The Jews, we well know, run Hollywood. But even the most unreconstructed anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist probably would never had anticipated a year like this: Three Jewish-themed films vying for the Best Picture nod on Sunday, and an Israeli contender up for Best Foreign Language Film.
True, the Oscars this year expanded the field of Best Picture hopefuls to 10. But thanks in part to that change, Sunday’s 82nd annual Academy Awards ceremony will offer considerable fodder for Semitic speculation.
Topping the Jewish favorites list is “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s brutal counterfactual fantasy in which the Jews get all sadistic and the Nazis get scalped.
At universities across the globe, the annual springtime ritual known as Israel Apartheid Week is kicking off, and Jewish students and pro-Israel groups have been readying themselves to respond in force.
Unlike past years, when intense pro-Palestinian activity in the wake of Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon caught many Jewish students off guard, this year the pro-Israel community is ready with initiatives of its own.
The largest effort, Israel Peace Week, is helping to coordinate responses at 28 campuses and counting. StandWithUs, the Los-Angeles based pro-Israel group, is promoting a U.S. speaking tour by Israeli soldiers to counter claims that the Israel Defense Forces engaged in widespread misconduct during 2009 offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
U.S. Jewish leaders pressed Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on incitement last week and the need to keep Israel a Jewish state.
At a meeting Feb. 18 in Jenin between Fayyad and a visiting delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Alan Solow, the chairman of the Jewish umbrella group, said the actions of the Palestinian leadership set back the cause of peace.
“When the Palestinian leadership visits and honors families of those who have murdered innocent Israeli civilians, or when produce is destroyed rather than used only because it originates from the west bank, that sets back our confidence of peace,” Solow said, according to a news release from the Conference of Presidents. “The Israeli prime minister is clear about Israel’s needs to be recognized as a Jewish state. Yet, not only do the Palestinians refuse to acknowledge Israel’s Jewish nature, but clearly state, in Article 19 of the Fatah constitution, that there must be an armed struggle with the Zionist entity.”
In the wake of the arrests of 11 University of California, Irvine students for disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Shalom Elcott, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, Calif., threw down the gauntlet.
UC-Irvine has long been caught in the thicket of the Israel wars, its campus notorious in the pro-Israel community for the intensity and often confrontational quality of discourse on the Middle East. But while some Jewish groups have pushed the administration to condemn inflammatory speakers sponsored by Muslim students, the university previously had been willing only to issue generic condemnations of hate speech on campus.
Gidi Grunberg at 16 fell in love with a boy at his Orthodox high school near Tel Aviv.
Consumed by guilt, he transferred to a high school that was more strictly religious, hopeful that with more rigorous Torah study his attraction to men would pass.
A product of Orthodox institutions, Grunberg eventually came to accept his homosexuality during his years of mandatory service in the Israeli army. But in his private life, he found himself faced with a choice between his sexual identity and his religious community.
“I prefer to be true to myself, and to accept myself, than being part of the community and living in a lie,” Grunberg told JTA. “I lost everything. I lost my friends from the yeshiva. I lost the youth movement. There were a lot of things at stake.”
For more than three years Ronen Shoval and Erez Tadmor, classmates at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have been building Im Tirtzu into a nationwide student network with chapters at nine Israeli universities.
But it wasn’t until last week, when the group ran an advertisement in several Israeli papers claiming that the much-maligned Goldstone report on Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war last winter would have been impossible without the contributions of Israeli NGOs supported by the New Israel Fund, that the pair found themselves in the international spotlight.
Tadmor and Shoval describe themselves as bookish, entrepreneurial types who have identified a gap in the Israeli psyche.
Shmuel Birnham’s road from Vancouver rabbi to official Jewish clergyman of the 2010 Winter Olympics began, in all places, at an interfaith service with the Dalai Lama.
During the Tibetan leader’s 2004 visit to Vancouver, Hong Chian, a local Buddhist doctor, invited Birnham to be one of the Jewish representatives at the service. When the Olympics rolled around, Chian, who serves on the multifaith committee for the Olympics, called on Birnham again — this time to head up the team of Jewish clergy providing spiritual support to visiting athletes.
When the call from Germany arrived at the Spector family home in Lenox, Mass., last month, the voice on the other end betrayed little of the excitement one would expect from a newly minted Olympian.
Laura Spector, 22, had qualified for the U.S. Olympic biathlon team that will be competing this month in Vancouver.
“It was a very quiet voice, and it was just, ‘Daddy, Hi it’s Laura. I made the team,’” her father, Jesse, recalled. “It was just like that. It was that quiet, from this 5-foot, 100-pound kid. It was probably a very emotional three to five seconds because her voice sounded as though, ‘Dad, I didn’t make the team.’ But she was so composed. It had its own — I don’t know — moment is the only way I can put it.”
JERUSALEM – The Conservative synagogue movement is launching a campaign to protest the recent questioning and possible prosecution of a leader of the group Women of the Wall.
For more than two decades, the group has been organizing regular women’s prayer services at the Western Wall and pressing for expanded worship rights at Judaism’s holiest pilgrimage site. Last week its chairwoman, Anat Hoffman, was summoned to a Jerusalem police station for questioning.
According to Hoffman, also director of the Reform movement’s Israel Religious Action Center and a former member of the Jerusalem City Council, she was questioned by police about her role in Women of the Wall, fingerprinted, and told that her case was being referred to the attorney general for prosecution.
NITZAN, Israel – More than four years after her family was ejected from their home in the Gaza Strip, Karen Sarfaty lives with her husband and four of their children in a small pre-fab house in this small town located about midway between the southern Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Ashdod.
Neither she nor her husband have found adequate employment. The compensation she received from the government is running out. Her daughter is only now beginning to overcome the trauma of their forced removal from Gaza. And while the lots allocated to them to build permanent houses are nearly ready, Sarfati says she lacks the money for construction.
“I have a lot of anger inside of me,” Sarfaty told JTA. “If [the evacuation] had to be, then it had to be. But at least if it had to be, it should have been done the right way.”
