J.J. Goldberg writes: As part of its promotion of Orthodox observance, Chabad Hasidism touts a traditional version of Jewish family values, including rules on modest dress for women, “impurity” during menstruation and opposition to homosexuality.
Less well known is Chabad’s political role in Israel, where many of its rabbis and leaders are prominent in far-right, pro-settlement and anti-compromise activism. Several top Israeli Chabad leaders have become leading right-wing activists. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburgh, a senior Chabad educator and philosopher, has written in praise of the late Baruch Goldstein, who committed the 1994 Hebron massacre. Ginzburgh also mentored Yitzhak Shapira, co-author of the 2009 book “The King’s Torah,” which justified killing Palestinian babies because they might grow up to be terrorists. Another Chabad leader, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpo, raised money for the families of Jewish terrorists and has urged the death penalty — by a court, not vigilantes — for dovish Israeli leaders Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni.
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The real meaning of Tikkun Olam (repair of the world) is like almost everything in liberal Judaism — a flexible instrument capable of almost infinite twisting.
The current connotation can be traced back to the beginning of the post-War period. Brandeis University professor Jonathan Krasner, in his 2014 article “The Place of Tikkun Olam in American Jewish Life,” identifies three distinct groups that transformed tikkun olam over the past 75 years. The first were theologians who, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, looked for ways to re-imagine the covenantal relationship between humans and God. They included Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, and various Reform and Conservative rabbis, including Rabbi Leo Baeck and Rabbi Harold Schulweis. Under tikkun olam, as used by these Jewish leaders, “the Jews were not merely partners with God but ‘senior partners in action,’ entirely responsible for the execution of the covenant.”
The second group were educators — including Shlomo Bardin, founder of the Brandeis Camp, and Rabbi Raphael Artz, director of Camp Ramah in New England — many of whom sought to reinvigorate Jewish education, including social action and tzedakah, under the rubric of tikkun olam. For example, as Krasner notes, in speaking to a group of campers in 1960, “Bardin insisted that it was their ‘task’ as Jews to ‘fix the world.’” Similarly, Rabbi Artz, in a 1967 address to Jewish educators, proclaimed, “The ultimate goal of man’s partnership with God is Tikkun olam.”
The third group was political. Beginning in the 1970’s, a number of progressive rabbis and community leaders began appropriating tikkun olam for their publications and programs. As Krasner notes, at the New Jewish Agenda’s founding conference in 1982, “The platform asserted that ‘many of us base our convictions on the Jewish religious concept of tikun olam (the just ordering of human society and the world) and the prophetic traditions of social justice.’” In the early ’90’s, says Krasner, “others took up the effort to shape a progressive Jewish politics around tikkun olam.” Among these was Michael Lerner, who founded Tikkun, a left-wing alternative to Commentary magazine. “Lerner hoped to energize alienated Jews with a model of Judaism that rejected the crass materialism and hypocrisy of middle class suburban Jewish life in favor of a Jewishly grounded ethic of social justice.”
Today, tikkun olam is part of modern, liberal discourse, even though its popularized connotation has little to do with its traditional meaning. In discussing the term in his 2014 article “The Assimilation of Tikkun Olam,” Levi Cooper, a faculty member at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, notes that “It has become a watchword for any value, even if a particular value — worthwhile as it may be — is not rooted in Jewish tradition.”
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John Derbyshire writes: When these riots happen, you get a lot of thumb-sucking pieces about why they happen, what causes them. Well, what does cause them?
You’re asking me? Well, I’m a race realist, so I’ll give you an answer in that vein. Then, in scrupulous fairness, I’ll give you some of the other hypotheses on offer, and compare and contrast them with mine.
My answer: Different races—different local varieties of Homo sap., that have followed different paths through evolutionary space for many, many generations, end up with different distributions on most heritable traits. That includes traits of intelligence, behavior, and personality.
So in a multiracial society that rewards certain traits and penalizes others, different races will precipitate out, average-average, at different social levels. American blacks, for example, with low average IQ, low average impulse control, and high average inclinations to antisocial behavior, will tend to pool at the bottom of society, in slums and prisons and criminal gangs.
The blacks thus pooled, being too dimwitted to understand anything about biology or statistics, will attribute their sorry plight to the malice of hostile agents. They’ll develop a lot of anger against those agents, the anger occasionally breaking out in riots…
So there you are: three hypotheses about what causes riots.
Hypothesis One: cranky old Derb with his stupid, bigoted, so-called “race realism.”
Hypothesis Two: It’s the fault of rich people not giving money to the black community.
Hypothesis Three: It’s our failure to tackle the root causes of crime and to have conversations…
When scanning the Western world for stories about race and diversity, I always like to take in the Antipodes. For one thing, I have some slight family connections with that zone. For another, the issues they’re having with diversity down under shed interesting light on our own troubles.
There seems not to have been any particular cause for the Moomba riot. The only thing the news reports are all agreed on is that it was nothing to do with race. Absolutely nothing, I tell you! The Melbourne Herald-Sun, April 10th:
A four-week police probe has ruled out race as being a motivation for the violence.
So if you think the Moomba riots had anything whatever to do with race, you are a very bad person, and you should go wash your mouth out with soap and water.
Strange to say, though, when you look at video clips of the riot, what you see is mostly black guys. Yes, there are white people around here and there in the videos; but that’s because Moomba, like Sweet Corn, is the name of a family festival, with rides and stalls and musicians and floats, and a fireworks display at night.
Someone better tell the Aussies they can’t have nice things any more either—not if they’re going to climb on the Diversity wagon.
The Moomba riot seems in fact to have been a gang rumble, with the major gang involved being this Apex gang, most of whose members are black.
Apex have been fortifying their numbers in recent years by recruiting from “PIs.” That’s Antipodes-slang for “Pacific Islanders“—Polynesian peoples from the islands of the South Pacific, who have settled in Australia and New Zealand in great numbers over the past few decades. I mentioned in that Richard Lynn’s estimate for the mean IQ of PIs is 85, same as the mean IQ of black Americans:
While of course there is much variation, as there is in any large group, Polynesian New Zealanders as a whole are underachievers … Polynesians … are way over-represented among high school dropouts. PIs are unemployed at twice the national rate …
So this mayhem in Melbourne fits pretty well with my race realism hypothesis.
I can’t see that it fits at all with the historical Hypothesis Three, even if the New York Times does support it. There was no plantation slavery in Australia, and no hundred years of Jim Crow. Practically none of the Sudanese have been in Australia even twenty years. Some of the PIs would have been there longer, but they weren’t there in any quantity before the 1970s.
And of course they arrived voluntarily, as did the Sudanese.
Yet there they are in Melbourne: racially distinct groups with depressed mean IQ and presumably corresponding statistical differences in heritable patterns of behavior and personality.
And they’re doing just what the blacks in Milwaukee and Cedar Rapids do.
I’m going to mark up one for race realism here.
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Despite the fact that they are forever scrutinizing Donald Trump, the mainstream media seem to have largely missed the fact that he advocates policies more supportive of Israel than those of any American president. They missed the fact, too, that if Trump became president, he would enjoy closer connections with American Jews than any of his predecessors. It’s decidedly ironic, then, that Trump is frequently attacked as anti-Semitic. I will discuss possible reasons for that after providing ample evidence of Trump’s philo-Semitism and intense pro-Israel positions.
It is almost axiomatic that a very successful real-estate developer in New York City such as Trump would need to have close ties to the Jewish political and financial elite. Because of his support for Jewish activities, charitable and otherwise, [1] prestigious Jewish groups have honored him in various ways. For example, in 2004 he became the first non-Jewish grand marshal of the Salute to Israel Parade in New York City. [2] Trump also received the Algemeiner Liberty Award in February 2015 at the Algemeiner Journal’s annual “Jewish 100” gala, which celebrates the “top 100 people positively influencing Jewish life.” The New York-based newspaper (which also has an important blog that has been compared to Huffington Post) deals with Jewish and Israel-related news. Former Senator Joseph Lieberman, noted for his support for Israel, described the paper as an “independent truth-telling advocate for the Jewish people and Israel.” [3] The recently deceased Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel chaired the Algemeiner Advisory Board. [4]
In 1983, the Jewish National Fund’s New York City real-estate committee presented Trump with its Tree of Life award, its second-highest award. [5] In 2000, the UJA (United Jewish Appeal) – Federation of New York’s Hospitality Division presented Trump with the Hotel and Real Estate Visionary of the Century Award. Trump donated $25,000 to the group in 2012 and $15,000 in 2014. [6]
Trump also has close family connections with Jews. Two of his three married children — Ivanka and Eric — are married to Jews. The most significant of those is Ivanka, his favorite child, who is now running his real-estate business while he campaigns for president. She is married to an Orthodox Jew, Jared Kushner, and she converted to Orthodox Judaism before the marriage.
Though only 35, Kushner, a Harvard graduate, is a prominent real-estate developer, as is his father, Charles Kushner. Jared Kushner and his family have connections to Israel. Along with his father, Kushner was listed in a 2015 report by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a benefactor of its real-estate committee, a status that required a donation of at least $36,000. Kushner’s parents are heavily involved in Jewish philanthropy. Their generosity includes a donation of $20 million to a medical-school campus in Jerusalem, now named after them.
On top of that, both Jared Kushner and his father have been major contributors to the Democratic Party. [7] (In 2005, the elder Kushner was sentenced to two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. [8]) Read on.
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Those Trump kids sure have a type. Five years after Ivanka Trump marriedNew York Observer publisher Jared Kushner (a card-carrying MOT for whom she converted), younger brother Eric Trump followed in her footsteps, marrying Inside Edition’s Lara Yunaska on Saturday at dad’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach.
Kushner himself performed the ceremony, which the New York Postreports took place under a “crystal-embellished” chuppah. Because while the wedding may have been Jewish, it was still Trump. Continue reading →
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
about.
