Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald, and Their War on Israel

By Gabriel Schoenfeld in Mosaic Magazine

When it comes to Israel, The Intercept’s coverage crosses the line from opinion journalism to a crude and vile form of propaganda.

Pierre Omidyar, founder and chairman of the auction site eBay, became a billionaire at the age of 31. Having made his fortune (his net worth is somewhere in the ballpark of $8 billion), the French-Iranian-American entrepreneur wants to give back. A decade ago, he established the Omidyar Network, an institution that is part venture capital and part philanthropy, to help businesses and nonprofits that share a “commitment to advancing social good at the pace and scale the world needs today.”

Some of Omidyar’s investments do good by anyone’s definition: funding joint public-private educational projects in South Africa, or helping indigenous peoples around the world retain rights to the resources on their own lands. But for other investments, “social good” is in the eye of the beholder. Omidyar recently infused $250 million into a new journalistic venture, First Look Media, and has installed a respected mainstream journalist, a former managing editor of the Washington Post, as President, to help “develop the best ways to serve audiences as well as oversee the company’s editorial vision.” That vision encompasses a number of lofty objectives: ensuring that citizens are “highly informed and deeply engaged in the issues that affect their lives”; helping “to improve society through journalism and technology,” building “responsive institutions”; and supporting efforts to “hold the powerful accountable.”

That is all well and good, but how are these high-minded goals working out in practice? The only product of First Look Media thus far is The Intercept, an online publication whose three founding editors are Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald. The latter two are both individuals to whom Edward Snowden entrusted the top-secret documents he purloined from the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence bodies before he took refuge in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Jeremy Scahill is a self-described “progressive journalist” who has written extensively for the Nation and wrote the script for a 2013 documentary film, Dirty Wars, based upon his book of the same title, about America’s “global killing machine.”

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18 Things You Should Do Before Rosh Hashanah

From Oy!Chicago

(This article might be from Chicago but there's no reason why you can't do most of these things in your own hometown.)

Not that we have anything against highs in the mid-70s, but as the calendar inches closer and closer to September (seriously, WHAT??), it’s kinda hard to believe that was it for summer this year. It’s been a joy pretending to live in northern California, but it’s time to face the truth, Oy!sters: fall and 5775 are fast-approaching, and with them sweaters, boots, and (even) cooler temps. We can practically taste the pumpkin spice lattes already.

That said, there are still a few weeks left to stock up on fresh air before you pack your bags for the suburbs or buy your plane ticket home for Rosh Hashanah and settle onto the couch for hibernation.

Chicago tradition dictates the aggressive enjoyment of nice weather until the LAST DAMN DAY WE CAN, right? With that in mind, from our rooftop barstool to yours, here are Oy!Chicago’s top picks for sending 5774 off with a bang:

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And while you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday kit with lots of wonderful ideas and suggestions to make your HHD fun and fulfilling.

Rosh Hashana, Circa 1919

By JOAN NATHAN for The New York Times

“SHALOM ALEICHEM!” Shiva Shapiro said in a heavy Yiddish accent to her visitors.

As she deftly stuffed cabbage leaves with rice and stewed tomatoes, and displayed other dishes she has made on her 1900 Beauty Hub coal stove, Ms. Shapiro drew her guests into her life.

“This is 1919,” she said. “Last year was the end of the influenza epidemic and the end of the war to end all wars. We’re a Jewish family and we’re keeping kosher in our home. I don’t read English, only Yiddish and Hebrew. My daughter Mollie learned about bananas at school. I think that bananas are mushy, but I take her to buy a hand of bananas for 25 cents.”

Mrs. Shapiro is actually Barbara Ann Paster, one of the actors here at the Strawbery Banke restoration, a living museum in which over 350 years of Portsmouth homes, stores, churches and history have been preserved. It is in Puddle Dock, which was a decrepit neighborhood destined to be razed under urban renewal until a campaign in the 1950s and ’60s led by the town librarian saved 42 houses on 10 acres to create the museum.

The area was first settled in 1623 by the English, who found a profusion of strawberries there. By the turn of the 20th century Italians, Irish, English, French-Canadians and East European Jews had come here to find work. Although most immigrants at that time settled in large cities, some settled directly in smaller towns like Portsmouth. By 1919, 152 Russian Jews made up about a quarter of the immigrant population of Puddle Dock and 18 of them were Shapiro relatives, according to the museum.

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Watching ‘The Producers,’ Nearly 50 Years Later

Mel Brooks’ 1968 film evoked laughs in the face of the obscene. It still does today.

By Isabel Fattal for Tablet Magazine

When I sat down to watch The Producers last weekend, I was prepared for the humor to be somewhat obscene. Having already seen Spaceballs and History of the World Part I, I was familiar with Mel Brooks’ style. But The Producers reached an entirely new level. I love Brooks’ sense of humor, but still I wondered if it was OK to laugh—while wincing—when the female SS officers dance in a Swastika formation during the first performance of Springtime for Hitler. Still, my discomfort was short-lived, and I didn’t find it too difficult to decide to just laugh at and enjoy the film.

My proximity to the film’s subject matter perhaps helped make me feel more comfortable laughing along with The Producers. As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I felt like my personal connection somehow allowed me to be entertained rather than offended. After all, laughing at one’s own history and identity seems more appropriate than laughing at the plight of others. This seems to have been true for Brooks as well; watching the film, I wondered if another writer or director who didn’t share Brooks’ background as the descendant of German and Ukrainian Jews would have been able to take the film to its extreme levels of obscenity—the key to its success.

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The kosher controversy at Sainsbury's speaks to a profound problem: acquiescence to anti-Semitism

Brendan O'Neill in Mosaic Magazine

Were you outraged by a Sainsbury's store's decision over the weekend to hide away its kosher foods in an attempt to placate anti-Israel protesters? You should have been. For this incident, though seemingly a one-off, speaks to a profound problem in Europe today – the respectable classes' acquiescence to anti-Semitism; their willingness to accept anti-Semitic sentiment as a fact of life and to shrug it off or, worse, kowtow to it.

The kosher incident took place at the Sainsbury's in Holborn in London. When a mob of anti-Israel protesters gathered outside the store, the manager took the extraordinary decision to take all kosher products off the shelves lest the protesters target them and smash them up. Kosher foods, of course, are Jewish not Israeli; they are part of the Jewish dietary requirement, not part of any kind of Israeli food corporatism. To shamefacedly hide away such foodstuffs in order to appease a gang of hot-headed Israel-haters is an attack on a religious people and their rights, not on the Israeli state. That in Britain in 2014 we have store managers taking kosher foods off public display should be of concern to anyone who hates prejudice and racism.

So does this mean Sainsbury's is anti-Semitic? No. It doesn't even show that anyone at the Sainsbury's in Holborn is anti-Semitic. But it does shine a light on the modern phenomenon of acquiescence to anti-Semitism, the rank unwillingness of influential people and institutions to face up to anti-Semitic sentiment and their preference for moulding the world around it rather than challenging it. Imagine if a Sainsbury's manager suggested that the best way to deal with a racist in his store was to remove the black employees who were offending him. There would be outrage. Yet this weekend, in central, apparently civilised London, a manager decided that the best way to deal with people possessed of a possibly anti-Semitic outlook was to hide away the Jew stuff, lest they see it and feel disgusted by it.

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