To fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectivity

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Justin Raimondo writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Are the rules of journalism being rewritten this election year?

My local newspaper, the Sonoma County Press-Democrat, is so clearly in the tank for Hillary Clinton that I no longer take pleasure in my morning read. Trump’s acceptance speech, for example, was covered on the front page with two stories: on the left a straight, albeit somewhat judgmental, account of the speech, and on the right a “fact check” that disputed every point made by the GOP nominee. Clinton’s speech was covered with three front page stories, with headlines describing her nomination as “historic,” “inspiring” and “trailblazing.” A relatively mild fact-checking piece was relegated to the back pages.

This transparent bias is a national phenomenon, infecting both print and television media to such an extent that it has become almost impossible to separate coverage of the Trump campaign from attempts to tear it down. The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat, and in playing this role they’ve lost the ability to assess events rationally.

To take a recent example: Trump said at a news conference that he hoped the Russians — who are accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers — would release the 30,000 emails previously erased by Clinton’s staff. The DNC went ballistic, claiming that Trump had asked the Russians to commit “espionage” against the United States. Aside from the fact that Trump was obviously joking, Clinton claims those emails, which were on her unauthorized server during her tenure as secretary of State, were about her yoga lessons and personal notes to her husband — so how would revealing them endanger “national security”? Yet the media reported this accusation uncritically. A New York Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker, ostensibly reporting Trump’s contention that he spoke in jest, nonetheless averred that “the Republican nominee basically urged Russia, an adversary, to conduct cyber-espionage against a former secretary of state.” Would it be a stretch to conclude from this description that the New York Times is a Trump adversary?

The DNC emails, published by Wikileaks, reveal a stunning level of collaboration between important media outlets and the Democrats. Former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sought to silence NBC’s Mika Brzezinski, who had found fault with the DNC’s role in the primaries. The emails have headings like “This must stop.” Incredibly, NBC’s Chuck Todd agreed to act as a go-between, even arranging a call between Wasserman Schultz and Brzezinski. Which raises the question: Why was a major media figure taking his marching orders from the Democratic party chair — and how did this affect his network’s coverage of the Trump campaign?

The DNC emails also show that Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel sent his copy for a story on Clinton’s fundraising operation to the DNC’s national press secretary, Mark Paustenbach, prior to publication. Politico has since apologized, but Vogel has his defenders. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said Vogel’s “prepublication generosity” was meant to give “the people you’re writing about … the opportunity to rebut all relevant claims in a story.” One wonders if the Washington Post does this for the Trump campaign. Somehow I doubt it.

Since last summer, Politico has been vehemently anti-Trump, and it’s only getting more extreme. It’s run several stories linking Trump to Vladimir Putin: “Why Russia is Rejoicing Over Trump,” “GOP Gobsmacked by Trump’s Warm Embrace of Putin,” “Donald Trump Heaps More Praise on Vladimir Putin” — and dozens of similar articles. The gist of these pieces is that Trump’s stated desire to “get along with Putin,” and his comments on the costs imposed by our membership in NATO, mean that Trump is essentially an agent of a foreign power. A recent article by Katie Glueck on Trump’s hacking joke said that Trump “appeared to align himself with Russia over his Democratic opponent” — as if he were a kind of Manchurian candidate.

Of course, Politico is not alone in what was once called red-baiting. The Atlantic also weighed in with Jeffrey Goldberg’s “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin,” and a Franklin Foer story in Slate was headlined “The Real Winner of the RNC: Vladimir Putin.” This coverage smacks of the sort of McCarthyism that we haven’t seen in this country since the most frigid years of the Cold War.

Any objective observer of the news media’s treatment of Trump can certainly conclude that reporters are taking a side in this election — and they don’t have to be wearing a button that says “I’m with her” for this to be readily apparent. The irony is that the media’s Trump bashing may wind up having the exact opposite of its intended effect.

Posted in Articles, Journalism | Comments Off on To fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectivity

What’s Wrong With Hawaii?

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Hawaii is a reliably Democratic state in Presidential elections so it is seldom exposed to the kind of media criticism given Republican states, such as in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas.

But, wow, in the 21st Century, Hawaii sure is an underachiever, especially compared to the high hopes invested in it in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, in the Urban Institute’s study of federal NAEP test scores by state shown below, Hawaii’s students do worst of all 50 states when adjusted for demographics. Hawaii’s racial mix isn’t that different, as first glance, from Silicon Valley’s, but they don’t test like Silicon Valley kids.

Hawaii was made a state in 1959 as a Cold War strategy to create a showcase state with nonwhite and mixed race political leaders, such as the war hero and future Senator Daniel Inouye. A goal was to persuade nonwhites around the world to accept American imperial leadership by demonstrating that leadership ranks would be open to nonwhites.

LBJ got Congress to put up a lot of money to make the East-West Center at the U. of Hawaii, the home base of President Obama’s mother for most of her career, the American equivalent of Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University. At the East-West Center, Third World students from leadership backgrounds, such as Lolo Soetoro from a well-connected Indonesian family (Lolo’s father was the top indigenous petroleum geologist in Indonesia), mingled with and married American students.

Oddly enough, the U. of Hawaii’s most important influence on American power turned out to be not abroad but back at home, where a product of the enthusiasm of the era for race-mixing as a demonstration of liberal empire became the U.S. President.

But nobody in the U.S. much thinks about Hawaii anymore. Heck, it took me about a half dozen years to figure out how our current President is a direct product of the Cold War goals behind the Hawaiian statehood that was so celebrated in the media (e.g., the movie version of James Michener’s breakthrough bestseller Hawaii was the top box office hit of 1966) when I was young.

Posted in Hawaii | Comments Off on What’s Wrong With Hawaii?

Donald Trump – The Inarticulate Orator

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

Therefore, it has come as a recurrent shock to the press that a man who doesn’t seem even conventionally gifted in English has liberated for democratic consideration so many forbidden ideas.

How did that happen?

First, the artlessness of how Trump frames his proposals exposes the extremism of the globalist ruling class’ emerging ideology of borderlessness.

For instance, when Trump proposes to build a wall, the establishment replies, in so many words, that the entire concept of national borders is outdated and immoral. When Trump says the U.S. should keep out Muslims, the elites reply that it is unconscionable for Americans to have a choice in who gets to immigrate.

Tipsy on their own rhetoric, the mainstream unintentionally reveals how crazy open-borders doctrines are becoming in a century when the U.N. predicts the population of Africa will quadruple to 4 billion.

But second, it’s also because Trump is a salesman without a silver tongue that he feels the need to avoid the usual eloquent obfuscations and boil ideas down to basic realities. He’s just not verbally adept enough to put over the kind of high-status bilge that has colonized our thoughts.

Seven hundred years ago an English friar named William of Ockham gave his name to the traditional Western prejudice that the simplest feasible explanation is most likely to be true.

Six and a half centuries later we went to the moon.

Lately, however, we haven’t really felt all that inclined to figure out how the world works. It’s more important to demonstrate our mastery of socially preferred locutions.

For example, one pressing public-policy question of the day is: What are the main causes of Muslim terrorism? Now, an Ockhamite might surmise that one useful answer is:

Muslims.

But the respectable answer in 2016 isn’t supposed to be anything that blunt. In particular, any acceptable explanation must include the six-syllable word “Islamophobia.” Read on.

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* I can tell you by personal experience that Trump talks like a typical New Yorker. Straight to the point with zero tolerance for nonsense and muddy thinking.

* It’s as if I were reading the cultural values of Ellsworth Toohey made real. Donald Trump is not Francisco D’Anconia, he is Howard Roark. That Trump can see the vacuity ( and nakedness ) of elite discourse is a wonderful thing for those who notice reality.

* Race is like Wegener’s theory that Latin America fits in to the side of Africa: so obvious that most people thought it couldn’t be true.

* Scott Adams has done a large amount of damage control for Trump, explaining how Trump really isn’t off-the-cuff or impulsive, but calculated. It’s amazing the Press/Left/Cucks haven’t figured out his style yet. Three points:

1. Trump sees and works towards big-picture end games. He wants a grandiose, beautiful thing—fame, a huge apartment complex, a huge golf course, a huge casino, a gorgeous model girlfriend/wife, the presidency, NAFTA overruled, immigration ended. So he sets out with the goal of getting that desired thing, no matter how outsized the ambition seems.

2. Trump doesn’t want that object after a long delay; he wants it as quickly as possible. He looks for inefficiencies in the system where people waste their time. He thinks people who wait for years just one shot are losers: he wants as many shots as possible for success when he wants it, and lets everyone else judge whether he’s good enough—he always thinks he’s good enough. He doesn’t cut corners, he cuts out the fat. So instead of building his real estate portfolio slowly and making sure critics were assuaged and he built an “image” of a trusted developer with “taste”, he put a building in as quickly as possible to his own liking, because that’s what he wanted.

3. To Trump, the details of getting there are less important than getting there, and he will stroke as many egos as possible to get there. Details are unimportant unless they impede his progress; e.g. he will let a trusted associate worry about how many ladies toilet stalls there are, unless it becomes a feminist loggerhead and he needs to step in and make promises.

That also means that, on an unimportant detail, he’ll reverse course if it hurts him. That’s why he’s not bothering on details of his Mideast policy or his immigration plan or his NAFTA plan—they are end games, and he will get there how he needs to , the details are unimportant, and he knows that losers are the folks who pay attention to the trees and miss the forest. Leaders think big and get smaller people to do the grunt work for him.

Trump’s off-the-cuff style is designed for the 2nd and 3rd parts—get him to the promised goal of #1 as easily and quickly as possible. But the goal is the key, the vision. Trump has a vision –a grandiose vision—of walls, immigration ending, NAFTA redone. When Trump is done with Presidency, whatever will be said of him, they will say he got things done, and the country was different afterwards.

So if Trump’s goal in a Putin negotiation was an arms deal, and he said something too insulting off the cuff, he’d immediately reverse course and possibly apologize (so long as it didn’t weaken him) because the goal was not yet met, and the means to it were unimportant, so reversing his style wouldn’t matter to him. That’s what the Press isn’t getting—Trump’s style is a calculated, battle-tested means to his ends, his visions. It’s a tactic, not a strategy.

Hillary has no vision. She has nothing more than her desire to win the white house because, darn it, she worked her whole life to be the first woman president and get some graft. In Trump’s mind, she’s a loser because she has no grandiose goal outside the presidency and has worked her whole life for this one shot, and then she’s just a rich man’s puppet in the end. That’s a loser. Every speech she makes and word she utters is party of her strategy—which means she can’t reverse course that easily if the strategy isn’t working.

Trump’s words are like an MMA fighter who switches from jabs to kicks to takedowns when needed versus different opponents, all with the end goal of being champion. Hillary’s MMA style is to continuously use the “proper” footwork and technique all the time, which works on most because she is on steroids, but can’t handle adaptation.

* Funny how, if you go to a top university or upper middle-class neighborhood, you see people of different races and cultures getting along just fine. White people and Asians in Vancouver get along just fine. What do they have in common? That they are well-educated, civilized and intelligent. The whites and Asians in Vancouver tend to be both average. Race doesen’t matter. Nationality doesen’t matter. What matters are individual people and how conscientious, intelligent and reasonable they are. This is what matters. From what I have observed, intelligent and well-educated people of different ethnic backgrounds get along just fine. The reason why open borders “doesent work” is because plebs of all races tend to be barbarians who judge each other based on irrational prejudices and are so intolerant that they are willing to use violence on each other instead of just being civil and tolerating each other. So maybe you’re right, Sailer. Maybe open borders doesen’t work, but that is not because open borders “can’t” work, but simply because most people are not up to haut-bourgeoise standards of civility and tolerance. Don’t blame the “doctrine” for the failure: blame the shittiness of most human beings.

And the elite is “pushing” globalization? Funny that a lot of national elites are actually suffering from Globalization and want a protected market. Riddle me that? Globalization has made only a minority of the rich richer. Most of the gains in wealth happened to the middle classed of First World nations and the poor of Third World nations. The biggest losers have been the lower classes from developed nations, because those jobs got outsourced to the Third World, and many rich people who lost their businesses when the markets were opened and they had to compete against more formidable foreign competitors. Most of the rich are actually against Globalization. Trust me, they don’t like international competition. They would much rather face as few competitors as possible and charge more for what they produce. Yes, the very poor have been hurt by globalization in the First World. But don’t pretend like “globalization” hasn’t benefitted Americans: Americans today have a significantly higher PPP per capita than they did in 1995 even if you adjust for inflation.

Also, Globalization is not something that is being “pushed” by anyone: it is the result of massive advancements in communications and transport technology over the past quarter century. The World has simply become smaller than it used to be. Deal with it! Complaining about this won’t change that.

* Trump comes off as cogent and highly normal in his weekly appearances on O’Reilly and tonight was no different — although after this past week of media tattooing we’re now supposed to think that he’s insane.

But the transcripts don’t read nice and smooth. His verbal tic of self-interruption of nearly every sentence is off-putting in print. But it works as a conversational style. Only partly accurate to describe him as “inarticulate” because he’s been launching memorable rhetorical broadsides for a whole year and dominating the national political conversation.

I go back to the Pacino Vegas boss character in Ocean’s 11 reboot: “I move fast and I slice.”

Trump slices in words and deeds. That’s why he’s hated.

* Steve, this really hits the nail on the head. It is incredibly strange seeing conservative intelligentsia fall into the ‘smooth talker’ language as well. A politician who is articulate should be the highest virtue we demand they seem to suggest. If they lie to us, that’s ok, they do it with such great style. Look at the crease!! It seems the entire intellectual class would happily submit to an articulate invader who could put together a flowing sentence lasting upwards of a minute. Perhaps there is a strong correlation to bookishness and a subconscious craving for dictatorship….or maybe it does boil down to a desire to separate themselves from the unwashed masses.

* Anyone who writes all day thinks the social hierarchy should be based on articulateness. The funny thing is, what counts as articulate is just a set of cliches and tropes that jibe with conventional wisdom. Thus, Dan Quayle is considered moron because of his occasional grammar goofs, where Jesse Jackson is a silver-tongued advocate for the oppressed, even though Jackson’s grammar is far worse.

* Trump is one of only a very small handful of people who can access the greater public via the airwaves. This means he has the ability to project a message of his choosing into to public discourse that is unfiltered by the media. Once it reaches critical mass, the media spin is rendered ineffective. The media’s greatest trick is excluding what or whom it does not like. Much of what if produces is junk but it does not matter because there is no competition.

One of the great lessons from this election that nobody is learning, or really relearning, is that the airwaves are public and we would be served by having much greater public access. Trump and his billions short circuited the regular process. This used to be a staple of leftist politics a la the days of Ralph Nader, but that is now out of fashion. The left made its peace to serve multiculturalism and now has to live with it. It should be noted that the Bernie-Butt-Bros movement to overturn the campaign finance laws is really about preventing certain groups from having their say but they are not trying to open it up for everyone, something that would be very dangerous for them if someone on the alt-right (like Trump) were ever to gain access.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Donald Trump – The Inarticulate Orator

Steve Sailer Tweet Storm

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Posted in Steve Sailer | Comments Off on Steve Sailer Tweet Storm

John Rivers: ‘I believed the Whites Are Serial Killers media lie until I looked into it. Turns out it always skewed Black.’

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Co5XUW6UkAA8wC-

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off on John Rivers: ‘I believed the Whites Are Serial Killers media lie until I looked into it. Turns out it always skewed Black.’

Gideon Levy In Haaretz: ‘Stop Living in Denial, Israel Is an Evil State’

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Needless to say, I find this analysis absurd. “Good” and “evil” are terms for the synagogue and for discussions of religious faith.

Aside from such faith, the world consists of different forms of life struggling to survive. Declarations of “good” and “evil” are declarations of faith.

Israel has always had a narrow band of options for survival. If Israel was 25% more moral, it would be dead as a Jewish state.

Survival usually depends upon putting the interests of your own group first.

From Haaretz:

Israel may not be Nazi, nor even a fascist state. Yet it is a member of the same terrible family, the family of evil states. Just consider these acts of evil perpetrated by the state…

After we’ve cited nationalism and racism, hatred and contempt for Arab life, the security cult and resistance to the occupation, victimhood and messianism, one more element must be added without which the behavior of the Israeli occupation regime cannot be explained: Evil. Pure evil. Sadistic evil. Evil for its own sake. Sometimes, it’s the only explanation.
Eva Illouz described its signs (“Evil now,” Haaretz Hebrew edition, July 30). Her essay, which challenges the idea of the banality of evil, considers the national group as the source of the evil. Using philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept, she finds a “family resemblance” between the Israeli occupation and history’s evil regimes. This similarity does not mean that Israel is Nazi, nor even fascist. And yet it is a member of the same terrible family, the family of evil states. It’s a depressing and brilliant analysis.
The evil that Illouz attributes to Israel is not banal, it cannot happen anywhere, and it has political and social roots that are deeply embedded in Israeli society. Thus, Illouz joins Zeev Sternhell, who warned in his impressive and resounding essay about the cultural soil out of which fascism is now growing in Israel (“The birth of fascism,” Haaretz Hebrew edition, July 7).
But alongside these analyses, we must also present a brief history of evil. We must present the instances that combine to create a great and horrific picture, a picture of Israeli evil in the territories, so as to stand up to those who deny the evil. It is not the case of the individual – Sgt. Elor Azaria, for example, who is being tried for the death of a subdued Palestinian assailant in Hebron – but the conduct of the establishment and the occupation regime that proves the evil. In fact, the continuation of the occupation proves the evil. Illouz, Sternhell and others provide debatable analyses on its origins, but whatever they are, it can no longer be denied.
One case is like a thousand witnesses: the case of Bilal Kayed. A young man who completed a prison term of 14.5 years – his entire sentence – without a single furlough, without being allowed to at least say goodbye by phone to his dying father; a clear sign of evil.
About six weeks ago, Kayed was getting ready for his release. A representative of the Shin Bet security service – one of the greatest agencies of evil in Israel – even showed him a photograph of the home his family had built for him to stir him up even more ahead of his release. And then, as his family waited impatiently for him at the crossing point and Kayed grew ever more excited in his cell, he was informed that he was being thrown into administrative detention for at least another six months, without trial and without explanation.
Since then, he has been on hunger strike. He is cuffed to his bed. His family is not allowed to see him. Prison guards never leave his room and the lights are not turned out for a moment. Evil.
Only evil can explain the state’s conduct toward Kayed – only an evil state acts this way. The arbitrary announcement, at the last moment, of a senseless detention is abuse, and the way he has been treated since then is also abuse.
Only evil can explain the detention last week of another young man, Hiran Jaradat, whose brother Arif (who had Down syndrome) was killed in June and whose father died two days ago. He is under arrest for “incitement on Facebook” and was not released to attend his father’s funeral. Evil.
The continuation of the detention of poet Darin Tatur – evil. The destruction of the tiny swimming pool that the residents of Khirbet Tana in the northern West Bank had built for themselves – evil. The confiscation of water tanks from a community of shepherds in the Jordan Valley in the July heat – evil.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Gideon Levy In Haaretz: ‘Stop Living in Denial, Israel Is an Evil State’

Marc Gafni Teaching at Tantric Sex School

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Forward: Applications are now being accepted for a year-long course on New Age tantric sex, which include instruction on “total body orgasms,” “Prayer Sexing” and “Pleasure Dharma.” Classes begin in October and applicants who enroll before August 15 receive a generous discount.

The instructor? Controversial one-time rabbi Marc Gafni.

Gafni, a New Age guru and former rabbi accused of abuses of power through his career, including molestation of a teenage girl, has another venture — as “wisdom teacher in residence” at the Institute for Integral Evolutionary Tantra.

“We need to be willing to stand with each other in sexuality,” Gafni wrote in an introductory message on the website of Integral Evolutionary Tantra. “We need to learn what that means with all of its complexity, with all of its shadows.”

“The sexual is the ultimate Spiritual Master,” Gafni wrote.

A one-year course at the school, starting this fall and held over six weekends in New York City, with 16 bi-weekly online workshops, costs $5,750. There are nine “total body orgasm” sessions and students are also allowed two “interactive online sessions.”

Applicants may chose to enroll in a “two-year transformational program and a four-year practitioner program” after which they will be a “Certified Outrageous Eros Relationship & Sexuality Practitioner.” Applicants must send in a completed application form, wth a letter of recommendation, and go through an interview process before being accepted into the program.

The Institute for Integral Evolutionary Tantra is a partner organization of the Center for Integral Wisom, Gafni’s think tank. The program incorporates “Integral and Evolutionary Theory,” New Age concepts that Gafni has helped shape. The institute is led by Kristina Kincaid, a member of Center for Integral Wisdom. Gafni has been involved with the institute since at least 2013, when he co-taught a weekend workshop including guidance on “how to move though the abuse of the sexual to sexual integrity.”

…The spiritual side of sex and intimacy have long been central to Gafni’s teaching. His books include titles like “The Erotic and the Holy,” and “Mystery of Love” and deal with topics like “the exile of the erotic into the sexual.”

Gafni’s defenders, who have stuck beside him despited the controversy, say that Gafni has what they call an overwhelmingly magnetic physical presence, which some call Eros.

“Marc himself is a powerful receiver [of Eros] and transmitter of it,” Adam Bellow, who is advising the Center for Integral Wisdom, told Tablet Magazine last year. “I also have no trouble believing that in his early life he had little understanding or control over this powerful gift.”

Kinkaid, who helms the tantric institute, praised Gafni’s teaching on Eros in a 2015 public letter. “I had the profound honor and wild pleasure of … supporting Marc as the Living, Breathing, Alive, Aflame, Awakened, Dharma as he liberated Eros,” Kinkaid wrote. “Deepest Bow Ever to our Beloved Teacher for all he is, all he gives and all he lives! Amen!”

Gafni’s latest title then, as a teacher-in-residence at a institute offering courses in “Mystic Sexing,” fits well into this pattern.

“I was convinced from an early age that religion had lost what I believed must have been its original erotic vitality,” Gafni reflected in one of his books. “I knew that the sexual, if liberated and ethically expressed, must somehow hold the mystery of return to the much larger-than-sexual Eros.”

Posted in Marc Gafni | Comments Off on Marc Gafni Teaching at Tantric Sex School

The complex, secret path to becoming an Orthodox Jew

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jewish Journal: Esther lives in the Pico-Robertson area with her Israeli-born husband and three children. She wears long skirts, speaks fluent Hebrew and has mastered the use of a fedora as a head covering when she goes to synagogue.
But in 2005, she was a prospective convert looking for answers. She and her husband, whom she’d already legally married, had been sleeping for months in separate bedrooms of their West Hollywood apartment. A rotating shomer, or guard, drawn from among a group of friends who volunteered to sleep on their couch, made sure they adhered to the separation mandated by the strict process of Orthodox conversion.
At some point, it began to dawn on the couple that to get a marriage certificate in Israel — which is what they wanted — the rabbi supervising Esther’s conversion, Zvi Block of Beis Midrash Toras HaShem, might not cut it for the Rabbinate, whose standards they were having trouble discerning.
They’d heard of other rabbis who claimed they could vouch for her Jewish status, but weren’t sure who to trust.
“There was a lot of weird alternatives that we could have gone through,” Esther, who also asked that her real name not be used to protect her privacy, told the Journal. “But it just didn’t sound right, and it didn’t sound legit. We wanted to make sure the way that we did it is totally legit, because it’s going to affect our kids. I want my kids to be able to marry whoever they want to marry.”
After she immersed herself in the mikveh, or ritual bath, she considered herself a Jew and thus bound by the modesty code of shomer negiah not to touch any man who was not her husband by Jewish law — including the man to whom she was civilly married.
“All of a sudden, that momentum crashed to a halt,” she said of the spiritual journey that had been accelerating through the process of finding a congregation and adopting Jewish customs.
She and her husband had arrived at a frustrating sort of nuptial limbo: They wanted badly to marry under Jewish law in Israel, but couldn’t get a clear answer on whether their conversion would be accepted. But as it happened, a cousin of her husband’s friend worked in a regional branch of the Rabbinate and was able to help.
He faxed them a list of names in Hebrew and English. He told them the list was a secret, for their eyes only, and if anybody asked, it didn’t come from him.
“ ‘Nobody knows this, but this is a list of the rabbis the Rabbinate recognizes to do conversion in the United States,’ ” Esther said the bureaucrat told them.
Sitting at her dining room table with a blue folder in front of her that contains documents related to her conversion, Esther pulled out four pages she said the man faxed her with the names, addresses and telephone numbers of a list of U.S. rabbis.
Their suspicions were confirmed: Block, their L.A. rabbi, was not on the list.
A few months later, Esther and her husband were on a plane to Monsey, a hamlet in upstate New York with a large Chasidic population, where a local rabbinical court performed her conversion. Shortly after, the two were married in Israel.

Posted in Conversion, Orthodoxy | Comments Off on The complex, secret path to becoming an Orthodox Jew

10 reasons why Persian Jews support Trump

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Afshine Ash Emrani writes for the Jewish Journal:

1. The accusations against Trump are overblown by a biased and hostile media that easily forgive Clinton’s criminal investigation but exaggerate Trump’s speech. In all of his years in business and during his television show, “The Apprentice,” not once was Trump accused of bigotry or misogyny. This political bullying was also used with past Republican candidates, most recently calling George W. Bush “dumb.”

2. I prefer an ugly truth to a beautiful lie. As a lifetime politician, Clinton sugarcoats her lies, whereas Trump speaks with honesty. Nixon’s Watergate pales in comparison to Clinton’s email leaks. Former CIA Director David Petraeus was prosecuted for sharing intelligence, while the media and President Barack Obama protect Clinton. Democrats dismiss her WikiLeaks lies because she is well composed when she lies, and they focus on Trump’s harsh and unedited speech because it’s raw.

3. We ran away from radical Islam and don’t want it to follow us here. Unlike Europe, Trump will deal with Jihadists head on. Islamist extremists respond only to strength. The left’s political correctness shows Islamists our weakness and helps them thrive. Clinton’s policies led to the rise of ISIS. She led the invasion of Libya. Trump wants to protect the United States and hates terrorists. America can’t become Europe. Look at Chancellor Angela Merkel’s troubles in Germany. Listen to the people of England. Brexit was a vote against radical Islamists entering as refugees from countries known to export terrorists. We need a better vetting process. We need more secure boarders.

Posted in Donald Trump, Iran | Comments Off on 10 reasons why Persian Jews support Trump

Henry Miller On How Immigration Changes The Old Neighborhood

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

From The Tropic of Capricorn:

The actual boundary was Grand Street, which led to Broadway Ferry, but this street meant nothing to me, except that it was already beginning to be filled with Jews. No, North Second Street was the mystery street, the frontier between two worlds. I was living, therefore, between two boundaries, the one real, the other imaginary – as I have lived all my life. There was a little street, just a block long which lay between Grand Street and North Second Street, called Fillmore Place. This little street was obliquely opposite the house my grandfather owned and in which we lived. It was the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my life. It was the ideal street – for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician. In fact this was just the sort of street it was, containing just such representatives of the human race, each one a world unto himself and all living together harmoniously and inharmoniously, but together, a solid corporation, a dose-knit human spore which could not disintegrate unless the street itself disintegrated.

So it seemed, at least. Until the Williamsburg Bridge was opened, whereupon there followed the invasion of the Jews from Delancey Street, New York. This brought about the disintegration of our little world, of the little street called Fillmore Place, which like the name itself was a street of value, of dignity, of light, of surprises. The Jews came, as I say, and like moths they began to eat into the fabric of our lives until there was nothing left by this moth-like presence which they brought with them everywhere. Soon the street began to smell bad, soon the real people moved away, soon the houses began to deteriorate and even the stoops fell away, like the paint. Soon the street looked like a dirty mouth with all the prominent teeth missing, with ugly charred stumps gaping here and there, the lips rotting, the palate gone. Soon the garbage was knee deep in the gutter and the fire escapes filled with bloated bedding, with cockroaches, with dried blood. Soon the Kosher sign appeared on the shop windows and there was poultry everywhere and lax and sour pickles and enormous loaves of bread. Soon there were baby-carriages in every areaway and on the stoops and in the little yards and before the shop fronts. And with the change the English language also disappeared; one heard nothing but Yiddish, nothing but this sputtering, choking, hissing tongue in which God and rotten vegetables sound alike and mean alike.

We were among the first families to move away, following the invasion. Two or three times a year I came back to the old neighbourhood, for a birthday or for Christmas or Thanksgiving. With each visit I marked the loss of something I had loved and cherished. It was like a bad dream. It got worse and worse. The house in which my relatives still lived was like an old fortress going to ruin; they were stranded in one of the wings of the fortress, maintaining a forlorn, island life, beginning themselves to look sheepish, hunted, degraded. They even began to make distinctions between their Jewish neighbours, finding some of them quite human, quite decent, dean, kind, sympathetic, charitable, etc. etc. To me it was heartrending. I could have taken a machine gun and mowed the whole neighbourhood down, Jew and Gentile together.

It was about the time of the invasion that the authorities decided to change the name of North Second Street to Metropolitan Avenue. This highway, which to the Gentiles had been the road to the cemeteries, now became what is called an artery of traffic, a link between two ghettoes. On the New York side the riverfront was rapidly being transformed owing to the erection of the skyscrapers. On our side, the Brooklyn side, the warehouses were piling up and the approaches to the various new bridges created plazas, comfort stations, pool rooms, stationery shops, ice cream parlours, restaurants, clothing stores, hock shops, etc. In short everything was becoming metropolitan, in the odious sense of the word.

Posted in Immigration, Jews | Comments Off on Henry Miller On How Immigration Changes The Old Neighborhood