America’s religious leaders are even more politically divided than the rest of us https://t.co/UX8DC7Hebi
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 12, 2017
More than any other group of clergy, rabbis choose to live in white neighborhoods.
Orthodox rabbis are apparently split between Democrat and Republican.
Comments: However, here’s a list of the world’s ten best selling English language authors.
Agatha Christie – English
William Shakespeare – English
Barbara Cartland – English
Danielle Steel – Half Jewish Half Portuguese
Harold Robbins – Jewish
Sidney Sheldon – Jewish
Enid Blyton – English
J. K. Rowling – English, minor French ancestry
Dr. Suess – German American
Gilbert Patten – English American
So 2.5 of the top 10 indicates a lot of ability to write what the public wants to buy. Also on the list are #11 Jackie Collins (half Jewish/half English), #13 R.L. Stine (Midwestern Jewish), #23 Stan and Jan Berenstain (Jewish-American husband and English-American wife, raised their children Jewish).
* Never understood the appeal of this author. Portnoy’s Complaint is just about an extremely whiny, nebbishy Jewish guy who masterbates too much and drones on forever about his psychological complexes.
* Unfortunately, that does explain his “appeal.” Jews control a large portion of the Megaphone, and did even back when Roth was starting out. Roth’s works appealed to them, as he was a “voice” of Jewish-Americans of that period. They thus promoted the turd out of him, and shoved him down the throats of others until he became a standard contemporary “great” author.
As Steve explained, this is rather similar to how The Graduate became a hit: Jews in New York and LA kept going to screenings, keeping it theaters, until gradually it was talked up to goys and became a hit, although the Jewishness, as Steve has noted, was downplayed to goys, and the “Generation Gap”/Baby Boomer aspects were uptalked.
The quite open Freudian nature of Portnoy’s Complaint makes it rather laughable to anyone not in the Freudian cult, and hence it hasn’t aged well. However, the Jewish obsession with sex, assimilation, their mothers, and shiksa women remains, so many young Jews can still pick it up and be enthralled by how much he “gets” them.
Much of Roth’s work is really insular to Jews, and it’s rather funny to think of him as anything other than a niche author. I was forced to read Goodbye, Columbus in high school and couldn’t find a bit of it to relate to. I realize why now: Roth’s work doesn’t even attempt to explain to outsiders the assimilation-with-American-goys Jews were obsessed with, and merely assumes you know what he’s talking about as he writes. Since that’s the major theme and metaphor of the book, it doesn’t resonate with non-Jews.
Reading Goodbye, Columbus was rather like reading a story about space travel where it’s assumed you know all the mathematics and physics and historical theories behind launching a rocket and is really obsessed with faster escape velocity theories in detail; it’s going to go over the heads of most readers unless you skillfully get them up to speed.
Broadly, if you’re ever puzzled why certain artists are extolled despite rather mundane outputs and low popularity, check if the reviewers extolling the artists share some sort of personal/ethnic connection with the artist. This rather explains why a lowly-rated, badly-written show like Girls got so much press: lots of ugly twenty-something and thirty-something Jewish American female critics living or from Brooklyn liked Lena Dunham’s depiction of fat, ugly Jewish broad having meaningless sex in Brooklyn.
* I have to laugh at whoever said Jews aren’t good at writing fiction. They punch so far above their weight that it’s not funny. Heller, Bellow, Roth, Salinger, Potok, Wiesel. Popular writers like Asimov, Ephron, Sendak, and Maria Doria Russell. Name me a genre and I can find you a zillion successful writers.
Compare their output to Mormons, and see what you get.
* You could also throw in highbrows like Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Paul Auster if you like, plus more popular writers like William Goldman, Ira Levin, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk, and Irwin Shaw. In science fiction I particularly liked Alfred Bester, but there are loads of others. Lots of great children’s books, too; The Giving Tree is a heartbreaker.
* I would add to this, the case of Lenny Bruce. I never understood his status until I understood how Jews regard themselves vis-a-via the goyim. Watch videos of Bruce. He wasn’t funny, not in the way, say, similar lefty Jewish comics of the era were–e.g. Mort Sahl, Jackie Mason. What he was, was a Jewish martyr. What Jews (and their subordinate goys who mimic them) love about him is his subversiveness. To paraphrase Malcolm X, telling the WASP, and his Institutions, to his face just what he thinks of him and his hypocritical 1950s American values. This made him a hero to similarly adverse, highly self-identified Jews like Woody Allen and Howard Stern. Norman Mailer whose writing I do admire, was similar. He sent a copy of The White Negro to William Faulkner and Faulkner told him he needed to see a psychiatrist. Not coincidentally, Bruce, Mailer, Stern and Allen were all sexual degenerates very much into degrading the shiksa!
* “Goodbye, Columbus” makes a lot more sense if you read it as someone who throws away a relationship with a beautiful woman from a prosperous family–a family that welcomes him, instead of rejecting him as an outsider–because it wouldn’t allow him to feel like a victim anymore.
See the movie. Ali MacGraw’s Brenda may be spoiled, but she genuinely cares about him and he could influence her if he took the trouble. What he’s really afraid of is that HE will be the one to be influenced and assimilated.
Published on Apr 16, 2017: “Documentary which follows events at Israel’s most notorious football club. Beitar Jerusalem FC is the most popular team in Israel and the only club in the Premier League never to sign an Arab player. Midway through a season the club’s owner, Russian-Israeli oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak, brought in two Muslim players from Chechnya in a secretive transfer deal that triggered the most racist campaign in Israeli sport and sent the club spiraling out of control.
Forever Pure follows the famous football club through the tumultuous season, as power, money and politics fuel a crisis and shows how racism is destroying both the team and society from within.”
In 2008, Russian oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak was hoping to become the new mayor of Jerusalem. His ownership of Beitar, secured a few years earlier, could potentially have been used as a campaigning tool but Gaydamak finally received just a few percent of the votes. Zinshtein’s on-camera interviews with the oligarch, who barely seems to speak any Hebrew, are chilling to behold, as the man has no problems in admitting what his plans were.
What is less directly addressed, but nonetheless suggested through the expert editing credited to Justine Wright and Noam Amit, is how the owner’s political defeat is related to his decision to bring on board to young Chechen players for the 2012-13 season. Foreign players aren’t unusual in Israeli soccer — and indeed Beitar already had a player from Latin America — but Gaydamak’s unexpected move was a shock for the core group of Beitar fans, known as the Familia. They pride themselves on the fact that their club is the only national soccer team that has never signed an Arab player — the film’s title is their proud chant that underlines the club’s “racial purity” — and they are now confronted with not one but two Muslim players at once. A form of revenge? Possibly. A way to thoroughly agitate Israeli sports and society at large? Certainly.
Zinshtein’s film intelligently dissects the many contradictions at play here, starting with the fact that it is absolutely shocking that Israelis, just a couple of generations after the Holocaust, want to pride themselves on any kind of racial purity to the explicit exclusion of others. The way in which different things get conflated — “Muslim” and “Arab” are two distinctly different things and Chechens are Muslims but definitely not Arabs — so they can be boiled down into angry and hateful rallying cries is a tragic and recurring theme.
It is shocking to see how the core group of supporters manages to turn the legions of fans against the club they profess to love so much. And all this only because of the arrival of two largely innocent pawns, 19-year-old Dzhabrail Kadiyev and 23-year-old Zaur Sadayev, the devoutly religious Chechen players who clearly had no clue what they were in for. (One of the film’s best scenes shows them holed up in their hotel room, like caged animals unable to understand what’s going on around them.)
The supporters’ loudly voiced anger and incitements to hatred finally result not only in practically empty stadiums but also physical threats and completely demotivated players.
When Arcadi Gaydamak, the Russian billionaire owner of the Israeli soccer team Beitar Jerusalem, known for being the only team in the league without Arab players, hires two Chechen Muslims in the middle of the 2012-’13 season, it sparks a catastrophic battle between the team leadership and its right-wing, extreme nationalist fan base. Granted amazing access to all parties in the story, producer-director Maya Zinshtein, a Russian-born investigative journalist, smartly places her shocking portrait of a team and its fans in a broader sociopolitical context, allowing it to surpass its token subject matter and explore issues such as racism and mob rule. Indeed, it provides a cautionary tale for countries like the U.S., where politicians have failed to thoroughly condemn hate speech. Loaded with stranger-than-fiction incident, this documentary should find robust festival play before seguing into international broadcast.
Zinshtein opens with a brief history of the team, founded in 1936 and one of the Israel Premier League’s most controversial because of its multitude of outspoken fans who provide the players with plenty of love, but who also incur penalties for the team because of their bad behavior in the stands. Traditionally the team of choice for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and Jews descended from communities in the Middle East, it is also known for a supporter’s group called La Familia that took over the eastern bleachers in Beitar’s Teddy Stadium back in 2005 and became notorious for chants that insult Arab players. The film’s title, “Forever Pure,” comes from a logo on one of their banners…
The members of La Familia take pride in being the most racist fans in the league and are able to instigate a boycott of the stadium. Certainly their absence seems preferable to their return when they boo their own team, fight with its new players, and threaten to kill the chairman.
This week’s Torah portion covers the 12 spies sent in to the land of Israel, ten of whom come back with negative reports.
* We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. Didn’t God and Moshe know who they were sending out to spy on the land? If they knew they were sending fearful people, they should expect a fearful report.
* It was weird that Moses sent tribal leaders rather than trained spies. The mission was doomed from the start. In Josh. 2:1, Joshua sends two trained spies to scout out Jericho.
* Yes, I am sure Russia spies on America and tries to interfere in American affairs, just as America spies on other countries and interferes in their affairs. Spying on competitors is just how the world works. I’m not outraged when foreigners spy on America and try to hack into our databases. I know we do the same thing to them. Life is war. If you’ve got something good, other people will try to take it.
* If only there were some clues, some coded hints in appearance, that let you know who was different and therefore likely had different interests. Did these Hebrew spies have any morphological differences from the natives in the land and therefore did the natives know that it was ok to fear people who look different? Or were the Canaanites living under some terrifying form of political correctness that condemned noticing patterns?
* Nature has color-coded people for our advantage. A wise man notices patterns.
* LAT: “A grim pattern in European attacks: Missed chances to pinpoint terrorism suspects beforehand”
* WP: “In Duterte’s home town, martial law is wildly popular — the selfies prove it”
* John J. Mearsheimer recommends that America do everything it can to slow the rise of China (including the removal of all Chinese students studying in America), because the more relatively powerful China gets, the more it will flex its muscles to push us out of its zones of influence.
* The Alt Right case for ISIS.
* Num. 13:32: A land that devours its people. Jacob Milgrom: “Thus this idiom can only mean that the nature of the land is such that it will perpetually keeps its inhabitants at war, perhaps a reflection of the geopolitical position of Canaan as a land bridge whose city-states were either fighting each other or stemming invasion fro Asia or Africa.” Wherever Jews go in the world, there is this perception that they tend to increase social tensions and division and multi-culturalism.
* Nobody can read the Torah and regard the Israelites as impressive. In Num 14:1: “They wept that night.” Num. 14:4: “They said to one another, “Let us appoint a leader and let us return to Egypt!” Is there any other people or religion that has a sacred text that makes their own group look so bad? I can’t think of one.
Stoicism is not typically a trait one associates with Middle Eastern peoples. They tend to be more emotional than Northern Europeans and they tend to have less shame about using their emotions to try to manipulate a competitor just as women tend to have less compunction about using emotional manipulation than do men.
* “Let us return to Egypt.” As a chronic under-earner, I’ve often preferred to return to under-earning jobs and abusive relationships because they were familiar. The older I get, the more I like routine. We have a profound affect on how other people treat us. If we’re willing to sell ourselves short, there will be no end of takers. I have friends who have noted to me that when it comes to interacting with others, I’m not flexible. I need to have things my way. That isolates me. It’s a reaction to growing up in foster care. Routine gives me a feeling of safety. The Israelites seem to have PTSD. They seem like losers. There wasn’t PTSD until that diagnosis was made popular, then large numbers of people had PTSD.
* I’ve never dated a woman above an 8. I just felt that 9s and above were out of my league. On the other hand, a GF who was a 6 asked me, “Why do you keep trying to date women who are out of your league?”
* Num. 14:5: “Moses and Aaron fell on their face before the entire congregation…” Can you imagine Winston Churchill or Charles DeGaulle or Adolf Hitler doing this?
* Num. 14: 11-20. Moshe manipulates God with an emotional appeal. How do you prefer to think about God? Through dogmatic theology or through stories? Christianity emphasizes theology, Judaism emphasizes stories.
* Num. 14:34. God sounds like Donald Trump: “Thus you shall know what it means to thwart me.”
* Num. 15:16. One law for everyone. But this will only work if the people are homogeneous. If the people are diverse, they will chafe against the law. Some will find it too strict, others too loose. If America is to have one law, it will be the white man’s law and other peoples will hate it.
* Num. 15:32-36. They find a man gathering wood on the Sabbath and they put him to death. This is an army on the march. They need discipline. The Torah is not libertarian.
Published on Apr 16, 2017: “Documentary which follows events at Israel’s most notorious football club. Beitar Jerusalem FC is the most popular team in Israel and the only club in the Premier League never to sign an Arab player. Midway through a season the club’s owner, Russian-Israeli oligarch Arcadi Gaydamak, brought in two Muslim players from Chechnya in a secretive transfer deal that triggered the most racist campaign in Israeli sport and sent the club spiraling out of control.
Forever Pure follows the famous football club through the tumultuous season, as power, money and politics fuel a crisis and shows how racism is destroying both the team and society from within.”
In a rare show of competency, he’s tapped five times as many judges as Obama had at this point—and conservatives are delighted.
The most critical government document released on Wednesday—the one that’ll have the most wide-ranging impact in the future—was not James Comey’s prepared testimony for the Senate Intelligence Committee about his interactions with Donald Trump. It was a simple press release, issued by the White House, announcing a “fourth wave” of judicial nominations since the Trump inauguration. The eleven nominations included four district court judgeships, three for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, three for the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and one for the Court of Federal Claims. Conservatives were uniformly delighted.
All told, Trump has nominated 22 judges to fill vacancies across the federal bench. Thus far, only two—Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Sixth Circuit Court Judge Amul Thapar—have been confirmed. But the prospect of filling vacancies over time explains a lot about why congressional Republicans have stood by Trump, despite the erratic and stormy start to his presidency. As long as Trump keeps funneling a steady supply of conservative jurists to the Senate, in a bid to dramatically reshape the federal courts, Republicans can go to bed happy that they’re fulfilling at least one major element of their political project.
Judicial nominations are the one area where the Trump administration is “running like a fine-tuned machine,” as the president boasted in February. In fact, Trump’s team has far outstripped the efforts of his predecessor. By this date eight years ago, President Obama had made just four judicial nominations: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and three nominations for the Court of Appeals.
