NEW YORK – The 400 rabbis who took Glenn Beck and Fox News to task in full-page ads last week did so under the name of a Jewish organization not generally known for policing the use of Holocaust imagery.
Jewish Funds for Justice, which paid for the same ad in two newspapers and whose name and logo appear at the top, is a social justice group that typically focuses on poverty issues. But it has found its highest profile issue in an ongoing spat with Beck over his frequent use of Nazi comparisons to disparage his mostly liberal political opponents.
Rabbis sign on to Jewish Funds for Justice battle with Beck, Fox News
Boosters of Birthright Israel are hoping that the Israeli government’s decision to more than double its investment in the popular free 10-day trips for young diaspora Jews will yield dramatic results.
But their hopes could be short-lived if Jewish philanthropists fail to ramp up their own contributions to the tune of some $222 million over the next three years.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week that his government would provide $100 million in financing to Birthright Israel from 2011 to 2013.
With a high-profile discussion scheduled on women’s leadership and two proposed rules aimed at marginalizing rabbis who deviate leftward on hot-button issues, an upcoming Orthodox rabbinical conference is expected to draw its largest crowd in years.
The Rabbinical Council of America’s three-day conference set to begin Sunday in Scarsdale, N.Y., comes just months after the near-ordination of a female rabbi by one of the RCA’s highest-profile members drew a sharp rebuke from the haredi Orthodox leadership of Agudath Israel of America.
“I think it will be one of the more exciting RCA conventions,” said Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, the council’s first vice president, seeking to put a positive spin on what also could prove to be a highly divisive gathering of mostly Modern Orthodox rabbis.
If Glenn Beck has his way, many American Jews would be abandoning their synagogues. If one Jewish group has its way, the popular right-wing talk-show host will be drowned out by a wave of haikus.
Beck — who has called the health care reform legislation “an assault on the republic” and the first African-American president a “racist” — is urging people to quit their churches if the term “social justice” appears anywhere on their Websites. “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Website,” Beck said on his nationally broadcast radio program March 2. “If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.”
NEW YORK – The last time the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance organized a conference at Columbia University, in 2007, Israeli activist Tova Hartman electrified a crowd of several hundred with her call to “stop kvetching” and start acting until the plight of “chained women,” or agunot, was resolved.
“Let this be the last JOFA conference where we need to ask if there’s a halachic heter [permissive legal ruling] for agunot,” Hartman said of women seeking divorces from husbands refusing them a religious writ of divorce, or get.
At universities across the globe, the annual springtime ritual known as Israel Apartheid Week is kicking off, and Jewish students and pro-Israel groups have been readying themselves to respond in force.
Unlike past years, when intense pro-Palestinian activity in the wake of Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon caught many Jewish students off guard, this year the pro-Israel community is ready with initiatives of its own.
The largest effort, Israel Peace Week, is helping to coordinate responses at 28 campuses and counting. StandWithUs, the Los-Angeles based pro-Israel group, is promoting a U.S. speaking tour by Israeli soldiers to counter claims that the Israel Defense Forces engaged in widespread misconduct during 2009 offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
U.S. Jewish leaders pressed Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on incitement last week and the need to keep Israel a Jewish state.
At a meeting Feb. 18 in Jenin between Fayyad and a visiting delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Alan Solow, the chairman of the Jewish umbrella group, said the actions of the Palestinian leadership set back the cause of peace.
“When the Palestinian leadership visits and honors families of those who have murdered innocent Israeli civilians, or when produce is destroyed rather than used only because it originates from the west bank, that sets back our confidence of peace,” Solow said, according to a news release from the Conference of Presidents. “The Israeli prime minister is clear about Israel’s needs to be recognized as a Jewish state. Yet, not only do the Palestinians refuse to acknowledge Israel’s Jewish nature, but clearly state, in Article 19 of the Fatah constitution, that there must be an armed struggle with the Zionist entity.”
In the wake of the arrests of 11 University of California, Irvine students for disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Shalom Elcott, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, Calif., threw down the gauntlet.
UC-Irvine has long been caught in the thicket of the Israel wars, its campus notorious in the pro-Israel community for the intensity and often confrontational quality of discourse on the Middle East. But while some Jewish groups have pushed the administration to condemn inflammatory speakers sponsored by Muslim students, the university previously had been willing only to issue generic condemnations of hate speech on campus.
Gidi Grunberg at 16 fell in love with a boy at his Orthodox high school near Tel Aviv.
Consumed by guilt, he transferred to a high school that was more strictly religious, hopeful that with more rigorous Torah study his attraction to men would pass.
A product of Orthodox institutions, Grunberg eventually came to accept his homosexuality during his years of mandatory service in the Israeli army. But in his private life, he found himself faced with a choice between his sexual identity and his religious community.
“I prefer to be true to myself, and to accept myself, than being part of the community and living in a lie,” Grunberg told JTA. “I lost everything. I lost my friends from the yeshiva. I lost the youth movement. There were a lot of things at stake.”
For more than three years Ronen Shoval and Erez Tadmor, classmates at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have been building Im Tirtzu into a nationwide student network with chapters at nine Israeli universities.
But it wasn’t until last week, when the group ran an advertisement in several Israeli papers claiming that the much-maligned Goldstone report on Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war last winter would have been impossible without the contributions of Israeli NGOs supported by the New Israel Fund, that the pair found themselves in the international spotlight.
Tadmor and Shoval describe themselves as bookish, entrepreneurial types who have identified a gap in the Israeli psyche.
