Bylines Andrew Silow-Carroll | Ottawa Jewish Bulletin

Rabbi leads a team of spiritual first responders in storm-tossed Texas

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: September 5, 2017

Rabbi Shira Stern of Marlboro, N.J., is a disaster spiritual care provider for the American Red Cross. (Courtesy of Stern)

(JTA) – It was a day before Hurricane Harvey was due to make landfall, and Rabbi Shira Stern knew she was headed for Texas.

As a director of Disaster Spiritual Care for the American Red Cross, she knew there would be people who would have other needs beyond shelter, beyond medical care, beyond a hot meal and a place to dry out. She met people just like them after floods devastated part of West Virginia in 2016, and when Superstorm Sandy pounded her own state, New Jersey, in 2012.

So after a circuitous two days of travel she found herself in Dallas, overseeing a team of chaplains in the shelters set up for families chased out of Houston by flooding that so far has claimed 46 lives and destroyed tens of thousands of homes and businesses. [Read more…]

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Op-Ed: President Trump just asked us to be fair to white supremacists

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: August 16, 2017

President Donald Trump speaking to the media at Trump Tower in New York City, Aug. 15, 2017. Looking on, from left, are Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council; Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin; Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao; and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

U.S. President Donald Trump speaking to the media at Trump Tower in New York City, Aug. 15, 2017. Looking on, from left, are Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council; Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin; Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao; and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

NEW YORK (JTA) – There was a moment in his “neo-Nazi, neo-Shmazi” news conference where you might have found yourself thinking, maybe U.S. President Donald Trump is right.

On the narrow question of who was responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, a prosecutor might note that punches were thrown by white supremacists and left-wing activists, neo-Nazis and members of the Antifa resistance.

“I think there’s blame on both sides,” is how Trump put it in his news conference Tuesday in New York.

It’s the right answer if this is the question: “Who threw punches in Charlottesville?” But it is the wrong answer to every other question raised by the awful events of the past three days. [Read more…]

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Analysis: Tel Aviv is the ‘home of Judaism.’ So is Boston, Sao Paulo, Marseille, Ottawa …

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: May 24, 2017

Ivanka Trump praying at the Western Wall, May 22, 2017. (Mendy Hechtman/Flash90)

(JTA) – U.S. President Donald Trump and his staff may have left Israel feeling pretty friendly to the Jews, but man, we don’t make it easy for them.

Flying with reporters from Saudi Arabia to Israel on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that they were “onto the second stop, Tel Aviv, home of Judaism.” Critics were not kind.

Jordan Schachtel of Conservative Review noted that because Tel Aviv does not have the religious significance of Jerusalem, Tillerson “managed to insult the people of Israel – and Jews worldwide.” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin accused the former ExxonMobil CEO of “bumbling his lines and committing gaffes a junior Foreign Service officer would never make.” And Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of American fumed that “Only those who are blind cannot point to Jerusalem as the centre of Judaism and Israel.” (I am anxiously waiting a comment from the Jewish Institute for the Blind.) [Read more…]

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Analysis – Spicer, Hitler and the Soup Nazi: Why can’t this White House get the Holocaust right?

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: April 13, 2017

Sean Spicer in an interview at the White House apologizing for comments he made suggesting that President Bashar Assad of Syria was worse than Hitler, April 11, 2017. (Olivier Douliery/Pool/Getty Images)

(JTA) – We interrupt this Passover to bring you two news bulletins:

Bashar Assad is worse than Hitler.

The Soup Nazi was almost a real Nazi.

Let’s start with the second revelation, since Sean Spicer’s Hitler gaffe about Hitler is probably better known. Entertainment Weekly reported that, according to a former writer-producer for the sitcom “Seinfeld,” the dictatorial chef known as the Soup Nazi in a 1995 episode was almost given a much darker backstory. [Read more…]

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Analysis: Trump, the Jews and the political weaponization of anti-Semitism

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: February 22, 2017

President Donald Trump delivering remarks after touring the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Feb. 21, 2017. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images)

U.S. President Donald Trump delivering remarks after touring the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Feb. 21, 2017. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images)

(JTA) – Was that so hard?

At some point in the past week, it looked like U.S. President Donald Trump was never going to use “anti-Semitism” in a sentence. It took a fourth series of hoax bomb threats at JCCs around the country and imprecations from Jewish groups across the ideological spectrum for the president to at last use the “A” word.

“Anti-Semitism is horrible and it’s going to stop, and it has to stop,” Trump said Tuesday morning. “The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and our Jewish community centres are horrible, are painful and they are a reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”

That it took so long for Trump to condemn anti-Semitism after twice being asked about it last week, and coming on the heels of a White House International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that somehow omitted any mention of the Jews, was “mind-boggling” to many groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which said so in a tweet. [Read more…]

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Analysis: Why Trump’s universalizing of the Holocaust matters to the Jews

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: January 30, 2017

(JTA) – Where’s Jared Kushner?

Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump have often defended his election campaign against charges of anti-Semitism by noting he has an Orthodox Jewish daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. Jews on the right are excited about Kushner’s role as a special adviser to the president, assuming he’ll be their advocate on Israel and other Jewish issues. Jews on the left hope Kushner, whose parents were longtime donors to the Democratic Party, will be a check on Trump’s most conservative impulses. [Read more…]

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Analysis: Obama was, for better or worse, the face of liberal Zionism

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: January 17, 2017

U.S. President Barack Obama delivering a speech at the Jerusalem Convention Center, March 21, 2013. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

(JTA) – During his campaign for U.S. president in 2008, I wrote a column suggesting that Barack Obama was struggling to connect with Jews because they weren’t sure that he supported Israel’s cause in his gut – that is, in his kishkes. I may have been the first to apply the term “Kishkes Factor” in relation to Obama’s politics and Israel.

Obama himself even heard a reference to the term, at least once. In an interview with the candidate that year, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg asked Obama about “the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don’t know you … then everything is suspect.” [Read more…]

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Analysis: Donald Trump can lay ‘Stargate’ to rest – assuming he wants to

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: July 7, 2016

Donald Trump's tweet using imagery traced to an anti-Semitic message board. (Twitter)

Donald Trump’s now-deleted tweet using imagery originating on an anti-Semitic message board. (Twitter)

Donald Trump waving after a news conference at the Trump Tower in New York, May 31, 2016. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

(JTA) – Mitt Romney’s 2012 U.S. presidential campaign never recovered after he was caught on video telling a group of millionaires that 47 per cent of Americans will always vote for Democrats because they don’t take “personal responsibility” for their lives and are “dependent upon government.”

The incident has become a case study not only in watching one’s words (and being nice to your waiters), but in spin control. Hammered by the media and the Democrats for sounding elitist and insulting half the country, Romney first blamed the listeners, saying they had misheard what he intended as innocuous demographic analysis. Later, as the transcripts of the video made clear that he said what everyone thought he said, Romney fell back on the classic dodge that his remarks had been taken “out of context.” [Read more…]

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Why not Al Franken? Some think the senator and former comic could be Hillary’s VP

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: June 30, 2016

U.S. Sen.Al Franken attending the 68th Annual Writers Guild Awards in New York City, Feb. 13, 2016. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images For The Writers Guild Of America)

(JTA) – Last week U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said that if Hillary Clinton asked him to be her running mate, he’d take the job. “If Hillary Clinton came to me and said, ‘Al, I really need you to be my vice-president, to run with me,’ I would say yes, but I’m very happy in the job that I have right now.”

Although Franken, 64, has spent seven years in the Senate and proven himself to be a conscientious lawmaker – championing decidedly unfunny issues like health insurance, mental health services in schools and net neutrality – some still find it hard to take the former comedian and Saturday Night Live writer seriously as a political figure. He was, after all, the author of an article in Playboy in 2000 about his visit to a (fictional) institute offering virtual pornography, and wrote an infamous Saturday Night Live sketch in which a suave Roman played by Burt Reynolds tries to pick up women at the local vomitorium. [Read more…]

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‘The Last Laugh,’ controversial new documentary about humour and the Holocaust

By Andrew Silow-Carroll: April 26, 2016

Mel Brooks doing a Hitler bit in an interview for “The Last Laugh,” director Ferne Pearlstein’s new documentary about Holocaust humour. (Tangerine Entertainment)

NEW YORK (JTA) – In “The Last Laugh,” a new documentary about humour and the Holocaust (you read that right), the comedian Judy Gold tells this joke: If the Nazis forced her to stand naked on a line with other women, would she hold her stomach in?

How you, or anybody, feels about a joke like that is the point of the documentary, which includes interviews with a slew of mostly Jewish comedians and a cinema verité portrait of an elderly Los Angeles-area survivor, Renee Firestone, who seems to have lived through the Holocaust with her sense of humour largely intact. [Read more…]

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