Last night, Ari and I watched Elia Kazan’s 1947 classic A Gentleman’s Agreement, the story of a journalist, P. Schuyler Green (Gregory Peck), who pretends to be Jewish for a magazine series on anti-Semitism. When his son, Tommy, faces hateful words at school, Green is forced to explain to him what it means to be a Jew, and the importance of the separation of church and state. His simple words in explaining the Jeffersonian idea to Tommy drive home the simplicity of this idea, even in 1947. Have we made backwards strides?

Tommy: What’s anti-Semitism?
Phil: Well, uh, that’s when some people don’t like other people just because they’re Jews.
Tommy: Why not? Are Jews bad?
Phil: Well, some are and some aren’t, just like with everyone else.
Tommy: What are Jews, anyway?
Phil: Well, uh, it’s like this. Remember last week when you asked me about that big church, and I told you there are all different kinds of churches? Well, the people who go to that particular church are called Catholics, and there are people who go to different churches and they’re called Protestants, and there are people who go to different churches and they’re called Jews, only they call their churches temples or synagogues.
Tommy: Why don’t some people like those?
Phil: Well, that’s a tough one to explain, Tommy. Some people hate Catholics, and some hate Jews.
Tommy: And no one hates us ’cause we’re Americans?
Phil: Well, no, that’s another thing again. See, you can be an American and a Catholic, or an American and a Protestant, or an American and a Jew. But look, Tommy, it’s like this: one thing’s your country, see like America or France or Germany or Russia. The flag is different, and the uniform is different, and the language is different. […] But the other thing is religion, like the Jewish or the Catholic or the Protestant religion, see that hasn’t anything to do with the flag, or the uniform, or the airplanes. Got it?
Tommy: Yup!

Now change “Jew” to “Muslim,” and we’ve got a lesson pertinent to most present-day Americans.

From BoingBoing yesterday comes this great bit of news about company called You’ve Been Left Behind, which, for a small fee and all of your personal bank codes/email passwords/trace-your-housekey-on-this-piece-of-paper, will notify all of your heathen friends and family what to do with your leftover money/pets/bibles after you’ve been “raptured” and they’ve been left behind. It’s kind of cool how it would theoretically work:

“We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the “Rapture” of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system”

And also:

“You will also be able to give them some help in living out their remaining time. In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys’ (you won’t be needing them any more, and the gift will drive home the message of love). There won’t be any bodies, so probate court will take 7 years to clear your assets to your next of Kin. 7 years of course is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the AntiChrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way.”

Hey Pete, just let me know where you’ve hid your weed.

You’ve Been Left Behind

Einstein rose from the grave this week to slam God and His believers via a 1954 letter. Thus Spake Albert:

“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,” Einstein wrote.

The famed physicist also rocked the Jews some for good measure:

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,” the letter said. “And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Burned!

Luckily, the Catholic Church struck back with the answer to one of sci-fi/theology’s most basic questions: did God create Aliens?

According to “Vatican’s chief astronomer,” which given Copernicus must be a pretty new position, the answer is yes!

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.

The interview was headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother.” Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom.

Booya! (more…)

By the first night of Passover this year, Providence supermarkets had already run out of Matzo. To those of us planning on observing the holiday’s mandated eight-day abandonment of chametz, leavened breads and wheat/yeast-filled products, this presented quite the dilemma. [Oy vey!] Ultimately, Ari and I found a secret stash of Matzo at the Shaws in Cranston but, still, the Providence Matzo shortage seemed pretty bizarre. What’s up? It’s not that there’s been an influx of Jews to Providence, or a rapid increase in the number of Jews who observe Passover, says Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times; the problem is a national Matzo shortage.

Steinhauer explains:

From coast to coast, a shortfall of the unleavened flat cracker bread eaten by Jews during the eight days of Passover has sent shoppers scurrying from store to store in search of it. On Monday, Allison Mnookin circled the aisles of her local Whole Foods store in San Mateo, Calif., three times. There was no matzo to be found. […]

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… now might be a good time. In a scene straight out of ‘The Life of Brian’, priests and worshipers got into a brawl at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher over something really important! Police who responded were pummeled with palm fronds.

Artist Janet Galore rendered ‘Jesus of Peeps’ using 494 peeps. Coming in at 4.5 feet by 3.5 feet she worries that it is still a bit low rez — you do have to squint a bit. (I’m not too clear on what the green is.)

The Just Born Company of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania makes 1.2 billion peeps a year, many of which seem to end up as art. And there seems to be a raging controversy about whether they are best eaten fresh or stale.

The Kids in the Hall do up The Passion… Dr. Seuss style.

The KITH will appear at the PPAC on May 1st.

I’ve long felt that Michael Moore greatly underestimated the huge affection that many peace-loving gun control advocates have for Charlton Heston. By the end of ‘Bowling for Columbine’ with Moore howling and cringing in the driveway, I just wanted Heston to march out of the house and kick his ass. In fact, I would pay to see that: a steel cage death match between the 84-year-old Heston and the 300-pound Moore (the loser could be made into soylent green and delivered to a food bank).

At any rate, this is the time of year for two of Heston’s best movies*. Fans of Moses and Passover should tune in to ABC tonight from 7 - 11:30PM for The Ten Commandments. Sure, the special effects are cheesy, but the colors are super-vivid and the acting exquisitely hammy.
If it’s Easter salvation you crave, then go rent Ben-Hur (not one hammy/cheesy frame in the whole 3 hours). Last year I got to see this at Cinemaworld and it was stupendous. During the chariot race I’m pretty sure I was making audible noises. No CGI here — this was a cast of thousands filmed in a real amphitheater, watching a real frigging chariot race. Charlton Heston knows how to drive a chariot.

*Apparently these were books first.

Psyche! There’s no such thing. Yet.

After blunderously claiming that mortal enemies Al-Qaeda and Iran were in cahoots, John McCain and life-partner Joe Lieberman popped over to the Temple Mount yesterday for a little fun, a little nosh, some kibbitzing, and a whole lot of nonplussed Hasidim. CNN tells it:

After slipping the traditional private note into the sacred wall which once supported the western side of the Second Temple, McCain received a tour of the tunnels of 0ld City Jerusalem.

Later, as he approached a railing to wave to the gathered Americans and a smattering of mostly less-interested Israelis, Eli Ezer of New York took a photo, but kept on a running debate with another tourist about McCain’s choice of a running mate.

“Do you think he should pick Lieberman?” the woman asked, referring to Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat-turned-Independent who is a McCain supporter, and was at his side Wednesday.

“I hope not, ” said Ezer.

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Projo’s got it:

A teenager allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail outside a long-vacant Jewish temple in South Providence early yesterday, but the police caught him and two of his apparent accomplices. The teens apparently intended to toss the Molotov cocktail into a vacant lot across the street from the temple in order to enjoy the sight of it shattering and flaming, but it was hastily cast aside onto the grass outside the temple when a police cruiser approached, the police said.

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Obama’s speech yesterday addressing race and the manufactured Jeremiah Wright controversy was brilliant and moving. Whether you agree with that assessment or see him as a crafty politician giving another pretty speech, it is notable for the fact that he actually dared to speak to the voters about a difficult issue as if they were mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.

It is unfortunate that we have to praise him for what should be the standard in American political discourse, but the fact remains that such forthright maturity is decidedly not the standard. All that remains to be seen is whether the voters (and pundits, and media, and his political opponents) actually are mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.

I have long felt that I am able to have a more nuanced and less personalized view on Israel policy than Jews of my parents’ generation, for whom anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence were and are far more real. But on Saturday night, two Molotov cocktails were thrown into the home of Yossi Knafo, the Jewish Agency’s representative at Brown University. The attack caused no injuries, and “the motive behind the attack is not yet known.” But this is totally crazy and fairly terrifying. The Jerusalem Post reports:

No one was wounded in the attack, which took place just before 2 a.m. near the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island. One firebomb hit an outside wall of the house and lit a fire in the yard, while a second firebomb passed through a window into the living room, but failed to explode. Knafo, who was awake in the adjacent bedroom at the time of the attack, immediately alerted local police and Jewish Agency security personnel. He was transferred temporarily to a hotel.

Though the attack was spontaneous, “this marks a serious escalation,” a source familiar with the case told the Post. “This isn’t a threatening letter, a stone through the window or an anonymous phone call.”

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Which one is Ben Stein?  Here he is in the Projo, going off on Darwinism. And here he is on O’Reilly:

Stein gets this right (while taking on the tone of the godless evolutionist Christopher Hitchens):

Maybe we would have a new theory: We are just pitiful humans. Life is unimaginably complex. We are still trying to figure it out. We need every bit of input we can get. Let’s be humble about what we know and what we don’t know, and maybe in time, some answers will come.

But how does that jibe with broad assertions of Creationism, predicated on nothing?

Evangelical nutbags still have a strangle-hold on the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The New York Times reports that three speakers invited to participate in a recent conference on terrorism may not be former Muslim terrorists as they claim, but rather proselytizing Christians.

Members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group suing the federal government to combat what it calls creeping evangelism in the armed forces, said it was typical of the Air Force Academy to invite born-again Christians to address cadets on terrorism rather than experts who could teach students about the Middle East.

“This stuff going on at the academy today is part of the endemic evangelical infiltration that continues,” said David Antoon, a 1970 academy graduate and a foundation member.

Experts say their stories just don’t add up and they aren’t even the correct ages, but the three former Muslim terrorists are very sure of one thing… “Jesus can change your life”.

I’m just guessing here, but I think that Governor Carcieri’s wife, Susan, is not an expert in Constitutional law, or anything else for that matter.  A report in this morning’s Providence Journal relates that Sue and Don hosted another anti-choice rally in the State House rotunda…

Sue Carcieri called the concept of life as fundamental a right as liberty and pursuit of happiness. “It is a basic right we have in our Constitution.  It’s really basic” she said.

Except that it’s totally NOT.  “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are among those certain unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and are not protected under our Constitution.  However, the Governor might want to consult a constitutional expert regarding the First Amendment and see what the Establishment Clause might have to say about holding Catholic services inside the State House.

Over the past few weeks, our political debate has centered on the intersection of race and gender in American politics. Clinton claims to be “ proud” of Obama’s transcendence of racial discrimination, and Obama claims to be proud of Clinton’s success in shattering the glass ceiling. And both campaigns have instrumentally used race and gender, both publicly and deceitfully, to smear their opponents.

Journalists, commentators, and public figures have contributed to this debate, at times stirring feminist or African-American solidarity and, at other times, commending a nation that seems, perhaps, finally colorblind and egalitarian. “ Women Are Never Front-Runners,” wrote Gloria Steinem, in an attempt to explain the importance of female support for Hillary Clinton. Chris Rock, opening for Obama at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, warned the audience not to waste their votes on “ that white lady.” Others still use this contest between a black man and a female front-runner as evidence of our progress as a nation.

Are we left with the realization that we are still racist? Still sexist? Or are we left with the warm feeling that we are somehow less sexist and less racist than ever before? Perhaps this is the most dangerous of all the assumptions. Noticeably absent from the Race/Gender debate over the past few weeks has been a discussion of the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab sentiment that has played a significant role in the formation of our voters’ choices.

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