For the past several days, there’s been a lot of chatter on the interwebs about a suggestion (which seems to have really taken off with this HuffPost article by Rabbi Jason Miller) that people boycott put pressure on Delta because “Delta will add Saudi Arabian Airlines to its SkyTeam Alliance of partnering companies and would require Delta to ban Jews and holders of Israeli passports from boarding flights to Saudi Arabia.” My colleagues on UPGRD.com, Matthew and Hunter, have offered thoughtful and thorough responses, as have podcast contributors Ben and Gary. Normally, I’d stay out of this to avoid the redundancy. But since I’m in the unique position of being an occasional UPGRD contributor and also someone who works professionally in the Jewish community, I felt like I should jump in. Below is the first of two posts on the topic, both of which are cross-posted on my UPGRD.com blog and on my personal blog.
Amy Pohler at Harvard’s graduation:
As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own…You’re all here today because someone gave you strength. Helped you. Held you in the palm of their hand. God, Allah, Buddha, Gaga—whomever you pray to.
Doug Mataconis on Scott Walker’s move to end a program that allows gay couples hospital visitation rights (or, to be more specific, his attempt to stop defending the laws of his state and the rights of his citizens in court against extremist anti-gay hate groups):
I really have to wonder what kind of person would seek to prevent two people who are in a relationship from making whatever arrangements they want to allow the other to visit them in the hospital, and what right the state has to tell hospitals that they cannot honor those requests.
Is the GOP hatred for gays so pervasive that they could really be this cold and heartless?
Yup. Apparently, it is.
Or as Jed Lewison puts it:
Gee, gay-bashing is just so fiscal conservative, isn’t it?
A recent article on Foward.com highlights a demographic study by Leonard Saxe that offers some new insights on the national Jewish population and might even contradict some of the generally-accepted-as-gospel research on the matter. In the Forward article, Saxe talks about the sticky problem of “identification”:
Instead of writing some fancy introduction, I’m going to just start by telling you that the thesis of this blog post is that the entire concept of the “December dilemma” is a myth. I’m going to explain why, and then I’m going to suggest what we (the Jewish community, and perhaps more specifically, those of us who serve in
leadership roles in the Jewish community) should do about it.
So with that totally transparent introduction, you can click if you’re interested in reading more.
My friend Ira recently got me riled up. On his blog, he posted about a “Mindset List” recently published by Hillel.
In case you’re unfamiliar: Beloit College, a liberal-arts school in southern Wisconsin, puts out this thing every year called the Mindset List. A few humanities or social sciences professors sit around and list a whole bunch of cultural references that, while familiar to adults, are not familiar to 18 year-old freshman.
“Professors will teach by referring to cultural information for purposes of analogy or illustration,” Beloit College humanities professor Tom McBride, one of two who developed the list, told the AP a few years ago. “But the kind of information they’re using may simply not be relevant to 18-year-old minds.”
This year, Hillel joined in on the fun by releasing a “Jewish Mindset List” of their own. Theirs is titled, “What Are Jewish First-Year Students Thinking?” and it’s introduced with the line, “Here, then, are the Jewish ideas that are kicking around in the minds of today’s first-year students.”
The entire concept of a “mindset” list is stupid. Here are four reasons why:
