Monday 3 May 2010

RubinReports: Obama Administration Continues to Supply Israel with Advanced Weapons

Obama Administration Continues to Supply Israel with Advanced Weapons

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By Barry Rubin

I have repeatedly pointed out that as of now the Obama Administration has never put any material pressure on Israel. There are wild rumors and irresponsible materials floating around to the contrary. They aren’t true.

As proof, for example, take the article by Barbara Opall-Rome in Defense News, May 3, 2010, “U.S. Backs Israeli Munitions Upgrades.” She writes of “ever-expanding bilateral security ties unharmed by the unusually high-profile political rift” that took place temporarily.

In fact, the United States is equipping Israel with GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs for its F-15I fighter-bombers and this will be followed by the same system on F-16I planes. These 250-pound bombs are called bunker busters because they are smart bombs that will go through more than six feet of reinforced concrete.

In addition, Israel has equipped F-15Is to carry the 5,000-pound-class GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrator, designed to burrow 100 feet into earth or 20 feet into concrete.

The Israel Air Force is also receiving the Laser-Guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions (LJDAM), developed by Boeing Integrated Defense Systems and Israel's Elbit Systems and able to direct smart bombs more accurately.

To put it bluntly, GBU-39s can be used against simpler installations like arms-smuggling tunnels dug by Hamas between Egypt and the Gaza Strip along with Hizballah field fortifications.

The GBU-28s could be fired at stronger Hizballah installations. They could also be used on Iranian nuclear weapons or missile installations some day. Clearly, the U.S. government is neither urging nor advocating such an action and may never do so. But it has not blocked the possibility in terms of weaponry either.

RubinReports: Obama Administration Continues to Supply Israel with Advanced Weapons

RubinReports: In Trouble: No Iran Sanctions This Summer? Unstable Palestinian Leadership

In Trouble: No Iran Sanctions This Summer? Unstable Palestinian Leadership

By Barry Rubin

Vice-President Joe Biden has said that there will be a sanctions' resolution on Iran ready by next week which is now this week. Really?

In trying to sound, as usual, tough toward Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drops in the idea that the United States and other countries are working to complete an agreement on sanctions against Iran by mid-June. In other words, they hope to have a plan—not sanctions--by then. So that means no sanctions before July or so. But even this deadline can slip again. And how minimal will the sanctions have to be to get them by the UN Security Council?

The whole sanctions’ effort is turning into a demonstration of Obama Administration incompetence.

RubinReports: In Trouble: No Iran Sanctions This Summer? Unstable Palestinian Leadership

Chesler Chronicles » Jews Not Wanted on Campus If They Support Israel—Not Even at Brandeis

Jews Not Wanted on Campus If They Support Israel—Not Even at Brandeis

Will Brandeis Withstand Being Intimidated, Shamed, in the matter of the Israeli Ambassador’s Right to Speak?

The world is watching. Will Brandeis turn out to be another version of the University of California at Irvine, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco, or will it continue to model individual achievement over mob rule, will it defend genuine free and academic speech?

Michael B. Oren, the distinguished historian and author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, the co-editor of New Essays on Zionism, and Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, has been invited to deliver the keynote address at Brandeis’s 2010 commencement exercises.

It is shocking but not surprising that a number of Brandeis students and faculty have denounced this choice while others applaud it. The denouncers claim that Ambassador Oren will be “political,” and as such “divisive” and “polarizing.” According to long-time activist and professor Gordon Fellman, “His role obligates him to defend Israeli policies…that includes defending the Israeli incursion into Gaza, housing policies of the occupation, and so on. I think for many people that’s a third rail. Why mess up a commencement with a third rail?”

I dunno. In 2006, Jordan’s Prince Hassan bin Talal delivered the keynote address at graduation. Students did not protest Jordan’s human rights record vis a vis the Palestinians both in 1970 and in 2010, or in terms of torturing its own citizens, nor its abysmal record on honor-related violence, including honor killings. Indeed, no one held Jordan accountable for its systematic past desecration of Jewish holy places and for its evacuation of Jews from the Jewish quarter in 1948. A Prince who represents a country and a regime that behaves in this way is as “political” as Oren could ever be. The only difference is that one man is an Arab, Muslim prince, the other is an intellectual Jew and an American-Israeli. Students did not create online petitions to debate the merits of choosing Jordan’s Prince as a speaker.

The Justice, Brandeis’s student newspaper, has published a range of views on Ambassador Oren. In a roundup of opinion, Jackie Saffir, Senator for the Class of 2010, is quoted as having said she was “disappointed” (even before she heard what Oren might have to say), that his “perspective is not a fresh one….worse, allowing him to speak might actually give people the idea that Brandeis is a Jewish school.”

Imagine the shame of that!

Brandeis students on both sides of this divide have now launched petitions and facebook groups. The fact that an almost equal number of students support and oppose Oren’s right to free speech has led some students to conclude that this alone “is reason enough for him not to speak.”

Please understand: I write this as the mother and mother-in-law of two former Brandeis students who both loved the school and as someone who once happily taught a course there. I have the fondest memories of Brandeis and deeply appreciate its commitment to high standards, diversity, debate, gender, religious, and racial equality, and its ability to make everyone feel warmly embraced.

However, this problem is bigger than this one instance; Brandeis has done nothing wrong. True, Brandeis has indulged many opposite points of view, including that of left liberalism, a view which has now turned on Israel with a vengeance. The question is only whether or how well the Brandeis community will now withstand the politically correct tides of anti-Semitism, censorship, and self-censorship, which threaten to engulf the world and the tiny Jewish state.

In 2003, I published The New Anti-Semitism. It effectively ruined my reputation as a pioneer feminist among my rapidly Palestinianized colleagues. But, I saw it then and I see it even more clearly now: This is open season on Israel, not only at the United Nations (which has legalized Jew hatred), and at every international human rights organization, but also in the media and on too many campuses in both the Islamic and Western worlds. Israel is the pariah Jew of the world, the designated scapegoat. Israel is the “Nazi, Apartheid state.” No one dares say the truth, which is that Islam is the largest practitioner of both gender and religious apartheid in the world and it is coming our way sooner rather than later. In Paris, mobs shouted “Kill the Jews” when Dreyfus was (falsely) accused and found guilty and they shouted this again in the early twenty first century.

As I’ve noted, what’s going on is so much bigger than Brandeis University and Ambassador Oren. Do the dissenting students and faculty at Brandeis really understand what is going on?

I fear not. Israel’s critics are as merciless and unbalanced in their criticism of Israel-only. Such critics fervently believe that their criticism is all that keeps both Judaism and Israel vital and honest. While holding an endangered Israel’s feet to the fire, these very critics practice compassion and understanding towards the non-Jewish barbarians of the Middle East and Islamic world. From their point of view, they are doing God’s work. The secularists and atheists among them believe that only Man (humanity) has the power and the mandate to change the world because there is no God. They plan to do just that no matter how many dead Jews and other civilians it will take.

What students and professors fail to understand, Orwell understands all too well. Israel is the world’s “Goldstein,” the one who is blamed for everything and whose permanent punishment is what diverts people from noticing who their real oppressors might be.

Indeed, the times are diabolically Orwellian. In the name of anti-racism, Jews are the only group whom it is fashionable, even necessary, to critique, even to “hate.” If you stereotype Jews and believe that the Jewish state should be destroyed or abolished, you are exercising free, politically correct speech. Thus, you will be funded and you will not lose your politically progressive reputation and friends. If, on the other hand, you support Jews and the Jewish state, you are deemed a racist and a fascist (except in insular Jewish groups). You will lose your friends and funding. And you will be heckled and menaced on campuses coast to coast and all across Europe, assuming that you are still invited to speak.

In February of 2010, Political Science Professor Martin Sherman found himself “disinvited” by the Israel Studies Program. Apparently, they feared that Sherman might be (gasp!) too much of an advocate for Israel, not enough of a harsh critic. Sherman is academic director of the Jerusalem Summit and research fellow in Security Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of The Politics of Water in the Middle East and Despots, Democrats and the Determinants of International Conflict, as well as articles in journals such as the Middle East Quarterly, The Journal of Strategic Studies, The Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, The Journal of Theoretical Politics, Nations and Nationalism, and Nationalism & Ethnic Politics. Like Professor Sherman, many others have also been disinvited or never invited. I was disinvited as a keynote speaker by the Cambridge University Women’s Studies program at their tenth anniversary celebration. I consider it an honor.

Even if a speaker might want to address a subject other than Israel (as Ambassador Oren conceivably might do), once it is known that one supports rather than condemns the Jewish state, one loses their credibility and their right to free, academic speech.

This has happened to me and to many other truth-tellers as well—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, ex-Muslim, and secular. We have all been heckled and menaced, interrupted, jeered and challenged as we tried to speak. We have all been condemned as “fascists,” “racists,” and “neo-conservatives.” Now, we all have to appear on campus with bodyguards. Yes, in America, land of the free and home of the brave.

Recently, Ambassador Oren got a taste of campus life at the University of California at Irvine where his speech was constantly interrupted ; the choreographed disruptions led to 11 student arrests. Now, he must be wondering what it will be like at Brandeis. At least Oren’s invitation has not been rescinded. In 2002, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech in Montreal at Concordia had to be canceled for security reasons.

How did this all come about?

First, it took years and years of Soviet, Arab League, Saudi, and Soros funded hate propaganda, doctored footage, Big Lies, all of which were meant to toughen people up for the simultaneous and subsequent legal, social, cultural, economic, and military blows against Israel. And, against Israeli officials.

Just as President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton publicly shamed Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu—but not Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah or Iran’s President Ahmadinejad; just as academics Mearsheimer and Walt condemned what they described as the Israel Lobby but did not mention the far more powerful Saudi Lobby; just as academics the world over continue to argue for boycotts against Israel, including against leftist Israeli academics (but do not suggest boycotts against Sudan, Iran, or Congo); just as intellectuals and First Amendment Freaks are busily romanticizing sophisticated misogynists and fascists such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Tariq Ramadan (but not the feminist hero Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was offered no post in Women’s Studies when she fled Holland for her life)—so, too, have the Islamist-ized mobs set upon individual Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as Israeli diplomats.

Just days ago, a pro-Palestinian mob tried to attack an Israeli diplomat outside the University of Manchester in the UK after she lectured at the university. Israel’s Deputy Ambassador, Talya Lador-Fresher, believed that the mob of 300 “genuinely wanted to physically hurt me. If I had not had the police and security team, I would have been beaten up…no foreign diplomat should have to go through what I went through.” Lador-Fresher’s previous speech had to be canceled for security reasons.

When the world stood by and did nothing to stop the Palestinian airplane hijackers and homicide bombers who attacked Israelis, that Intifada, that jihad, went global and we all inherited the whirlwind. As I wrote in 2003, “now we are all Israelis.” And, as we stand in long lines at airports the world over, our shoes in hand, our clothing in boxes, we do not curse the bombers and terrorists. That would be…profiling. If anything, we blame it on…Israel. For, if Israel did not exist (God forbid), then Al-Qaeda would lie down with the lambs, Sunni and Shia Muslims would stop blowing each other up while they pray, Hamas and Fatah–the tribes of Afghanistan too–would simply all get along.

This is delusional thinking. We must stand up for the truth and for the Jews—no matter the cost. We must name and reject radical evil. Heroism is now our only alternative if we want western civilization and the values of the Enlightenment to survive.

The world is watching. What will Brandeis do?




Chesler Chronicles » Jews Not Wanted on Campus If They Support Israel—Not Even at Brandeis

Netanyahu, Mubarak Meet on PA Talks - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

Netanyahu, Mubarak Meet on PA Talks - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

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Iran, Syria, Turkey Cementing Ties - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

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US Targets Israel as Anti-Nuke Conference Begins - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

US Targets Israel as Anti-Nuke Conference Begins - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

US Targets Israel as Anti-Nuke Conference Begins - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

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Israeli Start-ups Prepare for SmartCamp - Inside Israel - Israel News - Israel National News

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Religious Girls Compete for Top Math Prize - Education - Israel News - Israel National News

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Lots of Strands

Lots of Strands

Yesterday I introduced Zohar Argov, the hero of Shirim Mizrachi'im, the Sephardi wing of Shirim Ivri'im which has long since become one of the lanes of the main highway.

The Shirim Mizrachi'im tend to gravitate towards two types of content. Personal songs of love, anguish after love and regret about love, in a manner that might be called the Israeli version of American Country music (though that's where the similarity ends); and religious songs. Remember, the Sephardi Jews tend to be less fanatic at religion than some Ashkenazis, but also much less secular - or if, then a secularism deeply informed and living alongside religion. The songs I brought yesterday belonged to the first group; here's an example of the second.

Shabechi Yerushalayim (Jerusalem, Praise the Lord) is verses 12-13 of the 147th Psalm, so it's been around for a long time. Here's a possible translation of the Psalm, though Google will offer you many others. The two verses in Hebrew, as they've been adapted to the song are here, and the English song-structured version is

Jerusalem praise God
Tzion praise God
Jerusalem praise God
Tzion praise God

For He made your gates locks strong
For He made your gates locks strong

For blessed the sons that sit in your city
For blessed the sons that sit in your city
For blessed the sons that sit in your city

Praise God Tzion
Praise God Tzion

Tzion is of course Zion in English.

The fellow who rendered the ancient Pslam into a modern song is Avihu Medina, born 1948 in Tel Aviv, one of the most important creators and occasional singer of Shirim Mizrachi'im. Badad, for example, which we saw yesterday, was written by him for his friend and protege Zohar Argov. I've linked to three You Tube versions. The first is by Avihu Medina himself, a few years ago. It's quality isn't very good, but it demonstrates how such shirim are often performed: at some local event, in cramped quarters, with everyone singing along. This particular recording is poignant because 11-year-old Roy Ginat, a blind child, got on the stage and played the accompanying keyboard. So it gives that aspect.

The second is by Hadag Nachash, a modern loud-noise band whom I've already introduced. In this case, they were giving a loud-noise concert at a Washington DC synagogue, when they launched into Shabechi Yerushalayim. I expect the original psalmist was spinning in his grave, but then, after 3,000 years of decay maybe there isn't enough coherent skeleton left to spin, so who knows. This video is interesting because by now (2006?) the Jewish-American Ashkenazi teenagers and students in Washington DC all know this Mizrachi song, and sing along, unsuprised that it's being offered by a band that normally does stuff that is not recognizably music if you were born earlier than, say, 1985.

I keep on carping on the point that Jerusalem is an important place for the Jews; this gives a surprising perspective on how that works.

The third recording is even more surprising. It's by Glykeria.

Glykeria is one of a few Greek singers, non-Jews from Greece who don't speak Hebrew, who have reciprocated to the Israeli public's love for Greek music and its incorporation into Shirim Ivri'im, by joining, and recording their own versions of the Israeli songs. Glykeria, born in 1953, first reached prominence in Greece in the 1980s, about the time Shirim Mizrachi'im were breaking into the Israeli mainstream. I don't know enough about such matters to say what her homeland stature is these days, but she was recording there for at least 20 years, and still visits Israel to sing the common music. (A stance which has gained her some enemies at home, of course). So here you've got a Greek woman, singing what is obviously Greek music, except that the words were written centuries before the heyday of ancient Athens, and unfortunately stand at the very center of international disagreements of the highest degree till this very day. The world never ceases to amaze, does it.






Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Lots of Strands

Elder of Ziyon: The Return of the Zionist Attack Pigs

The Return of the Zionist Attack Pigs

After a lull of a few months, Jews are again being accused of sending highly-trained wild boars to target Arab lands:

A heard of wild boars destroyed several dunums of Palestinian farm land in the Salfit district on Sunday, local farmers said, prompting accusations of settler involvement.

Afterwards, the boars returned to their secret high-tech lair to receive further instructions. Rumors are that they are set to assassinate a major PA figure in their next mission.

Just as they killed Arafat. Bwahahaha!



Elder of Ziyon: The Return of the Zionist Attack Pigs

Elder of Ziyon: PalArab rocket kills Gazan

PalArab rocket kills Gazan

From Ma'an:

Palestinian resistance fighters from an unknown faction misfired a projectile Sunday night, hitting a Khan Younis home and critically injuring one man who later died in hospital, sources in Gaza said.

Eighteen-year-old Ibrahim Sulaiman Malalha was taken to the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis then transferred to the European Hospital in Gaza City for treatment of injuries described as critical. He was announced dead on Monday morning, medical sources said.

Two others were taken to the Khan Younis hospital for treatment, medics confirmed.

Sources said resistance fighters were training in a field outside the city, when a projectile was misfired.

Oops!


Elder of Ziyon: PalArab rocket kills Gazan

Elder of Ziyon: Why should Arabs be afraid of Iran? (Zvi)

Why should Arabs be afraid of Iran? (Zvi)

In response to my post about Iran's new term of "Iranophobia," Zvi wrote:


I don't suppose that "Iranophobia" in the region has anything to do with

* declaring sovereignty over Bahrain
* occupying the UAE's Tunb islands

* sending troops to seize control of the Fakah Oil Well 5 times this year (most recently last month)

* holding war games that involve seizing European shipping in the Gulf
* sponsoring insurgents in Yemen that threaten Yemen and, indirectly, the Saudis
* sending terrorist cells to infiltrate Egypt and carry out attacks in the Suez Canal Zone
* sponsoring the violent Hamas coup that took over Gaza
* sponsoring the violent Hezbollah coup that intimidated the elected government of Lebanon
* sponsoring the Syrian state that murdered Hariri and wishes to reoccupy Lebanon fully
* sending spies into Kuwait to facilitate attacks on Kuwait
* sponsoring violent Shia Iraqi groups like Hezbollah-Iraq
* Not to mention arming Hezbollah to attack Israeli civilians and threatening to use nuclear weapons against Israel (lots of Israelis, including Arabs as well as Jews, would die, of course, and due to the fallout in the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, Jordan, south Lebanon and Syria, there would be lots of dead Arabs. The Dome of the Rock would be vaporized - so much for Islam's third holiest shrine.)
* issuing numerous threats against the US and Israel
* abrogating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty after signing it, showing that Iran's signature on an international agreement has no value at all.

(Have I left anything out?)

No, I can't imagine why anyone would be concerned about the IRI.



Elder of Ziyon: Why should Arabs be afraid of Iran? (Zvi)

Elder of Ziyon: Some other recent anti-semitic Arab cartoons

Some other recent anti-semitic Arab cartoons

My readers seemed especially interested in the caricature of the hook-nosed Jew I posted earlier today. I guess that I am used to seeing these by now.

Here is one from today's Saudi Gazette:

This is one that MEMRI found from Egypt's Al Ahram Weekly this week:



Elder of Ziyon: Some other recent anti-semitic Arab cartoons

Elder of Ziyon: Hamas refers to suicide terrorists as "smart bombs"

Hamas refers to suicide terrorists as "smart bombs"

The Al Qassam Martyrs Brigades (Hamas) website has an article extolling the beauty of people who blow themselves up in order to hurt the Zionist enemy.

Hamas takes credit for pioneering suicide terrorism during the "blessed Al Aqsa intifada" and says that other Palestinian Arab factions imitated it, but weren't as good at it.

This article quotes a new Arabic book on the topic.

Here is some of their depravity:

Hamas has excelled in performance and excelled in proficiency, with development and innovation. Its results were characterized as distinctive, and their explosive power was increased with new, more effective materials, and added to the weapons the use of iron ball bearings instead of nails to make the impact more severe.

The attacks were professional and scientific..., and these facts combined to make losses of the enemy as large as possible, until observers and even the general people would attribute some operations to Hamas before any such announcement if it was clear that the losses of the enemy where great.

The martyr is a mobile, self-conscious, "smart bomb" that picks and chooses the time and place carefully so as to achieve distinctive success and confuse the enemy.

The article goes on to say that some other factions didn't put the same scientific controls around their terrorist bombers as Hamas, making the weapon not as effective as it could have been.


Elder of Ziyon: Hamas refers to suicide terrorists as "smart bombs"

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Three Stories about Staying Power

Three Stories about Staying Power

From time to time I pose the question - as a question, not an answer - of the ability of non-Israeli Jewry to sustain itself over time. I usually ask if it has staying power, since without it, Jews don't remain Jews for more than a few generations. Here are three recent stories about Jewish staying power.

The Bible doesn't much deal with non-military threats to Jewish existence, except a bit in some of the latter sections. Thus, the commandments to hold on no matter what, and the conceptual-religious-cultural mechanisms of doing so were mostly developed in the second millennium of Jewish existence. No single source for this is more important than the discussion initiated at Lod (Lyyda), where a wealthy Jew named Nitza gave his attic to a group of scholars to study. In the attic, so we're told, rabbi Yochanan taught what he had learned from Shimon ben Yehotzadak: All of the laws of the Torah, if a man is told to break them or be killed, he should break them and not be killed, except for idolatry, incest and murder.

The Gemara then goes into a long discussion which introduces distinctions such as if the demand is private (then there's more leeway to save one's life) or public (in which in some cases it is forbidden to give in at all). The motivation of the person making the demand and the threats is also relevant; if it's personal, or national, and so on. (Sanhedrin 74a and b)

At the time this was not a theoretical discussion, as many in the Talmud are, as there was a war going on with the Romans. Yet the rabbis could not have foreseen how serious their discussion would someday be; their conflict with the Romans was still largely political, or at least concentrated on the degree of autonomy the Jews of Judea would have within the Roman Empire. Many centuries later, after the Roman empire was no more, there would repeatedly be cases in Medieval Europe where the Jews would be faced with the full enormity of the dilemma, and large numbers of them would choose to die rather than to give in. (One assumes there were also large numbers who chose to give in, but their descendants were not Jews so their decision is lost). The horrible but extraordinarily powerful concept of Kiddush Hashem - Sanctifying His Name even through martyrdom - starts with this passage in the Talmud, which we passed last week.

During the Shoah, a number of rabbis reversed the logic of the ruling: if the enemy is attempting to destroy all of the Jews, without offering them any choice in the matter, perhaps they may transgress so as to survive, a few of them. A twist the earlier rabbis had not foreseen.

The second story began six years ago today, on May 2nd 2004, when Tali Hatuel, eight months pregnant with her first son, loaded her four daughters into the family van. Hila was 11, Hadar was 9, Ronny was 7,and Meirav was 2. They all lived in the village of Katif, and they were off to pick up their husband-father David, and go vote in the internal Likud poll on Ariel Sharon's plan to pull them out of Gaza. On the road to Ashkelon Tali was shot by Palestinian murderers, who then walked up to the stalled van and shot the four girls at close range.

The five were buried in a row: Tali, her foetus still in her, and to either side of her, two daughters.

I assume the murderers understood that such a murder on that particular day would likely hamper Sharon's plan of leaving Gaza. To the best of my knowledge the murderer or murderers were never apprehended, though one may hope they died in the 2009 attack on Hamas.

David Hatuel mourned his entire family, was forced out of their home the following summer, then remarried and now has three small children. His new wife is scrupulously left alone by our usually irrepressible media: there are some lines that are still not to be crossed. David himself, however, talks from time to time. In an interview over the weekend he said that he hasn't built a new family, he has built a second floor. Tali and her daughters are the first floor, Limor and her three (so far) are the second floor of the same family. His three new children have three sets of grandparents.

So that's the second story about staying power. Sort of puts things into perspective, doesn't it.

The third was this morning. We went to a Brit- the celebration of circumcision which Jewish boys undergo on their eighth day after birth. The great grandparents were there, and the grandparents, and lots of siblings and cousins and friends. The new-born is the first-born to his parents, and his mother looked deeply distressed as the moment approached. New mothers of new-born Jewish boys usually are, but the first is the hardest. Nearby I noticed another young woman, deep into her first pregnancy: she also has a boy coming, and she literally had tears in her eyes as the moment approached.

The baby, by the way, cried for about 30 seconds and then was given a pacifier with wine on it and went back to sleep, as always happens. Still, I'm always struck at this event by the underlying message that being Jewish hurts.


Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Three Stories about Staying Power

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