Spain’s skimpy, ubiquitous, mass market clothing chain, Mango, is venturing where no Western retailer has been before--at least since the 2003 war--by opening a branch in Iraq, WWD reported today.

Undaunted by the political instability, sporadic violence, and relatively more modest style of dress that prevails in even the relatively peaceful, liberal Kurdish region of Northern Iraq, Mango’s president of expansion Isak Halfon told Women's Wear Daily that the one million people in the city of Arbil are “starving for something like this.”

Unlike Mango’s Western branches, the Iraqi flagship won’t carry the typical skin-tight, midriff-baring, cleavage-flaunting, provacative attire, but a conservative line designed by Lebanese designer Zuhair Murad, tailored to the Middle East.  read more »

Not to belabor the obvious, but my father was saying that these big sociological questions are going to be brokered and renegotiated beneath the surface, quietly, and Jews and gentiles will adjust to a new reality. Smart guy, my dad.

I'm an optimist. But I think what's happening right now in the Jewish community is part of it. Jews are being forced to confront the contradictions in Zionism (as playwright David Zellnik says, describing his play, "Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl"). Despite the AJC's best efforts, all Jews are Wrestling With Zion (to quote the title of Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner's great anthology on the subject that the AJC attacked). This is the water we're all swimming in now, questions about Zionism; and I'm betting that without fireworks, the next generation of Jews is going to think differently about this, the ground is changing under them.

It has also got the AJC into a fight it doesn't want with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a longtime friend of Israel, who is named in the report because of his column last summer saying the founding of Israel was a well-intentioned "mistake." Cohen is upset.

Among the first to call me after the Times piece appeared was the AJC itself. It apologized. It did not mean to include me with the others, and it would, its representative told me, soon set matters straight. It issued a news release saying that Rosenfeld's characterization of me does "not reflect the totality of [my] occasional writings on the Middle East."

Well, the AJC has not set matters straight with Cohen. It is still fiddling. On its website the AJC crows that it got the Times to run a correction of its characterization of the AJC as a "conservative" group. This is a pure expression of vanity (Jewish groups like to think of themselves as liberal). In the Jerusalem Post, David Harris, the AJC's director, goes on for several paragraphs about the good news that he obtained a correction, and then seeks to justify the report: "[T]he individuals [author Alvin] Rosenfeld mentions are on the political fringes in asserting that Israel has no right to exist and should either be destroyed or morphed into a so-called binational state, which means the end of Israel as we know it."

This is called digging yourself deeper into a hole.

They affirm the right of Palestinians to return to a remembered homeland, but negate Jews' right to repatriate themselves to their remembered homeland. Jewish nationhood alone is a scandal. Morally, this is no different than deciding that everyone but black Africans has the right to self-determination...

Gorenberg's analogy of the Palestinian refugees' claims to the claim of, say, a former Diaspora Californian like himself to emigrate to Israel out of ideas he studied in a yeshiva that include religious messianism (as he states in his book The End of Days) is highly problematic. I think Gorenberg, a wonderful journalist by the way, is wrong.

Zionism's DNA is being examined by American Jews. Tony Judt and Alisa Solomon are at last being heard widely, in their call on the American Jewish community to examine the religious nationalist ideology that has helped foster violence in the Middle East. Liberal integrationists like myself, who chose not to make aliyah, are at last being heard. Call it poison, call it illegitimate: the world seems interested in what we have to say.

Well, gee. That's actually what movement means, a rearrangement of the political hierarchy (of which that reporter is a part) to include a formerly marginalized group. The women's movement. The settlers' movement. The evangelical movement.

—In Australia, the Age today does a piece on perestroika in the Jewish community (saying that author Antony Loewenstein is leading a breakaway to challenge the Israel lobby), and The Age's sidebar exposes as objectionable a regular practice in the Jewish community: Zionists use the word "self-hating" to describe Jews who dissent from the program;

—In Washington last week, Theater J held a reading of the heterodox historical play I saw performed in N.Y. last spring, David Zellnik's amazing "Ariel Sharon Stands on the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl". The reading went well, before a good-sized crowd in the Jewish Community Center in Northwest D.C. No one jumped up and screamed antisemitism, they wanted to talk about Zionism.

—Australia again. Today's Australian features a sharp opinion piece by TAMU's Michael Desch, a Holocaust scholar, who hops on the self-hating thing again. Dismissing "Jews who deviate from the pro-Israel line" as "self-hating" is the kind of "dirty pool" regularly practiced by the lobby.  read more »

A few comments:

The Rev. Ralph Galen, minister of Andover's Unitarian Universalist Congregation and a member of Merrimack Valley People for Peace, said [Rabbi Robert] Goldstein's stance against Wheels of Justice has disappointed him. "The situation in the Middle East is so complex that it's already at a boiling point," said Galen, who helped bring The Wheels of Justice to neighboring North Andover two years ago with less resistance. "It just pushes us over and it's so hard to maintain our rationality, but we must."

Liberal Protestants used to be quiet about the Middle East, now they're demanding to be heard; the Presbyterian church, for instance, is debating divestment. This is part of the rage at Jimmy Carter: rightwing Jews want to keep the Middle East club exclusive. 2. Contrast the liberal churches' position with the strength that pro-Israel groups are drawing from the religious right. See Zev Chafets's new book, A Match Made in Heaven, about evangelicals' support for Israel, reviewed lately in Commentary Magazine. Chafets calls it the "wonderful Judeo-evangelical alliance." I wonder how wonderful it is. To preserve Israel from criticism, the American-Jewish community is being drawn further and further right.

At a Christmas party of people in the movie business two nights ago, I talked to three Jews. 1 was a movie producer who said he welcomed Jimmy Carter's statements about the Middle East and couldn't believe the smearing he was getting, then went off to play with his child by a gentile woman. With 2 and 3 I had longer conversations about Jewishness.

3 was a beautiful woman who it seemed to me had traveled widely, using the powers of her beauty, and her mind. She had grown up here then gone to live in the middle of the country, where she had married and had kids with a gentile. Now she was going out with a non-Jew back here. She told me she felt really Jewish; it was her "core." I found that moving. And her father had said to her, "Israel is very important." But she was afraid to examine Israel. From what she had heard it was a place that prized violence and ethnic chauvinism. That wasn't her way. The soul of Jewishness, she said, was to participate in the modern world, and see the best in everyone, and reach out for greatness in other groups and add our greatness to the mix unselfishly. "High five," I said, mimicking Borat when the hotel clerk reads him the telegram saying his wife has been eaten by a bear. We high-fived. Her boyfriend came over, and our conversation petered out.

On the East Coast I feel a lot more pressure to be Jewish-identified in a chauvinist way. People who live in New York tend to be more particularist-Jewish than California Jews. (It's no wonder that Michael Lerner, one Jew to endorse Jimmy Carter, is in S.F.) And affluent Jews on the east coast form the heart of the Israel lobby. They have been given that role, by history, by the Jewish people, by Israel—someone—to stand with Israel and insist that America do so too, because they believe that America if left to its own devices would abandon Israel.

I'm still in that high-five moment with 3, a core Jew, not feeling alienated, offering a non-chauvinist way of identifying Jewishly to an America that, mimicking Israel, is mired in a bloody, racial clash with the Arab world. Happy holidays.