Jerusalem

Danièle Thompson’s Avenue Montaigne (Fauteuils d’Orchestre), from a screenplay by  read more »

At 10 a.m. Mayor Bloomberg will tour parts of Sderot in Israel with a pool report to be filed by Michael Saul of the Daily News.

At 10:45 a.m. Bloomberg will announce renovation of Jerusalem's main ambulance center and blood bank, in Jerusalem.

At noon, Councilman Leroy Comrie will introduce a resolution at City Hall calling for a moratorium on the N-word.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly will give the keynote speech at a Harper's Bazaar anticounterfeiting summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

At 12:15 Elinor Tatum, editor in chief of New York Amsterdam News, will speak at Bronx Community College's Freshman Convocation.

At 1 p.m. Red Cross officials will release a report on the lessons learned from major urban disasters on West 49th Street.

At 1 p.m. the supervisor of North Hempstead will deliver the annual State of the Town address at George Washington Manor Restaurant in Roslyn.

Long Island AARP members will demand drug affordability outside the campaign office of Craig Johnson. At 1:30, the group will do the same outside the campaign office of Maureen O'Connell.

At 1:30 p.m. at City Hall, Councilman Eric Gioia will call for the city and state to divest pension funds invested in Sudan.

Starting at 2 p.m., the City Bar Justice Center will host a small business legal clinic at the Flushing Library.

At 3 p.m. Bloomberg will meet with the families of Israeli soldiers.

At 3:30 p.m. education advocates will call for the passage of a New York Bill of Rights for Adult Education on the City Hall steps.

At 4 p.m. Bloomberg will meet with acting Israeli President Dalia Itzik.

At 6 p.m. Bloomberg will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

A documentary about the Atlantic Yards project will be shown at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

And First Lady Laura Bush will speak at the Woman's Day Red Dress Award near Columbus Circle.

At 6:30 p.m., "Bamako," a documentary about African development and the economy, will be shown at Columbia University.

At 7 p.m., Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz will give his State of the Borough speech at Steiner Studios.

The Public Service Commission will hold a public meeting on the proposed gas rate increase and the proposed merger of National Grid and KeySpan at The Petrides School on Staten Island.

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum will speak on the work-family dilemma facing poor working mothers at Barnard Hall on West 117th Street.

And Amadou Diallo's mother and former mayor David Dinkins host the screening of the documentary, "Death of Two Sons," in honor of the eighth anniversary of the Diallo shooting, at the Riverside Church.

-- Azi Paybarah

A founding father and jet-setter, a kibbutznik and a bon vivant, a secular man in an Orthodox city,  read more »

Last night Brit Tzedek, a group that opposes the Israel lobby from within the Jewish community, staged a presentation by two members of Combatants for Peace, an organization of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian resistance fighters working for a two-state solution. About 60 people turned out in the basement of Beth Elohim, a Reform temple in Brooklyn.

A table was set up on the dais. I recognized the Palestinian at once. He wore a pressed blue shirt and khakis, had a trimmed mustache. Sulaiman Al Hamri walked with a steel crutch. A smallish Jewish kid pulled out a chair for him, a mophead in his 20s with a string bracelet and jeans and old beaten shoes. Now I waited for the kid to bring in the Israeli. Then he sat down next to Al Hamri and I realized he was the Israeli. Just a kid. Elik Elhanan.

Elhanan introduced them. "We are not professors or experts. We did not come here to tell you the truth or what is absolutely right. We came here to tell you our stories and opinions."

Al Hamri told his story first, about spending 4-1/2 years in Israeli prisons. I'll blog about this in days to come, I want to tell Elhanan's story now.

Elhanan is a student in Tel Aviv, 29. He grew up in Jerusalem and as a boy, he did not realize there was a conflict in the Middle East. For he never thought about it, and when the time came that he did, he didn't see that he had any part of it. "I have no problem with the Palestinians, no fight with them." At 18, he joined the Army for the usual reasons. Out of a sense of duty, and privilege, and wanting to be part of something bigger than himself.

His consciousness changed. Over the next three years, he realized, "I am part of this conflict, I can't escape it."

Several events had taken place that had "obliged" him to see the larger issues. In some, he had found himself "an aggressor." He didn't want to go into these events, he said dismissively. They had made him aware of the "discrepancies between the very lofty discourse describing what we are doing and the reality on the ground.

"But the most influential event, I found myself all of a sudden, a victim. On the 4th of September 1997 two suicide bombers left Nablus and killed five people in Jerusalem. 180 people were injured. Among those killed was my sister Smadari and her friend. They were going to school." A third friend was so critically injured she is still not the same.  read more »

What an irony, that a war advanced by many as an alternative to forging a peace in Jerusalem—indeed who saw it as a clean break from such negotiations—has had the opposite effect.

And how revealing, that in seizing on the Golan provision of the report as one of its greatest challenges, Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell just now on MS-NBC both described the return of these high, watered lands as something "we" were being asked to do: Americans, American politicians. As though we might snap our fingers and this ally in the Middle East would respond. The Baker report was also forthright on this point. "No American Administration—Democrat or Republican—will ever abandon Israel."

• The world doesn't need another "wellness community" real estate article, but luckily Forbes' entry into the genre includes the following: "[W]hat is happening is the boomers have spent the whole time in the office, and they somewhat forgot themselves," and "It's not just about going to a gym. It's not about working on your mind a little bit." [Forbes]
• From the Lights of Dyker Heights to the 'Burg and Bergen Beach, Gowanus Lounge has the full guide to Brooklyn's glowing holiday cheer. Prospect Park, lord bless them, has 600,000 lightbulbs alone. [G.L.]
• Here's a grossly Manhattanized version of the news above: Sachs Fifth Avenue's yearly yuletide celebration will only consume "the energy equivalent of three toaster ovens." Green Design is officially chic. [Interior Design]
• Jonathan Miller has a must-read analysis of real estate bubble blogging, written (in part) as a response to a recent PBS piece. Mr. Miller's conclusion? "Lord help us." [Matrix]
• Jewish Condo News of the Year: A press release we got on Thursday brags that Riverdale's "Kosher-smart" condominium has "secured the approval of the community." Architect David Mandl admits that the community "was weary of the project," but apparently the golden Jerusalem Stone at the base won them over. More gold, after the jump.
- Max Abelson  read more »
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JERUSALEM, Israel—I’ve never been a war correspondent, and this failing has sometimes gn  read more »

JERUSALEM, Israel, Aug.  read more »

JERUSALEM, Israel—I’ve never been a war correspondent, and this failing has sometimes gnawed at  read more »

JERUSALEM, Israel, Aug.  read more »

I'm freshly returned from Israel and want to get down my impressions. Mine was a political trip but it was also personal. I'll begin with the personal.

The best thing about my trip was the feeling of making a full circle on my life as a young Jew, a life I began to move away from, say 20 years ago. I've never fully resolved that movement personally; and this trip was an encounter with the more-Jewish person I might have been, that maybe my community intended for me to be, but I'm not. There was some grief in that—I learned to read Hebrew as a boy, and now I was seeing Hebrew everywhere, and not knowing what to make of it—but there was also a feeling of reconciliation. Frankly, I liked wearing a yarmulke as I walked around Jerusalem, after visiting friends on Sabbath, but I saw that I don't want to be a Jew in the nationalistic way that Israeli society extols.

That said, I found I had some pride in Israel's achievement. It is amazing that this country leaped up from a fairly rural society to a modern one in 60 years. That's my people's achievement. They were focused and determined to make something to show the world, and did. I don't think much of Israeli architecture (and I despise the destruction and modernization in the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, but the roads, the journalism, the cultural life are impressive. And there are the institutions of a modern state. An Arab intellectual I spent some time with in Jerusalem expressed rage toward Israel for the way it's treated his people, but he also expressed awe for its institutions, and he's hoping that democracy will rub off on the Arab world—the free speech, the rule of law, democratic institutions.

On to politics. I went to Israel because I've said again and again in the last few months that the United States should not be joined at the hip to Israel. I come back feeling more strongly about that position than I did when I left. Allies, yes. Joined at the hip, no way.  read more »

Two nights ago on CNN, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dore Gold in Jerusalem and identified him as Israel's former Ambassador to the U.N. The polished Gold offered, as usual, an articulate statement of Israeli attitudes toward the war effort. "Well for most Israelis who see this—" he began. Gold lives in Jerusalem but interestingly, he is also a "scholar" at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, paid a whopping $96,000 a year for his services.

The curious thing is that you would never learn this on the AEI website, or from Gold's bio at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, of which he is president. The relationship is unspoken. I only know about it because AEI files 990 reports as a nonprofit that are collected by Guidestar.org. In these federal filings, AEI lists its highest-paid contractors; while almost all the others have been Americans, Dore Gold shows up every year from 2001-2004 (the last year filed), getting $96,000 a year as a scholar in Jerusalem.

The question here is why aren't AEI and Gold up-front about the relationship, why don't they brag about the association? $96,000 a year is a lot of money—far more than the average professor receives—yet AEI doesn't publicly list Gold as a scholar, and Gold doesn't list his status publicly. Indeed, Gold has published two books during his interval as an AEI scholar, Hatred's Kingdom, an attack on Saudi Arabia, and Tower of Babble, an attack on the U.N., and in neither book does he acknowledge AEI's support. Let me say it again: $384,000 is a lot of money for a writer—if someone gave me a fraction of that much when I was writing a book, their name would be all over the product. Nope, mum's the word. And though AEI lists other contracted scholars on its website, like John Makin and Roger Bate, it says not a word about Gold, except when he appears at an occasional event, and then nothing about his being a "scholar" with AEI.

It's like they're trying to hide something. I asked Gold about this at an AEI event a year ago and he brushed me off, saying there was nothing under-wraps about it, and he'd henceforth identify the AEI connection in his writings. My searches indicate this was an idle statement on his part, he hasn't done so.

My guess is AEI is justifiably defensive about its largesse to a rightwing Israeli pol and former high government official—who's not much of a "scholar"—because it raises a troublesome issue: the failure to make any distinction between American interests and Israeli interests, at a thinktank purportedly devoted to American concerns. As Walt and Mearsheimer wrote in their paper on the Israel lobby, "Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy [etc.] These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel."

Anyone got a better theory?

If you want to understand Muslim anger toward the West, this picture is helpful, for it shows one of the great griefs of Jerusalem. Taken two Fridays ago, by an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, it shows Muslim men, having been barred by Israeli soldiers from entering the Old City of Jerusalem so as to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, simply plunking down in the grass outside the wall of the Old City to pray in the direction of the mosque.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque is one of the three holiest sites in the Muslim religion, sacred to 1 billion people who believe the messenger of God came to that place.

Israeli authorities routinely bar Muslim men under the age of 45 from entering the Damascus Gate of the Old City on Fridays to pray at the mosque because they fear terrorist incidents when large crowds enter the Old City. You can understand the Israeli security concerns, arising from the suicide bombers of the second intifadah; and yet the resulting restrictions underscore the resentments created by Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and the Old City, as well as by its occupation of the West Bank: Christians and Muslims often feel discriminated against. Just last Friday angry men clashed with police, and the police employed stun grenades.

By the way, Jordanian rule of Jerusalem, which lasted from 1949 to 1967, was even worse. Jews couldn't enter the Old City, couldn't get to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, where the First and Second temple were destroyed (and where some religious nuts now want to build a third temple, and do what with the Al-Aqsa Mosque I don't know). Here is a famous photo of Israeli soldiers arriving at the Western Wall in 1967:

Jerusalem is truly an international city and one filled with seekers of all description (includng many messianic nutjobs). Lauren Likkel's picture demonstrates the unfairness of the Israeli occupation, and also why it is so important that the U.S. take a more evenhanded stance in this holy tinderbox, to turn down the temperature across the Arab world. There's got to be a better way to manage things than depriving religious people of access to a sacred site.  read more »

Joey Cavod has pointed out Biblical errors in an article I wrote for the Observer this past week. In explaining the ancient attachment of Jews to the West Bank, I wrote, "David bought Shem, and that is Jerusalem. Joseph bought Nablus. Abraham bought Hebron when he wanted to bring Sarah to this place."

Joey writes:

Schem and Nablus are the same places. Schem is the original name and Nablus is the name that the Arabs gave Schem a couple of thousand years (around 650 CE) after it was settled.

Schem is not Jerusalem. Joseph's tomb is in Schem. David has nothing to do with Schem. According to the Bible, Abraham bought caves in Hebron to bury Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah in.

According to the Bible, David bought the land for the Temple in Jerusalem, Joseph's father bought land in Schem and Abraham bought land in Hebron.

I thank Joey for the good word...

JERUSALEM—On July 26, the Israeli army suffered a historic blow when eight men from the elite  read more »

JERUSALEM—On July 26, the Israeli army suffered a historic blow when eight men from the elite Gola  read more »

I'm in a little town in Israel near the Lebanon border, full of reporters. They're flirting, over their expense accounts, as the shells are fired nearby, and the rockets land. At dinner, the restaurant's dog shoved in under my table, afraid of the explosions. Reminded me of home, where the dog is thrown by fireworks and thunder. You tell yourself it's thunder and you acclimate pretty fast.

This is, to be sure, not the same as the experience in Southern Lebanon. Who is eating a rib steak with a Stella a few miles from the border there, sending it back because it's too rare, needs another minute on the grill? I stayed at a place in Jerusalem staffed by Palestinian Christians and it really is true they watch al-Jazeera day and night. And al-Jazeera provides tape, over and over, that we wouldn't see back in the States—children's bodies being pulled from houses, handled like oversized dolls. In East Jerusalem the Arab street is unhinged. Every conversation you have soon rises in decibels with repetitions of the word "justice!" I nod and smile and agree. The hatred in Jersualem is mutual and scary.

The bus I took north was full of soldiers, their rifles dangling off their backs. They throw these things around a little too casually for me. But you get hardboiled in a hurry. This is my first time in a war zone so forgive a little Hemingwayesque allusion. You see normal village life going on but with only a few hard cases doing so. A kid on a tractor, a boy riding a bicycle, some old people having dinner on their porch, a man tilling his fields. Mostly this pretty (and affluent) town not far from Kiryat Shemona is shut down amid the banging. Soldiers and reporters move past one another on their cellphones in the restaurant with the same abstracted air. Not a lot of laughter.

Nearby's the Golan Heights. I can see legendary places, Mt. Hermon, Shebaa Farms, the Golan. How many times has Israel been fighting its neighbors here? In my hotel lobby there are photographs of Jewish lands lost to Lebanon at the drawing of the '49 armistice line. And a photo of the IDF arriving at the Wailing Wall in '67. Able to pray at last, after years.

Now Muslim men are prevented from praying at the Al-Aqsa mosque on Fridays, because soldiers restrict access at the Damascus Gate to the Old City, so they pray in the street outside the walls of the city. Cycle of violence. Not that I'm pulling for Hizbullah. I want to sleep tonight...

A couple years back a publisher who signed my (meager) checks asked me how I could justify being so critical of American policy in the Middle East and Israel when I'd never been to Israel. I'd traveled all over creation, never to Jerusalem. I answered that I'd never been to Vietnam or Iraq either, and it didn't stop me from having opinions about them. Still he had a point. Now that I'm doing this blog his point has gotten even bigger. Well I'm leaving in an hour or two. And about time, too.

I don't have any grand plans for this trip, I want to bounce around, see it for myself, see the dream, also the despair.

My family didn't give me Israel dreams when I was a kid, partly because they didn't travel, period. Still, a family that was extremely close to ours made aliyah in 1967, after the 6-Day War, and we had that connection. I saw pictures of my boyhood pal Michael in uniform on a tank, my mother kept me up on her friends' writings. It never occured to me to do the Birthright thing when I was young—organizations pay for Jewish kids to go out there, up to age 26. In a sense I'm treating this as a birthright experience at 50. I'm less interested in the politics than the people. I have a few names and I'm going to see where they take me. I'm thankful to the readers of this blog for finally getting me off my duff. Shalom.

The Forward (in a fine piece of reporting on a conference on the future of the Jewish people arranged by a leading Jerusalem thinktank, to which no women were invited) quotes feminist leader Shifra Bronznick, and on third reference to her notes that she is "the life partner of Forward editor-in-chief J.J. Goldberg."

Good for the Forward on two counts. Disclosing the connection. And for the unconventional descriptor. Let 100 flowers bloom.

Some commenters have gathered on my Juan Cole post to slag Cole. I need to defend him.

One thing they're angry about is that Cole is being considered for a top job at Yale. They say that he doesn't have the publications to merit such an appointment. Wrong on 2 counts. Cole has a number of books to his name. And isn't it rather silly that people who use the internet to exchange ideas seem to regard the internet as chopped liver when it comes to serious scholarship? Cole's blog, Informed Comment, is itself an act of considerable scholarship. He is constantly reading, synthesizing, and supplying research to others. This is what scholars do. And why are these critics so worked up about Yale? It is the prestige issue. They don't want Cole to gain any more legitimacy for his ideas than he has. Michigan is already Arab-American-occupied territory. Well, guess what—if he goes to Yale, he'll probably have less time to do his very influential blog.

Something else that upsets them, Cole is trying to throw the brakes on Iran war-mongering by questioning the intelligence. Maybe we should listen, inasmuch as the last time we got war-drum intelligence about a foreign country in the Middle East we ended up occupying it disastrously. Specifically, Cole questions the translation of the statement in Persian by Iran's president Ahmadinejad that he aims to "wipe Israel off the map." He says Ahmadinejad actually quoted Khomeini: "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Ahmadinejad''s comments about Israel are frightening; I agree. How should we react? For me, the larger issue is, To what extent will our foreign policy respond to Israel's interests? From hatred of the U.N., to the invasion of Iraq, to the demonization of European opinion, to the portrayal of Arabs as uncivilized, to the refusal to engage Syria as a possible partner in helping us out of the Iraq mess—again and again the neocons and fellow travelers have identified our interests and Israel's as congruent. The fellow travelers are often liberals. Like Paul Berman, who in his book Terror and Liberalism, endorsed the Iraq war in large measure because of suicide attacks in Israel. Or Tom Friedman, saying on Slate: that the only way to counter suicide bombers, at the WTC and in Israel, "was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something."

That kind of hysterical thinking has helped produce great suffering, and waves of further hysteria. At least Cole is trying to figure out what the other side is saying.

I went home for Passover yesterday and felt guilty. I feel close to my family but little closeness to my tribe. I am less Jewish than I have ever been, and certain statements I have made in the last year, both out loud and in my head, about my problem with religion, about official Judaism countenancing the treatment of the Palestinians, seem to have dissolved some of the knots that held me close. Saying the words of the Passover seder, I did not feel the thrill I sometimes feel. I wondered, Who is this story for? Whose lives does it apply to? When we say, Next year in Jerusalem, what does it mean that Israel controls all of Jerusalem, with the holy sites so meaningful to so many different tribes? I was silenter than I've ever been at a seder. I pulled faces for my nephew, next to me, and made him laugh, but more often I felt suffocated by selfish Jewish concerns and troubled by the knowledge that I have broken not a faith, I don't know that I ever had much, but like a blood oath to a people.

There is a portion of the seder text that talks about how the different sons respond to the story. There is the wise son, the contrary son, the simple son and so forth, each of them talking to his dad. The point of this episode is that you are supposed to be the wise son, who asks of his father, Why did the Lord do this for me? The contrary son asks, Why did the Lord do this for you? Excluding himself. It struck me last night that I am the contary son. I might wish that it was otherwise, and indeed the seder text seems to suggest that a kid might choose. But I have made my choices and am now having to live with them. It's not that I regret them, but I do feel guilty and awful about some of the consequences. Yet I feel that in the Seder text there is even some room for the contrary son. He has his place. The father may be upset about it, but he has his place.  read more »

Gidi Dar’s Ushpizin, from a screenplay by Shuli Rand, has emerged as the strangest yet still e  read more »

We’ll Skip the Chipotle Hand Roll, Thanks!    read more »

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We thought it was finished.  read more »

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Jesse Jackson had a close call last week, narrowly missing being publicly exposed as a staunch frien  read more »

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The death and funeral of Katharine Graham, proprietor of The Washington Post , has been one of those  read more »

"My ex-husband was always a pain about his food," said an English friend over lunch at Craft.  read more »

JERUSALEM-Three words, if Palestine becomes Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate Waterloo: Don't blame Su  read more »

Out of Place: A Memoir , by Edward W. Said. Alfred A.  read more »

"Do we want Hillary Clinton to be our next Senator?" Representative Michael McNulty asked the crowd  read more »

If he is as smart as he thinks he is, Rudolph Giuliani must be starting to realize just how formidab  read more »

It's an unexpected pleasure to see David Hare on a Broadway stage, of all peculiar places.  read more »

Damascus Gate , by Robert Stone.  read more »

In the last installment of my serialized response to Shadows on the Hudson , Isaac Bashevis Singer's  read more »