May 2007 Archives

Is where you will find me on the Web starting ... now. It's been a good run, and I hope this photo rings true, but my run at the Daily News is about up. Monday I move across town to the Jewish Journal, and hopefully I won't fall on my face.

Either way, you can e-mail me there at BradG@jewishjournal.com. I'll keep blogging at thegodblog.org (which redirects to bradgreenberg.blogspot.com).

The Christian Science Monitor has an insightful read today on Sen. Barack Obama's lackluster start courting the much needed "Jewish vote" in his quest for the presidency. (I put that in quotes because, despite the relevance of garnering the votes of Jews, God's people do not vote as one.)

Washington - For a candidate intent on courting the Jewish vote, some of the headlines for Sen. Barack Obama in recent weeks have been less than heartening.

"Obama comment draws fire from Jews," the Des Moines Register declared after the senator's unscripted remark at an Iowa campaign stop in March that "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" from stalled peace efforts with the Israelis.

"Obama on the Mideast: Not quite comfortable," The Chicago Jewish Star said after his first major policy speech on the Middle East, to a pro-Israel group in his hometown.

And at last week's Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina, Senator Obama's omission of Israel in response to a question about America's top allies gave moderator Brian Williams an opening to revisit the Iowa flap in front of a television audience of more than 2 million.

No mention was made of Obama Christ.

The Forward has a biting piece tomorrow about the newfound friendship between "John Hagee, the firebrand evangelical Christian minister from San Antonio, Texas," who stole the show at Aipac's convention in March, and a growing number of Jewish federations:

“If you search through Jewish stories around the U.S., a lot of us have pieces of personal memory where non-Jews were there for us — not because they had a hidden agenda, but because they believed it was the right thing to do,” said Michal Kohane, the Israeli-born executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region. “There is a strong aspect of CUFI in which they are the descendants of that ideological concept.”

Just as liberals have criticized Aipac for giving Hagee the dais, they are now speaking out against the pastor’s grass-roots fundraising dinners. Most recently, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, Betty McCollum, declined an invitation to attend an April 29 “Night To Honor Israel” in Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, citing what she called “Hagee’s extremism, bigotry and intolerance.”

Pray for LA, a ministry started by the pastor of Metro Calvary Chapel in Santa Monica, will host its inaugural 5K run Saturday at Hansen Dam Recreational Center in Lake View Terrace. Entry costs $40 for adults and $25 for children, with $15 from each fee going to the Union Rescue Mission downtown. An entry form can be found here. Registration begins at 6:30 a.m. and the run will start at 8.

Employees at LA Councilman Jack Weiss' district office in Sherman Oaks found three red-and-black swastikas taped to the front of the building and a "short manifesto," via LA Times:

"We have no time to listen to Jewish American children!!! If you don't believe us, just try talking to us." Then there is an obscene reference to "a homoerotic cop" and what that cop should do to Weiss. It concludes "Heil Weiss!"

Weiss, who is Jewish, plans to run for city attorney in 2009. He has been under fire for his pro-development policies (not that I am drawing any parallels between that and the vandalism).

I've been getting all kinds of e-mails from a group called Faith in America that bills itself as "the emancipation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from bigotry disguised as religious truth."

Coinciding this morning with the National Day of Prayer, Mitchell Gold's Faith in America announced it would commence Sunday a five-city "Call to Courage" campaign. Target cities are off the beaten path: Ames, Iowa; Reno, Nevada; Manchester, New Hampshire; Greenville, South Carolina; and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor who came out of the closet while in office and resigned because of an alleged affair, has converted into the Episcopal Church and will enter its General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. (The ordination of gay priests has become, to put it mildly, a contentious issue in the U.S. branch of King Henry's church.)

Here's the word from the Newark Star-Ledger, which broke the story online today:

I'm boxing up my desk this morning, and then I have an afternoon assignment. The God Blog will be active again tomorrow, my last day at the Daily News. After Thursday, thegodblog.org will become my online forum until the blog moves onto jewishjournal.com.

Have you heard that story about Richard Gere? No, not the gerbil hoax that tainted Dr. T when I was a kid. But the one about Gere smooching Bollywood babe Shilpa Shetty at an AIDS awareness event in New Delhi last month.

As my friend Manya Brachear points out on her blog for the Chicago Tribune, Gere's actions "enraged some Hindus who thought the public display violated laws of public obscenity."

If apprehended, Gere can be sent to jail for up to three months, fined or both. He is not in India now but can be held if he visits the country again, which he does for at least three weeks each year to study Tibetan Buddhism under the tutelage of the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in northern India. He is also involved with AIDS prevention groups there.

The Samaritan's place in history is cemented in Jesus' famous parable. But their existence is on the brink. They believe they are the true followers of the Israelites religion, and only 700 of the "keepers of the law," as their name translates, remain. Today the Samaritans, "dressed in white and spattered in blood," celebrated the Passover in Mt. Gerizim, where most of the sect live. From AP, via Haaretz:

The sect's high priest opened the ceremony with a prayer in the Samaritan tongue, a dialect of ancient Hebrew. Then ritual slaughterers killed sheep, skinned them, and roasted them in large ovens. According to tradition, the meat must be ready in the middle of the night - the time that the Angel of Death killed the Egyptian firstborn in the biblical story - and the Samaritans eat it in haste along with unleavened bread, emulating the ancient Israelites.

Would you do it? Would you confess your worst sins for millions -- maybe more -- to read on the Web? I wouldn't, but a growing number of people are pouring out their hearts, albeit anonymously, on sites like ivescrewedup.com, grouphug.us and dailyconfession.com.

"I am so sick and tired of trying to be like everybody else," a 19-year-old from Crystal Lake, Ill., wrote on ivescrewedup.com. "If someone asked me for 3 words to describe myself, I'd have no words. It's like I will do anything with anybody to please somebody all the time....this is insane, I confess that I don't know who I am and that I wish I did."

"With above-average levels of education and a combined buying power estimated at more than $170 billion, Muslims represent a major untapped niche market, according to a new study commissioned by JWT."

That was from an e-mail from the publicist for JWT, the largest advertising agency in the U.S. The report on their Web site was given the headline, "Traditional American values are thriving among muslims in the U.S."

The study looked at broad sentiments among Muslims, but focused on their feelings about the way they are marketed to:

It's May Day, and for the second year in L.A. that means marches for immigrant rights will be snarling traffic in the city's busiest corridors. (Avoid downtown and Koreatown.) Last year, massive walkouts and work boycotts drew more than half a million people to L.A. streets, including Cardinal Roger Mahony, once a compatriot of Cesar Chavez.

Here is what the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had to say in advance of today's protests:

While only the U.S. Senate passed meaningful immigration reform legislation in 2006,May 1" 2007 once again gives us the opportunity to support our immigrant brothers and sisters by calling on our legislators to bring an end to the persecution of immigrants and the separation of immigrant families, and fix our broken immigration system that benefits from the hard work of immigrants, while keeping them in the shadows of society.