Which Rabbi Jacobs Will Lead the Reform Movement?

Rabbi Richard Jacobs, President-Designate of the URJ

 The Jewish Reform movement has just started the transition to a new leader. In 2012, Rabbi Eric Yoffie is stepping down after 30 years in leadership roles in the Reform Movement. The process of introducing his successor,  Rabbi Rick Jacobs to the public has begun. One of Jacobs' first public appearances after the announcement was made was with Rabbi Yoffie was in DC last week. Speaking to Reform social justice activists he mounted a vigorous defense of his pro-Israel credentials. Rabbi Jacobs is a moderate. He has supported Rabbis for Human Rights, an activist group that does great work on behalf of Palestinian human rights. While he is a member of J Street's Rabbinic Cabinet, Rabbi Jacobs has aligned himself with Jewish Voice for Peace's position on BDS (economic sanctions and other measures). Namely, Rabbi Jacobs does not oppose BDS  against West Bank settlements.
His appointment to the head of the Reform movement is being hailed  - and attacked – as a victory for the  left-of-center J Street.
In this speech, however, Rabbi Jacobs goes out of his way to appease the right-wing. After coming under attack by the right wing,  he is now speaking with a different voice, answering Amen to the anti-Palestinian camp’s talking points.

Which of is two two public personas will Rabbi Jacobs bring to the URJ? The Rabbi Jacobs who supports BDS against or the one who supports the IDF's onslaught on Gaza?

 

I posted this response on The Forward website:

Rabbi Jacobs speaks of equality between Jew and Arab in Israel and speaks approvingly, if only in passing, of activism to dismantle settlements. These are important messages.

But these good points are, unfortunately, overshadowed by major sections of the speech.

Rabbi Jacobs speaks admiringly of Daniel Pipes, a man whose idea of reaching out to other faiths is expressed in statements such as "we should tolerate moderate Islam", and, in commenting on the peaceful, democratic revolution in Egypt said: "Muslims...at this time, they are the least democratic of peoples". Notwithstanding that one of the world's most populous democracies, is the Muslim country of Indonesia.

Where is Rabbi Jacobs' voice urging Reform Jews to reach out to American Muslims?

2. Rabbi Jacobs has nothing to say about Israel's shameful attack on the people of Gaza in 2008-9. He boasts that he anticipated the partisan retraction of one of the 13 serious war crime charges against Israel in the attack on Gaza in 2008-9. He implies that the retraction by a single member of the commission of just one finding is sufficient to invalidate the other 12 accusations of war crimes. Rabbi Jacobs surely knows that in our tradition, a da'at yachid, (a minority, dissenting opinion) does not decide the law.

Where is the Rabbi's moral concern for the horrendous destruction of civilian institutions and human life in the IDF's campaign in Gaza?

3. Rabbi Jacobs speaks approvingly of AIPAC and disparagingly of J Street. Jewish Voice for Peace is not mentioned in his speech on Israel.

Where is the "big tent" that the leader of the largest denomination in Judaism seeks to build?

Given such a partisan, political stance, Rabbi Kaplan's call for Reform Jews to disengage from Israel is understandable. However, this is less than optimal. A new generation of young American Jews is emerging who will not put aside their values in the name of loyalty the State of Israel. What will Rabbi Jacobs and Rabbi Kaplan tell them?

In the U.S. we have Palestinian and Arab neighbors. What message do we want to send them?

In the past the leadership of American Jewry gave the Israeli government the authority to bring settlements to the West Bank. Rabbi Yoffie has since retracted that support.

I wish Rabbi Jacobs well in his new position as leader of the Reform movement. There is still time, before he takes office next year, to go beyond narrow partisan politics and reach out to the broad, diverse spectrum of opinion that is American Reform Judaism.

I hope he does so.

           

           

The Solution to Hyatt Corp's Problem

Jane Ramsey (JCUA), a translator & the three Hyatt housekeepers:
Linda Lopez (L.A.)  Drupatiie Jungra (Boston) Ofelia Martinez (Chicago)
Chicago, August 28, 2011

Last week I heard the story of a Hyatt worker who was fired from her job of 29 years and replaced by temp workers whom she had trained. On August 31, 2009, all the housekeeping staff at three Boston Hyatt hotels were fired and replaced by temps. Management had lied to her and her co-workers about why they were training these new workers. According to this worker, the general manager of the Hyatt Regency Cambridge told the housekeeping staff on the day of their dismissal that the reason they were being fired was because the hotel was short of money. The reality is that the hotel industry is, and has been doing very well, with high occupancy rates, as reported by Hyatt itself. The actual hardship is born by the workers. In our "jobless recovery" desperate people will take any job, undercutting workers who are just a little better off than they are.

Hyatt has a problem. The company is required to constantly increase its earnings. Since business is already booming, the money will have to come from cutting costs. Since the hotel cannot lower its standards of hospitality,  this means that costs must be cut. And that means labor. Our 'jobless recovery' has generated an abundance of poor, unemployed people, a bonanza in cheap labor.

You might think that dismissing veteran, loyal, hardworking staff might be a bump in this plan. But, actually, the real problem is how to exploit this change to cut out the messy business of dealing with people.

Thankfully, this problem has a solution. Hospitality Staffing Solutions provides affordable, hassle-free labor. HSS sums up its pitch with one advertizing image. "HSS offers convenience at affordable prices." - just like the vending machine in the company's advertizing:

HSS ad targeting Hyatt and other hotels and hospitality businesses

I find the company's ad offensive on several levels.
1) The size of the workers. The images are reduced to the size of a packet of M&Ms. You can pop these workers into your mouth. This is humiliating: all these workers added together are still smaller than the client.
2) The workers in each category are identical to each other - all workers are equally indistinguishable from each other. These clones are faceless,  dependable drones.
3) The clean transaction of the vending machine translates into the business world. The vending machine offers you no shopping for food, cooking, sitting down to eat and cleaning up. Just put some change into the vending machine and pop instant food into your mouth.  Similarly,  HSS promises employers protection from dealing with all the human messiness of real people.

Finally - and perhaps it's my own sensitivity having just finished working Holocaust material -  but talking about human beings in terms of "solutions" leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Now, take another look at the workers in the first picture. Do they look like they belong in a vending machine?

Too Much, Too Little, Too Late

Osama Bin Laden's death should be a cause for relief. The mastermind of 9/11 is gone. 
But I'm left with an uneasy feeling.

Firstly, as Jerry Haber points out it wasn't just the guilty who died. A woman was targeted and killed by the U.S. force.

Secondly, I heard several times in the media coverage interviewees using the phrase "justice has been served."

Well,  according to the Guardian report:

As the raiding party closed in on the last unsecured room in the compound, Bin Laden, who according to the White House had no weapon, was shot dead. US officials say – and there is no independent verification of this fact – he was shot twice, once in the chest and once in the head. "Done in by a double tap – boom boom – to the left side of his face," wrote Marc Ambinder of the National Journal, a beltway insider's journal.

That sounds to me like the execution of an unarmed man. Since the death penalty is controversial at best and Osama Bin Laden was not served with a legal process, how can this be called justice?

The New York Times offered a different angle:

Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation. Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial recognition program.

Since, so far, the only source for this information as to what happened in the compound rooms has been the United States government, there is no way right now of verifying what actually happened.
I am suspicious of the argument that time was pressing. Clearly, there was enough time for:
1. the Navy Seal's picture
2. transmitting the picture, running the facial recognition program, making an evaluation and transmitting that through command to the Navy Seals.
3. removing Osama Bin Laden's body for burial at sea.
Why could the forces not have stunned him and removed him for interrogation and trial?
It is clear, even from President Obama's statements, that the U.S. goal was not justice but retribution by execution.

The scenes of people rejoicing at the news of the killing in Time Square and elsewhere are IMHO distasteful. I sincerely hope that President Obama did not order an execution to satisfy that sentiment.

If Osama bin Laden was too potent a leader to be taken captive and put on trial like Saddam Hussein, then we better put on our thinking caps fast. Let's figure out Osama's allure and fix that problem.
Killing him won't do it and there's no cause to rejoice until we do.

Already the U.S. and its allies are bracing for the inevitable counter-attack. If Osama Bin Laden was the figurehead of Al Qaeda,  he will not inspire his followers any less now that he is a martyr.


Lastly, we have lived through 10 years of disastrous U.S. policy in response to and justified by 9/11. These policies resulted in the killing of many more innocent lives than were lost on 9/11.
How can the death of Osama bin Laden make that right?