In 2005 there was much sound a fury about a series of Danish Cartoons portraying the prophet Mohammed. The bottom line was that several Danish cartoonists drew cartoons including the prophet as part of a newspaper's publicity stunt. Two of the cartoons were making fun of the newspaper's publicity stunt itself. Two were, arguably, based on racial stereotypes. At least one specifically addressed Western stereotypes of Muslims. In other words, the cartoons were a mixed bag of attitudes towards Islam and the West's attitudes towards Islam.

The overwhelming reaction in the Muslim world was of outrage, often with no real knowledge of the actual cartoons.

This controversy has come back. One of the cartoonists, Kurt Westergaard, was targeted for death by Muslim terrorists. This plot was stopped by the Danish police. In response to the terrorist threat 11 Danish newspapers reprinted Kurt Westergaard's original cartoon...further pissing off Muslim nations.

Again...much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Back in 2004 I published this piece at culturekitchen as an elections post-mortem and a response to pieces written by Steve and Chris Bowers.

I have had people research my work for either papers or dissertations and so ... if there ever was an "it" blog post for my online political activism, this has to be the post. This post informs all my political activity and the issue that keep me up at night.

And I have to say that neither Steve nor I could have written had we were not only black but from socio-economically blended families with some rich, some in the middle, others working and some just poor. This is what makes us unique in the political blogosphere.

So without further ado, Secular Blue America.

November 11, 2004
Secular Blue America
by Liza Sabater

I got to Steve Gilliard's News Blog : They voted for this mess via another awesome post, written by Chris Bowers, at MyDD :: Yes, These Are Conservatives.

Gilliard's is one long-winded rant that starts out hitting liberals good but ends up really tearing appart the post-election appeasement façade of the extremists ruling the Republican party. I wish he had spent more time flogging the "Liberals". Here's why :

“… but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
– U.S. Constitution, Article VI

Poll after poll suggests that Mitt Romney is up against a huge challenge – about one-third of all Americans say they won’t vote for a Mormon. Some people compare this to the trouble overcome in 1960 by John Kennedy, when people weren’t about to vote for a Catholic. Indeed, it seems that we’ve merely redrawn the line, rather than truly begun to erase religious bigotry, or any other brand of hate, from our society.

But there is another facet to the current polls that is not receiving widespread attention. Since Romney is only running for the Republican nomination, most people are focusing on whether Republicans will vote for him. But all the polls show there is very little difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to voting for Mormons.

Fellow Culture Kitchen writer, Leo Igwe, from Nigeria, recently wrote about a murder in Nigeria where a mob tore a teacher apart because she was perceived as "defaming the Koran." He uses this incident to discuss the hypocrisy of religious fundamentalism where pieces of paper are considered sacred, but human life expendable.

Today Salon.com has another story of Fanatics Gone Wild, this time in Iraq. It seems that the traditional practice of honor killings is alive and well in post-Saddam Iraq.

April 20th is Hitler’s Birthday. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler wanted to give Hitler a particularly nice birthday present. He decided that in honor of Hitler’s birthday he would eliminate the entire Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw, which had been causing trouble in the early months of 1943.

Instead, the Jews of Warsaw gave Hitler a present that he certainly didn’t want: months of armed rebellion that DEFEATED the German army repeatedly and wasn’t completely crushed until October 1943, though major combat operations, to borrow a phrase, were completed around May. Including the periods of more sporadic fighting, this resistance lasted far longer than the German take over of Poland as a whole, which took scarcely one month. It is pointed out in Melvin Konner’s book Unsettled that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, largely fought by Jews but with some Polish uprisings occurring at the same time and inspired by the Jewish uprising, also lasted longer than the time it took Germany to defeat France, though again you have to include the period of more sporadic fighting as well as the main combat.

The uprising was partly inspired by the Socialist Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair (coincidentally, my mother briefly belonged to this organization in her youth). Insurgency started in January, 1943. By the end of January the Ghetto was actually controlled by two armed Jewish organizations, one led by Mordechai Anielewicz, of Hashomer Hatzair, and Zivia Lubetkin (who survived the uprising) and the other led by Dawid Mordechaj Apfelbaum, a former officer in the Polish army. As Passover began on April 19th, Himmler’s birthday present to Hitler also began, with thousands of German, Polish and Ukrainian forces attacking the Ghetto. They moved in at 4 a.m. They moved throughout the Ghetto and believed they had occupied it within 4 hours. Then, at the intersection of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets, the insurgents struck with a single captured machine gun, ample small arms fire, and many Molotov cocktails. The Germans were completely routed by the Jewish insurgents by 2 P.M., providing Hitler with a major embarrassment for his birthday.

In honor of the suppression of an art exhibition right here in New York where a crucified Jesus made of chocolate was found to be offensive, I present the lyrics to Tom Waits' song, Chocolate Jesus:

Dont go to church on sunday
Dont get on my knees to pray
Dont memorize the books of the bible
I got my own special way
Bit I know jesus loves me
Maybe just a little bit more

I fall on my knees every sunday
At zerelda lees candy store

Well its got to be a chocolate jesus
Make me feel good inside
Got to be a chocolate jesus
Keep me satisfied

Well I dont want no anna zabba
Dont want no almond joy

There has really been a recent dovetailing of Israel related issues. From a Bulgarian friend quizing me on Israel to a discussion among NYC bloggers (offline and private, so none of your business) about Israel/Palestine, to some rather disturbingly anti-Israel diaries on Daily Kos with some outright anti-Semitic overtones. (Note: This statement in NO WAY implies an anti-Semitic bias of dKos in general. The opinions were those of particular individuals, not the community as a whole). And, of course, my recent writing about Jewish issues, including what seemed to be a not so well received piece on the depth and persistence of anti-Semitism historically.

In the context of all of this, I find an editorial that gets to the crux of one key issue in Israeli politics: the balancing of equality for Israeli Arabs with security of Israel as a whole. In an ideal world these two things would not need balancing. But the Middle East is not and never has been an ideal world even if you look back thousands of years.

This is from Abraham Foxman and Ken Jacobson, both of the Anti-Defamation League, and originally appeared in The Jerusalem Post on March 5, 2007:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

At a time when I was simultaneously becoming more agnostic/atheist and more Jewish (perhaps in the tradition of Isaac Deutcher who recognized a place within Judaism for non-believing Jews), I quite naturally posed the age old question of just what it means to be a Jew. Parts of my quest to answer this question for myself have become diaries on various blogs. Genetic, cultural, tribal, religious, nationalistic and historical definitions of Judaism all combine into a mish mash that must be confusing to non-Jews but that I have come to see as a very key aspect to Jewish identity. I have come to see this identity crisis as a core part of Judaism that goes back as far as we can trace.

That’s how I think. Immerse in the complexity and maybe even add to that complexity with some paradoxes: atheists can be perfectly good Jews, identity crisis can be a defining feature of identity, etc.

My wife thinks differently than I. And her response to the question of Jewish identity was characteristically terse and to the point:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

I have shared with this community my ongoing and very personal search for my Jewish heritage and identity more than once, most recently, lovingly and visually in a diary based on a talk I gave at a Jewish Genealogical conference.

What I have not shared as much is the academic backdrop to this personal search. I am inspired to share this academic backdrop with you as I reread one of the books that is key to this backdrop: Melvin Konner’s 2003 book Unsettled. This book is billed as an “anthropology of the Jews” and covers the entire panorama of Jewish existence at least to some degree. It is primarily this book I want to share with you.

But first I want to also mention a few other books that complement Unsettled as what I would consider “must read” books for an understanding of Jews as a people. Most particularly I consider Israel Finkelstein’s iconoclastic book The Bible Unearthed a must read. It is considered one of the more radical interpretations of the archaeological evidence, but it by and large rings true to me particularly in light of the far less radical work The Canaanites, by Jonathan N. Tubb, which I read at about the same time as The Bible Unearthed. I found the evidence presented in each work to dovetail very nicely and reading The Canaanites gave me a better appreciation for The Bible Unearthed. Two supposedly counter-views to Finkelstein’s work were written by William G. Dever, Who Were and What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Oddly, to me Dever comes off far more in agreement with Finkelstein than at odds with him and it seems to me that Dever obsesses over differences with Finkelstein in details…so much so that he felt the need to write TWO books more or less directly addressing Finkelstein’s work. But reading Dever’s view as a partial counterpoint to Finkelstein’s book is well worthwhile. Together, these four books, perhaps with the additional Finkelstein book David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, are to me key books for understanding the origins of Israel and the Jews and I cannot stress enough how important this is to an understanding of being Jewish. Jews are nothing if not obsessed with the thousands of years of tradition that they are a part of and reading these archaeological works gives you a very good sense of what that tradition really is. Judaism was NOT at its start a monotheistic religion, for example. But it WAS a religion that shunned the eating of pork.

John Lavelle did not die in vain. A few hours before his death, while at Wednesday’s Council candidate Manny Inamorato's Beekman Pub fundraiser, I learned Lavelle donated his organs with one of his kidneys saving the recipient’s life.

Unless prohibited by religious belief or medical condition, it’s a no brainer to donate organs postmortem. The former Staten Island political boss and legislator positively impacted people, even in death. We all can do likewise by joining organ donor lists.

My favorite organ donor story is that of JJ Greenberg, the son of the former US Holocaust Memorial chair. He died after being hit by a car while bicycling in Israel. His organs saved six people including a Palestinian in need of a liver.