The Armenian genocide debate within the Jewish community shows no sign of abating. If the Forward is correct, and I think it is, the reason is that the argument brings up questions that get at the very heart of Jewish identity today, with its confusing mix of religious, moral and national obligations. Here’s a bit from the Forward’s editorial to ponder over the weekend:

There’s no doubt that collisions between fighting genocide and defending Israel cut the heart of Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust era. What, we may ask, is the point of fighting for a Jewish state if it will not act in a Jewish manner — that is, serve as a beacon to us and the world? Wasn’t that supposed to be the promise of Israel?

Well, no, it wasn’t. The promise of Zionism, from Herzl to Ben-Gurion to today’s Israel, was to normalize the Jewish condition — to remove the Jewish people from its rootless, luftmentsh status as a scattered nation with no ground to stand on and no responsibility for the implications of its beliefs. It was to bring the Jews back into the rough-and-tumble of history, of real-life struggles as lived by sovereign nations. The idea of Israel as somehow exempt from the rules of realpolitik, from the tough moral choices faced by other nations, was an invention to make the Zionist revolution comprehensible to those of us who did not undergo the revolution. It was an Israel we invented for ourselves.

[…]

If anything, the genocide collisions of August should make us re-examine the moral principles we have created for ourselves in the wake of the Holocaust, and consider whether they reflect the realities of today’s cold, hard world. In the end, political ethics based on slogans and theories, with no recognition of the ugly choices required in navigating this hard world, are no ethics at all. The task of the post-post-Holocaust era is to forge a new ethic for our new world.

Read the whole thing.

I wish I could give credit where credit’s due, but the name on the e-mail that came into my inbox was Jewish Power, so perhaps it was those Jewish Defense League thugs or some such? Anyway, it’s funny. With apologies, of course, to Paul McCartney:

Abe Foxman’s version of “Yesterday”
Yesterday,
All my scandals seemed so far away
Now, I realize that they are here to stay
Oh how I long
For yesterday.

Yesterday,
With arrogance I’d get my way
Now I hope that I can hide away
In Florida
Like Yesterday

Suddenly,
I’m just half the man I used to be
The Marc Rich scandal still hangs over me
The expose’
Came suddenly

Why
The donors
Had to go
I should know
They wouldn’t stay
I did
All those wrongs
Now I, long
For yesterday…
Yesterday,
The Pollard scandal seemed so far away
Now I realize it’s here to stay
I wish he’d die
Just go away

Yesterday,
Holocaust survivors I betrayed
Now my image has begun to fade
O I remember
Yesterday

Suddenly
I’m just half the man I used to be
My temper tantrums are exhausting me
Don’t question my
Stability

Yesterday,
Funds were such an easy thing to raise
And the Board against itself I’d play
But now our bills
Are hard to pay

Yesterday,
Armenian Genocide I brushed away
Now I’m frightened by the news it made
They called me smug
Just yesterday

Yesterday,
Firing staffers was a game I’d play
Now my own job might end that way
O how I long
For Yesterday

Hilly Kristal, the founder of the punk-rock club CBGB, is dead from lung cancer. For those unfamiliar with CBGB and New York’s punk scene, it was comprised of a startling number of Jews. The history was dutifully recorded last year in the book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk by Steven Lee Beeber. 

Six days and counting until the release of “The Israel Lobby” and already the media is beginning to weigh in.  The New Yorker’s take is here.  Money quote:

Lobbying is inscribed in the American system of power and influence. Big Pharma, the A.A.R.P., the N.R.A., the N.A.A.C.P., farming interests, the American Petroleum Institute, and hundreds of others shuttle between K Street and Capitol Hill. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national-security adviser, recently praised Mearsheimer and Walt in the pages of Foreign Policy for the service of “initiating a much-needed public debate,” but he went on to provide a tone and a perspective that are largely missing from their arguments. “The participation of ethnic or foreign-supported lobbies in the American policy process is nothing new,” he observes. “In my public life, I have dealt with a number of them. I would rank the Israeli-American, Cuban-American, and Armenian-American lobbies as the most effective in their assertiveness. The Greek- and Taiwanese-American lobbies also rank highly in my book. The Polish-American lobby was at one time influential (Franklin Roosevelt complained about it to Joseph Stalin), and I daresay that before long we will be hearing a lot from the Mexican-, Hindu-, and Chinese-American lobbies as well.”

Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance laws. But that is clearly not the source of the hysteria surrounding their arguments. “The Israel Lobby” is a phenomenon of its moment. The duplicitous and manipulative arguments for invading Iraq put forward by the Bush Administration, the general inability of the press to upend those duplicities, the triumphalist illusions, the miserable performance of the military strategists, the arrogance of the Pentagon, the stifling of dissent within the military and the government, the moral disaster of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the rise of an intractable civil war, and now an incapacity to deal with the singular winner of the war, Iran—all of this has left Americans furious and demanding explanations. Mearsheimer and Walt provide one: the Israel lobby. In this respect, their account is not so much a diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it.

Amy Winehouse, that nice Jewish rock star from London, as many of you who pay attention to the world of Lindsay and Britney may know, is hitting bottom even worse than those two (as if such a thing is possible). Rumor has it the singer of the popular “Rehab” was shooting crack in between her toes last week, and photos are going around with her walking in the street with blood dripping from her feet and her face cut up. All pretty disgusting, and at least one person has had enough: Amy’s father-in-law. The AP (by way of the P-I) reports that Giles Fielder-Civil has told fans to stop buying her albums.

Fielder-Civil said he believed Winehouse and his son, Blake Fielder-Civil, had used cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin and were in “abject denial” about their problem.
“I think they believe they are recreational users of drugs and they are in control,” Fielder-Civil told British Broadcasting Corp. radio Tuesday. “Clearly they are addicts.”
He said fans should send a message to Winehouse “that her addiction and her behavior are not acceptable.”
“Perhaps it is time to stop buying records,” Fielder-Civil said. “It’s a possibility, to send that message.”

Winehouse’s father begs to differ, however. “It’s all clutching at straws,” Mitch Winehouse told the BBC. “There’s only one way out of this, and anybody with any drug experience will tell you ... that the only way out of this is not sectioning them, not locking them up. At some point they are going to reach rock bottom ... and at that point they will say, `Listen, I don’t want to do this anymore.’”
Um, yeah. Hopefully before somebody gets hurt.
The elder Fielder-Civil thinks the record label should get involved, but when has the man ever come through? Just look at Winehouse’s Web site, created by Universal UK: “It’s been a fantastic few months for Amy since the release, at the end of October ’06, of her anthemic single ‘Rehab’.” 
From the AP report:

Concern for her health has grown since Winehouse was taken to a hospital earlier this month for “severe exhaustion” and spent a short stint in a rehab facility. She has since canceled a series of British concerts and postponed a tour of the U.S. and Canada.

Fantastic!