Winter 2009 Feature
So Whom did Midstream Support for President? Financial Meltdown; Terror in Mumbai; Gaza Rockets; Changes at Midstream and an Appeal to Readers
by Leo Haber
This editorial is being written in late November, some three weeks after the monumental nation-wide vote that resulted in the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States and Joseph Biden as vice-president. The unprecedented triumph of an African American in the race for the presidency, the highest office in the country and, in effect, the most powerful office in the world, was undoubtedly a landmark event. Even many of those who did not vote for him could not avoid being moved by the joyous emotional response within black communities throughout the land. Television images caught moments of elation and tears, especially among older blacks who lived in the years of enforced segregation and humiliation down south and even elsewhere and the subsequent civil rights revolution of the 1960s led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.. An elderly woman who remembered that time of trial and heroism said it best. “I did not think I would live to see this day. Thank God that I did.”
The lovely woman who could have been anybody’s grandma was inadvertently expressing the essence of the Hebrew blessing that Jews recite with similar emotion: “Baruch atah ha-Shem...she-hecheyanu v’kiyimanu v’higianu la-z’man ha-zeh. (Blessed art Thou O God...Who has kept us alive and sustained us and allowed us to reach this [glorious] time.) The Hebrew blessing is recited by Jews at the close of the kiddush prayer at the beginning of every holiday. It is also recited by parents and friends upon living to witness a landmark family or communal event—the marriage of a son or daughter or even the 60th anniversary this past year of the founding of sovereign State of Israel. It is certainly an appropriate sentiment at the election of America’s first African American president.
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Along with the presidential campaign and the election came the shocking meltdown of the domestic and international financial system that reminded one and all of the tragic events of the depression era in the 1930s. Within weeks, if not days, thousands of homes throughout the land went into foreclosure as hard-pressed homeowners could not meet their mortgage payments. Banks and financial institutions stuck with worthless paper which they had invited in the drive for higher profits, courted bankruptcy and sought government bailouts. Unemployment rose to heights not seen in years, small businesses went broke, and giant businesses like the Big Three automakers in Detroit sent their CEOs to Washington on private jets to beg for government bailouts to save them from bankruptcy. The stock market went into a tailspin that wiped out ten years of value in a fortnight and put into shock countless retirees whose 401K and 403B investments in stock funds nosedived and slashed their available retirement income in half and perhaps more. Who could envy the president-elect and his financial team who would be taking office in a little more than two months on January 20th only to inheri such a disaster?
Who could envy Barack Obama’s situation now? Joy turned to prayer mixed with fear and trembling. In almost every synagogue where prayers are recited every shabbat for the welfare of our American government (and also for the welfare of the government of Israel), the routine words blessing our leaders, asking God to grant them wisdom and to bring peace and contentment to all the people carried special meaning and was recited, I suspect, with greater fervor.
To lighten this discussion, let me talk about Midstream and the presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. During the campaign, our friends and relatives discussed every step and misstep made by Obama and McCain and their staffs, every revelation, and every rumor and lie that made the rounds of the Internet and the press. Even the vice-presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin were subjects of passionate political discussion among us. We all knew where each of us stood; after all, relatives and close friends don’t keep secrets from each other, in spite of the secret ballot. But surprisingly, few casual acquaintances ever asked me, at least, whom I was voting for. It was as if they considered it a breach of etiquette to ask such a blunt personal question. It seemed as gauche as asking someone how much he or she earned or what his net worth was. There are permissible secrets in a democratic society, and whom you’re voting for is apparently one of them. I have a hunch that the large number of undecided voters reported in all the polls were simply folks who were keeping their choices a sublime secret. None of your business, sir.
But after the election, a peculiar thing happened to me. The same casual acquaintances who avoided asking me whom I voted for, were not ashamed to ask me a different question that took me by surprise. The question began with the unusual word “so.” It is etched sharply in my memory: “So whom did Midstream support for president?” Sometimes “who” supplanted “whom” and “endorse” replaced “support.” But it was the same inquiry time after time.
“Oy Gotenyu!” I groaned to myself. Not again! I thought I had put all these types of questions to rest in my previous editorials written for Midstream ever since my assumption of the editorship in 2001. Are my casual friends such casual readers that they skip over my dull ruminations in favor of the meatier stuff in our brilliant journal? I recalled my editorial in last year’s January/February issue entitled “To Publish or Not to Publish” and concluded that although I thought at that time that I had covered every aspect of Midstream’s principles of publication, perhaps I hadn’t. American elections are, after all, a very special case.
When two other casual friends accosted me with the same question, I decided to play along for a while. “So whom do you think Midstream endorsed?” I asked with a wicked smile on my face. One, a right-winger who consistently claimed that Midstream was too far to the left, blurted out, “Obama.” The other, a left-winger who often assured me that Midstream was a right-wing conservative journal, sneered “McCain.” I smiled sadly and told them that both of them were wrong. “Not Ralph Nader!” both of them gasped almost in unison. I insisted that Midstream had not endorsed the perennial third-party spoiler. My two friends were totally perplexed. “So whom did Midstream support for president?” they repeated, as if there was no other viable option. What follows below is what I explained to my two friends and now pass on to all our readers in the hope that you will finally understand the uniqueness and probity of Midstream magazine.
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Midstream is an American Jewish Zionist journal, but it differs from other journals that may describe themselves in the same way. Midstream does not endorse any candidate or party in American elections. Midstream is sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel (the Sochnut), a quasi-governmental Israeli body from whom our magazine receives substantial (but never enough) monetary support through the World Zionist Organization, American Section. This means that Midstream is, in a manner of speaking, a representative of Israel in the United States. It is therefore expected to abide by all the courtesies between the two governments. The Israeli ambassador to the United States never publicly meddles in American politics, certainly does not endorse candidates for office in the U.S., and neither does Midstream. I, an American-born citizen of the U.S., and a very proud one at that, have my own opinions and vote in American elections, but as editor of Midstream, I must see to it that the journal makes no endorsements whatsoever. Though writers for our magazine express their own opinions on Zionist issues and Israeli political decisions, we don’t publish their articles supporting candidates in American elections. We received quite a few of such unsolicited articles this past year, and we respectfully suggested that the writers seek publication elsewhere. We must be beyond reproach in this matter.
I can conceive of only one instance in which we might veer from our rigid stand of not taking a stand on American elections. If a Nazi-like skinhead were running for American office spouting virulent antisemitic diatribes calling for violence against Jews and/or destruction of the Jewish State of Israel, we would take a stand. Midstream did include many articles in the 1960s deploring the violence against blacks (and Jews) down South. We did not keep quiet at other times when Jews were subjected to Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitic outbursts calling Judaism a “gutter religion.” If he were ever to run for public office, we would take a stand.
An additional clarification in this discussion: Though we publish reams of material by American and Israeli writers on political issues in Israel in keeping with our mission as a Zionist journal representing all responsible sides of Zionist opinion, we also do not endorse candidates for Israeli office. After all, we are an American journal, and we don’t meddle in Israeli elections.
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Nevertheless, we can discuss the reaction of American Jews to the recent election of Barack Obama after it has taken place. I can’t recall a previous election for president that elicited so much talk among my fellow and sister Jews during the campaign about which of the two major candidates would be better for Israel. Most of the talk dwelt on Barack Obama since he was a relative newcomer to international issues. John McCain, by contrast, had a long record of service in the Senate and a history of warm support for Israel. In one of the debates Iran’s nuclear capability came up and the shocking statement of its prime minister that Israel should be wiped off the map was mentioned. McCain moved many hearts by saying bluntly that the U.S. will never permit another Holocaust against the Jews.
But Obama, in spite of his equally clear statements of warm support for Israel, was the center of a veritable storm of fact and rumor. His father was a Muslim. Obama’s middle name is Hussein. Therefore Obama was a Muslim. Obama sat for twenty years in a church whose pastor fulminated against the U.S. and against Israel with frequency in words of unadulterated vitriol.
Those who distrusted Obama cited these allegations over and over again. Those who accepted his frequent expressions of warm support for Israel had an answer for each of the claims. Obama’s father may have been a Muslim, but Obama is a Christian. He almost never saw his father. His mother and maternal grandmother brought him up and gave him his values and his religion. So what if his middle name was Hussein. There are bad Husseins (Saddam Hussein) and there are good Husseins (the deceased King Hussein of Jordan—at least in his final years of life). So what if Obama attended services in the church of a pastor who said nasty things, one friend maintained. The friend insisted that he had been listening for a lifetime to his rabbi’s political opinions without agreeing with a single one of them. And on and on it went.
The result? Jews apparently voted for the Democratic candidate Barack Obama in greater numbers and percentages than they had for John Kerry, the Democratic candidate in 2004! About 78% of Jewish voters this time chose Obama as their man. I wonder what Professors Mearsheimer and Walt—authors of an assault on the so-called Jewish lobby behind the Bush administration that, in their view, had manipulated American foreign policy to the benefit of Israel and to the detriment of American interests—are making of the strong support of Jewish voters for Barack Hussein Obama.
As for us here at Midstream, we are permitted, thank God, to congratulate a newly elected president of the greatest country in the world. All governments do that, including the Israeli government. So I quote my dear father, z”l, who would have said to the president-elect in Yiddish spoken in the Galitsiyaner brogue, had he lived to meet Obama in person, “Mister President, es kimt akh a hartzikn mazltof; Got zul akh bentshn” (Mr. President, you deserve a hearty wish of congratulations and good luck; may God bless you).
Tragic postscript: Upon completing these words just before Thanksgiving, I heard the news about the awful attack by ten Islamist terrorists in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay), the great municipal financial center of India. In a well-planned act of terror, the heavily-armed suicidal terrorists occupied prominent luxury hotels in the city, taking hostages and slaughtering civilians indiscriminately everywhere along their route. They murdered more than 170 men, women, and children and injured more than 400 in what Indians called their “9/11.” Nine of the ten terrorists were ultimately killed by Indian sharpshooters; one of the terrorists was captured alive. This last one apparently confessed that the plotters had come from Pakistan and were protesting India’s policy in Kashmir.
For us Jews, if not for all men and women of good will in the world, there was another aspect of heartrending tragedy. The terrorists also seized one small building that contradicted their apparent interest in destroying major financial structures of Indian power. It was a Chabad House, a small Jewish Center of religious outreach to Jewish tourists and service to those in need, sponsored by the Chasidic Lubavitcher movement. Six Jews were tortured and murdered in that venue, including the young twenty-nine-year-old rabbi and his pregnant wife. The two-year-old child of this couple was saved by the Indian nanny who sneaked out successfully with the baby in her arms. “Why the Jews?” asked a CNN commentator, as if she were Rip Van Winkle fallen asleep in our world for the last half century and more. For us, the mantra we’ve frequently heard from Arab and Muslim apologists in the West that they are not anti Jews and Judaism, but merely anti-Israeli policy can be put to rest as the phony canard that it truly is. The atrocity in the Chabad House was nothing less than hatred against all Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish religion. Let the world notice once again.
A last-minute addition to the postscript, written in the last week of December and the beginning of January 2009: Israel is again at war. Upon the end of the six-month cease fire with Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza, resumed launching a torrent of Qassam rockets over southern Israeli towns and cities. Hamas came to be the sole power in Gaza by means of a violent, illegal coup against President Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, a war they won in 2007, two years after Israel withdrew completely from Gaza. Israel had had enough. In the last three years, about 6,000 rockets had landed on Israeli soil, dozens each day, terrorizing young and old running all day for cover, however few casualties resulted from these primitive missiles. But now, more powerful industrial rockets, acquired, undoubtedly, from Iran, smuggled through tunnels built from southern Gaza to the Egyptian border, entered the Hamas terrorist arsenal during the cease fire. These far more dangerous weapons with much longer range began to hit as far as Be’ersheva (Beer Sheba), 27 miles from the northern border of Gaza. What was next? Tel Aviv?
The government of Israel issued warnings to Hamas to cease and desist from shooting rockets into Israel. It made no impact whatsoever. Hamas simply refused to renew the cease fire and continued their terrorist policy of targeting civilians in Israel. Israel then proceeded to pinpoint air attacks on Hamas facilities in Gaza—ammunition dumps, qassam launchers, Hamas encampments, all facilities that housed their fighters, their terrorist leaders, and their planning facilities. Casualty figures rose. By the end of the week, some 400 or more Palestinians had been killed, three-quarters of them Hamas militants (a euphemism for terrorists), according to United Nations figures, and perhaps 100 civilians. The reason for the civilian deaths was clear enough. Hamas terrorists, like their brother terrorists of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, embed themselves in civilian houses and communities, using the civilians as covers and shields—I would say hostages—for their violent activities. It’s an old trick, callously exploiting their own people and hypocritically appealing to Western sensibilities and feelings of horror about civilian casualties. It is rarely mentioned that Israel drops leaflets over areas to be targeted, warning civilians to move to safety during an impending attack, endangering Israeli soldiers and strategy with these prior warnings for the sake of diminishing civilian casualties. In the Gaza engagement, the Israelis even called homes in Gaza by phone (how they got all these phone numbers is a mystery) in order to warn civilians directly and prod them to safety. After a week of bombing, Hamas continued launching rockets into Israel by the dozen. The Israeli army then moved in to attempt to finish the job of eliminating Hamas’s missile capability once and for all. Ground war again.
I am no expert on military affairs. I can only express my fears, my anguish, and my hopes. I fear that Israel’s experience with Hezbollah in 2006 will be duplicated. After all, how do you fight terrorists who are not an army, wear no uniforms, live among civilians, and preach the glory of martyrdom? It is not the Jewish concept of martyrdom al kiddush ha-Shem, of being an innocent victim of murderers who kill us because we are Jews; it is the Islamist notion of dying by killing Jews and other infidels in the process, not by being a victim but by victimizing. Such a guerrilla enemy lurking behind innocents, launching a bomb and disappearing or being a willing suicide bomber on a crowded school bus —how does an army, however powerful, fight by so-called Geneva rules against those who obey no rules and seek no permanent compromise peace with infidels they hate? These I fear; the inadvertent deaths of innocent Gaza children, of men and women who are not necessarily supporters of Hamas terror, I mourn and am anguished on their behalf. I blame their deaths on Hamas, not on Israel. I grieve on the death of every Israeli soldier who fights this just fight, as well as every civilian death in Gaza and in Israel.
I am resentful of the inevitable protests throughout the world by those who equate Israeli defense actions with Hamas violence. I don’t recall a single incident of mass protest in the Western capitals (certainly not in Arab and Muslim countries) against suicide bombing, head decapitation, missiles raining down on Israel from the scuds launched by Saddam Hussein to the Hezbollah missiles that reached Haifa and even Netania, or the Hamas rockets and mortar fire that hit Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Be’ersheva. I recall dozens, perhaps hundreds of U.N. resolutions against Israel. I don’t recall a single one against the suicide murderers and the rocket launchers. During the week of Israeli bombing of Hamas targets in response to the barrage of rockets, hundreds marched in New York to protest against Israel. When I left the Midstream office late that Monday, two days after the start of Israel’s response to Hamas’s resumption of rocket fire over Israel, I saw the marchers on 42nd Street with signs about Israel’s “holocaust” against the Gazans and heard their chants for Arab victory in Palestine. A young American protester was interviewed on TV that night. The young woman said, “Okay, the rockets are wrong, but the Israelis killing 400 children is terrible. They are Nazis.” My despair was compounded. I understood the young woman’s anguish, but her statistics were blatantly wrong, her sense of who was to blame misdirected, and her analogy odious.
This too is part of Jewish fate. We are not only victims of those who would eliminate the one sovereign Jewish state in the world, but we are also, as living, sentient, moral beings, defamed in the worst terms imaginable. Those who should be our defenders are ideologically misled.
And so I struggle to come finally to my hopes. I hope that the young woman in that crowd and all other progressive peaceniks will somehow realize the following: If Israel is to make a durable peace with moderate Palestinian leadership, it cannot happen so long as Hamas, a terrorist group that seeks Israel’s destruction, holds sway in Gaza and can sabotage peaceful intentions or even agreements elsewhere in Palestine. The ultimate elimination of Hamas’s power is a prerequisite for peace between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. To support Hamas in this current battle in Gaza is to be against the peace that the young woman protester in the streets of New York yearns for.
CHANGES AT MIDSTREAM; AND AN APPEAL IN TIME OF CRISIS
Because of severe cuts imposed upon Midstream’s budget as a consequence of the world-wide financial crisis that certainly includes America and Israel, our magazine is now a quarterly journal as of this issue. Our current subscribers who contracted for six bi-monthly issues per year will not be shortchanged. Even though we’ll now be producing four issues per annum, those subscribers will have their subscriptions extended. New subscribers will sign up for four issues annually at reduced rates that can be found on the subscription blank in this issue on page 23.
We are not happy about this development. Will our reputation suffer because of fewer issues per year? Will we retain our loyal readership? Will we grow or will the four become two, chas v’chalilah (God forbid)?
Even though Midstream began in 1955 as a quarterly journal, it soon blossomed into a monthly publication of substance and wide influence. Our very first issue, which included an essay by Eleanor Roosevelt on a visit she made to the relatively new State of Israel and a short story in English translation by the renowned Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, showed clear signs of our subsequent cultural and political impact as the American voice of Zionism. I always enjoy citing the fact that Midstream is mentioned in one of Philip Roth’s great novels. This is true kavod (honor) in American high culture.
In 2003, nine of our essays and poems were chosen for an anthology on the best Jewish writing of the year. It was published by a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons. No other journal was represented by as many pieces. We have striven to maintain these achievements even though in 2005 we had to shrink somewhat into a bi-monthly journal of six annual issues because of the financial constraints of that time.
In this past year of 2008, we produced an expanded gala issue honoring the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence. We included articles by Elie Wiesel, former Mayor of New York Ed Koch, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Itamar Rabinovich, and the current director of the budget in Israel Ram Belinkov. We continued the celebration through December with the text of a speech by the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, poetry by Marge Piercy, and articles by extraordinary writers of talent and intellectual acumen. We will strive to do the same in the quarterly format. That’s a promise.
Readers who look forward to our thematic issues on Yiddish, Ladino, and other Jewish Diaspora cultures or on Israeli writers or on American Jewish history or on Holocaust testimony and scholarship will not be disappointed in spite of reduced issues per year. We look to our writers to keep sending us relevant material that our readers look forward to, however reduced the available space when six issues have become four. May we look forward to future expansion, rather than continued tzimtzum (shrinkage).
The fear persists that Midstream’s continuing existence as the leading American Jewish Zionist journal is still in jeopardy. That is why we come prayerfully in this year of financial trauma with a fervent appeal for aid from our fans—our readers, our writers, our past supporters and subscribers—asking for help. To make an appeal at this time of dire financial crisis would seem to be an insolent endeavor on our part. Most people have many more things to worry about than the fate of a magazine. We can only hope that the tragedy of families losing their homes, breadwinners their jobs, retirees their savings, and other unbelievable consequences of recession and greed in high places will ease up and that the new president and his administration will work wonders, veritable nissim v’nifla’ot to ameliorate the horrible situation.
At this very writing, I cannot stop thinking of the frightful news on all front pages of newspapers and in lead stories on TV about the malevolent Ponzi scheme that has financially crushed thousands of innocent individuals, including a substantial segment of the Jewish community, affecting some of its educational institutions and charities. We can only pray for miracles to restore them to financial health and piece of mind. We also hope that our readers will forgive us for persisting in making our annual plea for support of Midstream, more urgent at this time of misfortune.
Once again, we expect to set up a special page to appear from time to time in our publication that will list those of our friends who are generous enough to support us with a tax-deductible contribution. All contributors will also receive formal letters of acknowledgment and thanks. Here are the designations of honor that we intend to list with gratitude:
Friend: $36 to $99
Supporter: $100 to $499
Associate: $500 to $999
Patron: $1,000 to $4,999
Benefactor: $5,000 and above
Please do not be terrified by the largest sums listed above. We will gladly accept any contribution, however small, with equal gratitude. Make checks payable to The Theodor Herzl Foundation / Midstream, and address your tax-deductible contributions to The Theodor Herzl Foundation / Midstream, 633 Third Avenue / 21st Floor, New York, NY 10017. Todah rabbah.•
About the author
Leo Haber, editor of Midstream, was educated at C.C.N.Y. (Phi Beta Kappa) and Columbia University, earning degrees in English language and Literature, and at the Herzliah Hebrew Teachers’ Institute in New York. His novel, The Red Heifer, was published in 2001 and reissued in paperback in 2005.