Editorial & Opinion

A Kaddish vision ...

The case of little Ela Reyes raises many thorny issues about church/state entanglement, parenting in a multicultural world, and the challenge of religious pluralism. Ela’s parents, Rebecca Reyes (born Jewish) and her now ex-husband Joseph Reyes (raised Catholic, converted to Judaism, and now returning to the Church) found themselves in court over the issue of his right to bring Ela to church. Cook County (Illinois) Judge Renee Goldfarb ruled that Mr. Reyes has the right to do so. 

It must be nice to live in a world of Jewish absolutes. Denizens of the black and white Jewish world experience no discomfort. For them life is simple. Neither the extreme left nor the extreme right has any doubts. Their belief system permits no dichotomies, allows for no flexibility, and frowns on compromise. This is especially true of religion, and politics. More so when they are combined.

A favorite inside joke among American Jews has always been their disproportionate influence on American culture. Although small in absolute numbers, their contribution to cultural achievement has been indisputably vast, to the point where some American art forms would almost not have existed were it not for Jews.

Last week, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research revealed nearly 80 documents showing that Otto Frank, the father of the world’s most famous diarist, Anne Frank, attempted in 1941 to emigrate his entire family from Holland to America.
 

Ah, to live in a confessional age. The fever to publicly acknowledge past mistakes is the latest craze of popular culture. Contrition, apparently, is in. With the television box as the new confessional booth, celebrities rush to repent on Larry King, Oprah and even Tyra — all as a means of public expiation and shrewd career management.

One virtue of the novel is that fictional characters often outlive the novelist who created them. Actually, that’s one of the reasons why some people give up their day jobs to tell stories instead. Aside from having children, fiction writing is one of the best ways to leave evidence of oneself. And, in some cases — think Atticus Finch, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Tom Sawyer — it can even lead to immortality.
 

The theme song for radical Islam is not exactly “Let it Be.”
 

Salman Rushdie spent nearly a decade of his life with a fatwa hanging over his head for having written “The Satanic Verses.” To Muslim clerics the novel presented irreverent depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, which, in the Islamic world, is tantamount to signing your own death warrant.
 

A number of years later, Danish cartoonists suffered a similar fate after newspapers published cartoons that Muslims deemed to be mocking of Mohammad.
 

Everyone is familiar with the parlor game so fashionable among armchair Jewish and African-American politicos. You know, the one with the implausibly absurd question: Who will become the first Jew or black to be elected president, and which one will come first?
 

As if things couldn’t possibly get any worse, being a Jew suddenly got even tougher.
 

Israel is being condemned for having unleashed its own version of “shock and awe” in Gaza. The unremitting rocket attacks inside Israel — during a purported cease-fire — generated little public outcry until Israel decided to do something about it.