad at a picnic (bugs aren’t kosher). And I was told that if—to the best of the frumster’s knowledge—the potato salad was kosher, said frumster is in the clear.

So it would stand to reason that this Paul Kramer fella, while a sleazy-cheapo, is actually protecting his in-laws from knowing transgression… sort of. Though he himself is a big fat liar of course.

The Ethicist’s response?

Religious laws, like secular ethics, often distinguish between knowing and unknowing transgressions. Menachem Genack, an Orthodox rabbi, confirms that this is so for Kashrut, Jewish dietary codes. Biblical law punishes deliberate violations more severely than inadvertent errors… This would ameliorate but not obviate your in-laws’ misdeed.

Which leaves us to ask about the difference between “ameliorate” and “obviate” I guess. But Paul Kramer, you’re still a sleazy-cheapo. And I bet your wife was PISSED when she saw this letter!

Score one for Edward O. Wilson and the commonsensical forces of sociobiology. Chimps and gorillas have sympathy and will sacrifice themselves for others:

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

[...]

“Sympathy is the raw material out of which a more complicated set of ethics may get fashioned,” he said. “In the actual world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our sympathy. And the business of ethics is deciding who to help and why and when.”

Remember that the next time you don't return Coco's calls. 

 

Clearly the most arresting paragraph in Laura Secor's dispatch from Iran:

No elected leader can serve, let alone execute a policy agenda, without the acquiescence of the supreme leader and his associates. But was Ahmadinejad one of the leader’s associates? Or was he, like his predecessor, Khatami, something of a political rival? The answer to this question should determine the extent to which Ahmadinejad’s foreign-policy extremism and authoritarian tendencies are taken seriously as a political program. But it is a puzzle that has vexed political analysts since the president took office in August 2005, bringing with him a faction that was largely new to the post-revolutionary political scene. Composed partly of military and paramilitary elements, partly of extremist clerics like Mesbah-Yazdi and partly of inexperienced new conservative politicians, those in Ahmadinejad’s faction are often called “neoconservatives.” But to the extent that they have an ideology, it is less new than old, harking back to the early days of the Islamic republic.

Must have been Frank Rich's 11th-hour addition. 

It takes John Burns over five minutes in his audio recounting of the opprobrious hangings of Saddam's secret police chief and Potemkin magistrate to draw the obvious conclusion: these executions were death squad murders unwritten by the Iraqi regime. 

Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the former head of the Mukhabarat and also Saddam's half-brother, was dropped a full three feet too high, given his weight, to keep his head attached to his shoulders when the rope snapped taut. (Only blind luck kept Bandar's body in one piece.) There was ample information available to take the necessary precautions to ensure something like this didn't happen, and yet the Maliki government, in its swift scramble to the microphones to call this latest travesty a "mishap," mentioned the gruesome decapitation almost as an afterthought. Our bad. More calculated, however, must have been the dressing of the accused in bright orange jumpers reminiscent of the official garb of Guantanamo Bay inmates. (At least someone had the good sense to keep conical ghost outfit of the Abu Ghraib prisoners locked in the closet this time.) Also, cell phones and audio equipment were banished. The cell phones you can understand: let's avoid more YouTube and al Jazeera propagated snuff cinema. But the audio was a curious fatwah because if someone were actually to shout "Moqtada! Moqtada!" again, or otherwise verbally taunt the condemned, no one would ever know about it. Video of the hangings was exhibited only once to the press and will now be locked away in Baghdad, that is, until a U.N. investigation into these criminal proceedings tries to retrieve it -- or whatever remains of it.

Condi Rice puts it mildly:

“I would be the first to say that we were disappointed that there was