January/February 2008

Letters

Baseball Chapel

Grand Slam
I was delighted to read Karin Tanabe’s October/November cover story on baseball and religion, “Is the Nation’s Favorite Pastime Pitching Jesus?” What a wonderful tone she was able to weave in while addressing the charged issues of Baseball Chapel, religious exclusivism and the need for wholesome support groups for at-risk young adult males. Tanabe’s handling of Waddy Spoelstra’s motivation for establishing Baseball Chapel was quite sensitive, and I appreciated the wonderful humor and constructive proposal at the end of the article.

I was also engaged by Tanabe’s essay, “After Night in Sighet” about visiting Elie Wiesel’s house in Romania. For me, Night continues to be a work that I can use to help my students develop sensitivity to others, to experience the depth of darkness and horror of the Holocaust, while embracing memory without suppressing it, and to move toward an affirmation of life.
Joseph L. Price
Professor of Religious Studies, Whittier College
Whittier, CA

Keeping Score
I enjoyed “Is the Nation’s Favorite Pastime Pitching Jesus?” by Karin Tanabe. One small correction: The article says that 21 owners of professional sports teams are Jewish. I count 33. And that doesn’t include teams like the Atlanta Hawks, the Atlanta Thrashers and the Arizona Diamondbacks, which are owned by groups that include Jews. The NBA seems to have the most Jewish owners, with 15 out of 28.
Howard Friedman
Baltimore, MD

An Eye-Opener
I was blown away by Moment’s October/ November issue. My eyes were opened wide reading Karin Tanabe’s article about baseball pitching Jesus. I laughed myself silly with Mark Pinsky’s “Do You Know This Family?” about the Simpsons and rejoiced at the beauty and creativity of the Reconciliation Bowls featured in Gallery.

What a treat to think about something else besides conflict in the Middle East, internal struggles in Israel and who is a Jew.
Ann R. Haendel
St. Pete Beach, Florida

Let’s Get Serious
The editor writes that Elie Wiesel named this magazine for Warsaw’s Yiddish daily Der Moment (1910-1939). At a time when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose rhetoric is not much different from Hitler’s, is threatening the state of Israel and Jews everywhere, you publish articles about baseball and a homosexual playwright? That’s fine, but will it help this generation of Jews to be better educated about the approaching danger than Elie Wiesel’s family was in the 1940s?
George Korbel
Pleasanton, California

Tony’s Politics

Contradictions?
In the October/November 2007 article on playwright Tony Kushner by Ted Merwin and David Zax, “The Playwright’s Politics,” Kushner is quoted as saying that “the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity.” Kusher also says that he “is not anti-Israel.” I believe it would be of interest to know why, then, would he support a “historical, moral, political calamity” for the Jewish people?
David L. Bruck
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Is He or Isn’t He?
In “The Playwright’s Politics,” Tony Kushner says that I and others who have described him as hostile to Israel “work very hard, by taking things out of context, to make you sound nuts.” Really?

Kushner has called Israel’s establishment a “mistake” (Haaretz, April 7, 2004) and stated plainly, “I’ve never been a Zionist. I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened” (New York Sun, October 14, 2002). He alleged that Israel was involved in “a deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture and a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people” (New York Sun, April 4, 2002), and accused the [Israeli government] of “ethnic cleansing” (Yale Israel Review, Winter 2005).
Perhaps Kushner can explain how these words and deeds are not hostile to Israel.
Morton A. Klein
National President, Zionist Organization of America
New York, NY

CAMERA’s Focus

CAMERA Protests
Gershom Gorenberg’s intemperate “Uncandid CAMERA” in the October/November isue serves only to underscore his own biased agenda and slippery way with facts. Gorenberg launched his attack because he was a key source for CNN’s God’s Jewish Warriors, which we criticized for its extreme anti-Israel tilt. The documentary series established a false equivalence between Jewish and Christian “warriors,” who with rare exceptions are merely devout, and Muslim “warriors,” whose ranks include jihadists responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

In our criticism, we pointed out numerous material errors. For example, the series claimed that after the Six-Day War, “the Israeli government was divided—trade the captured land for peace or keep it and build Jewish settlements.” Israel faced no such choice, because less than three months after the war the Arab League Summit passed the infamous “three no’s resolution”—no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel.

Gorenberg also makes much of a 1960s-era memo in the Israeli state archives, written by the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, which argued that settlements would violate the 4th Geneva Convention. We pointed out that the legal adviser, Theodor Meron, was hardly the senior or most respected expert on international law in Israel. Every ministry in Israel has a legal adviser, meaning Meron was just one of many such advisers.

Gorenberg, who praises himself as “a responsible member of Israel’s fourth estate,” ignores most of the serious errors we pointed out, and instead charges CAMERA with being “cavalier with facts.” So it must be embarrassing to Gorenberg that a recent rebroadcast corrected many of the errors we had pointed out to CNN. Will Gorenberg now charge his friends at CNN with being “cavalier with the facts?”

It is a pity that, rather than dealing with the facts, Gorenberg instead stoops to name-calling. He also charged, again with absolutely no evidence, that we are “not really interested in accuracy,” and are “the embodiment of some American Jews’ discomfort with any media coverage that fails to portray Israel with a halo.” On the contrary, the evidence shows Gorenberg’s own discomfort with any coverage that accurately portrays Israel or its self-declared adversaries.
Alex Safian
Associate Director, CAMERA
Boston, MA

Gershom Gorenberg Responds
Truly, I am dumbfounded anew at CAMERA’s willingness to quote out of context, misuse information and misrepresent the past. Since space is limited, I’ll stick to key points:

In the wake of the Six-Day War, the Israeli cabinet was indeed divided about the future of the occupied territories. Intensive cabinet debate of the issue began within days of the war, as documentary evidence shows. The Khartoum summit did not end the dispute at the highest level of Israeli government about the wisdom or legality of settlement.

As legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron was the Israeli government’s in-house authority on international law in September 1967—which is precisely why the Prime Minister’s Office asked him to evaluate the legality of civilian settlement in the occupied territories. Meron answered that the Fourth Geneva Convention barred such settlement. Meron’s qualifications included a doctorate from Harvard Law School and advanced studies in international law at Cambridge University. Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira separately told Prime Minister Levi Eshkol that civilian settlement violated the Geneva Convention.

A full listing of sources on this debate can be found in the footnotes of David Kretzmer’s The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. CAMERA, citing scholars who dissent from the accepted view, misleads readers by failing to note that they represent a small minority in the field. Meron’s position is the mainstream one.

My “agenda” in researching my country’s history is to uncover the past and describe it in all its complexity. If CAMERA actually cares about accuracy, it should take time out from demanding corrections from others and correct its own accounts. If not, let it change its name to the Committee for Agitprop in Middle East Reporting in America.
Gershom Gorenberg
Jerusalem, Israel

The Real Issue
The debate between Gershom Gorenberg and CAMERA over the legality of the settlements, interesting though it is, remains a distraction from the main issue. Even that great supporter of Israel, President Ronald Reagan, conceded that the settlements themselves were “ill-advised.”

Indeed, it is hard to overestimate the degree to which the settlements are an obstacle to peace, not only because they are so difficult to remove, but also because they force Palestinians in the West Bank to confront on a daily basis the radical disparity between their lives and those of Israelis. Defending the settlements requires scores of checkpoints within the West Bank which subject Palestinians to long delays and humiliations. Bereft of land, water and freedom of movement, Palestinian society sinks in misery in full view of settlements with lush lawns and swimming pools. Two separate and unequal societies live side by side, perhaps not apartheid, but its close cousin.

To say that the settlements are an obstacle to peace does not mean that they pose the only obstacle. Surely the political fragmentation and violence of Palestinian society deserve a large share of the blame. But to ignore the role of the settlements— legal or not—is to revert to a pre-Zionist mentality in which nothing the Jews do can influence the beliefs and behaviors of non-Jews. The settlement policy of successive Israeli governments is proof that the Zionist desire to give Jews political agency has succeeded, but in a way that threatens the very future of the Zionist enterprise itself.
David Biale
Emanuel Ringelblum Professor
of Jewish History
University of California, Davis

Let’s Even Those Hands
Gorenberg is again using a Jewish organization to present and promulgate his opinion that settlements are illegal, and he does this under the guise that he is doing his job as a journalist and is even-handed. If he believes settlements are illegal, fine, I respect that. But if he claims to be evenhanded, then why not acknowledge that others disagree and present another point of view? There are many whom he could have quoted, including Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, who helped draft Resolution 242. Goldberg was very clear that the resolution does not obligate Israel to withdraw from all the captured territories.

CAMERA is an advocacy organization and does not claim to be even-handed. Its self-imposed role is to combat anti-Israel propaganda, lies and distortions, of which I am sure Mr. Gorenberg is well aware. There is a lot of honest reporting and justified criticism of Israel, but I am afraid that Gorenberg, in his attempt to be even-handed, has crossed the line.
Mayer Jacobovits
New York, NY

Diplomacy and Religion

A Historical Perspective
In his October/November 2007 column, “Can Religion Lead to Peace?,” Marshall Breger decries the reality that religion is not part of foreign policy and diplomatic endeavors. He complained that there were no rabbis, imams and priests present at the Oslo peace process signings.

I question his notion that involving religion in diplomacy will somehow help things. Christian wars against Jews and Muslims litter history. It is obvious that when some religious adherents get stirred up they cannot avoid attacking each other. It hardly appears that religion is a source of peace. Of course, diplomats should study and understand religious differences so that they can figure out how to calm outbreaks of religious violence.
Bertram Rothschild
Aurora, CO

Rabbis on Psychiatry

An Enlightened View
As a psychiatrist, I was most impressed with the enlightened and humane responses given by your panel of rabbis on the matter of Judaism’s view of psychiatry. Indeed, I would venture to say that the rabbis know more about psychiatry than most psychiatrists know about rabbinical Judaism—which is a shame, since the Judaic world-view has much to offer my profession. Maimonides, for example, was arguably the “father” of modern cognitive-behavioral therapy and psychosomatic medicine. It is to the credit of your panel that the treatment of psychiatric disorders is given an honored place in Judaic ethics.
Ronald Pies, MD
Professor of Psychiatry, SUNY Upstate Medical University
Syracuse, NY