By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Friday, February 4
New Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been in office a week, and already she’s on the fast track with her first trip: to the Middle East. She’s decided she’ll put her fingerprint on the ongoing peace process—by stepping back. “Not every effort has to be an American effort,” Rice told JTA. “It is extremely important that the parties themselves are taking responsibility.”
One day after the election, however, JTA wrote that “There is a mainstream assessment in the Israeli Foreign Ministry that American policy on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, even under Bush, will be become more proactive and more closely coordinated with Europe.”
Saturday, February 5
“As the first Jewish governor of Texas, when elected I will reduce the speed limit to 54.95,” said musician, mystery author and now Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman.
Sunday, February 6
Seattle Times theater critic Misha Berson took a look at the new Shakespeare flick The Merchant of Venice today. The adaptation from the play (apparently Will wasn’t making movies back then) “lumbers to the screen laden with mounds of centuries-old baggage,” Berson says, most notably in the form of Jewish moneylender Shylock.
“Is Shylock, a Jew who demands a ‘pound of flesh’ as his bond for a defaulted loan to the merchant Antonio, essentially a racist caricature?” Berson asks. “Or is he a more complex individual, who can’t be neatly categorized as victim or villain, stereotype or singular?”
These are questions that have raged through the centuries—notably asking whether Shakespeare himself was anti-Semitic or even Jewish—particularly after Shylock’s portrayal turned from comedic to serious after the Holocaust. Ultimately, this review says, the movie’s abridged telling of The Merchant softens the story, and “is missing much of the brutal candor and mixed messages that make the play so vitally provocative.”
Tuesday, February 8
“Cease Fire!” shouted the Associated Press. “Cease fire,” said the New York Times. Not so fast, said the Israel News Resource Agency.
“They will declare quiet,” the agency quotes the Israeli prime minister’s spokesman as saying. “Sharon will not sign anything. The important thing is the ‘quiet.’”
Additionally, though Israeli officials believed that the anti-Israel rhetoric had been toned down, they were surprised to find that “the texts of Friday’s official Palestinian Authority mosque speechesÖcalled for the violent liberation of all of Palestine, once again.”
“Despite the repeated statements, on tape and on the record, that no ceasefire had been agreed to in Sharm,” the report concluded, “every single media outlet blasted out the word that a cease fire had been reached.”
Thursday, February 10
Tonight marked the final curtain call for one of America’s great playwrights. Arthur Miller taught us that when it came to the stage, life did not have to be a cabaret, and it did not have to be stuffy like Shakespeare, either. His Death of a Salesman was a watershed in American theater, proving that people would spend an evening out to see the darkest depths of the human soul, and The Crucible managed to be topical and highly critical while remaining entertaining. Plus, he had that thing with Marilyn Monroe. Miller was 89.
Friday, February 11
Whatever the rhetoric coming out of both sides of the Middle East conflict, today we saw some action. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas got rid of three of his security chiefs after Jewish settlements in Gaza were attacked by mortar fire. “His aides said the sharp, swift response reflected Mr. Abbas’s determination to enforce the cease-fire he announced along with Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, at Tuesday’s summit meeting in Egypt,” the New York Times said.
The attacks were in retaliation for the death of three Palestinians at a jail in Gaza City the day before, “where Palestinian assailants shot dead three prisoners in revenge killings tied to a local feud,”—and not about anything Israelis had done.
Monday, February 14
Anybody hoping for a ticker-tape parade in Zion Square? The intifada is (effectively) over, proclaimed President Abbas in his first interview to the foreign press since taking office.
“Abbas wants progress to continue so that the two sides can move quickly to political discussions about the Road Map,” according to today’s New York Times, “questions of final borders, refugees, Jerusalem and now, ‘President Bush’s initiative about a democratic Palestinian state,’” he said.
Though there is yet much to be done, including deciding borders, converting terrorist organizations into political parties—a move which Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom called a “ticking bomb”—and Abbas’ biggest priority: the release of prisoners captured by Israel since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Also, any of you hoping to find love today wouldn’t have gotten any help from Jewish dating site JDate. “The most popular Jewish singles site on the Internet was down most of Valentine’s Day,” according to JTA. Visitors “received a message saying the site was down and [which apologized] for the inconvenience.”
Tuesday, February 15
AIPAC congratulated him, but the Republican Jewish Coalition and the National Jewish Democratic Committee are going mano-a-mano on the election of Howard Dean to leader of the Democratic National Committee.
“Dean’s unanimous election is an important barometer of the Democratic Party’s direction. Regrettably, that direction is towards indifference, if not outright opposition, to the war on terror,” said the RJC. The group brought forth Democrats such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, who said that “Dean’s statements break a 50-year record in which presidents, Republican and Democrats, members of Congress of both parties have supported our relationship with Israel based on shared values and common strategic interests.”
The Jewish Democrats quote Dean himself, who told House Democrats in 2003 that “Since Harry Truman’s historic decision to make the United States the first nation to recognize the Jewish State, Democrats have been united in their commitment to the state of Israel. I will not allow a split to emerge in our party on this critical issue.”