“What to make of people who actually cheer at the mention of American exceptionalism? Well, post-1960s liberalism had so won over the culture, and so congealed into the new moral establishment, that conservatism — as a politics and a philosophy — became a centerpiece in liberalism’s iconography of evil. It was demonized and stigmatized as an ideology born of nostalgia for America’s past evils — inequality, oppression, exploitation, warmongering, bigotry, repression, and all the rest.”
Or, the battle of Left and Right for the moral meaning of America.
I was recently invited to make some remarks at a charity dinner for a cause that I strongly support. The organizers worried that, because their cause affected only Third World nations, they would have a hard time raising money from an American audience. Localism, it seemed, in everything from farm produce to charity giving, was the new vogue. People wanted to see their dollars at work locally rather than watch them disappear into the coffers of some international organization.
Could I help them make the case for international giving? On the night of the dinner it occurred to me to make the point that America was the world’s exceptional nation — not that its people were superior, but that its wealth and power bestowed upon it a level of responsibility in the world that other nations did not have to bear. Exceptionalism as a burden, not a vanity, was my point. Through my wife I had had an involvement with a charitable organization that focused on the problem of obstetric fistula in Africa. On a visit to Africa in behalf of that group, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much we Americans were respected for our compassion and generosity, quite apart from our wealth and military power. The people I met saw something essentially good in the American people.
On one blazing hot afternoon in a remote village in the nation of Niger, a local chieftain, dramatically bedecked in the head wrap and flowing robe of his desert people, told me through an interpreter that it was striking to him to meet people who would come halfway around the world to help his people — to visit, as he said in a phrase that mixed pathos with eloquence, “a country lost in the sun.” I recounted this story at the charity dinner simply to make the point that American exceptionalism in the world had as much to do with the largesse of our character as with our great wealth and power, and that causes like the one at hand only enhanced our reputation in the world as a fundamentally decent nation — a beacon, as it were, of human possibility. I thought this would be the easiest of points to make. And things were in fact going smoothly until I uttered the words “American exceptionalism.” Instantly — almost before I could get the words out of my mouth — quiet boos erupted from one side of the banquet room. Not loud ugly boos, but polite remonstrative boos, the kind that respectfully censure you for an impropriety.
I was shocked. This was a young, bright, prosperous American audience reproaching me for mentioning the exceptionalism of our nation. It was as if they were saying, “Don’t you understand that even the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ is a hubris that evokes the evils of white supremacy? It is an indecency that we won’t be associated with.” In booing, these audience members were acting out an irony: They were good Americans precisely because they were skeptical of American greatness. Their skepticism was a badge of innocence because it dissociated them from America’s history of evil. To unreservedly buy into American exceptionalism was, for them, to turn a blind eye on this evil, and they wanted to make the point that they were far too evolved for that.
Beset on all sides, it stands firm Jerusalem —
“Israel stands, battered but battle-hardened, in many ways more successful than ever. Yet with the Islamist tide rising relentlessly throughout the region, how much longer can it last? The Israelis stand united and confident, committed to fighting for what they have. That’s more than the Europeans can say, and maybe more than we can say. Still, Israelis are nervous about the future. When here, it feels as if there were always a hurricane just nearby, threatening to make landfall. ”
In the weeks since the Charlie Hebdo and kosher-supermarket massacres in Paris, thousands of French Jews have contacted Israeli authorities to begin the process of aliyah, the “ascent” of emigrating to Israel. Many are likely to settle in the charming 19th-century “German Colony” of Jerusalem — where you will nowadays hear a lot of people speaking French. Stopping by a Parisian-style bistro in the German Colony, I meet Meir Schweiger, a modern-Orthodox rabbi of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
As I do with most Israelis, I ask Rabbi Schweiger how he sees the prospects for peace. He recalls how things were in the 1970s and 1980s, after he first moved to the Gush Etzion, a large block of settlements between Jerusalem and Hebron in the West Bank. Back then, he tells me, Jewish settlers routinely went shopping in nearby Palestinian markets. Palestinian businessmen were often well known among settlers and could move freely in and out of settlements with their employees. Peaceful coexistence started deteriorating in 1987, with the first intifada, and ended altogether in the terrible second intifada of 2000 to 2003, which killed nearly a thousand Israeli civilians and ended only with the construction of a separation wall. Schweiger recounts that the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the terrorist wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah militia, went into nearby Palestinian villages to distribute weapons and incite violence.
It’s been another wild, wacky and worrisome week in higher education. There’s the “activism” class at the University of Michigan that teaches capitalism should be “overthrown.” There’s the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor who offered students extra credit to attend a rally against Gov. Scott Walker. There’s the UCLA student who was told at one point that she could not serve on the student government – because she is Jewish. There’s the University of Wisconsin-Madison College Republicans who were viciously attacked for defending higher education budget cuts.
There’s the professor who was cleared of wrongdoing after he forced students to recite a satirical anti-American pledge that characterized Republicans as racist, homophobic and anti-poor. This is the highlight reel from just this week. But I could go on and on. Indeed, that is one of the most shocking aspects of working as editor of The College Fix. Day in and day out, month after month and year after year, we report on troubling campus developments, and it just … never … ends. I keep wondering – can anything, will anything – be done about how our centers of higher education are completely controlled by the left, by social progressives and outright socialists who hold disdain for America and yet continue to shape our country and its future?
The best thing Obama can seem to say about the country is that it elected him into office.
Dear Reader (Unless you’re that lucky lady with Joe Biden standing pressed-up behind you as he pretends to search for your car keys while whispering the contents of this “news”letter to you), So the question of the moment is whether Rudy Giuliani should be flayed or simply drawn-and-quartered for saying that Obama doesn’t love America. Naturally, this has led to Giuliani being called a racist, because the best working definition of racism in America today is any criticism of Obama that stings.
Kevin Williamson runs through the highlights of what is, by now, a pretty old argument. My own view isn’t so much that Giuliani is right, but that he’s not exactly wrong either. Look, it was like a week ago that we were talking about Obama’s inability to criticize the Islamic State without first going out of his way to flagellate the West and America over the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, and Jim Crow. Is it really so crazy to think a guy who feels compelled to warn his own countrymen not to get on their “high horse” about child rapists and slavers (who are also beheading and/or immolating and/or burying alive Americans, Christians, Yazidis, and fellow Muslims) might subscribe to an, um, unconventional form of patriotism? (Personally, I think looking down your nose at men who do such things doesn’t require a high horse, or even a pygmy horse, or even any horse at all.
A recent report by the Parliamentary Committee on Antisemitism noted “a palpable concern, insecurity, loneliness and fear following the summer’s rise in incidents and subsequent world events.”In California, where I was earlier this week, Jews and non-Jews are asking the same questions. Is Europe finished? Is it time for the Jews of Europe to move to Israel? And then finally: Are we in America also vulnerable to this earthquake? The French atrocities last month and last weekend’s attacks in Copenhagen, in which Jewish targets were singled out for murder along with cartoonists and their supporters upholding the right to give offence to Islam, have forced into public attention the murderous hatred of the Jews in the Islamic world.
Europe has been discovering to its horror that once again Jews are being made victims in its midst – and once again it is powerless to protect them.
Jews are leaving France in great number because the risk of violence to them there has become acute. In Britain many Jews don’t see a problem at all, especially if they live inside a Jewish community bubble and don’t care much about Israel.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In what is becoming an increasingly nasty grudge match, the White House is mulling ways to undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington and blunt his message that a potential nuclear deal with Iran is bad for Israel and the world.
There are limits. Administration officials have discarded the idea of President Barack Obama himself giving an Iran-related address to rebut the two speeches Netanyahu is to deliver during his early March visit. But other options remain on the table.
Among them: a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security aides and a pointed snub of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington, according to the officials.
The administration has already ruled out meetings between Netanyahu and Obama, saying it would be inappropriate for the two to meet so close to Israel’s March 17 elections. But the White House is now doubling down on a cold-shoulder strategy, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official than normal to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the officials said.
“Shutting out the messenger.
President Roosevelt sneaked out of the White House through a rear exit rather than meet with the 400 Rabbis who were to plead for the Jews in Europe and thus created a Disgraceful Precedent. If Roosevelt could do that why not Obama to Benjamin Netanyahu who is coming to plead with him not to sign a bad agreement with Iran?”…..Nurit Greeger
“I was seven years old, in 1943, and becoming comfortable in the United States, where my parents and I had arrived as refugees from Poland, via Japan, in 1941.
Almost from the moment we hit the blessed shores of America, my father, Rabbi Dr. Isaac Lewin, z”l, worked day and night with the Va’ad Le-Hatzala to rescue the Jews trapped in Poland and the rest of Europe. They included my grandfather, Rabbi Aaron Lewin, z”l, the revered rabbi of Rzeszow who had twice been elected to the Polish parliament, and who had – unknown to my father – already been murdered by Ukrainians in Lvov in June 1941.
I remember the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 1943, as news of the slaughter of Jews by Hitler and his cohorts dribbled out to the free world and reached American media. I was already a New York Yankees fan, and attention was focused on the World Series between my Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. As a seven year old, I could not really appreciate why my father was ignoring the World Series and was busy soliciting volunteers among the Orthodox rabbinate and rank-and-file Jews to make the arduous train ride from New York to Washington to convey personally to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt how precarious the lives of Jews in Europe had become and to request decisive action against the death camps to which Jews were being transported.
Riots, restrictions on speech and religion, and the takeover of politics and law enforcement are just a few of the unwelcome changes that can be expected in non-Muslim societies as Muslim immigrants increase in number, according to Dr. Peter Hammond. A Christian missionary based in South Africa and author of 40 books, Hammond delineates how Muslims change societies in his book, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam. Citing examples of countries worldwide, Hammond outlines typical activities that occur as the Muslim percentage of the total population increases. It is a warning bell about the gradual, step-by-step changes that can be expected in other countries still undergoing significant Muslim immigration.
These societal changes occur because devout Muslims are bound by a 1,400-year-old doctrine of immigration originating in Islamic scriptures and based on Mohammed’s migration from Mecca to Medina. Under the religious edict or Hijra, Islamic expansionism and submission of all non-Muslims to shariah or Islamic doctrine must occur. Islamic expansionism and its counterpart, jihad, are first expressed as Muslim demands for special status and privileges within the host country. A higher percentage of Muslims in the host country can soon translate into Muslim control of political processes, law enforcement, media, and the economy, as well as restrictions on freedom of movement, speech and religious practices. The appropriation of goods and property, as well as violence with impunity, can also occur.
www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Winning medical advice. (Israel21c) Israeli startup Medivizor uses patent-pending technology to find the most essential information applicable for each individual’s medical situation. Medivizor won 4 prestigious competitions in 2014, was highlighted by Forbes and is recommended by doctors to their patients.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/goodbye-dr-google-hello-medivizor/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe01iuVH0E8
A traffic-light pacemaker. (M) A joint Israeli-UK project is testing whether a pacemaker emitting pulsating blue and yellow light can be used to regulate the beating of newly implanted heart tissue generated by stem cells. Also interesting because the UK’s Independent newspaper rarely includes any positive Israeli news.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/tests-begin-on-traffic-light-pacemaker-that-could-revolutionise-heart-treatment-10045618.html
ReWalk makes miracles possible. (M) Here’s a rare positive Israel article from CNN. It describes the exoskeleton from Israel’s ReWalk that is changing the lives of paraplegics. People previously confined to wheelchairs can now walk upright once again. (Stop video after 2 minutes.)
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/08/technology/innovationnation/rewalk/
Turning darkness into light. (Israel21c) Ben-Gurion University is hosting “Light and Blindness” – a full-day exhibition of research-and-development activities in Israel designed to improve the quality of life for people with visual impairment. It includes a startup contest and the opening of a trail for the blind.
http://www.israel21c.org/israel-in-the-spotlight/turning-the-darkness-into-light-with-innovation/
Boost for ice treatment to destroy tumors. Israeli biotech IceCure Medical has received $21 million of funds from Epoch Partner Investments to speed up the sales and distribution of its IceSense3 cryoablation system to treat breast cancer. IceSense3 uses extreme cold to destroy targeted tumors in less than 15 mins, with no pain.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/02/17/israeli-icecure-gets-21-2-million-international-investment-to-treat-breast-cancer-with-extreme-cold/
$9 million donation to fight cancer. Philanthropists Laura and Isaac Perlmutter have pledged $3 million to finance six joint cancer research projects between NY University and Israel’s Technion, plus a further $6 million to establish a state-of-the-art research facility focusing on cancer metabolomics at the Technion.
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/NYU-and-Technion-to-forge-groundbreaking-partnership-in-cancer-research-391503
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The most efficient desalination plant in the world. (M) Israel’s new Sorek desalination plant is now at full capacity, producing 627,000 cubic meters of drinking water daily. With the lowest rate of energy consumption in the world, its water is the cheapest of any large-scale desalination plant.
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-desalination/
Washington to host US-Israeli cyber security conference. The Israel Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) will hold its 5th annual Defensive Cyberspace Operations & Intelligence Conference and Exhibition in Washington, DC, April 27-28, 2015. This is the first INSS cyber conference to be held in the US.
http://www.dcoi.org.il/#!about/cvz5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaCNHKupDI
Israel establishes Cyber Defense Authority. Israel’s cabinet has approved the establishment of a national cyber defense authority which will have overall national responsibility for cyber defense. It will also operate an a Cyber Event Readiness Team to strengthen the resilience of organizations and sectors in the economy.
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2015/02/15/israel-establishes-cyber-defense-authority/
The importance of technology and education. (M) Graduates of Israel Technion have won 4 Nobel Prizes and have either founded or are managing two-thirds of the Israeli companies on NASDAQ. Technion’s President Peretz Lavie describes why Israel’s foremost technical institute has been so successful.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-technion-president-peretz-lavie-on-technology-and-education-1423854912
Israeli Sci-Tech schools. 100,000 Israeli kids – 10 percent of all Israeli high school students (Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze) – attend a Sci-Tech school. The Sci-Tech network builds curricula based on the demand for professionals in various Israeli industries, and it currently has 18 industrial vocational schools.
http://www.jewishledger.com/2015/02/seeds-start-nation-cultivated-israel-sci-tech-schools/
Israeli cleantech in Germany. Nine Israeli cleantech companies attended Leipzig’s Green Ventures Forum – Germany’s leading B2B platform in the cleantech arena. Thanks to the Israeli Economic Office in Berlin and Israel NewTech, Israeli companies held over a hundred meetings with companies from over 30 countries.
http://israelnewtech.com/2015/02/international-cleantech-forum-germany-provides-platform-israeli-companies/
Technion’s new hi-tech student lab. Israel’s Technion and Microsoft have together built a development lab that resembles that of a startup company. Students can develop innovative technologies that will add to the “Internet of Things” – Internet-enabled devices and applications to rival anything a hi-tech company can design.
http://www.israelscienceinfo.com/en/hightech/internet-objets-incubateur-technion-microsoft-simule-lenvironnement-start-ups/
Your TV interacts with your smartphone. (M) Israel’s Applicaster lets you watch a program on your TV set whilst interacting with the program and its characters on your smartphone. Applicaster has released more than 100 mobile apps for 36 broadcasters, including Fox International and Mediacorp.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/applicaster-scores-10-5m-so-more-tv-characters-can-become-your-mobile-buddies/
Israeli technology with every diamond. (M) If you’ve got a diamond on your finger, there’s an 80% chance it’s been touched by Israel’s Sarine. (Stop the automatic video sequence at the end of the Sarine clip)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-02-18/diamonds-too-expensive-blame-technology
http://sarine.com/about-us/about-us-2/
M. D. Aeschliman is the author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, and he recently edited a new edition of Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (Ignatius Press). He studied with Morris Dickstein at Columbia University nearly 50 years ago.
Morris Dickstein left Jewish Orthodoxy, but never embraced a Mailer-like egotism. In any moderately literate and moderately free society there is always and inevitably a “battle of the books” (as Swift put it) as part of a larger “culture war,” either chronic or acute: a battle over beliefs and values as articulated and conveyed in books and films, school curricula, and music and art works, as well as in political elections and legislation. As the cultural critic Morris Dickstein noted in 1997, “We are a nation . . . at war over basic social and moral values.” But we are also part of an increasingly interdependent global culture where a similar “Kulturkampf” is being waged.
One of Dickstein’s teachers, Harold Bloom, has been very influential in the world of literary criticism and literary studies — of how and what our very brightest students read in college and graduate school — and both Dickstein and Bloom, ten years apart in age (Bloom was born in 1930 and Dickstein in 1940), are important figures in a massive cultural-social development in post–World War II America: the emergence of Jewish intellectuals in positions of prominence in American cultural life. There is a great and grievous irony behind this emergence, itself a proof of the promise of American life through mobility: The last 75 years have represented both a Hell and a Promised Land for Jews.
