Apologist For Islamism?: Well doesn't he look like one? Writing at Pajamas Media, New York Post film critic Kyle Smith gives Jon Favreau's new Iron Man movie 3 out of 4 stars. Which is a pretty generous rating, considering that Smith has discovered that Iron Man and Iron Man --- both the film and the character --- are rooting for our defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else. That's right ladies and gentlemen, the tentacles of the Islamofascist octopus stretch farther than you thought; indeed, they've poisoned the #1 grossing movie in America. Fortunately Smith was able to recognize the threat and sound the alarum --- otherwise Ali Jon al Favreau bin Omar might have succeeded in corroding the will of armchair amateur warriors that's so crucial to maintaining neoconservatives' paranoid cocoon our struggle against Islamic radicalism.

And how did Smith manage this startling deduction? Iron Man is "another America-as-root-of-all-evil message" because at some point along the way, Robert Downey, Jr./Tony Stark/Iron Man, a weapons manufacturer, decides to get out of the biz when he "realizes his products can't be kept out of evil hands." And not to give anything away, but the comic book Iron Man is basically an ally of the US government, and the film in no way makes any radical revision of the character.

That's. It.

Iron Man doesn't even weakly imply that the terrorists are anything but bad guys. It doesn't imply that Americans are anything but good guys. It doesn't imply that US foreign or military policy is in any way objectionable or even flawed; it doesn't imply that US private citizens are involved in objectionable enterprises. It merely suggests that if terrorists were to get hold of weapons that happen to be made by an American, they would do bad things with them.

So apparently, unless you agree that anything made in the USA is so pure, holy, and righteous that it'll repel Islamofascists like garlic on vampires, or perhaps melt them like Nazis in front of the Ark of the Covenant, then you, my friend, lack moral clarity. Don't despair though: There's no shortage of people who have the moral clarity to see that waterboarding isn't torture, and who will be more than happy to set you right.

Observing the wreckage of Smith's review, Julian Sanchez writes: "What’s intolerable is any hint of ambiguity, any hint of doubt. This is the fragile insistence of a movement that has lost its confidence."

But has the mishmash of neoconservatism, psychopathological vicarious living through soldiers in the field, and apolitical belligerent nationalism that constitute Bush Republicanism ever tolerated a hint of ambiguity or doubt? I distinctly remember the roll call of the Ships of the Decent in 2002, embarking on their Iliadic journey to Baghdad by sacrificing former comrades who voiced doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise to appease Artemis Ahmad Chalabi. (I remember because I was part of that cadre.) And I remember the Glorious Summer of War in 2003, when it was pretty much the same story, except with more smugness and premature triumphalism.

Suppose, at any time from the moment the dust of the towers settled, until... --- what time is it now? --- you suggested that invading sovereign states under conditions of dubious international legitimacy, occupying them in a manner indistinguishable from what someone seeking to stoke a nationalist uprising would have done, and establishing a regime of torture in lieu of a functioning judicial system, weren't the awesomest and decentest ideas ever. In that case, you can be sure some self-righteous scrivener would be only too happy to accuse you of cheering for our defeat.

On the other hand, there is plenty of independent evidence for Julian's claim that the war party has lost its confidence, cf. their apparent determination to run the principal exponent of their ideology for president not on any platform, not for any positive program, not against any presidential candidate, but against a few irrelevant petrified relics of the 60s radical left.

The corner of Church and State: Neither are one-way streetsSunday night, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed up at Messiah College’s Compassion Forum to talk about faith in political life. Good for them. Just wish it had been Hebrew College.

As a persecuted, outnumbered, and very intelligent people of faith, we Jews have been staunch supporters of the separation of church and state. After all, when you make up just over 2% of the population of a country, you don’t want presidential politics to turn into a “most popular faith” contest. We’d be sitting on the sidelines with the Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and wild Wicca folks, watching the Christian evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics duke it out for religion numero uno.

As a result, Jews have lived split lives, following a kind of self-made kashrut in which politics and faith may never mix. Jews have become well-known for our left-wing political activism, from the labor movement of the 1920 and 30s to the hippie/peace movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the pro-peace and anti-globalization movements today. Yet, with just a few exceptions, the political Jews have been secular Jews, using tikkun olam as a substitute for religion instead of as an expression of it.

The result has been a damaging split within the Jewish community. On the one side, the progressive, pink, secular Jews; on the other side, the insular, black-hatted, religious Jews. Religion and politics grew so far apart that many of us felt we had to be closeted to cross the divide—Orthodox Jews had to pretend to being apolitical; progressive Jews had to pretend to be secular.

Both had to disregard a difficult little fact—namely, that Jewish law is all about mixing politics and faith. Torah teaches us to feed the poor and house the homeless, care for the sick and instruct our children, steward the earth and, in all cases and everywhere, protest wrongs. We even have cool terms for these obligations: tzedakah, give charity; bikkur cholim, care for the sick; pikuakh nefesh, save human life; ba’al tashchit, do not waste the earth’s resources; tikkun ha’olam, repair the world.

These obligations come to us as essential elements of our faith tradition. They are not simply examples of good ethical practices, nor are they limited to caring for our immediate family, community or faith group. As Ruth Messinger and Aaron Dorfman remind us in Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, the Talmud tells us that we have a broader universe of obligation than just caring for our own:

Our Rabbis taught: We sustain the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor, visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick, and bury the non-Jewish dead with the Jewish dead, for the sake of peace. [Gittin 61a; and see Rambam’s gloss, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, 10:12] In the modern world, political action is the most effective way to fulfill these ethical obligations. Social Security and Medicare, a national health care plan (may it be so) and public schooling, global aid and a military that can intervene to right wrongs—these are all part of our political system. In short, Torah itself tells us that politics and religion cannot be separated.

How do we reconcile a faith tradition that tells us to mix politics and religion with a democratic and pragmatic belief that politics and religion must be kept separate? Barack Obama framed the problem, and offered a solution, when he suggested that asking whether we can have politics and religion together is a false question. The real question is to ask, how do they belong together. And for that, Obama had an intriguing answer:

All of us come to the public square with our values and ideals and our ethics—what we believe. And people of religious faith have the same right to come to that public square with the values and ideals that are rooted in their faith, and they have the right to describe them in religious terms….

There is a fundamental difference between talking about values, about the why behind our ideas and actions, and talking about programs and positions, the what of political life. For example, a Catholic should rightly be able to talk about why even the potentiality of life is sacred—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should be against abortion. As Jews, we should be able to talk about the holiness inherent in our choices about what we eat—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should take up kashrut.

Indeed, when we understand that faith gives us political values, we will find ourselves back in that comfort zone for Jews—flourishing debate. Torah tells us that we must intervene to right wrongs—but what does that mean, precisely? For example, does the value of pikuakh nefesh, protecting a life, mean we must protest the Iraq war and withdraw our forces (the good left answer) or (as John McCain insists) bring it to the best possible conclusion, however long that takes? Does caring for the sick mean a national health care plan or health care tax credits? Values don’t necessarily lead to particular positions.

It’s time for Jews to stop worrying so much about dividing faith from politics. We should be spending our energy getting into the debate, offering up our own ideas about how Jewish values would lead to a better politics.

No, we swear, he's a really good actor: Phillippe and crew in 'Stop-Loss'We missed former Jewcy editor Michael Weiss's culture posts, and not just because we all enjoy the drinking game that accompanies them. (One shot whenever Weiss mentions Kingsley Amis or calls someone a "Trotskyite," chug if he talks about his dog.) So we brought him back as our movie reviewer. Below, his look at Stop-Loss.

Ryan Phillippe’s acting ability has fallen, according to popular judgment, somewhere between Hayden Christensen's in Star Wars and Hayden Christensen's in Jumper. An unfair verdict, I would submit, since Phillippe has been more burdened by poor role choices, almost all of which have resulted from his career-making one as Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions. This was the teen-cast remake of Les Liasons Dangereuse, set on the Upper East Side, and it was both better than the book and better than all cinematic adaptations prior or since. Will someone please smelt an Oscar for Best Age-Defining Plot Motive? Phillippe may not be the Olivier of the guilty pleasure, but who else can say he spent the fin de siecle destroying Reese Witherspoon’s heart in order sodomize Sarah Michelle Gellar (“You can put it anywhere”)?

Of course, cruelty and sadism have metamorphosed since the late 90’s from something private and diaristic to something intensely public and world-historical. There have not been many good, watchable films dealing with our belligerent troubles overseas, and re-reading the foregoing paragraph, it seems odd that Phillippe should star in the first.

Stop-Loss tells the story of a squad of Texas natives, led by Sgt. Brandon King (Phillippe), who have suffered a long tour of duty in Iraq. At the film’s start, we see them carousing in their barracks, recording digital footage of combat missions, and singing Toby Keith’s 9/11 payback anthem in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. After a devastating urban gun battle with insurgents kills one of their beloved comrades and badly maims another, this band of brothers is sent home, chastened but relieved. The trip is meant to be leave for some, the end of a long, bloody affair for others, including Brandon. Yet each soldier finds that adjusting to civilian life is nearly impossible after the hell he has lived and breathed for five years, both in Iraq and, we are told, Afghanistan before it.

Third rock from the Sunni: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, third from leftBrandon’s best friend Steve gets so drunk on his first night home that he digs a trench in his backyard, thinking he’s still deployed – but not before beating his fianée Michele (the pretty but vapid Abbie Cornish). Another friend, Tommy (played by the excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt, now many accomplished rocks from the sun), takes alcoholism to a pathological level, and loses his wife and his epaulettes in due course. But it is Brandon, the natural and official leader of the group, who is buffeted most severely by a post-war reality because, as he soon discovers, there’s nothing “post” about it. He is the victim of the “stop-loss” policy in the Army, whereby his expired military contract is renewed at the whim of the president, here never mentioned by name.

“Not afraid, pissed off” is how Brandon voices his decision to go AWOL and hit the road with Michele, who only poses the possibility of something other than a forced fugitive partnership. The rest of the film plays out like an Uneasy Rider of post-traumatic stress, balanced virtues of patriotism and anger, honor and disloyalty, and a persistent but never quite overweening political critique. (All war movies are antiwar movies.) One horrible scene features the all-too-winsome soldier who barely escaped the Tikrit melee alive: His face reduced to sirloin, his eyes blinded by shrapnel, and his arm and leg amputated, he is like an Otto Dix painting come to life. For the five minutes or so he is on screen, any thought of “winning hearts and minds” or “democracy promotion” seems septic and inhumane.

It helps that Stop-Loss, which is distributed by MTV Films, has been directed and co-written by Kimberly Peirce, whose first and last film was Boys Don’t Cry. Hilary Swank’s gender-bent protagonist had to navigate the violent discontents of thwarted masculinity and confused identity. In a way, both themes are subtly teased out here, too: The ties of martial solidarity are depicted as alternatively strong and fragile, and each man represents two irreconcilable roles – the down-home American twentysomething and the exported killing machine. Steve, who might otherwise have been reduced to a meathead or golem, is permitted a depth of character he almost doesn’t deserve. Even the state of Texas manages to evade facile caricaturing as place not to be messed with. If anything, it is her veteran sons on whom that dubious privilege must fall.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer was elected overwhelmingly in 2006 on his promise to finally bring transparency and efficiency to New York, a promise brokered on his glamorous Wall Street-busting successes as state attorney general. Well, it didn't take long for his administration to plow right over public expectations.

First came the disclosure last year that members of his staff had been spying on Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, and using tax-payer dollars to do so. (More distressing to New Yorkers with a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Bruno is that they didn't turn up anything good on him.) Spitzer took a fall, then rebounded, owing, I suspect, to his lantern-jawed, comic book hero visage which you just want to believe in, damn it. Now comes word that he was involved in a prostitution ring. (Batman never paid for chicks.) His career in politics is effectively over today.

The New York Times just posted this story to its website and Drudge and Fox News have gone all woo-woo in their inimitable ways:

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Which of course doesn't prove anything except that Spitzer was likely getting fucked by someone who isn't his wife for $5,500. That's how much the Emperors Club charges for its finest ladies per hour, and everything the Spitz would have us believe about him suggests he's no compromising, part-time lover.

NBC is also reporting that cell phone records are the damning evidence that makes this a no-spin situation.

The Emperors Club website is down now. If it stays that way permanently, a balanced budget and the end to the Rockefeller drug laws can't be far behind.

UPDATE: Spitzer is apparently listed as "Client No. 9" in the prosecutor's brief against the Emperors Club. I just heard on CNN that the call-girl frequented by him said one of their sessions went "very well." So the day hasn't been all bad for the governor, after all.

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.

AppeasniksMichael O'Hanlon, "Obama as Diplomat in Chief," The Wall Street Journal

O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and famous booster of the surge, was last heard from advocating the seizure and transportation of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal to New Mexico, through the power of wishful thinking. Today he takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to criticize Barack Obama's pledge to engage in diplomacy with unsavory regimes. He does so despite acknowledging that "Mr. Obama is not wrong about the utility of negotiations with unsavory regimes. They are often useful, and they need not amount to appeasement or even a false raising of hopes."

O'Hanlon fears that by "elevat[ing]" presidential diplomacy "to a doctrine," a President Obama would risk rewarding autocrats and thugs with international credibility. But of course, if American policy were to speak to any country that wanted to speak with us, getting to speak with US diplomats wouldn't be any sort of distinction. On the other hand, remaining sclerotically tied to a conception of foreign policy that cannot distinguish between negotiations and concessions does, in fact, make diplomacy needlessly difficult.

Grrrr: Scared yet?Max Boot, "Go With the Tough Guy," Los Angeles Times

John McCain's foreign policy advisor advises us to vote for John McCain because he'll frighten Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama won't:

It is hard to see how Bush could reverse this decline in America's "fear factor" during the remaining year of his presidency. That will be the job of the next president. And who would be the most up to the task?

To answer that question, ask yourself which presidential candidate an Ahmadinejad, Assad or Kim would fear the most. I submit it is not Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or Mike Huckabee. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, the leading candidate to scare the snot out of our enemies is a certain former aviator who has been noted for his pugnacity and his unwavering support of the American war effort in Iraq.

This kind of thing appeared pretty frequently in 2004, with Bush taking the place of McCain and Kerry taking the place of all the others. And indeed, with just a little find-and-replace action, you'd have a perfectly serviceable College Republicans flier in support of George W. Bush's re-election.

Which is sort of the point. While it's conceivable that the foreign policy failures of any president, no matter how belligerent, stem from being not belligerent enough, belligerence is bound to run up against diminishing marginal utility eventually. Since, for example, it's not feasible to invade North Korea, exactly how is an empty threat from McCain going to inspire fear in Kim Jong-Il? And if it isn't, maybe it's time to consider whether there are other salient objectives in foreign policy besides making empty threats.

Swing Voter:: "What's the opposite of progress? Congress! Ha! Get it?"Douglas Schoen, "The Disaffected Voters Who'll Decide 2008," Washington Post

One of our most depressing quadrennial rituals, after the presidential election itself, is the fabrication discovery of some moderate swing-demographic that's going to decide the election. Naturally, the pollster or consultant who drunkenly pummels statistics into submission until they tell him what he wants to hear makes this discovery will cash out handsomely is a disinterested footsoldier in the cause of science.

Disinterested pollster Douglas Schoen has big news. Soccer moms, NASCAR dads, security moms, baseball cousins, bipolar aunts, insecurity in-laws, it's time to make way for the RAMs:

I call them "restless and anxious moderates," or RAMs. Most come from the third of the electorate that identifies itself as independent, but some Democrats and Republicans have also joined this new bloc. These voters tend to be practical, non-ideological and unabashedly results-oriented -- people such as Gary Butler, 60, who lives in Show Low, Ariz. Both parties, he says, "are way too far apart, and nobody is looking out for the good of the people."

"Address my life and the problems I face in my terms," another RAM told me. "Cut political rhetoric, cut political fighting, cut the game-playing, stop the five-point programs; just address my issues in a real-world, straightforward way."

"Address my life and the problems I face?" "Cut political rhetoric?" "Cut political fighting?" Slow down there, kimosabe. What dangerous, new, radical kind of talk is that? I'll bet it barely predates the invention of hackneyed political writing.

In all seriousness, congratulations to Douglas Schoen for discovering that people want problems solved.

On Saturday, Mike Huckabee told a cheering crowd that he’d majored in miracles, not math. With all the religious rhetoric being thrown around this election season, we voters need a guide to understanding the volatile relationship between religion and politics in America. Fortunately for us, Dr. Jacques Berlinerblau, Associate Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown, has written the informative and often humorous Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics. I spoke with him about church, state, and of course, the Jews.

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According to a high ranking official in Obama's campaign, JEWCY was informed this weekend that plans have been discussed for a joint Gore/Edwards endorsement of Barack Obama.

Why hasn't it already happened?

According to the official, the endorsement's value for Super Tuesday would be relatively minor given that it would only have 24 hours to circulate.

It would seem that the Obama campaign has determined that a Gore/Edwards endorsement would be more effective coming after what most expect to be a narrow Clinton win on Tuesday, helping the presidential hopeful rebound and regain some momentum going into the weekend's carousel of political talk shows.

(While Tamar's at Jewish learning conference Limmud NY, she's bringing us regular updates.)

Robert Sugarman, who chairs the Religious Freedom Task Force of the Anti-Defamation League, gave a session discussing how religion is taking a bigger and bigger role in elections and on the Supreme Court. This isn’t news to most of us, and I’m getting to the point where I nod and sigh when I hear another story about how Huckabee told everyone how much he loves Jesus. But Sugarman pointed out that religion is becoming so central to political campaigns and personas that candidates have to make statements saying that they’re all for religious freedom for all faiths. No one seems to be standing up for the rights of those who don’t believe in God, though. Sugarman brought examples of both Romney and Huckabee saying things that seemed to in some way condemn atheists.
God (any God): is the only option

It took a few hours for this to sink in, but when I really thought about it, it was terrifying. Of course it’s imperative to me that I always be allowed to keep Shabbat and observe various mitzvoth, but I think my Jewish atheist friends deserve to have their rights protected, too. If they want to go to a mall on Saturday mornings, or eat ham all day long, even if I’m not crazy about it, they need to always have the right to do that.

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Show some pride for your tribe: and your team

Possibly seeking to escape the performance-enhancing drugs controversy, New York Mets General Manager Omar Minaya recently traveled to the Holy Land. (He envisions making baseball a global sport that can unite Israeli and Palestinian youths.) While there, Minaya hung out with Olmert, Peres, and other Israeli politicians, but left before President Bush arrived to meet with the prime minister.

However, Minaya informed and instructed Olmert: “[Bush] doesn’t call me Omar. He calls me O. Tell him you talked about baseball with O and he’ll know what you’re talking about.”

Barack Obama: He has 99 problems, bitch ain't one.On the Left: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have called a ceasefire over the race issue. Hillary had previously said that Martin Luther King, Jr. wouldn't have accomplished his goals without President Lyndon Johnson, who was (get this!) white. Hillary's staffers accused Obama's campaign of distorting her remarks. Former President Bill Clinton described Obama's supposed superior judgment on Iraq as a "fairy tale," and many African-Americans felt that Clinton was referring to the notion of a black president -- which isn't crazy considering that a Clinton aide described Obama as voters' "imaginary hip black friend." Meanwhile, Obama entered a rally accompanied by the lyrics: "I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one." The political guru Dick Morris, occasional toe-suckler (seriously, how the fuck does this guy have a career?), argues that John Edwards should end his candidacy like Bill Richardson, so that he might boost Obama's chances of winning the nomination. Another hopeless candidate, Dennis Kucinich, won his lawsuit to appear in tonight's debate. (Kucinich is fun, but he can't rock a mic like Mike Gravel.)

This week's winner: Clinton -- but she's playing dirty.

On the Right: Rudy Giuliani is in T-R-O-U-B-L-E. The former New York mayor is unable to stay ahead of John McCain in the polls and can't afford to pay his own staffers. Ron Paul is dead. Mitt Romney, who has money to spare (you sure save a lot of cash when you never purchase booze or pornography), is investing heavily in TV advertisements to regain his status as front runner. (A Mormon president? Isn't that kind of a fairy tale?) Mike Huckabee pandered to pro-lifers in South Carolina by visiting a "pregnancy counseling center." He also proclaimed that wives should "submit" to their husbands, and wouldn't answer whether he believes that only Christians go to heaven. But he has God's digits, so he should know.

This week's winner: McCain -- but his comeback is very fragile, and he looks awful.

Riddle me this: What do you think would happen if the Center for American Women in Politics attempted to take out an ad in Ms. magazine featuring three female senators? Say they chose photos of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, along with the text: "This is America." Do you think that the magazine's executive editor, Kathy Spillar, would reject the ad on the basis of editorial "favoritism" because two of the three women belong to the same political party? I suppose it's possible, although it is hard to imagine.

Not so hard to imagine is the parallel reality that's unfolding as I type: Ms. magazine has rejected this ad, for that stated reason:

Image from LGF. 

A small correction* to Dan's post: It looks like McCain edged out the dignified pair of jowls that are Fred Thompson for a gentleman's third place (with 78% reporting as of this writing). To give this some perspective, that's exactly where George H.W. Bush placed in 1988, right behind Pat Robertson (second) and Bob Dole (first). To give it further perspective, we need only define the driving force behind a number of Republican caucus-goers:

About a third of Republicans interviewed before they cast their votes cited illegal immigration as the most important issue facing the country, followed by the economy and terrorism.

There's something about GOP-centric triptychs in Iowa that tend to get things exactly backwards, isn't there? I can already envision Mike Huckabee's SlimFast spots: "I may have lost the nomination, but that's nothing compared to the weight I lost on these shakes."

As for the Democrats, the big winner is actually John Edwards, who managed to eclipse Hillary by a small but telling margin (716 votes to 704 votes). I don't think the better-coiffed Huey Long has got much of a chance moving forward, though. In national politics, populism is good for demonstrating how it generates an unexpected momentum before extinguishing itself.

As for Obama, his win doesn't surprise, given the polls, but it's a hurdle he had to surmount in order to stay in the game -- not to necessarily win it. (Contrast to other cases: Bill didn't snag the Iowa caucus in '92. Native Senator Tom Harkin did. And do you remember anything about him, even that last fact?) Moreover, as even conservatives have begun to appreciate, Obama's style comes off as being "above politics" rather than left-wing or right-wing. In rhetoric, he shrewdly employs the dialectic without seeming smarmy about it. It goes like this: "Yes, illegal immigrants are a major problem, and the burden falls mainly on employers who hire them -- and on George Bush, who has done nothing to enforce the law. But, we can't very well kick every illegal out of the country. It's not practical and it's cruel. So let's enforce the current laws and create incentives for naturalization." Not groundbreaking, but nor is it triangulation because Obama actually tells you what he thinks; he just wants to show you how he got there, and he doesn't take opposing opinions for granted. And in this paraphrased example, he was talking to a seven year-old.

I pulled that example from Stephen Hayes's fulsome profile of Obama in the Weekly Standard, which seemed to argue that his more affable personality is a good vote-splitter, particularly in the idiosyncratic states:

I spoke to a lawyer from Des Moines whose first choice is Dennis Kucinich. (We agreed that I would not use his name because, well, would you want your name used if you supported Dennis Kucinich?) Since Kucinich is unlikely to be viable, the lawyer's second choice will be particularly important. Right now it's among Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama. The lawyer told me that he has problems with each of them. Clinton is too opportunistic, too corporate, too Washington. Edwards is too insincere. Obama is too inexperienced. Still, of the three, he prefers Obama.

And after the Ron Paul Revolution becomes an Alamo, how many disgruntled anti-partisans like our Des Moines attorney will choose to stick with the maverick who also was too prematurely counted out?

Rotten luck on Hillary, either way.

* Dan was right in the long run, McCain came in fourth.

Israeli Security Fence: Ensuring security or ensuring separation?The plastic surgeon who specializes in breast implants had issues with my play. He intimidated the director of the theatre hosting the reading into canceling! In an email he wrote, “The last thing we want to do is offend the local Jewish community by showing some progressive lefty self-hating Jewish propaganda.” Only after 24 hours of intense lobbying by the artistic director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, who has nurtured the play and was producing the reading, and a letter from me to the artistic director and board of the theatre did reason prevail. The reading was back on.

Art: 1, Thought Police: 0.

In e-mails the surgeon disparaged me, the author and professor who would lead the post-show discussion, and the artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Program. We were either “self-hating Jews,” “anti-Semites,” or just plain ‘ole “ignorant.” The plastic surgeon hadn’t even read or seen the play.

But he did come to the reading.

What were his issues once he saw the play? That while I presented both literary and visual images of the controversial separation barrier that divides the West Bank from Israel, I did not present gruesome images of children killed or injured by suicide bombers that the barrier is there to prevent. During the Q&A, he told me and the rest of the audience in the crowded theatre that, as a plastic surgeon, he’s worked on such victims in Israel and he offered to provide me with x-ray images of ball-bearings, screws and nails embedded inside the skulls of children, to add to the projected images in the play.

I thanked him for his offer. And we heard from a number of other audience members who were not missing such imagery.

Sad to say, while he came to the reading—and I do give him credit for that—the surgeon didn’t hear my play. He didn’t hear the very personal story of an American Jew who loves Israel deeply and fears for her survival. He didn’t hear the story of internal conflict that so many of us share as we try to untangle the competing interests of our allegiance to our tribe and our commitment to social justice. I do respect and honor his efforts to help Israeli victims of terror attacks. But there is no gruesome imagery in the play. None. To present such imagery would be to use violence as pornography. A few years ago I spent a day with a sweet and broken-hearted father of a ten year-old boy who was murdered in a bus bombing in Haifa. He would be as outraged that an x-ray of his son’s remains would be used for someone’s political agenda as he was outraged that Israeli politicians have used funerals of suicide bombing victims to make speeches to bolster support.

That’s the theatre of politics, not political theatre.

For more information on my play, “A Jerusalem Between Us” go to: http://aarondavidman.wordpress.com

Congressman Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants to know why the media sucks at teaching us about "the greatest problems facing our country." Clip at bottom (Hat tip Kvetcher).

Bernie says “the function of the media is to educate you to live in a democracy.” Really? If the media ought to serve a single function rather than lots of functions determined by lots of people with different goals, I imagine the state would have to take over, perhaps allowing Secretary of Mass Media Sanders to provide a list of appropriate topics along with guidelines about how the populace might be educated about them.

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Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held positions with which most Jewcers would not agree. Our would-be comrade commissars proclaim that O'Neill must be exiled from Jewcy.

Michael Kinsley says that the digital age is a propitious time to be a cranky libertarian, but it's also springtime for leftist factionalism. On the web, every clique can sanctify its own luminoso blogrollo, forever excommunicating deviationists for doctrinal unorthodoxies, past affiliations, refusals to pronounce some shibboleth of our corner of the internet.

Not here. Take the stultifying provincialism of left politics, amplify it with the Circle Jerk culture of the blogosphere, and you have something of a Jewcy nightmare: a hothouse of unchallenged ideology and lazy self-congratulation that looks like everything Jewcy was born to combat. Neither the Jewish community nor the left need help making themselves sclerotic, conformist, or irrelevant. The promise of the internet, for us, is its capacity to smash those tendencies, rather than reinforce them.

This isn't just about this specific issue: about Brendan O'Neill, the RCP, Living Marxist, or the Oxford Union debate. It's about what breadth of views can be accommodated in Jewcy, and who gets to contribute. We agree that there are borders to the pale, and some people are beyond those borders. But we're also aware of all the barriers that stand in the way of productive communication between people with well-entrenched and opposing positions: a reluctance or flat-out unwillingness to process evidence contradictory to one’s own point of view, an application of nearly impossible standards of evidence for opposing points but a knee-jerk acceptance of supporting points, a presumption of one's own intellectual bravery and integrity and an assumption that the opposition is weak or foolish or venal or lazy, et cetera. These, too, are things we want to overcome, rather than reinforce.

So defining Jewcy's boundaries will be an ongoing process. We'll discuss them. But we won't define them by pronouncing takfir on anyone who joined an organization with which Jewcy itself would not wish to partner.

Meanwhile, Kvetcher, nee David Kelsey, has taken Jewcy to task for our handling of the Oxford Union kerfuffle.

Jewcy chose a symbol of November 9th Society to represent the debate, even though the November 9th Society is a hardline neo-Nazi party that is quite critical of the British National Party for being mere "conservatives on steroids." That Jewcy chose their logo (replete with swastika, of course) to represent Nick Griffin is as risible as it is shrill.

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The mission of the Other Israel Film Festival is to expose the lives of Muslims that live in Israel. I am behind the mission of the festival. I am interested in the Muslim perspective in Israel and I am interested in the art that Muslims are generating. Do they feel like second-class citizens, how do Muslim women view themselves, and what is the Other Israel?

This is the first year of the festival, and I believe that it was an inspiring one. I have been to my share of festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, and I've thrown my own. There were technical problems with the festival, like the films being re-sized as we watched them, but I understood these problems as a festival's growing pains. The Other Israel Film Festival got a group of films and filmmakers together that got the other side seen and heard, and I commend them for that.

Here are some highlights of the festival.

The Syrian Bride

Nervous on your wedding day?Every bride is nervous on her wedding day. She might trip on her dress or Aunt Ethel might get wasted at the reception. A million things might go wrong, but eventually, her nervousness recedes, she kisses the groom, and the two begin a married life.

Mona is nervous on her wedding day for different reasons. As a Palestinian, once she marries her Syrian fiancé, she can never return to Israel or see her family again—the Israeli government has also prohibited her father from attending her wedding. So Mona must turn her back on her family in order to get married. This is more than most brides have to deal with on their wedding day.

The Syrian Bride exposes the difficulties of not being a citizen of your homeland. My biggest critique of the film is that it could have gone further, and investigated what it means to live with resignation— to know that you are not in control, do not have basic privileges, and are denied happiness because of your lack of identity. The Syrian Bride alludes to these themes, but the lack of resolution leaves loose ends where solid conclusions are necessary.

Pickles

Women starting a feminist revolution through...Pickles?According to convention, Muslim widows are dead to the world. They cannot remarry or work outside of the home, or do anything other than raise their children and mourn their husband's death. They must live the rest of their days with their husband's family as well. The family watches over the widow and ensures that she does not disrespect her husband's memory.

These are the makings of a barren, miserable, and lonely life.

However, this is not the case for a group of eight Muslim widows. They start a pickling factory to earn money for their families, and in so doing, they give meaning to their lives. They have a place to go to, a job to do, and soon, a social network forms. However, none of the women is prepared for the difficulties that await them.

This is a moving documentary about the limitations of faith and culture, and the inherent disadvantages of living in a chauvinistic society. Pickles asks: must we accept these limitations? It is an articulate and intimate portrait of Muslim life.

Roads

The road from poverty.Amores Perros begins with two young men in a speeding car, escaping a car full of thugs, as a dog bleeds to death in the backseat. Roads begins with two young boys in a speeding car, escaping a car full of thugs, as a sheep bleeds to death in the backseat. Coincidence?

Roads is about a young Arab boy working for a heartless drug-dealer. One day, he decides to take the money and run. Then, he gets his best friend and a Jewish drug-addict involved. Will he escape his life of poverty or get stopped along the way?

Perhaps if Roads were not a rip-off of Amores Perros, I could appreciate it. Then again, the terrible plot-development, sloppy editing, and lazy camera work were no picnic to sit through. As a filmmaker, I've learned that a great idea does not make a great film; good storytelling, strong acting, and careful attention to detail make a great film. It takes vision and a high level of technical skill to pull one off—and you must make your stories your own. Roads lacks the originality that makes a film worth watching.

For the past several months, the Jews of Turkey have been in the international spotlight. As Congress has debated the Armenian Genocide resolution, high-ranking Turkish officials have warned that Turkish Jews will be endangered if the resolution passes. And Jewish-American organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have repeatedly cited the predicament of Turkish Jews as reason to support Turkey's campaign of genocide denial.

In an effort to better understand the plight of Turkish Jewry, I interviewed several prominent scholars who have studied the community.

Ottoman Jews: Safety Through Loyalty

For 500 years, Jews have lived as a loyal minority in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire and the present-day Turkish republic. According to Turkish-Jewish scholar Rifat Bali, who has published several books on the history of Turkey's Jews, their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire allowed Turkish Jews to escape the tragic fate of the Empire's Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians.

"Turkish Jews were not involved in any sort of ethnic nationalism," says Bali. "The Zionist movement did not take root in Istanbul because the community leadership had witnessed the tragic fate of the Ottoman Armenians. [They] understood that the Ottoman leadership would perceive Zionism as a separatist nationalist movement and that this would have dire consequences. They therefore took an ‘anti-Zionist' position."

Like today's Turkish Jewish community, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire were utilized as international advocates for Turkish political goals. "Haim Nahum, the last Ottoman Chief Rabbi, was an ‘anti-Zionist' and a supporter of the Turkish Nationalist movement," says Bali. "He was sent by Mustafa Kemal to the USA and Europe for lobbying on behalf of the Kemalists."

Turkish Jews in the 20^th century: Loyal Scapegoats

Turkish political groups that fight bitterly on other issues find common ground in blaming Turkish Jews for the country's ills. "Turkey's Jews have been scapegoated by the Islamist movement which started to grow in 1946," say Bali. "In 1969, the National Order Party began propagating its Islamist National View ideology, which accused Jews and Zionism of being behind all the troubles of Turkey." And in the ‘70s, Turkey's Jews were hostage to the clash between Turkey's ultra-leftists and ultra-rightists.

Turkish Jews Today

Adopting Muslim Names to Escape Attention

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Among the 500 entries for the Blake Prize for Religious Art in Australia are a painting depicting Osama bin Laden as Jesus Christ and a statue of the Virgin Mary covered in a blue burqa familiar to Afghani women that lived under the Taliban. The outrage and the debate—if you can call it that—is predictably stale, because the anti- side if reflexively offended but also because the art itself isn’t good. I don’t know how some artists get away with claiming provocativeness to be the supreme goal of art, especially since—by these standards, at least—anyone out of ideas and marginally shameless can be provocative. If you’re going to get people talking, you should be able to answer them. Otherwise, stun their sleeping asses into woken silence. Also: how is this “religious art”?

Damien Hirst, the obscenely rich and famous British artist, is more complicated. His diamond-encrusted platinum skull was sold today for US $ 10 million. If you’ve ever seen Hirst speak, or even read what he’s said, it’s clear that he’s a performance artist, that the man’s responses to the (eagerly awaited) criticisms of his art are as much a part of the art, more so, even, than the inanimate spectacles themselves. The art never stops, and Hirst is clearly calculating, if not always consciously. The fact that richer he gets the better an artist he becomes is, as far as I can tell, a new one for history. Worse, weirder, is that if you try to protest, you add to it. 

Hi. I'm Josh. I'm been shvitzing all summer, though this week it's official. Since I am a nice Jewish kid from Manhattan it is going to take a concerted effort for me not to constantly link to the New York Times. In that spirit, I had planned to start safe and make a day out of Time, where Mother Teresa's dark night is given the cover treatment and Rudy Giuliani is sufficiently panned. I was all set to reiterate the Giuliani panning, maybe even explore Hitchens' hypocrisy re: Teresa's hypocrisy, when, bam!, my NYT homepage refreshed to reveal the remarkable: the Gonzales resignation.  When I watched Gonzales testify on television re: the attorney firings he looked like a murderer protected by double jeopardy. But then Rove, and now this. Both Rove and Gonzales have been with Bush since his reign in Texas. I'm sure Bush'll stick with the "unfair treatment" line for Gonzales. 

Anyhow, I'm already really late to the party in blog years, and so now that the palpable (and justified) glee is subsiding, I think it's fair to ask, who's next? There's nowhere to go but up from here, and that means Cheney. If that seems absolutely unlikely, so did this. Then, also, there's this important question: Is the world watching? And what do they think? I ask because several minutes after the NYT broke the news, I got a text message from a friend from Germany which read: "Come to Berlin. Ur ship is sinking, homey." Forgetting that the German called me homey, it was both surprising and worrisome to me that rather than see this as the rightful purging of all that has ailed our great country for the past seven odd years, my friend triumphantly indulged in schadenfreude at the further disintegration of the Bush administration. How are the Democratic candidates going to respond to this? And how are Liberals in general--the blogosphere especially--going to translate their celebration into a serious moving-forward?

Further reading: Besides the cover story which asks "What took you so long?" over at Slate, John Dickerson has a short and interesting piece laying out the psychology of the Bush administration. He claims, among other things, that "the more radioactive his aides become, the more Bush embraces them." Maybe Bush has a death wish. Has he ever been in therapy?