Mother Nature as Nazi Stormtrooper

It is rare that New Yorkers perceive another American city as more stressful than their own.

The last time it happened was two summers ago when Katrina devastated New Orleans and now we are in the throes of another such moment as the nation -- nay, the entire world -- watches San Diego burn.

Because The Colbert Report was replaying last week's shows, HOBB and I tuned into CNN last night at 11:30 and spent an entire hour glued to the tube. First, America's sweetheart Anderson Cooper collected dispatches from San Diegans who had fled their homes while camera crews filmed scary reports from correspondents in the field, fire fighters and officials. Then, at midnight, as if America hadn't had its fill of tragic scenery, the baton was passed to a funereal Larry King who emceed the horror show from the safety of his CNN studio.

Naturally, the televised images were not the first I had seen, in fact, I had spent most of the day flipping computer screens between my email and the homepages of foxnews.com; cnn.com; nytimes.com; latimes.com; in addition to Reuters; the AP; the local San Diego paper -- the Union Tribune; blogs; sites belonging to local synagogues, the local Jewish Federation and the JCC; and other venues from the purgatory that has become San Diego, California.

Like the death toll in Iraq, the numbers of evacuated residents kept rising, the number of homes and businesses destroyed kept getting higher.

Friends who felt safe on Monday were packing their vans up by Tuesday and heading to hotels or family in other states. In my mind, I transported myself into their beautiful homes, recalling my last trip to the area, how I marveled at the flawless weather, the utterly calm feeling of Southern California.

How I indulged in that snide, Woody-Allenesque East Coast supremacy, secretly curling up my lip in disdain for the utter lack of stress or adversity in the lives of our San Diego friends.

Remembering how I scoffed at the fact that there were even weather reports on the news, how I quipped that television stations would save a bundle by firing their meteorologists and simply printing a sign that contained a single word -- PERFECT -- which they could flash on the screen to report describe the day's weather.

And perfect still applies, as in perfectly horrible. Perfectly shocking. Perfectly devastating.

Or, as some have said, The Perfect (Fire)Storm, the confluence of all the factors that culminated in this holocaust.

The way that the flames of the San Diego wildfires have moved over the hills and through the canyons reminds me of nothing more than SS stormtroopers moving in on the unsuspecting and innocent populace.

Yes, this is the way events appear to this Jewish New Yorker as she witnesses the devastation of San Diego: Mother Nature has turned into a Nazi -- homicidal, hateful, bent on sheer and total annihilation.

MEDIA ADVISORY: BUNGALOW BABE TO MANAGE STEPHEN COLBERT'S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

Because I fell asleep on the black leather couch last night while Anderson Cooper was replaying Matt Lauer's cringe-worthy interview with international laughing stock and Republican liability Senator Larry Craig and his pretending-to-trust-him-and-trying-really-hard-not-to-grimace wife, I missed Stephen Colbert's announcement on The Colbert Report that he was kinda considering running for president of the U.S.A.

However, through the magic of YouTube and my ability to spell Stephen Colbert's name correctly, I was able to recapture this media moment where ingenuity, satire and the dawning realization "hey, that's not a half-bad idea!" merged in simultaneous orgasmic oneness.

But "hey, that's not a half-bad idea!" is the understatement of the 21st Century.

Colbert's prankish announcement is the most uplifting, greatest, fully flipping amazing news our nation has had since September 10th 2001.

We all know that Stephen Colbert (previously referred to in this blog as my BF, a fact that I'll just have to confront honestly yet noisily in the media) is a natural winner. However, to win the election as the first Democratic/Republican presidential contender, he'll need a brilliant campaign manager -- a well-connected, Manhattan-based strategist whose thinking is so far out of the box as to be off the wall.

Such a campaign manager would ideally be a woman, prefer short skirts and boots, possess a supernaturally high energy level, be madly in love with her client, have a way with words, be capable of courting the press, love to travel, have, oh, about three photogenic children and a husband with no pending lawsuits against him and be able to hide evidence of her past unpaid parking tickets, ignored jury duty summonses, unreturned library books, unpaid pledges to college radio stations, under-decorated apartment, penchant for watching YouTube videos of questionable artistic and moral value, the kitten she once abandoned in a Westchester parking lot, her fondness for visiting Before and After plastic surgery websites and refusal to buy age-appropriate clothes or even shop at any store other than Target, Old Navy, H&M, Loehmann's and Forever 21.

In other words, I hereby announce my candidacy for the position of Stephen Colbert's campaign manager.

And if I haven't managed to convince you that I would be the most kick-ass campaign manager ever, here's one more unique selling point: the smart-aleky yet Catholic Colbert would benefit enormously from teaming up with a smart-aleky yet Jewish gal.

Together, we would epitomize the Judeo-Christian image America likes to have of itself.

So, Comedy Central and Mr. Colbert, I hope you are reading this.

America is hot for Stephen and so am I.

How to Perfect Ann Coulter

Okay, this one is simply too easy.

The poster grrrl for neocon outrageousness, the horsey Ann Coulter, opened her yap again, this time to Donny Deutsch on national television.

This dispatch, from CNN.com:

Conservative commentator and best-selling author Ann Coulter may find herself in the midst of a controversy for comments Monday suggesting America would be better if everyone was Christian.

Asked by CNBC host Donny Deutsch what the U.S. looks like in her dreams, Coulter said it would look like the Republican National Convention in 2004

"People were happy,” she said, according to a transcript provided to CNN by CNBC. “They're Christian. They're tolerant. They defend America." (Video: Watch Coulter's comments on CNBC)

When Deutsch responded, "It would be better if we were all Christian?" Coulter said "Yeah."

Deutsch, himself Jewish, continued to press Coulter on her remarks, asking, "We should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians then?"

"Yeah," Coulter responded, adding "Well, it's a lot easier. It's kind of a fast track."

"You can't possibly believe that," Deutsch responded. “You can’t possibly. You’re too educated.”

"Do you know what Christianity is?" Coulter replied. "See, we believe your religion, but you have to obey. We have the fast track program."

Later in the interview Deutsch asked Coulter if she doesn't want any Jews in the world, Coulter responded, "No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say."

"Wow, you didn't really say that, did you," Deutsch said.

Oh yes, she did.

Knowing that the cameras were rolling and the eyes and ears of the nation would once again be trained on her.

No surprise with this calculating fascist media whore, just the latest in a series of verbal scud missiles.

Who knows what the hell she really believes and who the hell cares?

But since we're talking about getting perfected, I've got a great suggestion for Ann Coulter:

Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver.

In other words, shut your stupid mouth.

Hello Muddah, Berlin-Style

Whilst walking Alfie the Pomeranian at 7:30 this morning, my Crackberry vibrated with the promise of a new incoming e-mail.

Digging the addictive device out of my raincoat pocket (hastily thrown atop my shorts and bra-less t-shirt so as not to scandalize Morningside Heights, esp my disgraced neighbor Lee Bollinger), I saw that the new missive was from none other than Big Babe, my firstborn, recently graduated from Columbia U and now based in Berlin.

Two days ago, I bought a mega-cheapo ticket to Berlin (Delta, direct, nonstop, round-trip for $450!!!!!!!) to see my son and the news of my impending arrival awakened that instinctual impulse shared by offspring of all ages: the instant awareness of things lacking in one's life and the composition of a list of such items to be shlepped by one's parents, often internationally.

With Big Babe's permission, I am hereby reproducing his request list:

1. Books from that bag I left in the dining room: Updike collected stories, a few others that can be chosen at random. I forget what's there...possibly Schnitzler and Svevo? Naked Lunch??? I really am at a loss.
2. Gap 3/4 peacoat (hanging in front of house)
3. A couple of scarves (you know 'em)
4. My leather gloves (should be in some coat pocket)
5. A few blazers from my closet. Green corduroy banana republic one; somewhat stiff brown cord one w/big pockets (you know it)...whatever else you feel is classy enough.
7. A couple button-down shirts (same instructions)
6. Some more Henley shirts (in hideous cupboard next to closet)...and another sweater or two (black wool turtle-neck and maybe a zip-up or two)
7. My pleather fender shoes (ersatz converse)
8. a pound of Zabar's coffee (F.I., ground for Melitta)
9. More pairs of socks!!! (alle Farben)
10. A warm cap / hat - like that stupid black thing with the pompom
11. Anything else that you think would improve my quality of life here
12. My portable typewriter - only if it isn't too much of a pain in the ass
13. Hyemin
14. The Complete New Yorker - it's on the shelf in the livingroom. If the whole things too much of a hassel, then take the discs out and put them in the protective vinyl sleeves I have in my room inside that CD / DVD storage box.
15. Before I left, I was looking everywhere for a notebook that says "World Turned Upside Down" on it. It's a thin (50 sheets), beige and classy notebook with non-recycled paper...It should be 1/2 filled up. Maybe it made its way into the piano bench or with elsewhere with sheet music. No need to turn the house upside down to look for it...but if you do see it lying around, please bring it.
16. My opera throw with the Chagall design on it. It's rather light and non-bulky.

OK...I think that's about it. Remember, all these items and quantities are negotiable...and Dependant on what you can physically bring with you. I can even meet you at the airport if you need help!

Luv ya!


So....there you have it. The modern Wish List of an American in Berlin. To learn more about Big Babe, visit his amazing blog at ajg2106.blogspot.com.

And stay tuned for word of Middle Babe's Wish List from Towson, Maryland. We're planning to visit her the weekend before I fly to Berlin. She has warned me that her list is extensive and might require many trips to Target.

Donations can be made to Bungalow Babe in the Big City.

Earmark the funds Hello Muddah.

Stephen, Be My Hero Tonight!

(Ben Gurion International Airport, Israel) -- It is 4:20 a.m. and the boarding for my flight to New York via Prague begins in five minutes.

Naturally, I'm seated near the illy counter, drinking a double cappuccino and eating chocolate cake...and writing on my laptop.

Next to me, Little Babe is plugged into his Mac, watching the Top Ten Naruto Jutsu.

Just before closing my computer down at my sister's place in Har Adar and throwing my luggage into the waiting taxi, I learned something very disturbing about tonight's Colbert Report, which I cannot watch, alas, since I will be en route to Prague.

So disturbing was it that I couldn't board my flight without registering the following plea to my BF Stephen Colbert.

Here it is:

Dear Stephen,

During the day, it came to my attention that on your show tonight you will host a nefarious person by the name of John Mearsheimer. He is one half of the duo responsible for the book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which revives the basic theme of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

That theme is: The Jews did it.

What?

Everything, beginning with dragging the US into the Iraq War.

Because of Israel and their greater loyalty as Jews than Americans.

And come to think of it, Israel probably shouldn't exist. Yeah, once upon a time there was widespread American and world support, but it is time to drop that charade.

Because Israel is full of controlling Jews who in turn control US Foreign Policy.

The issue is Jews and control, you see. But really, it is Jews and power. A paradigm the world cannot accept.

The Jews, state Mearsheimer and his writing buddy Stephen Walt, exert this supernatural control over things. And with their amazing power, which is wielded chiefly through this dangerous entity called THE ISRAEL LOBBY, they control YOUR life!

Thankfully, in the United States, Mearsheimer and Walt's poorly-researched, outrageous book has not gotten rave reviews. A recent, measured New York Times Book Review by Leslie Gelb basically decimated the work. Also, check out Jeffrey Goldberg's whip-smart write-up in The New Republic.

Too many other intelligent reviewers, while stopping short of praising the work, nevertheless refrain from calling it what it is.

Perhaps because -- in a baffling and illogical leap -- the Israel Lobby conspiracy camp is quick to accuse their detractors of censorship or stifling debate.

They scoff that the default mode of their critics is the overused charge of anti-Semitism.

Well....this new breed of university-bred anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism...simply adorned in the socially-acceptable sheep's clothing of academia.

So, Stephen, while I will admit that I was dismayed to hear that Mearsheimer will grace your show tonight, I am still holding out hope that you will remove the wooly cover and reveal the wolf beneath.

You are bold.

You are fearless.

Out him and his cronies as the Jew-haters they are.

Rah, rah, ree! Kick him in the knee!

Rah, rah, rass! Kick him in the other knee!

Nah....kick him in the ass.

Hard.

Yours,

Bungalow Babe

So, what do Britney Spears and Lee Bollinger Have in Common?

It was supposed to be BritBrit's comeback performance at MTV's Music Video Awards ceremony earlier this month, the show-stopping dance number for her new single Gimme More that would put an end to the endless tabloid trashing of the Pop-Tart.

It was supposed to be BoBo's career-making moment earlier today, the world premiere of Gimme Mahmoud, the biggest, baddest and boldest move a university president had ever undertaken, a tactic that would prove so brilliant that it would make Harvard rue the day it rejected him as president. It was a counterintuitive and thoroughly post-modern seduction strategy.

Instead, poor, incompetent Britney found herself at the receiving end of a tsunami of media criticism and ridicule and today's MTV (Meshuggeneh Talking Vile) performance at Columbia's Lerner Hall hosted by the Bo-Man has largely been hailed as an exercise in failure by bloggers, pundits, observers and journalists alike.

Yes, there are some well-scripted soundbytes delivered by the white-tressed Columbia president that will live on in cyberspace and have the ring of J'accuse. And there are those who give the Big LeeBoskie high grades for his harsh dressing down of AhmadI'msickofevensayinghisname in his introductory comments.

Still...the misguided decision to grant a public forum to a world leader who is a Holocaust-denier, has the chutzpah to claim that homosexuality doesn't exist in Iran (that's right...homos are killed when they are outed), making a bizarre claim that some people blame the Palestinians for the Holocaust, chews out Bo-Bo for his lack of good manners and attempts to portray Iran as a pro-feminist, peace-loving nation is dangerous through and through.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, read the comments on www.nytimes.com by readers or hear from some of the students at Columbia who felt that their minds were opened by coming to hear Ahmadinejad. Inviting this maniac to speak at Columbia sullies the university. It is an act akin to the desecration of a holy temple.

I have this little suspicion, though, that the judgment-impaired LeeBo is probably so pumped right now that he's camped out in the corridor of his mansion on Morningside Drive -- where we take Alfie the Pomeranian to poop daily -- just waiting for the phone to ring.

Freshly-showered. LeeBo will keep Harvard waiting when it finally works up the nerve to make the call. He will let the phone ring five, six, seven, eight, nine times. Then, just on the brink of the tenth ring, he'll pick up the receiver, say hello with studied nonchalance and pretend to check his calendar for about half an hour when Harvard asks him out.

Of course, he'll go to bed on the first date.

Well, I guess one good thing came out of the Columbia carnival today and that is that the appearance distracted Mahmadman from his To-Do list, where written in extra-big block letters are the words: Wipe Israel Off Map. For his forgetfulness, I breathe a deep sigh of relief for I am watching the Manhattan madness unfold from a quiet hilltop on the outskirts of Jerusalem, City of Gold.

Little Babe and I arrived in Israel about eight hours ago. Since that time, I have spent most of my time working feverishly, punctuating e-mail, research and phone conferences with visits to the Internet to read up on The End of Days at Lerner Hall.

When I spoke with him two hours ago, HOBB was breathless, describing the frenzy of the day... and its horror as well. A professor of journalism, he dispatched his students to cover the story of Ahmadinejad at Columbia. They created a blog for the event, http://apresidentvisits.blogspot.com/

Uh... guys? A president visits? Not only is that lame but isn't that a huge insult to, like, regular presidents?

Watching Bollinger introduce today's event, I thought of Britney, tottering around on stage, lip-synching, twittering to herself, raising suspicions that she was on something.

Watch LeeBo's mouth and body-language when he lobs his Hardball questions at MahAh.

It looks like he's lip-synching.

Or hoping that Harvard is watching.

Or on something.

Coming Soon: The Leave LeeBo Alone video.

LeeBo to Play Hardball on Mahmoud Monday

It's stupid enough that LeeBo issued the invite to MahAh to speak at Columbia. The latest idiocy can be found in the number of faculty members who actually support this move on "free speech" grounds.

The intellectual and moral dishonesty of this argument is staggering. Since when do our democratic principles demand that we give an audience to an international criminal and genocidal madman who has stated his ambition to kill us?

And by "us" I mean Jews and Americans. I am guessing that for MahAh, the two are virtually indistinguishable.

Yet Free Speech must prevail, state LeeBo's faculty supporters on campus, those staunch men and women charged with educating the next generation. Ideas must be free to be expressed in a university setting, they whine. Even controversial ones.

Oh yeah?

When was the last time Columbia gave a forum to the leaders of Gaymarriageno.org or Focus on the Family...with their anti-homosexual agenda? Why don't we host a panel discussion for advocates of Female Genital Mutilation? Hey, when Warren Jeffs finishes his trial, why doesn't he stop on by to chat about how amazing polygamy is? And wouldn't it be cool to have some Aryan Nation dudes come over and talk to us about why black people are inferior and should be shot?

And I'm not even going to bother discussing the hypocrisy of barring ROTC from campus while inviting the man from Iran.

Today's NY Times magazine had an article on honor killings in Syria. The article focuses on the tragic case of 15 year old Zahra, whose crime was having been raped. Well...her brother Fayyez set that little whore straight by stabbing her to death while she slept. And he believes that Islamic law mandates his actions. Certainly, his entire village celebrated when he relayed the news, by cellphone, that he had succeeded in killing her, thus clearing the family name.

Hey, LeeBo, why not invite Fayyez to Columbia so that our minds can be expanded by his understanding of Islamic law? Maybe he can even share the podium with Mahmoud? I'll bet the two guys would have lots in common!

If there were no limits to the concept of free speech, our society -- let alone the Columbia campus -- would be a complete circus. I'm fairly certain that 9/10th of the writers/thinkers/leaders who request a speaking gig are denied one for a variety of reasons, including ideological.

Universities tend to invite A-list speakers whom they find valuable for their students and faculty. These people include world leaders, authors, performers, scientists, personalities, celebrities, inventors, businesspeople and others.

Certainly, people with controversial views have spoken before and will continue to speak at Columbia as well as other campuses.

But to call Ahmadinejad's views merely controversial is to deny a dangerous reality: his aim is to kill us.

If his long-range missiles fell on Columbia University, he would proclaim a national day of celebration. Fayyez's village in Syria would probably be celebrating as well.

There is humor in the fact that the milquetoasty LeeBo is trying to spin the coming circus as a public tribunal/Hardball episode with him as an upper-crust Chris Matthews lobbing tough questions at MahAh to get things started, putting him in the hot seat, taking off the kid gloves, turning the spotlight on, giving him the old third degree, showing him what for.

The problem is that Ahmadinejad deserves a public hanging, ala Eichmann.

Not a Q&A at an Ivy League institution.

Well...clearly, my point of view will not prevail and alas, I'm not even going to be here to watch the circus.

By the time Mad Mahmoud arrives on campus, I will be walking through Jerusalem with Little Babe. At this time tomorrow evening, the youngest Babe and I will hopefully be aloft, en route to the Holy Land for this pre-Bar Mitzvah visit that coincides with the Bat Mitzvah of his cousin.

Yet, HOBB will be here on Mahmoud Monday, as he is a prof at this noble institution across the street from our home.

He promises to call me with news from the Big Top.

Free Speech! Ahmadinejad to Speak at Columbia

You gotta hand it to the Daily News.

They know a madman when they see him.

Shockingly, the white-tressed Columbia U president, Lee Bollinger, whom I often pass on runs around the Central Park Jackie Onassis reservoir and whose manse is located down the block from my own Columbia U. apartment, lacks that good judgment.

Evidently, he has invited Ahmadinejad to speak on campus next Monday as part of the World Leaders Forum, to be held at SIPA: The School of International and Public Affairs.

Sadly, I'll miss this partay as I am leaving for Israel on Sunday night, unless Ahmadinejad succeeds in wiping it off the map, as he has publicly pledged to do.

Anyhoo...things seem to be getting more and more interesting...in that break-out-into-a-sweat-and-contemplate-moving-to-Israel kind of way.

And there is a ring of deja vu to this forthcoming event, reminding me of an infamous evening in the winter of '05 when Daniel Barenboim turned a lecture on playing Wagner in Israel into a demented rant against Israel...with Bollinger aiding and abetting him from the front row of Miller Theatre.

This incident, witnessed by your own Bungalow Babe and HOBB (husband of Bungalow Babe), resulted in a sleepless night where the two of us wrote furious e-mails to Whiteylocks, resulting in a personal meeting for HOBB and a personal email to me wherein LeeBo claimed he, too, was horrified by what Barenboim had to say and deliberately did not clap at the end of his presentation.

Wow. You gotta be impressed by such a courageous act of public dissent.

This incident, incidentally, formed the inspiration for The Jerusalem Lover, a novella I recently completed. At the end of this posting, you will find an excerpt.

Meanwhile, here's how the acting SIPA dean, John Coatsworth rationalizes the school's decision:

"Opportunities to hear, challenge, and learn from controversial speakers of different views are central to the education and training of students for citizenship in a shrinking and dangerous world."

And I would have provided a soundbyte from LeeBo himself, but the Spec website appears to be currently unavailable, inundated, no doubt, by incredulous reporters, producers, editors and regular ole folks, thinking, say it ain't so, LeeBo!

I do, however, recall reading shizz earlier where LeeBo promises to hit up mah main man Mahmoud with difficult and challenging questions during the course of this circus...uh, event.

Too bad I can't be here to lob my own question at the madman. It would be:

"Could you stand really still so I can wipe you off the map?"

Giving up the fight to convince LeeBo of the error of his ways, Columbia/Barnard Hillel's Israel Va'ad sent around this emergency memo last night:

Ahmadinejad’s views on Israel, Women, homosexuals and his denial of the Holocaust have been called “repugnant” by many leaders, including our own President Bollinger.The event is surely a contentious one and pressing for the entire Hillel community. We wanted to alert you to this and give you the opportunity to register for the event so that we can all be there to challenge Ahmadinejad on his objectionable views.

And here you have it...another reason why it's increasingly hard for Jews to look inward this Yom Kippur.

The madman of Iran is coming to town. Speaking at the Columbia University campus, directly across the street from the Urban Bungalow. At the special invitation of President Lee Bollinger.

Looking inward at such a time could be harmful, or fatal to one's health.

I'd like to conclude today's post with the aforementioned excerpt from The Jerusalem Lover, coming soon to a bookstore near you. You will recognize Bollinger as the inspiration for the fictional character of Martin Holloway, Columbia U president.

And with a reminder that the root of evil is not supernatural.

Evil happens because otherwise good people allow it.



From The Jerusalem Lover

The line outside of Miller Theatre snaked up Broadway, ending at the tip of West 118^th Street. Holding a ticket and shivering, Dan Seligman wondered why the theatre’s public relations office couldn’t get their act together. It was ridiculous, really, how they had failed to furnish press tickets or a press kit or even answer his e-mails or phone calls. The entire episode was either an exercise in stonewalling or sheer incompetence. Perhaps both.

Appearing tonight at Miller Theatre was controversial Columbia professor, Elisha Rosensweig. His subject for the evening was “Israel/IsNOTReal.” The copy on the fliers, posted all over the campus, promised a “provocative evening from a provocative thinker.” One week before the appointed evening, the event had sold out.

Dan, who was on assignment from the Columbia Spectator that evening, was three months into his college career, a wide-eyed freshman hailing from Oakland, California, madly in love with New York. One year earlier, he had traveled east with his mother to see twelve campuses forming a protracted triangle from Maine to Chicago to Maryland. Columbia was the first stop on their trip. After spending six hours on the campus, Dan declared the college tour officially over. He would be applying only to Columbia University, he informed his mother. If he didn’t get in, he would apply for a job there and spend every waking hour on campus, auditing classes.

An exceptional student, Dan was admitted to Columbia on early decision and granted a freshman dorm in Carmen, the ugly-as-sin building fronting West 114th Street, designed for first-year-students. His roommate was the son of a folk musician from New Hampshire and the roommate’s friends became Dan’s surrogate family. He loved every one of his classes, including the First Year writing seminar, considered a deadly requirement by every member of the student body. Following the recommendation of his writing professor, he joined the Spectator as a feature writer.

This Monday night’s event constituted Dan’s fifth assignment for the Spec. His beat was loosely defined as cultural events that fell outside of film, dance, music, theatre or art. Though the staff argued at some length over whether Professor Rosensweig’s lecture was culture or news, the assignment was unanimously handed to Dan, who had been hearing wildly conflicting reports about him since virtually his first week on campus and had been curious to hear the man and draw his own conclusions.

The night was icy-cold for early November and Dan could have kicked himself for running out of Carmen dressed only in a t-shirt, jeans and thin blazer. On his feet were his over-worn and much-loved Birkenstocks, bought in Berlin the previous summer. When a matron joined the line, wrapped in a fur coat, Dan forgot his anti-fur sentiments and coveted the dead animal with all his heart.

After an interminable crawl towards the entrance, Dan was inside Miller Theatre. He strode to the staircase, scoring a front-row seat in the balcony. On his way, he passed the audio-visual crew setting up their recording equipment. Stepping gingerly over the wires, he patted his microscopic tape-recorder, nestled in his breast pocket next to his thin reporters’ notebook.

A flow of humanity filled the theatre. Seats were snatched like life rafts on a sinking ship and students sat on steps and lined the back walls. In the front row orchestra, Dan made out the form of university President Martin Holloway, the provost Marlin Jennings and numerous faculty members of the university. Opening his notebook, he began taking notes.

Within minutes, the program began, with an introduction from President Holloway about the value of an academic institution such as Columbia hosting events wherein controversial views were to be aired. “What is a university, if not a universe of forces and ideas, often colliding?” he asked rhetorically and rather moronically, thought Dan. The mike was handed over to a young girl whom Dan recognized from the spate of anti-Israel protests on campus that fall. She was fair skinned, freckled and tall…saved from boring Mid-western wholesomeness by the ratty black kafiyeh wrapped around her curly red hair.

“I’m Claire Bernstein?” she squeaked into the microphone. “As founder and president of CSAZO? -- Columbia Students Against Zionist Oppression? – it is my great pleasure to introduce to you a modern hero? a man who is not afraid to stand up to the fascist regime of Israel? a noble truth-seeker who has risked his life to transmit his message and hope for peace? an important thinker who will reveal the racist policies and programs of the country that is the worst violator of human rights today?…Dr. Elisha Rosensweig!”

Dan swiveled his head around, eager to catch the audience’s reaction. Claire Bernstein seemed to him a caricature of an activist, light on the facts, heavy on the moral outrage. Last year it was Take Back the Night, this year it was The Unpardonable Crimes of Israel. She probably spent her school breaks denouncing her parents’ Zionism to their faces, screaming at them for being such hypocrites. Next year she might be marching with PETA and pouring buckets of red paint on fur-wearing women. Who could take her seriously?

“Free Palestine!” screamed a girl directly in back of Dan. The theatre reverberated with lusty applause as Claire Bernstein sashayed off the stage, passing the lumbering Elisha Rosensweig who paused to hug her before assuming the podium himself, powerful, erect, electric. He gripped the sides of the lectern as he scowled out at his audience. Learning over the railing, Dan saw President Holloway, returned to his front row seat, clapping vigorously, his face frozen in a mask of sheer and abject terror.

Return, O Israel! (But Don't Forget to Watch Your Backs)

Honestly, I had about ten other, more compelling things to write about today instead of the latest lies from the enemies of Israel. There were lofty yamim noraim (Days of Awe) musings, for instance, and thoughts about repentance, renunciation and what this period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is all about.

Instead of writing about yet another group hiding their hatred of Jews behind the noble principles of peace and within the socially-acceptable framework of political discourse, I would have preferred to devote my post to something diverting such as that wonderful/horrible experience shared by observant Jews, known informally as the triple whammy.

And since you asked, a triple whammy occurs when Shabbat precedes or follows a two-day festival. It is a three-day tower of time wherein you eschew travel, communication, commerce, work and other trappings of the real world.

While it's great to have all this downtime to chill with the family and friends and read the New York Times in hard copy and catch up on your New Yorkers and even finish a novel or two and take long walks and have lots of festive meals with the aforementioned family and friends, there is also a weird time-out-of-time aspect to these three days, a forced separation from the world of commerce and communication that we depend on, the growing, panicky awareness that stuff is piling up while you close the door to this world....and that when the door is opened, you will be buried beneath the avalanche.

(Not to mention the fear that clients or co-workers or bosses might perceive of your observance as a religious form of slacking off.)

So, before I saw the press release about a particular forthcoming conference in Boston dedicated to "exploring" the ways in which Israel was just like South Africa (hint: apartheid!) and featuring South Africa's own Desmond Tutu plus the usual assemblage of anti-Zionists, some of them psychotic Jews, I aspired to write about embarking upon the arduous task of introspection that the period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur demands.

Like the conference planners of this group called Sabeel, I wanted to explore the process of taking a candid look at myself in order to identify what I need to change in order to become a better person. This inward gaze is the first step of teshuva, returning to the path of righteousness.

If Sabeel was a person, I might recommend the following steps along the path to personal teshuva: stop scapegoating Israel, start caring about the Palestinians instead of using them as pawns, drop your mission to slander the Jewish State out of existence and try dedicating yourselves to the stated goal on all of your press material -- peace.

In fact for all the people currently affiliated with Sabeel, I heartily recommend an ecumenical exercise since they do indeed have the word "ecumenical" in their title, as in Ecumenical Liberation Theological Center (pssshhh!). The exercise is easy and doesn't even involve loss of work time because Yom Kippur falls on a Saturday this year.

It begins like this: go to shul. Find a local synagogue. Stand among the Jews you regularly slander, reading through the pages of personal confessions in the Yom Kippur liturgy. Search your soul and ponder the depths of your stated beliefs. Ask yourself if the things you say, write and promote about Jews and Israel are true. Seek the truth on your personal motivations for the work that you do or the cause you support. Ask yourself if it is really God's work or a perversion of religious principles.

Spend a long time thinking about the real way to bring peace to the Middle East. And then, just before the Gates of Heaven close at the end of the ne'ela service, with the blowing of the shofar, repent. Let the clarion call of the ancient ram's horn compel you to turn back from your sinful ways.

Not to imply that introspection cannot take place at other times of the year. I've noted in the past that for people who are plagued by the constant need to self-examine and self-flagellate (f'rinstance, me), Yom Kippur can often feel just a tad redundant. Yet even if it doesn't, one might ponder whether it is really effective to examine one's soul whilst battling low-blood sugar and the bad breath of people who are fasting within an enclosed area.

Going to shul on Yom Kippur is the ultimate paradox. On the day we are called upon to do the most personal act of worship -- confession of our sins coupled with the resolve to repent -- we leave our private abodes and come together in our places of prayer.

Engaged in our private tete-a-tete with the Almighty, we nevertheless remain opaque to the Jew in the pew beside us.

Yet we come together because there is power to being in proximity to all of this God-wrestling. And for those who are having trouble getting started, a perusal of the plaster or wooden reproduction of the Ten Commandments -- usually hanging helpfully over the bima -- can produce the desired effect.

Our frenemies at Sabeel might do well to ponder the commandment -- Do Not Bear False Witness. And if that fails, there is always the unambiguous Do Not Kill.

As for the rest of humanity, four out of five rabbis surveyed recommended directing one's attention towards the inescapable tablets as a way of jumpstarting the act of introspection: Taking the Lord's name in vain? Guilty as charged. Stealing? Check. Remembering the Sabbath Day and keeping it holy? Hey...that trip to Woodbury Commons was an emergency! Honoring thy father and thy mother? Yikes...I never did return mom's call from, like, five months ago. Adultery?....uhh...

While teshuva can happen anytime, Yom Kippur helps us by making it a must-do item one day of the year. And, as a special, limited-time bonus, the Gates of Heaven are open for the entire 25 hour period.

Which leads me to contemplate those folks who are headed straight in the other direction...not that Jews really believe in hell, y'all.

I am referring, of course, to Sabeel and Co., the loose confederation of anti-Zionists, Israel-bashers, Israel-dissenters, Israel-deniers, Israel-slanderers, scapegoaters of Jews, phony-baloney crunchy granola peaceniks, promoters of lies about Jewish control, whisperers about Jewish cabals, printers of canards, pseudo-political theorists, revisionists, rewriters of fake narratives, Israel-hating academics, intellectual terrorists, lying racists and various and sundry others whom I shall simply refer to as Anti-Semitic Scum, or ASSes.

The problem with ASSes is that they are numerous and widespread and gaining popularity and not raising the alarm level high enough within the majority of the organized Jewish community.

The danger posed by ASSes is that they are devious and dishonest and there is an alarming public appetite for the terrible things they say about Israel and the Jewish People...witness the sales figures for Walt and Mearsheimer's new book, The Protocols of the Elders of the Israel Lobby.... I mean The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

The ASSes are enraged by the notion of Jewish power and self-determination. The only good Jew for them is a Shoah-victim Jew, although increasingly, some of the ASS literature is pointing towards the Holocaust as being God's will. In the case of Sabeel, there is a bizarre casting of the Palestinians in the role of Jesus, suffering at the hands of the...you guessed it...Jews.

Quite stunningly, the masterminds at Sabeel, committed to peace, blah, blah, blah, don't find it problematic to revive the ole notion of deicide.

And though it is preposterous to allege that Israel is South Africa, ASSes like Sabeel cannot stop gnawing at this bogus bone, insisting on trumping up charges of Israel abuse against the Palestinians, never letting the facts get in the way. At the same time, they accept terrorism against Israelis as an acceptable act of resistance by an oppressed and desperate people.

ASSes have a relative sense of morality. Killing people is bad, of course, except if they are Jewish. Then, they probably deserve it because they are occupiers and oppressors. Even when they are four years old and eating pizza in Tel Aviv.

And ASSes always have compassion for Palestinian refugees but are strangely deaf to the news that there are over a million Jewish refugees of Arab lands, driven out by a concerted campaign of racism within countries where Jews have few, if any, rights to this day.

The ASS cause is aided and given some kind of inoculation against the charge of being anti-Semitic owing to the Jews they attract to their camp, pathological yiddin like Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or most disappointingly, Tony Judt, who cannot stand the sight of their own Jewish faces.

Almost hilariously, ASSes focus their ire on Israel while ignoring places like the Sudan, like North Korea, like Arab countries where girls are killed by their fathers and brothers, often on imaginary suspicions of minor sexual offenses. Their so-called critique of Israel is actually a demonization, with no admission of wrongdoing on the part of Palestinians or their leaders.

And most unforgivably, ASSes often posit themselves as promoters of peace.

They couldn't care less about peace or even the Palestinians.

The name of their game is pulling the plug on Israel.

And now Sabeel has roped Desmond Tutu into their ranks so I guess that the good Archbishop is an ASS as well. Even former US president Jimmy Carter shied away from making in the Israel-South Africa direct analogy despite the unfortunate presence of the word "apartheid" in the title of his recent and deluded book. He is therefore only a half-ASS.

"Yeah," confirmed Hillel Stavis from the David Project during our phone conversation this morning. "Sabeel will be the most overtly anti-Semitic conference in the Northeast."

Just to share the bulls$%&, here is a portion of Sabeel's release for the October rally in Boston:

"Participants will discuss the moral issues of confronting and dismantling apartheid-like policies Israel administers in the occupied Palestinian lands and the emerging role of social movements and the U.S. government in addressing injustice. The conference will culminate in a peace rally in Copley Square organized by the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. Sabeel is a Palestinian Christian international grassroots peace movement based in Jerusalem which promotes nonviolence, human rights, international law, democratic principles, and Gospel teachings on justice and peace-building."

Blah, blah, blah.

So...where does this leave me -- and the world at large -- three days after a triple whammy and with another three days to go until Yom Kippur?

I admit that it is hard to look inward when you feel like you need to watch your back. The problem with anti-Semitism (in our country! in our time!) is that it is time-consuming to monitor. Being an anti-Anti-Semite necessitates research and networking and conversations and mobilization and action.

It cannot be left unaddressed because stuff like this doesn't just go away.

While I turn to the liturgy of Yom Kippur as I seek to repair my relationship with God, myself and my fellow humans, I also invoke the words from the Passover Hagaddah (liberally translated), which were composed for times just like these:

O God, pour out your wrath against the Anti-Semitic Scum who seek to harm us....for we have seen their brand of hatred before and it has devoured the Children of Jacob and laid waste their dwelling places throughout the Diaspora, wherever Jews have fled to escape persecution.

Pour out your indignation upon them and let your wrathful anger take hold of them and their lies. Destroy them in anger from under your heavens.

NIPPLES AND HONEY

Mmmmm.....

Honey.

The sticky, sweet, golden, dripping delight associated with both Rosh Hashana (apples and honey) and Israel (the land of milk and honey).

And current events as well. Wasn't there a major archaeological discovery this week about bee-keeping in the Holy Land?

Last night, as I joined the Upper West Side Jewish cocktail party that was Fairway, I chose two jars of honey for my Rosh Hashana table: a overpriced number from Spain via San Francisco and an overpriced number from New Zealand, whipped to a buttery consistency and color.

Mmmmm.

Everyone knows that Jews dip apples and challah into honey on Rosh Hashana so we will have a sweet year.

Shana Tova, Shana Metuka, we wish one another in the days leading up to the festival.

A good year. A sweet year.

We Jews believe that you are what you eat.

You eat kosher, you lead a kosher life.

We stay away from eating animals that are predators, for instance, for we do not wish to become predatory ourselves.

Naturally, not all kosher-eaters lead kosher lives.

And not everyone who dips their apples in honey has a sweet year. Jews have known many bitter years, bitter decades, bitter centuries.

The taste of Rosh Hashana honey is tempered always by Passover's salt water in our yearly rituals.

Still, we give sweetness a chance. Especially at the start of the year, ten days before the gates of heaven open on Yom Kippur and we get a chance to petition God on high.

So, if there is any mystical power to honey, I say -- bring it on!

Increase the dosage.

Make honey a habit.

Welcome honey into your life.

Let honey drip from the walls of your home, from your door-posts, between your eyes and down the length of your body.

Honey belongs not only on your dining room table, but in your bedroom as well. Shana Tova u' Metuka!

September Eleven Again

It is pouring rain in New York City.

Outside the Urban Bungalow, Columbia students race across the campus in an effort to keep themselves and their books as dry as possible.

The weather is one of those eerily appropriate details of today - the sixth anniversary of September 11.

During the memorial program held at Ground Zero (which I viewed on local television) the tears of relatives and friends merged with raindrops, watering the mass graveyard that is now lower Manhattan.

The reading of the names is always moving but today's performance of Bridge Over Troubled Water by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus sent me over the edge. With wind whipping their hair and rain streaking their faces and soaking their clothes, the low-key rendition by these NYC teens left me wailing on my couch.

Hard to believe, but one week ago, we vacated the Love Shack and returned to The City. The sun was shining -- even glaring -- and the smell of our country cabin was still in our clothes as we drove towards Manhattan.

The move itself was more harmonious than any I can recall. Probs because part of the work was already done the night before but probs also because we didn't do the ultra-wrenching act of actually closing down the cabin -- emptying and unplugging the fridge, filling the empty drawers with mothballs, putting Clorox in the toilet, wiping down counter-tops, flipping the mattresses on their sides to prop up against the walls.

I know it's a mental trick, but we left the cabin sorely in need of our return.

If I'm lucky, we might even have to go back twice before we close it up for good.

Perhaps if I spend some time in the Love Shack, the sad/horrible news of the world will seem slightly less so.

Last week, I recall being grateful that we didn't have the equivalent of a Hurricane Katrina or a war in Israel to watch in horror over this past summer. The summer of '06 was overshadowed by the terrible drama of the Second Lebanon War and the previous summer was colored by the fiasco of FEMA and our Federal government's non-response to the disaster in the Gulf Coast.

In the absence of these dramatic events -- and in the face of mostly-glorious weather -- I got lulled into a false sense of security, leading me to ignore such serious developments as the stunning rise of global anti-Semitism and the proliferation of anti-Zionism in academic circles, which might kinda be the same thing, after all.

Yeah, I knew that the Protocols of the Elders of the Israel Lobby was about to be published, in fact, I've blogged about the canards of Walt and Mearsheimer, et al in the past. And I've been reading the same Haaretz, Jpost and JTA dispatches as everyone else. I've even had the pleasure of getting up-close and personal anti-Zionist rants from JOURNALISTS to whom I have sent press releases regarding a current project that critiques Walt/Mearsheimer's point of view.

Still...being back in Manhattan, just across the street from the Columbia campus, which is just across the street from the Barnard campus where professor Nadia Abu El Haj's tenure might get derailed because of a book she wrote that has been accused of being an anti-Zionist polemic, cloaked in (pseudo) scholarship...some things seem more glaringly horrible.

These things are both Jewish in nature and universal, such as the beating death of theatre impresario Mark Vail in Tashkent this past weekend and the stabbing of a rabbi in Frankfurt last week and the recent acknowledgment that there is a HUGE problem with anti-Jewish attitudes in England and the revelation that Madeleine McCann's parents are suspects in her murder and the rising incidence of elder-beatings and stunning acts of child abuse and the heightened security at Jewish schools and synagogues this holiday season.

Locally, I am shocked to return to the public menace posed by NYC's pint-sized gangstas riding the rails. I am depressed by the cowardice of grown men who can, in my opinion, open their mouths and tell the kids on the subway car where to go. I hate the fear in the eyes of senior citizens and young mothers and little kids. I am afraid I might lose it one day and get all Bernie Goetz on the high school hooligans.

I am angry at these kids and want to know why they have decided at such a young age to give up. I want to know why they are choosing this route while the Brooklyn Youth Chorus kids are choosing another.

And it might sound trivial, but I am also disheartened by Sarah Silverman's shockingly nasty attack on Britney Spears and her kids following Britney's uber-embarrassing "comeback" performance at MTV's VMA's this past Sunday night, which I'm not afraid to admit to having watched in real-time while HOBB looked on in horror.

The meanness of Silverman's banter quite took my breath away. While I usually applaud her nerviness, this was something else. It was not funny and it was not clever. It was a public whipping of someone who has already fallen and cannot raise herself up.

In the course of her frankly stupid riff, Silverman alluded to her own Jewishness, as she often does, mixing up references to heroin-addict/singer Amy Winehouse's yiddishkeit and the obviously Jewish punim that both women share.

In this week before Rosh Hashana, known as a time of introspection, I doubt that many members of the tribe are proud to count Sarah Silverman as one of their own.

But I digress.

It is now the afternoon of 9/11...six years after our collective mental landscape changed. The rain has turned into drizzle and I haven't changed out of the Old Navy baby doll nightie I slept in because I haven't left my computer desk and phone since 7:35 am when Little Babe left for school.

Yes, I feel somewhat dysfunctional in my nightie but that seems perfectly fitting for the dysfunctional reality of the world beyond the Love Shack.

Bye, Bye Bungalow Summer

My heart is going to break.

It is 12:03 am and I am sitting on the screened porch of The Love Shack, listening to the crickets chirp in time with the steady breathing of 12-year-old Little Babe and HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe), suitcases standing like a mini Stonehenge on the floor of my bungalow.

While visiting news sites and answering e-mail, Labor Day quietly passed away.

That exquisite creature -- Summer 2007 -- has officially departed.

It is Back-to-School, nearly Rosh Hashanah, The Party's Over.

And in six hours, HOBB and I have vowed to return to our packing marathon, planning to be on the road by 10 am so that we can salvage the majority of the work day in Manhattan and help Big Babe as he prepares to leave, on Wednesday, for a half-year in Berlin, get Little Babe ready for life as a seventh grader, which commences on Thursday.

The sane thing, of course, would have been to leave yesterday or today (like most of the inhabitants of our summer community) but neither of us had the ability to wrench ourselves away, craving a day filled-to-bursting with our country adventures, craving one more night in the too-small bed of The Love Shack, craving one more morning in this little kuchalein by the edge of the woods, decorated now with the kitsch and memorabilia of innumerable summers.

And so, we orchestrated a memorable farewell to summer. We paid homage to the goddess of consumerism and spent a frenetic hour at Woodbury Commons buying underwear and school clothes while waiting for Big Babe's bus to arrive from New York. Dropping Little Babe and HOBB back at the bungalow, Big Babe and I headed down to Sterling Forest to relive a sacred rite from his childhood -- the annual visit to the NY State Renaissance Festival.

I am especially pleased to report that after a hiatus of many a year, the fair seemed to me -- and Big Babe -- virtually unchanged. In a good way. We came craving a connection with the sweet memories of our shared past and were not disappointed. Nearly everything was as we remembered it: the shoppe with the wooden swords and shields; the alley of tarot readers and soothsayers; the spontaneous folk-singing duos; the abridged Shakespearean performances; the face-painting and hair-braiding; the sparkly magic wands and crystals; the jousting contests; the bawdy cammaraderie of the workers; the archery game; the hordes of fair-goers dressed as wizards and ladies and lords and dragons and fairies and ninjas and vampires and other inexplicable characters.

We waited on a too-long line for underwhelming Middle Eastern salads and drank water and hard cider and searched for bathrooms and rolled our eyes at the abundant display of pushed up bosoms and peculiar garb. Crossing over the kissing bridge, Big Babe spontaneously gave me a peck on the cheek and I felt a tug backward, recalling the tiny, wide-eyed child with blond curls clutching his wooden sword and shield with proprietary joy, now seeing the graceful young man with a straight dark locks wielding a professional camera, snapping images of the day, capturing scenes straight out of his youth.

It was so perfect that I could barely speak. I felt nearly selfish for engineering this day's journey to provide me with tangible memories to hold close while my eldest child is gone in Europe.

Later in the afternoon, after we returned to Rosmarin, I stood on the shores of Walton Lake with HOBB, watching the sun glint off the water, slipping lower and lower over the trees. "It's so beautiful," I whispered, afraid of the floodgate of feelings about to overwhelm me. A million memories from the thirteen years that we have come to this summer paradise danced around me. I tried to recall the glorious return to the lake this past May, the joyous reunion with summer friends, the walks with my children on the shore, our Scrabble games, conversations on blankets, songs in the water, kayak rides, snacks and meals on picnic tables, the amusement of watching Alfie the Pomeranian race madly through the grass, owning the moment, owning the world.

"The summer's over," moaned our New York neighbor Brian one month ago, as we bumped into each other dog-walking outside our building. It was early August and the words shattered like a broken window pane around my ears.

"No!" I protested, loudly, hauling Alfie into the apartment. I had just come back from a week-long trip to St. Louis for a client's convention and felt gypped of The Love Shack, bereft of NYC. I was back and I still had a solid month left of summer. No way was it over. There were still reams of days to dance through.

Each day this summer was its own world. Each morning had its own flavor. Each evening its own magic. We were here at the Love Shack, but also elsewhere-- there were trips to St. Louis and Hartford and Maryland and the Hamptons and upstate and, of course, the Urban Bungalow back in Manhattan.

There were movies and day trips and parties and conversations and books and magazines and weekend guests and visits from my sister from Israel and my nephew and a Shabbat with my parents and hot-button issues and fights and day camp for Little Babe and returning from Israel and then leaving for college for Middle Babe, our only daughter.

With Middle Babe now completing her second week at college in Maryland, I hold dear the memories of her visits to the Love Shack, wish to wear my recollections like a locket against my heart.

Artifacts from my past wink to me from the combination kitchen/living room of my tiny bungalow. My Grandma Dorothy's challah plate, now hanging on our wall. An oil painting by my mother. Caricatures of my three children, drawn by an artist at my Israeli nephew's Jerusalem bar mitzvah, two years ago. Camp pictures stuck in drawers. The Happy 4th of July streamer from two years ago. The 2007 schedule from Rosmarin's Day Camp, still affixed to the side of our fridge by magnet.

For lo, the beautiful summer is past.

Sadness mingles with gratitude, for it was as full and memorable as I could wish.

My cup and my heart runneth over.

LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE

My good buddy, Jonathan Mark at the New York Jewish Week spilled the beans on the Noah Feldman affair in this past week's paper, revealing that the infamous reunion picture from Maimonides High School was not deliberately cropped to exclude Noah and his obviously goyesque then-fiance.

Rather, Noah and his now-wife as well as people on the other side of the too-wide photograph were cropped for space -- and not ethnic -- considerations.

Moreover, the photographer states that Noah misrepresented the regret he voiced as "sorry for bumping you and your shikse from the picture" when instead he was merely apologizing for cutting him out of the published photo, nothing personal intended.

With the revelation of that inconvenient truth, the entire premise of NoFel's rant -- look how exclusionist the Modern Orthodox are!!! -- is entirely lost.

Scarily, however, both Noah AND his editors at the New York Times Magazine knew this before the article appeared.

So, in addition to the Hah-vahd law professor having a Jewish problem, he also has a credibility problem.

Noah Feldman gives Jews a bad name.

NOAH FELDMAN PLAYS A DANGEROUS GAME OF CONNECT THE DOTS

Here he is, Noah Feldman, in all his adorable elegance.

Noah Feldman, another feather in the cap of American Jewry, the product of an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, the globally-acclaimed intellectual wunderkind, the author, the political pundit, the Harvard Law Professor -- formerly of NYU -- who barely looks old enough to shave, let alone get married.

To an Asian, non-Jewish woman, as he details in the pages of this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Well, who cares, really?

Noah cares. He cares that the yeshiva he attended for 12 years -- The Maimonides School in Brookline, Mass -- has airbrushed him out of any of their newsletters, thereby erasing any evidence that he ever attended their institution.

And he cares enough to write an essay that lays out a dangerous game of connect-the-dots, hopscotching from his personal tale of being hurt by exclusion to finding a basis in Judaism itself for the terrorist actions of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir.

By the end of the magazine piece, any sympathy I might have had for him had evaporated and in its place was sheer disgust. Reading postings on the blogosphere, I know that I am hardly alone.

Oh, Noah, you meander through childhood memories that are hardly unique to anyone who attended Orthodox Jewish day school. So the Maimonides School had to cloak their obligatory sex ed in the prohibitions of negiah, hauling out the philosophy of Feinstein in a multi-volume set to suppress your teenage hard-on. Big freaking deal. So you got reprimanded for holding hands with a girl? Been there, done that. So, your rebbes said stupid, parochial things about...goyim? Wow. I never heard of that happening.

There is a Talmudic debate about saving the life of a non-Jew on Shabbat? How fascinating that this took place so many centuries ago! Of course it is as dated as most of the discussions in the Talmud about women. Isn't the proof of the pudding in the fact that Jewish doctors are a worldwide institution, saving the lives of Jews and non-Jews without discrimination on Shabbat, on Yom Kippur, on every day of the week????

Do you hope to reveal some ugly, hidden face of Judaism to your shocked readers who previously had such a positive view of Jews? A pile of gentile corpses outside of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, all the unlucky goyim in Upper Manhattan who had the misfortune to get sick on Shabbos?

Which readership are you writing for, anyway? The subscribers to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

You delve into the stories and teachings of our tradition, trying to out an ugly underbelly.

By connecting the dots, the reader might assume that Judaism is a hateful religion, promoting genocide, leading to acts of terrorism.

Gee, speaking of religions associated with promoting acts of contemporary terrorism...isn't something missing from your essay?

Here's the thing: I personally think that Maimonides' decision to airbrush you out of their newsletter was pretty stupid. But you shouldn't have been surprised. To be surprised is kind of disingenuous, isn't it, Noah? You know the consequences of marrying a non-Jew within the Orthodox community.

Some readers of your essay familiar with the goings-on inside Orthodox Jewish community might conclude that you must have been dozing in day school during that lesson on sure-fire ways to obliterate the Jewish future. Numero uno: marry out and raise non-Jewish kids. Have the line end with you. Finish the job Hitler left undone.

Other readers might conclude that you want it both ways: to spit in the face of the community and receive applause for marrying the woman you love...who happens not to be Jewish.

But this reader thinks that in your pain and hurt at the rejection of you and your wife by the Orthodox community of your youth, you have marshalled all your forces, all your intellectual aptitude and built a dangerous missile, pointed straight at the Jewish community at large, packed with enough ammo to inflict real damage.

ON THESE, I WEEP

How does the city sit desolate
That was full of people?
How has she become as a widow

She who was great among the nations?

The lights were low at Eitz Chaim, the congregants seated on the carpeted floor, individual copies of the Book of Lamentation illuminated by flickering candlelight.

Every year, a familiar gathering at this low-key Conservative synagogue in Monroe, led by Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, whom I first met when he was in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

More than a decade later, he still has the youthful aura of a recent graduate tempered with the gravitas of being a religious leader in increasingly perilous times.

To my left, Little Babe sat cross-legged, wrapped in polar fleece, black Crocs on his feet. He looked chilled and tired. It had rained all day in New York and by evening, we were water-logged and weary.

Another year, another Tisha B'Av.

I have written elsewhere of my great love for this day of observance, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem -- first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. In my writing, I have often detailed the somber and magical observances at the legendary and now-defunct Camp Massad, which have stayed with me my entire life.

Possibly because of my camp experiences, the mourning for the devastation of the Temple in Jerusalem -- which signalled the beginning of the Jewish diaspora -- is immediate and accessible to me, winding through the centuries, becoming enmeshed with other tragic historical moments deserving of commemoration.

Tisha B'Av is about pure sadness, grief, regret, remembrance. It doesn't require fancy preparation or complicated observance, mostly abstinence from food, drink, washing, sex and other pleasurable activities, the shunning of leather shoes, reciting special prayers and the reading of the Book of Lamentations.

Tisha B'Av is a day when Jews, hard-wired for survival and overachievement, have a chance to cry about everything horrible that has been done to us as a people.

While the rabbis would have us believe that the Temple was destroyed for sinat hinam -- senseless hatred -- between Jew and Jew, I am pretty convinced that the senseless hatred was directed AGAINST the Jews for refusing to accede to Rome, for stubbornly insisting upon being Jewish.

Last night, the ground at the Love Shack was wet beneath our feet as Little Babe and I trudged to the minivan to drive to Eitz Chaim. We had just eaten our seudah mafseket, finishing meal, and were ready to greet the fast.

Prior to our meal, Little Babe had been at Tae Kwon Do. During his lesson, I met an Israeli woman I had never seen before and we spoke compulsively while watching our sons spar in padded uniforms, bonding avidly as Jews meeting one another in an unexpected outpost. She invited me to a reading of Eicha (the Book of Lamentations) at the local Chabad and I told her about our tradition of attending Eitz Chaim.

Now Little Babe and I were heading to the synagogue through the dark, raindrop-bejeweled night. Five minutes before we arrived, he surprised me with a question: Why do so many bad things happen to the Jews? Why do so many people hate us?

Reading Eicha is difficult, as it is filled with self-flaggelation. Jeremiah, widely considered to be its author, depicts a ravaged city and a hopeless people. The desolate Temple mount is overrun by foxes; women cook their own children. A verse tacked onto the end -- Return us O Lord to you, renew our days as of old -- provides only the slightest relief from the sheer and utter devastation.

This bleak scenario could not be farther from the world that Little Babe inhabits on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a world in which being a Jew, even an observant Jew, constitutes being a member of a social and cultural elite. Moreover, the Jerusalem of Eicha is utterly alien to Little Babe, who has visited and lived in a sparkling, overpopulated, Jewishly-dominated Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem of Jeremiah is not even close to the creepy experience of living in Oxford, England three years ago, where Little Babe was regularly called a variety of names that involved his Jewishness and Middle Babe was attacked verbally by her elite private school classmates for the alleged sins of the State of Israel... the chief one being its very existence.

Once a year, on Tisha B'Av, I cast off my comfort as a contemporary American Jew and dwell in the sadness of being part of a persecuted people, exiled, longing to be returned to my beloved Zion.

Once a year, on Tisha B'Av, Jewish parents -- especially those living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, spending their summers in a glorious paradise at the foothill of the Catskill Mountains -- begin the process of explaining to their children the difficult truth about being Jewish.

WHEN YOU'RE A JET

It took the better part of one entire year, but I finally prevailed.

After refusing to veer from his steady habit of anime and Cartoon Network, Little Babe grudgingly allowed me to cajole him into watching West Side Story.

The Sunday night screening was one of the most magical moments of my recent life.

Following a relentlessly social Shabbat at the Love Shack and a trip out to Long Island to visit MOBB and FOBB (mother of Bungalow Babe; father of Bungalow Babe) in Great Neck and friends in Long Beach, Little Babe and I returned to Monroe, New York just as the sun was setting on Sunday evening.

Driving west on Route 17, a mysterious fog settled around us like a great big benevolent quilt. What I really longed to do at that hour was to dive onto my bed to read Mary Gordon's stories but somehow, as if by magnetic force, I found myself drawn into the new Target in the pre-fab new shopping development known as Harriman Commons.

The impetus for this detour was to pick up a few packs of the popular undershirt known as a wife-beater for Big Babe who has developed a sudden dependency upon them. Those of you who frequent Target are probably well-acquainted with the syndrome of check-out shock, which is the phenomenon of being utterly astonished at the check-out counter by the sheer quantity of (non-essential) items you have just purchased.

However, tucked into the trademark red and white bag were three magnificent metziahs (steals) that made the excursion entirely worthwhile: the musicals Hair, Fame and West Side Story on DVD, each for $9.99.

Oh, snap!

Upon returning to the horrifically messy Love Shack -- abandoned hastily earlier that same day in a mad effort to get HOBB (husband of Bungalow Babe) to La Guardia on time for his flight to Boston -- Little Babe and I collapsed onto the master bed, eyes trained upon my computer screen, which was balanced on the makeshift table that forms my desk. Between us rested Alfie the Pomeranian, blissfully squashed between our sandy, beach-burnt bodies.

The DVD player whirred inside my computer. The window for the DVD player popped up. I pressed play. The computer screen went black. That famous West Side Story whistle sounded, hovering in the silent air, and then the thrilling overture began, a skycam panning New York City, causing Little Babe to cry out in recognition -- "Columbia University!" "The Empire State Building!" "The East River!!" -- until the lens honed in upon a playground on the West Side.

In the quiet of the country, Leonard Bernstein's energetic music sounded overly loud and I kept compulsively fiddling with the volume button, afraid of waking the entire bungalow colony. Lying on our stomachs, facing the computer, chins resting on fluffy pillows, a soft breeze wafting through our curtains and brushing our pajamas, I kept stealing glances at Little Babe, monitoring his reaction.

Some adults take their kids to Disney World to show them the time of their lives.

For me, Disney World is eclipsed many times over by the wondrous world that Bernstein, Robbins, Laurents and Wise created in this film: the urban battleground of the Sharks and the Jets, the Eden of Tony and Maria, the sisterhood of Anita and Maria, the safe haven of Doc's Candy Store, the frilly retreat of the bridal shop, the shadows in the schoolyards and playgrounds (haunted by Anybody's), the alleys and streets, nooks and crannies of New York's dirty, down-at-the-heels West Side in the very era I was born.

The epic relationships of West Side Story have been with me my entire life: Tony and Riff; Anita and Bernardo; Riff and Bernardo; Tony and Maria; Anita and Maria; Maria and Chino. And the characters are hard-wired into my memory: Officer Krupke; Doc; Ice; A-Rab; Baby John; Velma; Graziela; Consuela; Lieutenant Schrank; Action and mah gurl Anybody's, the ultimate celluloid tomboy.

After four decades of watching this film, the characters of West Side Story have become mishpocha. Their story, oft-told, is family lore, a primer for life, a template for every situation one is likely to encounter -- love, longing, hatred, disappointment, betrayal, exhiliration, adversity, loss.

And rumbles. Especially rumbles.

To see West Side Story is to take a crash course in life-preparedness.

The first time I saw West Side Story was in 1972, watching it from the high-rise bed next to my cousin Rena in the basement of her house in New Hyde Park. The film was on TV, a Sunday night special, perhaps Channel 9's Million Dollar Movie. From the very beginning of the film, I was breathless with the thrill of discovery; I felt like the Vasco da Gama of Queens. Here was entirely new territory! Never before had I seen a musical like this, filled with characters I instantly loved... and wanted to be.

Watching the film unfold, I recognized myself in Riff, in Action and in Anybody's. With each viewing -- sometimes even between each viewing -- I wrote myself into the script. Little did I know that ten years later, their West Side setting would become my own neighborhood.

As I got older, I even tried on the persona of Anita -- sexy, savvy, hot-blooded, Spanish like me, though it would be many years before I learned the truth about my own Sephardic origins.

How bold the film was, confronting the tribal animosities of urban life! Yes, we all knew it was a modern-day adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but it wasn't until I actually saw Romeo and Juliet performed that I realized how faithful the adaptation was.

And it wasn't until I was older that I realized how daring the film was, allowing good-girl Maria a night of sex with Tony. The scene of Anita coming upon an obviously post-coital, half-clad Maria in the room with the rumpled bedsheets, Tony escaping through the alleys was an important milestone in my moral development.

Don't listen to your parents...people in love can and do have sex, it informed me... even if they are not married! Good girls like Maria and good boys like Tony. People like Judy and Bob, my birthparents, a college and a medical student, in love, unmarried, utterly unknown to me at that time in my life.

Thirty-five years ago, I watched, miffed, as the final, melodramatic scene unfolded and Maria cradled a dying Tony. Naturally, my girly-girl cousin wept and naturally, I laughed at the corniness of it all, tomboy that I was. I remember rolling my eyes at that excess of emotion while my cousin shouted at me through her tears that I was ruining the ending for her. But the ending had been ruined for me by the director.

Until that final scene, everything had been great and irreverent and suddenly, there were violins and ashen-faced gang members and everyone was acting serious and grown-up and like they didn't hate each other anymore. Eeeeuuuuwww!

Outraged though I was, I ultimately forgave the filmmakers, pragmatically deciding that they needed to turn the movie into a tearjerker...this was Hollywood, after all.

I have no idea how many times I've watched West Side Story, seeing it anew through the eyes of each of my children, finding it ever more brilliant with each viewing.

So, what novel observations did Sunday night's viewing bring?

Well, for one thing, the choreography nearly made me swoon. It is utterly sublime, sophisticated and greatly varied -- ballet to mambo to jazz to modern and back again. I saw Little Babe's mouth open during each dance number, suffused with wonder that "boys" could dance so well.

This Sunday's viewing also activated my gaydar. Maybe it is due to the dancing, but at this recent viewing, most of the Sharks and Jets struck me as gay. Especially the Sharks. Check out their tight little butts and high-waisted pants. (The lipsticked pouty mouths don't help matters.) Still, the gayest guy of West Side Story has got to be Tony. When he attempts to look love-besotted, he merely manages a constipated grimace. The way he holds Maria is distant and awkward. It is far more natural to imagine him, say, making out with Bernardo.

Gratuitous musings about the the actors' sexual orientation aside, what my latest encounter with West Side Story gave me was the sheer joy of sharing it with Little Babe --wondering how it looks to him now that he is the very age I was when it entered my life in a very different world, a world before the Intifada and 9/11 and videotaped decapitations and American students going on murderous rampages and flaming jeeps being driven into airports. I wonder how Little Babe's mind will preserve the memory of the first time he viewed the Jets and Sharks rumbling in urban playgrounds and alleyways, an Upper West Side child on the cusp of adolescence, camping out in the country in the summer before his Bar Mitzvah.

COFFEE AND TERRORISM. Part Deux.

God is taunting me. He/She obviously read my previous posting and thought to Him/Herself:

So, you like to racially profile perfect strangers? Two can play the game!!!

Evidently, the game has begun. This morning, when I popped into my local Dunkin Donuts, I nearly dropped my small cappuccino with an extra-shot when Verena, the Eastern European clerk from last summer, emerged from the back of the store wearing a Muslim headcovering and a long sleeve black leotard beneath her Dunkin Donuts shirt.

The veil was pinned beneath her chin and her face was utterly free of make-up. She kept her eyes downward, looking up only briefly to take orders. Last summer, she smiled at customers and wore her mousy-brown hair free and uncovered.

Now, of course, I am consumed with wondering whether Verena and the sleazeball from last week are related. Now, of course, my paranoia level has gone up to Level Red.

And it didn't help that five seconds later, I was trotting on the treadmill at Straub's Fitness three stores down, listening to Michael Chertoff talk about the hunch he has that a large-scale terrorist plot might be hatching for a city such as New York. Possibly this summer.

No specific information about a threat, just the hunch from the director of Homeland Security.

Of course, this could be a ploy from the Bushies to get everyone all paranoid and nervous and deflect from the fact that the troop surge in Iraq is a huge failure and the frikkin war in Iraq is a huge failure and the Iraq government is a huge failure and every frikkin thing that has happened over on Bush's watch has been a huge failure.

It's hard to figure out where to focus my paranoia.