The guy who tried to run for POTUS in a space says...

'Demanding Iran's capitulation' is no way to get a nuclear deal done.  And like, the Space Suit Guy should know....

Ever wonder what kind of mail the Israeli Ambassador to Germany receives?

 He reads a sample. Watch and learn.

Emerson Swift Mahon, Jew

On the last day of Black History month, I found this via  Mosaic Magazine via CJN:

Emerson Swift Mahon, born a Christian, left his native Grenada for Canada in 1912 in search of higher education and harboring a deeply-felt interest in Judaism. Two years later, he enlisted in the Canadian army to fight in World War I, and there met a Jewish chaplain named Herman Abramowitz. Eiran Harris writes: 


Mahon persuaded Rabbi Abramowitz of his sincere desire to convert, and after a lengthy course of instruction in the intricacies of Judaism, an appropriate test of knowledge, and a religious ceremony, Rabbi Abramowitz signed the conversion certificate. 

After the war Mahon settled in Winnipeg and graduated in 1929 with a science degree from the University of Manitoba. . . . Unfortunately, the Depression forced him to accept a job as a sleeping-car porter with the Canadian Pacific Railway. . . . In Winnipeg, Mahon joined Young Judaea, a Zionist youth organization, and quickly rose through the ranks. His work on the railway enabled him to organize chapters throughout Western Canada as well as to photograph every synagogue between Winnipeg and Vancouver. Mahon also became proficient in Hebrew and Yiddish: “on the way to synagogue on Saturday mornings, it was quite common to observe Mahon urging his children, in Yiddish, to hurry along.”

Galut vs Jews

Ryan Bellarose, a writer at Israellycool, asks an interesting question in a post called ‘History Lesson’.

 I see these same problems now with young Jewish people in North America. Aside from a few, they have not been properly taught their own history, and they have been sold a false narrative. Instead of being proud at surviving almost ridiculous odds, and achieving something no other displaced indigenous people has ever accomplished, they feel shame at their people’s success. 

 How messed up is that? They come from a people who, today, number maybe 14 million worldwide, yet whose contributions to the world far outweigh their mere numbers, yet they feel ashamed? They come from a nation that survived two thousand years of exile, only to emerge triumphant to retake their ancestral lands from the hands of their colonizers. Yet they are made to feel like they have done something wrong and must apologize? No.

We need to ask: how did we allow the twisting of the quintessential bully story? 

To answer Ryan, one needs an understanding of Jewish history and the make-up of North American Jews.  North America is host to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. If we were to examine the Jewish community in North American, the largest single group of Jews is self-identified as ‘secular or culturally’ Jewish. The second largest group, after those self-identifying ‘secular’ Jews, comes from the ranks of ‘Reform Judaism’. I suspect the vast majority of those ‘secular’ Jews also draw their roots from the Reform movement, but I digress.

Reform Judaism was born in Germany in the 19^th century. I am not going to go over all the ins and outs of the Reform movement, since this history bores me senseless (and I would rather curl up with my bio of Rav Kook) but suffice to say that Reform Judaism rejected a number of core Jewish beliefs. Among those beliefs rejected by the early Reform movement was a belief in the coming messiah to redeem the Jewish people and re-establish our state in our ancestral homeland or the re-building of our Temple in Jerusalem. Reform Judaism rejected idea that any Jew was dwelling in exile. To Reform Jews, there simply was no Galut.  Jews were full citizens of those societies in which they were dwelling, and the only meaningful Jewish mission was to address universal issues of social justice faced by both Jews and non-Jews of those societies. 

It was imperative to the early Reform Jewish thinkers that Judaism became merely a religion, just like any other religion.Nazi Germany killed off most of the ‘Reform’ Jews of Europe, and after the Shoah, Reform Judaism ceased to be a significant religious stream of interest outside North America. The devastation laid to waste in the Shoah did cause a serious ‘rethink’ by Reform Jewish philosophers towards ‘Zionism’ (the movement for self-deter mination for the Jewish people) for a time, but the kind of ‘Zionism’ the North American Reform Jewish community was prepared to support could not have a religious nationalist component; hence, their contempt towards the Dati Leumi movement. Concepts based on ‘indigenous rights’ for the Jewish people in their historic homeland conflicted with the founding characteristics of Reform Judaism. 

This is why so many so-called progressive Jewish organizations like J Street, B'Tselem or Rabbis for Human Rights often appear to be so ‘anti-Jewish’ in nature and drawn the bulk of their Jewish membership from the Reform community. That is not to say, all Reform or Reform influenced Jews are ignorant of their history and/or refuse to recognize themselves as members of Kol Yisrael, but as North American Reform Judaism moves closer and closer to being a general religion based on humanitarian, rather than, Jewish values, well, they risk being our lost tribe rather than a members of our tribe. 

To complicate matters further, political progressive liberals, put enormous pressure on secular and reform Jews to actively disassociate and divorce themselves from the community of Kol Yisrael. Elliot Abrams touches on this in a recent article on this very theme highlighting the Obama Administration’s manufactured outrage over everything ‘Israeli’.

The third Obama administration reason for building up this crisis is also deadly serious: it is to use the current tension to harm Israel’s support in the United States permanently. All opinion polls in the last several years show a partisan edge in support: overall support for Israel is steady and high, but its composition is changing. More and more Republicans support Israel, and the gap between Democratic and Republican support levels is growing. President Obama acts as if he sees this as a terrific development, one that should be enlarged as much as possible before he leaves office. That way he would leave behind not just an Iran deal, but weakened support for Israel on Iran and everything else.  Support for Israel would become less of a bipartisan matter and more a divisive issue between the two parties. It is not hard to envision Obama in retirement joining Jimmy Carter as a frequent critic of Israel, pushing the Democratic party to move away from its decades of very strong support for the Jewish state.

Perhaps this manufactured crisis will diminish after Netanyahu’s speech, where he is likely to say things that many Democrats still agree with. Perhaps it will diminish if Iran rejects any deal, even on the terms the Obama administration is offering. Perhaps Netanyahu will lose his election and a new Labor Party-led government will appear in Jerusalem. But more likely, the remaining 23 months of the Obama administration will be months of continuing tension between Israel and the United States. That is because the administration desires that tension and views it as productive. The problem is not Netanyahu’s speech, which right or wrong to deliver should be a minor and passing factor in bilateral relations. The real issues are deeper and far more serious. This president has fostered a crisis in relations because it advances his own political and policy goals. That is what his subordinates and many Democrats in Congress are trying very hard, and with real success, to obfuscate.

Jewish history is long and diverse. We have seen this type of Jew before. They are not self-hating Jews, but Hellenistic Jews, robed in modern garb. To modern Hellenistic Jews, the greatest threat to their existence comes not from murderous intentions of  Anti-Semites and Assimilationists, but to the fidelity shown by the Jewish people to the covenant of our Torah in our land.

Is This Because I'm A Lesbian? Shorter Kathleen Wynne

Premier Katherine Wynne asks:

“What is it that especially disqualifies me for the job that I’m doing? Is it that I’m a woman? Is it that I’m a mother? Is it that I have a master’s of education? Is it that I was a school council chair? Is it that I was the minister of education?” Wynne said in the house, staring down the Tory MPP.  “What is it exactly that the member opposite thinks disqualifies me from doing the job that I’m doing? What is that?” she demanded. The Toronto Star

But for rest of us, the answer is really simple: you are not the mother or father of our children.

You do not get to make those decisions for our children.

You do not have parental rights to our children.

You do not provide the necessities of life to our children.

In fact, your government is steadily eroding the size of our pay cheques. Pay cheques with which we provide the necessities of life to our children, but mostly, it is because we live in a land where the progeny of any womb is not in service to the state.

At a time when French Jews are fleeing France at levels not since the Vichy Government....

The word chutzpah is often mistranslated to characterize someone exhibiting ‘nerve’ or ‘gall’ but chutzpah is more than just galling or nervy behaviour.  

 Think of a thief who calls the police to lay a complaint that someone has stolen his own illicit stash of ill-begotten loots. That’s chutzpah.

Applied to the world stage, a  man who wrote a doctoral thesis steeped in holocaust denial and is rumoured to be the bag man who helped finance the PLO’sterror attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics against the Israeli Olympic team attending a French anti-terror march - now that’s real chutzpah.

The Queen’s English

When I was in grade school there was a great deal of emphasis on the ‘Queen’s English’.  As Canadians, we took pride in using the Queen’s English in spelling, grammar and pronunciation. Writing ‘colour’ as ‘color’ was guaranteed you would be given a big red ‘sp’ that ripped across the word and counted as a spelling mistake on your papers or tests. Being able to express yourself in a comprehensible and logical form in the Queen’s English was considered the pinnacle of literacy.   

I think it can be safely suggested the British government no longer officially speaks a comprehensive or logical form of the Queen’s English. Forward:

A new United Kingdom government report showed significant progress being made in combating anti-Semitism.  The “Government Action on Anti-Semitism” report, published Monday by the Department for Communities and Local Government, noted advances despite a surge of incidents this summer during Israel’s military operation in Gaza. In July and August, there were 543 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.K., more than the entire previous year. Incidents included physical assaults, vandalism and graffiti.

If the British government can issue a report on Anti-Semitism and show ‘significant progress being made in combat ant-Semitism’, and still note there was a surge (aka an increase) in anti-Semitic incidents from one year to the next…well, the Queen's English isn't what it use to be.