Murray Head-- Say It Ain't So

The Passover Story-- Unvarnished

Battle for Jerusalem

Jonathan Tobin, from Commentary magazine, blogs on the ominous turn of events for Israel's hold on Jerusalem:

As the dispute between the Israel and the United States enters its third week, President Obama’s anger at Israel and his determination to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give in on the question of building in the eastern sector of Israel’s capital is apparently unabated.

Yet this is hardly the first dispute between the two countries. Every administration since 1967 has proposed peace plans and negotiating strategies that Israel disliked or actively resisted. Genuine friends such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as less friendly presidents such as Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, all pushed hard at times for Israeli acceptance of unpalatable concessions. But in spite of these precedents, Barack Obama has managed to go where no American president has gone before. For all the problems created by all his predecessors about settlements in the West Bank, no previous American leader has ever chosen to draw a line in the sand about the Jewish presence in Jerusalem.

It is true that the United States never recognized Israel’s annexation of the eastern sector of the city after Jerusalem’s unification in 1967. In fact, it has never even recognized western Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But the new Jewish neighborhoods that sprang up along the northern, eastern, and southern outskirts of the city, as well as the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, were never a source of contention even during the presidencies of Carter and the elder Bush. Indeed, the notion that places such as Ramat Eshkol, Pisgat Zeev, Gilo, and even Ramat Shlomo (the site of the “insult” to Vice President Biden) are considered “settlements” by the United States and thus no different from the most remote hilltop outpost deep in the West Bank is something that has come as a complete surprise to most Israelis, let alone American supporters of Israel.

During the course of his first go at Netanyahu, Obama made it clear that, contrary to a promise given by George W. Bush in 2004, he considered the bulk of settlements situated close to the 1967 borders, which Israelis believe they will keep even in the event of a peace deal, to be just as illegitimate as more controversial communities. In the hope of defusing the argument, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a freeze in these towns and villages while still maintaining that Jerusalem could not be treated in the same way. But Washington’s demand that the freeze be extended to eastern Jerusalem signals that Obama clearly believes that, like the big settlements of Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim, the homes of the approximately 200,000 Jews who live in eastern Jerusalem are also on the table.

But despite the fact that Palestinian intransigence (strengthened by the belief that it is futile to talk, since the refusal to negotiate with Israel will only motivate Obama to press Israel harder) means his diplomatic offensive has virtually no chance of success, Obama has still done something that will permanently alter Middle Eastern diplomacy. By treating the Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem as a vast, illegal settlement, the continued growth of which is an alleged impediment to peace, Obama has made it impossible for any Arab leader to ever accept Israel’s possession of this part of the city. This not only makes the already near-impossible task of forging peace that much harder, it is also a crushing blow to decades of Israeli and American Jewish efforts to foster international recognition of a unified Jerusalem.

This year, along with the conventional four questions of the Passover Seder, some Americans are starting ask themselves: “Why is this president different from all other presidents?” The answer is that Barack Obama has now established opposition to Israel’s hold on its capital as a cornerstone of American Middle East policy in a way that is completely new as well as dangerous. Those wondering whether this development ought to cause them to re-evaluate their political loyalties might want to remember the closing refrain of Passover Seders down through the centuries: “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

Emiliana Torrini-- Sunny Road

Let My People Stay

My column this week in The Jewish Journal:

Why does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem so intractable? Why do we hear the same ideas over and over again, even though they never work?

At her AIPAC speech this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of the need to find “a new path” to the two-state solution. But nowhere in her speech did she actually challenge a key tenet of the current path: We can never have Jews living in Palestine.

She’s not alone. For decades now, the world’s most brilliant political minds have worked with this same unimaginative and racist assumption: To have peace with the Palestinians, we must have ethnic cleansing of the Jews.

As a result, a peace vocabulary has developed that suggests anything but peace: words like “freezing” and “dismantling” rather than “warming” and “creating.” The Jews themselves who live in the areas of a future Palestinian state have been globally demonized as the biggest obstacle to peace.

Sure, there may be terrorist entities like Hamas and Hezbollah that are sworn enemies of any peace agreement, but as far as the world is concerned, the soccer moms in Ariel and Efrat are bigger obstacles to peace.

Never mind that when Israel tried to cleanse Gaza of all Jews a few years ago, it got rewarded not with peace and quiet but with a few thousand rockets.

It’s gotten so absurd, that the headlines around the world two weeks ago weren’t about the terrorist rockets flying into Israel, but about interim zoning permits for apartments in East Jerusalem. Had those apartments been for Buddhists or Hindus or Hare Krishnas, no one would have flinched. But they were for Jews, which makes them obstacles to peace.

The Obama administration’s obsession with freezing Jewish settlements — including Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem — has further demonized the settlements, made the Palestinians even more intransigent and pretty much frozen the peace process.

But what if the peace processors took a different view of these settlements and saw them not as obstacles to peace but as potential contributors to Palestinian society? What if, instead of forcing Jewish settlers to leave as part of a peace agreement, they were invited to stay?

In all these failed peace meetings over the years, has anyone considered that a Jewish minority in a future Palestine may actually be a good thing? That it would encourage mutual dependency and co-existence and democracy — and help the Palestinian economy? And that for Israel, it’d be good to have Jewish representatives in a Palestinian parliament — just like we have supporters in Diaspora communities throughout the world?

I know what you’re thinking: How naïve of you, Suissa! How many Jews would want to be part of a Palestinian state? Who would protect them? It’ll never work!

To which I reply: Maybe you’re right! But nothing else has worked, so why not shake things up and try something new? Let’s poll the Jews of the West Bank who’d be most likely to be evacuated and see how many would be interested in staying in a future Palestine, and under what conditions. Dual citizenship? Security guarantees? Equal voting rights? These are great questions for peace talks.

Even if you’re a cynic who believes peace with the Palestinians is impossible in our lifetime, pushing for the right of settlers to stay in a future Palestine is a game changer. It disarms critics who claim that settlements are the main obstacle to peace and shines a light on fundamental issues, like whether the Palestinians are willing or even able to deliver peace, and how they would protect a Jewish minority in their midst.

Just like Soviet Jewry was about the Jews’ “right to leave,” this new cause is about the Jews’ “right to stay.” And if the world ends up opposing the idea, well, we’ll finally have our PR homerun: An international movement fighting for “Human Rights for Palestinian Jews!” Our mantra: The Jews of Palestine deserve the same rights as the Muslims of Israel.

If you’re not a cynic but a hopeless romantic who believes in the power of co-existence, you should have been with me the other night at the Levantine Cultural Center, a storefront salon on Pico Boulevard co-founded four years ago by local activist Jordan Elgrably to foster harmony between all peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. The guest speaker was author and journalist Rachel Shabi, who was talking about her new book, “We Look Like the Enemy: the Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews From Arab Lands.”

Shabi, a Jew of Iraqi descent who grew up in London and now lives in Tel Aviv, has had a lifelong fascination with the story of Jews who come from Arab lands like Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Tunisia.

As she spoke about the long and complicated journey of these Jews of Arabia, she didn’t sugarcoat their struggles, but you could feel her passion for the golden moments and possibilities of cultural co-existence.

Stuck between my cynical and romantic sides, and perhaps caught up in the moment, I couldn’t help wondering whether there might be, one day, a Palestinian chapter to this Jewish-Arab odyssey — a chapter that wouldn’t be about Jews being kicked out, but about Jews being asked to stay. l

Santana-- El Faro

Patsy Cline-- Crazy

Jay Z-Mr Hudson-- Forever Young

Seabear-- I sing I swim

James Morrison

Beirut-- Cherbourg

Rufus Wainwright-- Across the Universe

Beirut--Nantes

If Robinson Crusoe was on Facebook

A cool piece from how technology is changing human history:

When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as dead. Daniel Defoe's novel, masquerading as a memoir, came out in 1719, a time when voyages were dangerous and people could easily be lost to one another with no way to get in touch or even determine if the other party was living. Indeed, when Crusoe finally gets back home he finds himself disinherited by a father who had assumed, sensibly enough, that his son was deceased.

Today, of course, Crusoe's dad would probably just check his son's Facebook page—unless Crusoe had used his iPhone to send his GPS coordinates to his various Twitter followers. After all, these days what is known as Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile, has Internet access.

What a momentous change. For most of human history, losing contact with a loved one was all too easy, especially when great distances intervened. Leave-takings must have been particularly fraught when one might not get word of a loved one for months, years—or ever. Laura Linney, as Abigail Adams, brought to vivid life the heartache of an 18th-century parting when John Adams left for Europe in the TV miniseries. In Crusoe's day, in fact, most people didn't even have pictures of one another to hang onto.

It's no wonder that variations on the long-lost theme have been a literary staple practically since the dawn of narrative. In "The Odyssey," Penelope weaves her way through years without word from her wily husband, Odysseus, who finds himself waylaid by a Cyclops here and a minor goddess there for the better part of a decade. Fast forward to the 20th century and the same issue is at the center of Chaim Grade's novel "The Agunah" (published in English in 1974); unable to prove that her husband really was killed in World War I, the uncertain widow of the title risks bigamy in the eyes of Jewish law by marrying another man.

Frank-- Summer Wind

Obama's folly

Obama's reckless offensive against America's best friend in the Middle East, Israel, as expressed in an editorial today in the New York Daily News:

The Obama administration has just finished - it is
hoped - an unfair, unwise and unconscionable
pummeling of Israel, of which no good will come.

The deliberately calibrated fury directed at the
Jewish state by Vice President Biden, Secretary of
State Clinton and top White House aide David
Axelrod since last week was grossly
disproportionate to Israel's perceived offense.

And what was that? As Biden visited, hoping to
advance tenuous peace talks, Israel's Interior
Ministry blindsided Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu by announcing plans to proceed with
plans for building, in a few years, 1,600 apartments
in East Jerusalem.

Setting aside the fact that the area is a Jewish
neighborhood, and the fact that Israel's eventual
sovereignty there has been taken for granted in
round after fruitless round of two-state
negotiations, the planning announcement was an
ill-timed gaffe that complicated Biden's mission.

Netanyahu was profuse in apology. No matter. The
vice president roared with moral outrage properly
reserved for terrorism and other heinous crimes.
Speaking more harshly than the administration does
to, say, Iran, he began with the two strongest words
possible: "I condemn."

Dylan-- Don't Think Twice

Velvet Underground-- Sunday Morning

Plastiscines-- Barcelona

Shabbatones-- Somebody to Love

The Starbucks magic

Is it a radical movement or the ultimate in conformism? Reason magazine weighs in on the Starbucks phenomenon:

 In the late 1980s, of course, there weren’t many cafés serving high-quality coffee anywhere. Coffee consumption per capita was at its lowest point since 1962, soft drinks had recently surpassed hot caffeine as the nation’s favorite beverage, and Coke was in the midst of a campaign advertising its utility as a breakfast drink. The few cafés that were selling espressos and capuccinos, however, were located precisely in places like Wicker Park.

In choosing to locate his outlets in busy downtown locations, Schultz was expanding the world of high-end coffee—diversifying it, in fact, by taking it beyond its insular, self-conscious subculture. The décor of his stores amplified this process. They had the clean and slick streamlining of a fast food restaurant but were more comfortably appointed. Instead of walls lined with old books, there were gleaming espresso machines for sale, packages of whole beans, ceramic cups. They felt a little like a Williams-Sonoma store crossed with an unusually tasteful airport lounge. They were cafés for people who would never set foot in a bohemian coffeehouse, people traditional coffeehouse entrepreneurs had completely ignored.

For less than the price of a Whopper, you could hang out in a sophisticated middlebrow lounge/office for hours on end. And they were popping up everywhere. Exclusive, elitist? Starbucks was exactly the opposite, introducing millions of people who didn’t know their arabica from their robusto to the pleasures of double espressos. Finally, good coffee had been liberated from the proprietary clutches of hipsters, campus intellectuals, and proto-foodies and shared with bank managers and real estate agents. In offices across America, it suddenly smelled like ’ffeine spirit.

For Schultz, this mainstream customer base was both a boon and a curse. In Pour Your Heart Into It, his 1997 account of Starbucks’ rise to global behemoth, he reveals a preoccupation with authenticity that echoed Kurt Cobain’s. In 1989, he initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers—it wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a true coffee lover would enjoy.”

Eventually, Schultz relented. And really, what greater punk-rock middle finger is there to purist prescriptions about what constitutes a true coffee drink than a blended ice beverage flavored with Pumpkin Spice powder?

Simon recounts the birth of the Frappuccino in Everything But the Coffee too, but while he acknowledges the grassroots origins, he quickly positions it as an item the chain is “pushing” on “caffeine-dependent women and men.” In his estimation, the company’s “consumer persuaders” and “mythmakers” are the ones with real power. They’re constantly selling false promises, implanting “subliminal messages” in store décor, and otherwise manipulating hapless consumers.

In reality, the chain’s customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of creative interaction and spirited public discourse.

Over the years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.

At 15th Avenue and Tea, the quest to cultivate highbrow customers continues. There’s a wall covered with excerpts from Plato’s dialogues. Blended drinks are banned from the premises, and you can safely assume that Bearista Bears, the highly sought-after plush toys that Starbucks has been selling since 1997, won’t ever appear here either.

But if Starbucks really hopes to re-establish its authority as an innovative, forward-thinking trailblazer, it should perhaps use its next experimental venue to honor its heritage as the first chain to take gourmet coffee culture beyond the narrow boundaries of traditional coffeehouse values and aesthetics. Imagine a place with matching chairs, clean tables, beverages that look like ice cream sundaes, Norah Jones on the sound system, and absolutely no horrid paintings from local artists decorating the walls. A place, that is, exactly like Starbucks!

Al Stewart-- Year of the Cat

Playing For Change - Stand By Me

The XX-- Crystallized

Jack Penate-- Pull My Heart Away

Luciano and Frank-- My Way

Anya Marina-- Whatever You Like

The Clientele-- Can't Seem to Make You Mine

Response to "Obomacare-- beta"

Just received this letter from health care expert Brian Rosman, in response to my post yesterday of Michael Graham's column in The Boston Herald. If you recall, Graham tore into Obamacare by using Massachussets as a test case-- and noting that President Obama hardly ever brings it up in his speeches. One interesting question: If the Massachussets example is as successful as Mr Rosman explains, why does the president not mention it more often? Here's the letter:

Mr. Suissa,

I am the research director of Health Care For All, a Boston-based advocacy organization working on health policy in Massachusetts. The Jewish community was deeply involved in supporting health reform in Massachusetts. The JCRC along with a broad coalition of synagogues were active participants in the campaign. As a result of his experiences in the Massachusetts health care campaign, Rabbi Jonah Pesner left Boston's largest temple to form "Just Congregations," a Reform project to teach synagogues how to get involved in public policy campaigns.

I was surprised to see you reprinted verbatim material from an opinion column in the Boston Herald, our tabloid newspaper. The writer, Michael Graham, is a far-right radio talk show host. Graham, a former campaign staffer for Pat Buchanan, has been repeatedly reprimanded or fired for violating the standards of conservative talk radio, if that's possible. Even Glen Beck criticized Graham's inflammatory statements as going too far.

Contrary to Graham's column, we think Massachusetts health reform has been a remarkable success, and this points to the likelihood that national reform will also expand affordable health coverage. Over 97% of the state's residents have health coverage. The proportion getting preventive care has increased, and the percent of people skipping needed treatments due to the cost is down. The most recent survey found 69% of state resident support the reform law. Employers, hospitals, doctors and advocacy groups like ours are all in support.

The points made by Graham are either false or misleading. Let me try to correct the record.

1. Exploding the budget - false. The best impartial referee of this charge is the non-partisan, business-backed Mass Taxpayers Foundation. They are a right-of-center policy institute aimed at controlling government spending. They reviewed Massachusetts health care reform and concluded that the costs were "modest and consistent with projections." The study is here: http://masstaxpayers.org/publications/health_care/20090501/massachusetts_health_reform_the_myth_uncontrollable_costs

2. Costs of health care - misleading. Graham is right that Massachusetts has the highest health care costs in the country. We had the highest costs before reform, too. Part of this is due to the fact that everything is more expensive in Massachusetts. Compared to median state income, Massachusetts is 41st in health care costs. Other factors are that insurance plans here are much more comprehensive than in other states, and the high number of brand-name teaching hospitals in Boston, which command higher rates.

The key point is that the 2006 reform law was not aimed at controlling costs. The goal of the law was to expand coverage, which has been an unquestioned success. So first, the reform is not responsible for the high costs of Massachusetts health care, and second, the goal of the law was not focused on costs. However, since 2006 the state has been focused on costs in a serious way - see below.

3. "Capitation" - misleading. Recognizing that the initial bill did not deal directly with costs, state policymakers set up a process to find innovative ways to improve care and bring down the costs of coverage. A panel of stakeholders, including business, experts, providers and state leaders, have proposed moving away from the current "fee-for-service" payment restructure, by which hospitals profit by doing more and more procedures, regardless of medical value, to a system that rewards health and wellness. The system is called "global payments," and is different from the capitation systems of the 1990s. As a consumer group, we strongly support global payments as way of controlling costs, prioritizing primary care and prevention, and building accountability to the patient. Graham's charges are wrong, and all experts would dispute his description of what is being proposed here.

4. Drop in coverage - wrong. Before health reform, the best estimates was that Massachusetts had about 9%-11% of the population uninsured. The current rate is 2.7% - close to universal coverage.

For us, it's been sad that our state's health reform law, which was championed by both Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy, and was truly a middle-of-the-road incremental approach, has been distorted by opponents of Obama. We were able to build a bi-partisan consensus here, and a very similar policy being proposed in DC is now savaged as something radical.

Brian Rosman

Research Director

Health Care For All

www.hcfama.org

rosman@hcfama.org

(617) 275-2920

Greg Laswell-- And Then You

Obamacare-- beta version

From today's Boston Herald, a preview of the Obamacare experiment in Massachussets:

Here are a few “highlights” of the current status of the Obamacare experiment in Massachusetts:

It’s exploding the budget: Our “universal” health insurance scheme is already $47 million over budget for 2010. Romneycare will cost taxpayers more than $900 million next year alone.

It’s killing us on costs: Average Massachusetts premiums are the highest in the nation and rising. We also spend 27 percent more on health care services, per capita, than the national average. Those costs, contrary to what we were promised, have been going up faster here than nearly everywhere else.

It’s creating bizarre marketplace mutations: In Massachusetts, ObamaCare 1.0 is such a mess our governor is talking about imposing draconian price controls. He’s even suggested going to “capitation,” a system where doctors get a fixed amount of money per patient - and then that’s it. Which means it would become in your doctor’s financial interest never to see you again.

All this damage to the taxpayers, the insured and the responsible business owners . . . and for what?

The percentage of uninsured Bay State residents has gone from around 6 percent to around 3 percent.

In other words, it’s a dud.

And now Obama is preparing to drop the Big One on bipartisanship and turn Congress into a political hot zone for the remainder of his presidency, in order to pass a similar plan.

We are the Web

Joanna Newsom-- This Side of the Blue

Joanna Newsom-- Sprout and the Bean

Keep your shoes on!

Nick Drake-- From the Morning

Hey, if you're Muslim, watch out for Starbucks!