do you think mordy might one day make aliyah to a settlement?

extended family members in israel seem happy. not in chipper untroubled way, but... grounded.

(xp) never heard that argument! v interesting. privately honest explanation for (ostensibly well-intentioned) public dishonesty,

and/or rationalization for tacitly approving/ endorsing views of others who really do believe israel is worst human rights violator in the world (e.g. according to UN human rights council)

i finally got a paid gig to write hasbara :P the rumors are true!

just googled the term

really? interesting! can you share what that entails?

it's just doing some music journalism about israel for a website, but their explicit mission is to publish non-political, non-religious stories about israel to present it as a normal country. i've written coverage about israel before but never for an outlet that has such an explicitly 'hasbaraesque' mission statement.

ha excellent, where does the money come from?

lol that's the best part - the non-profit that funds the website is funded by sheldon adelson. honestly if it was about any other topic than music i might've balked but it's material i'd be happy to produce anyway, i don't mind taking adelson's blood casino money. :P

congrats on the gig!

it's telling (of present moment & not just present moment)-- cf bds, israeli schoolgroup snubbed in paris-- that there's need simply to present israel & its citizens as normal-- not exception(al).

you're our man on the inside, link your work when it's up!

http://forward.com/culture/yiddish-culture/320338/speaking-yiddish-in-gaza

slightly thrown by 'gutzul' for a second (ie 'hutsul' as it is usually transliterated)

this makes me so angry:

http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Abbas-Israelis-have-no-right-to-desecrate-our-holy-sites-with-their-filthy-feet-416307

describing jews visiting or praying at their holiest site a "desecration" is just the sickest bullshit. esp in a country where this related bullshit continues to happen:

http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-israel-more-jewish-holy-sites-desecrated-than-christian-muslim-ones-combined/

ugh depressing
kinda shocked by those quotes coming from abbas (maybe shdn't be)

1976 births, Living people, Bad Boy Records artists, Baalei teshuva, Belizean businesspeople, Belizean expatriates in Israel, Belizean musicians, Belizean Orthodox Jews, Belizean people of Ethiopian descent, Businesspeople in fashion, Children of national leaders, Def Jam Recordings artists, East Coast hip hop musicians, Converts to Judaism, Jewish fashion designers, Jewish rappers, Jews in the African diaspora, People banned from entering the United Kingdom, People convicted of assault, People deported from the United States, People from Belize City, Musicians from Brooklyn, People from Jerusalem, Rappers from New York City, Shooting survivors, Gangsta rappers, People from Flatbush, Brooklyn

https://www.facebook.com/theisraelproject/videos/10154516393317316/

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yj7cTYhFkCw/VkYXLOvJxCI/AAAAAAAAs6w/XeUegx5fnQw/s640/ban%2Bkin.jpg

The Baron was born in 1869 to one of the best known family in the Prussian nobility. At the age of 21 he came to Wirtsburg to join the military. As a talented musician he served in a military band. At that time he got in touch with the Jewish community and developed close relationship with Torah and Talmudic scholars. He studied Torah in the Talmudic College (yeshiva), and expressed desire to convert to Judaism. His requests were repeatedly denied, but he persisted and eventually his sincerity won......

“In 1942 the Nazis ordered all the Jews of the Wirtsburg area to go to the city’s main square and from there marched them to the railroad station. Baron von Manstein came to the square covered with his prayer shawl (talit) and wearing phylacteries (tefilin) on his forehead and arm. The Nazis tried to turn him back saying, you are not a Jew, repeatedly, but he adamantly said, where the Jews go, I go too.”

“He was transferred with the rest of the Jews to the Terezinstadt concentration camp and died there two years later. Members of my family have said that most victims died in Terezinstadt from starvation. On his nephew, the General’s initiative his body was transferred to Wirtsburg and was buried in Christian cemetery with full Nazi honors.”

http://www.zeevgalili.com/english/2009/03/the-uncle-of-the-nazi-general-von-manstein-who-convert-to-judaism/

this is on libgen

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300115314

look the settlements are a left-wing project!
http://www.timesofisrael.com/greece-to-defy-eu-order-on-labeling-settlement-goods/

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/UN-index-ranks-Israel-as-one-of-worlds-most-developed-countries-437501

Czech parliament refused labeling Israeli settlement products by a large majority
http://echo24.cz/a/iFsis/poslanci-odmitli-plan-eu-oznacovat-izraelske-zbozi-z-osad

http://i64.tinypic.com/fctzqh.png

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/11224212_1678438799069475_8846967488878692303_n.jpg?oh=45a3bdead1df8985788a889b49fee42d&oe=5719B57A

http://www.jpost.com/Not-Just-News/Meet-the-Israeli-who-is-trolling-BDS-and-Roger-Waters-438641

The prime minister seems to have formed a bond with the large, aging white dog. When his family adopted her, he called on Israelis to help rescue dogs and to look for a dog in a shelter before considering buying a purebred.

A photo taken during a recent meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry, shows the prime minister smiling fondly as he looks down at the family’s newest member.

According to reports, Netanyahu himself was bitten by the rescue pooch earlier this year.

Kaia’s victims were MK Sharren Haskel and attorney Or Alon, the husband of Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/196345/stop-worrying-about-israel

i admit this made me tear up a little near the end
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-i-left-western-europe/

As someone with a pretty substantial, errrr, relationships with the Glasgow Jewish community, I don't recognize any of that, Mordy, but obv. it's that person's experience, so fair enough. Doesn't sound much like Glasgow though.

he sounds like he was very uninvolved in the glasgow jewish community and more heavily involved in the college activist leftist community? iirc he says something like his birthright trip was the first time he was in a majority jewish group? that would be v unusual for participants in the community

i'm like so full of shit btw i have zero intention of leaving the US. luckily yearning to move to israel w no actual plans or intentions to do so has a long tradition i can tap into.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-israel-remain-firmly-positive.aspx

his birthright trip was the first time he was in a majority jewish group?

lol wtf

i just checked bc it is lol so tbf he says: "I went to Israel first on Taglit-Birthright. Just meeting the group I would be travelling with at Heathrow Airport was the most young Jews I had ever been around." "most young Jews I had ever been around" birthright iirc my trip had like... maybe 25-30? so not totally insane, but still probably means not a huge amount of participation in glasgow jewish life.

i won't hold my breadth for BDS advocates to address the new gallup numbers. for those guys the big revolution is always imminent if not sooner

personally I don't really know what to make of Americans' continued love affair w Israel - pro-Israeli Jews make up such a tiny portion of the overall American population it isn't too hard for me to imagine that the bulk of support is rooted in either a) general anti-Muslim sentiment and b) eschatological evangelicals, cuz really why else would yr average American give a shit about (or even remotely understand) Israel.

maybe 25-30? so not totally insane, but still probably means not a huge amount of participation in glasgow jewish life

yeah I don't think my kid has ever been around more than 25-30 young jews; e.g. the whole student population of his talmud torah is maybe about that much, so I guess there are times when there are that many young jews together in a building with him, but I'm not sure he's "around" the much younger or much older kids. There are no more than 10 Jewish kids in his entire school I'd say. That's just how it is when you don't live in a Jewish town!

25-30 is kind of a lot if you narrow it down to a particular age range, although there were various points in my life when I was definitely in a bunch of Jews of my age group (primarily summer camp sorta situations). But yeah my daughter's never been in a group of 25-30 Jewish kids her age. She's definitely been around more than 25-30 Jews tho!

ok so i've spent a lot of time thinking about this and my best answer is that americans identify very strongly with the jewish people. i'm not sure exactly why (something maybe related to self-identification as exceptional) but once you start looking for it you see it everywhere. the puritans saw themselves as enacting a certain kind of exodus and i've read that they heavily identified with the old testament and used it as a basis for their legal code (and that thanksgiving was originally thought of as a yom kippur analogue). you def hear it in the expression judeo-christian which obv was not invented by jews, and in hebrew roots phenomena. i've considered that black communities might have their own version of this re identification w/ the exodus narrative, and of course u have black israelites groups. i think that support for israel is related to this, and its refounding as a kind of seismic religious moment that is not exclusively eschatological. and then you have obv answers that for christians it is probably nice to have access to so many of their holy sites and there's a lot of american religious tourism. xxp

ok so i've spent a lot of time thinking about this

lol u don't say

I think a lot of it is as simple as "all those countries over there hate us - except for Israel!" and from there it's just a circle-the-wagons mentality + sure religious tourism

like the way i see it the eschatological stuff and anti-muslim stuff was grafted onto this original identification which is the real story (and i think has v interesting implications if you're interested in speculating about the future of religion in america). mormons have heavy philosemitic identifications too. (btw this isn't too uncommon and there's a thing where a royal english family identified as being scions of david or something? but i think totally ahistorical on a national level like we see today.)

mormons have heavy philosemitic identifications too

yeah I find this really annoying personally. But they were looking for a biblical analogue to their own experience and the OT was a better source (duh) than the NT. Same goes for the Puritans I suppose.

the puritans overlaid the entire narrative. they crossed a sea to enter a promised land. i feel like the US is indisputably the most philosemitic country in history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism

It's because the OT is a core text, surely?

which part? i think obv christianity's lineage has a lot to do w/ it but some of these things - like the ten lost tribes of israel - are post-OT

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/middleeast/yemen-jews-israel.html

JERUSALEM — They landed in Israel late at night — a man in a dark suit and traditional headdress, wheeling a suitcase; a mother, veiled, in a long black robe and holding a sleeping toddler; and a rabbi carrying a Torah scroll believed to be more than 500 years old.

They were among a final group of 19 Yemeni Jews who were spirited out of their war-torn country in recent days, the Jewish Agency announced on Monday, bringing a monthslong clandestine rescue operation to a close.

Photographs taken at Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv by a representative of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body that deals with Jewish immigration, documented the arrival late Sunday of the last of the Yemeni Jews who wanted to go to Israel.

They are remnants of an ancient and once-vibrant group that became increasingly imperiled by violence and anti-Semitism as Yemen descended into civil war.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuHhRatCQAAd8eM.jpg

can someone with photoshop superimpose this on an irl map of the united states

daydreaming antisemites should probably transfer their planned new israel to an area of the united states that is less likely to contain native americans and other groups they might purport to care about

https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/stalin70th_pppa.jpg

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/israel-can-customize-americas-f-35-least-now/

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-israels-air-force-dominates-the-sky-16896

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/