Raymond Ibrahim spoke (Video) to the David Horowitz Freedom Foundation Tuesday night on his new book, "The Al Qaeda Reader." Audio Michael Finch’s Intro Video
Before the speech, a woman came up to me to discuss my recent appearance on Hannity & Colmes. Only it wasn’t me, it was Ibrahim.
Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times carried a piece by one of the most provocative of urban pundits, Joel Kotkin, under the headline, "Why the Rush to Manhattanize L.A.?" Mr. Kotkin speaks of a zoning vote last week by the Los Angeles City Council that will create a denser downtown, along with efforts to expand the Los Angeles subway, "create a Times Square for Los Angeles," and "duplicate New York’s 5th Avenue." He attributes the rush to campaign contributions by real estate developers, and darkly predicts, "Traffic congestion is likely to get worse."
If the Los Angeles Times is going to pose that sort of question, we’re happy to answer them with some of our own. Could it perhaps be that the residents of Los Angeles decided to pursue Manhattanization, not under the duress of powerful real estate developers, but because they were tired of having to get in their car and drive an hour on the freeway any time they wanted to go anywhere? Could it be they decided that a nightlife that didn’t involve drinking and driving might be a good idea? Or that density might be better for the environment than sprawl?
At 6 feet, eight and a half inches tall and with millions of dollars in the bank, veteran actor and comedian Brad Garrett knows how to tread carefully around confrontation– especially with the paparazzi and other media. So it was a shock to read that he was involved in a confrtonation with a photographer from the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ– until you realize that TMZ has increased its aggressive tactics in order to gain attention for its upcoming syndicated television offshoot.
And like a petulant, delinquent child, it seems that TMZ is deliberately flexing its "muscle" in obvious defiance of our constructive criticism. We at Tabloid Baby feel especially bad for Brad Garrett because TMZ’s provocation of the star outside the Nobu restaurant in Malibu late last night and its use of the incident for publicity, come within hours after our criticism of TMZ’s tactics was posted on Luke Ford‘s widely-read media site, and linked to many sites from there:
"In a town full of legendary, hardworking professional paparazzi, TMZ takes the cheap way out by giving inexpensive PD-150 cameras to kids, and ordering them to hang out in front of nightspots at two in the morning to harass celebrities in hope of a confrontation. We took a stand against this back in the mid-90s, when the people who took over Hard Copy from us, used “stalkerazzi” cameramen to provoke celebs (oddly, the same people now run the tabloid TV series Extra, which spawned TMZ). And when the celebrity is provoked to respond, TMZ lambastes him, as they did with Woody Harrelson and Matt Dillon. In the case of Gary Dourdain from CSI, they actually called him a ‘c**ksucker’! In print!"
This provocation and attending celebration follows the site’s tasteless mockery of the death of the great Merv Griffin. What’s next? As TMZ heads toward a mass audience in syndicated television, those in control of TMZ appear to be out of control at a time that they should be in complete control.
Jewish Journal writer Danielle Berrin blogs about Friday night’s dialogue:
The truth is, you can only really edit a Jewish publication, if you love being Jewish, if you love Israel with your soul. Yet among the crowd gathered at Sinai Temple late Friday night, The Journal’s support of Israel was challenged; its "service" to the community was challenged. I thought: if only these people visited The Journal, they would feel how much love there is…
Real love is not unbiased love. Real love is complex; it’s complicated. And really loving something or someone is not believing in their perfection or in their flawlessness, but in learning of their weaknesses and accepting their vulnerabilities–and challenging them to grow. Robert Frost once said, "I have never learned anything from any man who has agreed with me."
Danielle’s emotional reaction reminds me of how I used to feel when my daddy was attacked.
In this case, I don’t think love has anything to do with it. Love is such an amorphous term in America today that it is meaningless. Many Christians will say that executing a murderer is a loving act.
If you gave a traditional rabbi a choice between a congregant who professes great love for Torah but doesn’t observe it with that same person constantly complaining about the Torah yet observing it (like me), there’s no question that the rav would prefer the complainer (that’s why the rabbis love me).
So too those who think the Journal is left-wing and too frequently anti-Israel would much rather the entire Journal staff hated Israel in their hearts yet shifted their coverage to the right.
You can edit a Jewish publication such as the Jewish Journal if you know next to nothing about Judaism, feel uncomfortable with traditional Jews and their particularist lives, are completely on the left and hire editors who reflect your left-wing views. For example, Gene Lichtenstein, the founding editor of the Jewish Journal.
None of this is meant as a criticism of Gene. It’s an honest description to show that editing a Jewish publication is no guarantee that a person is a normative part of Jewish life. Most journalists, particularly Jewish journalists are on the left (I don’t think there’s been a Republican staff writer at the Journal in 20 years) while most of those who practice Judaism most seriously, the Orthodox, tilt right.
Those who criticized the Jewish Journal Friday night are not concerned with whether or not Rob Eshman and his staff love the Jews and the Jewish state. They are concerned with what the Jewish Journal publishes.
I have little concern with what the Jewish Journal publishes about anything outside of Los Angeles Jewish life because that’s the only thing where its staff has expertise (if they had expertise elsewhere they’d be employed elsewhere, do you think any of them have turned down offers from the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times to rewrite press releases from American Jewish University?). Anyone who looks to the Jewish Journal to learn about Israel and Islamic terrorism and American politics and culture is retarded.
The Journal’s non-staff contributors would much rather be published in the New York Times but aren’t good enough to land there regularly. So we’re stuck with commentaries by such third-rate minds as Raphael J. Sonenshein, a poli-sci prof at Cal State Northridge.
Rob Eshman insists on blowing his wad (aka spending much of his meager resources) covering topics done far better and quicker by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other media.
The Journal goes to press Wednesday afternoon. What kind of moron depends on news that is guaranteed to be at least 36 hours old?
Perhaps I can best teach here by analogy. If I go to Friday Night Live and spend all of my sweaty aging charms chasing Danielle Berrin, then I’m going to go home alone (with a restraining order arriving on Monday). But if I pay court to some chubby 45-year old matron with four kids, three divorces, and two chins, I may well find someone with genuine gratitude for what I have to give.
If people only thought of the Jewish Journal as a socially marginal 41-year old bachelor who drives a serial-killer van and sleeps on the floor of a hovel but yearns to hook up at Friday Night Live with the young hotties, then we’d avoid much unpleasantness. We’d replace feelings of frustration with fascination. Anger would turn into compassion.
The latest cover of the Journal is by Amy Klein on Jewish pulp fiction. It’s a solid article but nothing special. Amy’s kinda cute but she’s no James Wood (famous literary critic). The space could’ve been better used to explore how wonderfully fascinating I am.
I’d like to be profiled by every hot single female writer in L.A.
Note to editors — next time you assign a profile on me, bestow this great gift upon someone truly deserving, someone young, needy and breasty.
Ana Garcia, anchor, sometime "investigative reporter" and former communication director to Los Angeles District Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, is not happy with Mayor Villaraigosa. It seems the Mayor doesn’t want to talk to her about how and when he goes shopping with his girlfriend Mirthala Salinas and a few other issues.
Last Friday Garcia wanted to know about the Mayor’s trip to a valley mall with his girlfriend Mirthala Salinas, the now suspended Telemundo anchor/reporter. The video of the shopping trip was posted by celebrity website TMZ.com. It was the first pictures of the happy couple together and out and about in LA since the scandal involving their relationship erupted onto the headlines back on July 3rd of this year. It was not the first reports of them being together on the town, ERS reported that long ago.
The Mayor responded to Garcia’s questions saying basically he was just out buying some shoes and wasn’t aware of much else! In this case, we have to side with the mayor, can’t a man go buy a pair of shoes in peace. Then as a follow-up, Garcia asked Villaraigosa about some emails and schedules the Mayors office is refusing to release as public records to Garcia and KNBC. Garcia says they are public record, the Mayor’s lawyers say they are not.
It seems Garcia is still a bit peeved that her Telemundo rival, Mirthala got some exclusive access to the Mayor in the past that Garcia felt she was entitled too. In her last story about the Mayor, Garcia complained she only a got a few minutes with the mayor one day and Mirthala got a lot more!
…Feldman has performed one valuable service: His piece serves as a warning against the easy assumption that the best in secular learning can be readily reconciled with passionate Torah study. When equal emphasis is placed on the curriculum of the dominant secular society and Torah learning, the former will trump the latter. Maimonides has produced hundreds of Ivy League graduates, but few distinguished Torah scholars.
No doubt Feldman is being disingenuous when he complains that his alma mater and former classmates should be able to make peace with his intermarriage and his “desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence.” But when secular knowledge and Torah learning are proclaimed to be fully compatible, even complementary visions of Truth, it is not surprising that some will treat them as a smorgasbord from which one can select the savory bits, as Feldman has done.
Tellingly (and wrongly), this “best and brightest” product of the combination of a New England prep school and a Lithuanian yeshiva characterizes modern Orthodoxy by Moses Mendelssohn’s dictum: “Be a Jew at home and a man abroad.” That is a recipe for a bifurcated life rather than one lived at all times and all places in the presence of G-d. Following that dictum, virtually all of Mendelssohn’s descendants and disciples had found their way to the baptismal fount within two generations.
I take personal offense at this because my rebbe in yeshiva — R. Mayer Twersky — went to Maimonides! So did his brother, R. Moshe Twersky, a rebbe in Yeshiva Toras Moshe in Jerusalem.
In my time in yeshiva I learned with three different graduates of Maimonides, all of whom were serious learners. One eventually went into business and is a model of a successful businessman with one leg in serious lomdus, one into Jewish organizational life after a stint in high tech, and the third became a pulpit rabbi and Jewish librarian. That last one is, in my opinion, a brilliant talmid chakham who is known to many readers of this blog.
…But, in R. Rosenblum’s defense, he did write "few": "Maimonides has produced hundreds of Ivy League graduates, but few distinguished Torah scholars." Since most yeshivas produce only a few DISTINGUISHED Torah scholars, he might have actually been praising the school rather than insulting it. In that case, I am pleasantly surprised that he is now advocating Torah U-Madda.
It was 2004. For a few months now, we’d been having lunch regularly and exchanging email almost daily.
"I’d love to see Rabbi X.’s face when he finds out we’re going out," I wrote her.
"We’re not going out," she replied. "We’re just friends who have lunch."
Oh.
Ralphs. Sunday morning. After davening.
I first see him in produce so I wheel my cart into breakfast cereals. He shows up there too and proceeds up the aisle towards me. I turn my cart around and head for dairy. I pick up some cottage cheese and head for ice cream. Just as I am filling up with popsicles lacking a kosher certification, he wheels up. I put the popsicles back and select instead the high-priced but certified Haagen Daz sherbert.
I look for a cashier. Find one. Wheel in. Right behind my former teacher. I’ve been rehearsing this moment for 15 minutes now. I nod and wave. He doesn’t flinch. He just looks sad.
To sort out my feelings, I turn to the great poet Barry Manilow:
Even Now
When there’s someone else who cares
When there’s someone home who’s waiting just for me
Even now I think about you as I’m climbing up the stairs
And I wonder what to do so she won’t see
That even now
When I know it wasn’t right
And I found a better life than what we had
Even now I wakeup crying in the middle of the night
And I can’t believe it still could hurt so bad
Even now when I have come so far
I wonder where you are
I wonder why it’s still so hard without you
Even now when I come shining through
I swear I think of you
And how I wish you knew
Even now
Even now
When I never hear your name
And the world has changed so much since you been gone
Even now I still remember and the feeling’s still the same
And the pain inside of me goes on and on
Even now
Even now when I have come so far
I wonder where you are
I wonder why it’s still so hard without you
Even now when I come shining through
I swear I think of you
And God I wish you knew
Some how
Even now
The curvy hottie writes for the Jewish Journal:
As the least observant member of my family for most of my life, I don’t think my mom ever expected me to start lighting shabbat candles. But I have recently. At first, I did it because it means a lot to my boyfriend, who also keeps kosher, puts on tefillin every morning and goes to synagogue every Saturday morning. But then I started to check the lighting times on my own, without David having to nudge me. Sometimes I’m worried I’ll forget (it hasn’t become an ingrained habit yet) so I set an alarm to remind myself.
I like lighting the shabbat candles because it makes me feel like a woman. I feel like the spiritual guide of our household though David and I would be in deep trouble if I was to lead us in religious practices. I feel holy. Like in thost 30 seconds when I’m covering my eyes and reciting the prayer I deserve my last name (Kadosh). I feel significant because if I wasn’t there, that apartment on Zelzah Avenue would be without the warm glow of the Sabbath candles.
