Jeffrey Goldberg

He's lost Gaddafi's vote.

I suppose it only makes sense for John Kerry to attack John McCain (unfairly, if you bother to understand the context) for suggesting that it was not terribly important when American troops exit Iraq, and I suppose it only makes sense that Kerry would make his attack so personal by suggesting that McCain is "confused" about basic facts of Middle Eastern history. These are low blows, of course, but understandable, given the way McCain turned on Kerry during the Swift Boat attacks of 2004. Oh, wait.

Larry Kaplan, an (evidently) close reader, as well as a partisan of venison, writes:

Regarding the kashrut of giraffe, remember that the method of slaughter is as critical as whether or not the beast has a cleft foot. So, in order for a giraffe to be kosher, it must be slaughtered under rabbinical supervision in a humane manner, which is essentially a quick slash with a sharp knife to the carotid artery. Therefore, a giraffe killed by a big game hunter with a high powered rifle is not kosher. Now, while this is largely irrelevant concerning giraffes, it IS germane to the kosher-ness of venison. Deer, like cows and giraffes, have cleft feet; but again, a deer shot by a hunter is not kosher. However, your observant venison lovers (and it is a tasty meat) can get farm raised and kosher-slaughtered venison here in the US at a select few high end kosher butchers in places like NY, Chicago and LA. Thought you'd wanna know.

Jack Shafer's report on the Bilderbergs contains many interesting pieces of information, but the most interesting to me is that this putatively powerful, highly-secretive group met in a Marriott in Chantilly, Va. Doesn't this mean rather dispositively that the Bilderbergs are not, in fact, powerful? A Marriott? Do you think that Henry Kissinger is collecting Marriott Reward Points for his stay? When the Elders of Zion meet, it's Four Seasons or nothing. When we're not at the King David, of course.

I don't know how this escaped me, but a rabbi named Shlomo Mahfoud (which sounds like a made-up name, in the "Zohan" sense) has declared that giraffe meat is kosher. This must come as a huge relief to the vast Jewish population of the Serengeti. Questions like this one have actually arisen in my life. On a couple of occasions I've been to a restaurant in Nairobi called Carnivore, which serves all sorts of inedible animals, including crocodile, and I've managed to avoid eating some particularly gamy-looking game by pleading Jewishness in the first-degree. Which reminds me: I was once talking to a game scout in Tanzania who had several times eaten elephant trunk. After I got over my initial revulsion, I asked him what it tasted like. "Wildebeest," he said.

"I just wish they didn't have that oil." Robert F. Kennedy, writing about the Arabs in 1948.

I'm back from Jordan (more on that later) and I opened up my e-mail to find this note:

Dear Mr. Goldberg, We read your article about Obama and Hamas. Our question is: Do you feel Obama is a friend of Hamas. As a Jew, are you comfortable with his responses and feel he will be a friend to Israel? Your answer will be responsible for 5 Chicago votes.

They never told me at Blog School that I would have such awesome responsibilities foisted upon me. But, let me give it a stab here: No, Obama is not a friend of Hamas. As a Jew, I'm comfortable with his responses. Yes, I feel he will be a friend to Israel. Actually, and I'm going to blog about this later, after I recover from jet-lag, which usually takes me about eight or nine weeks, I think Obama's performance at AIPAC was designed specifically to placate those Jews who believe that any criticism at all of Israel is illegitimate. I wish that Obama's speech had about ten percent more nuance in it. Also, and I know it's none of my business, but my new friends from Chicago should consider voting on a more expansive range of issues than simply Hamas.

ZARQA, JORDAN Though it's my official doctrine to buy magazines at newstands, rather than read them for free on-line, I just read Todd's new piece on Clinton because, weirdly, I can't find a copy of Vanity Fair anywhere in Zarqa. What's wrong with these Zarqawis, anyway? Though I have to say my Internet connection isn't bad. I just watched John McCain's speech to AIPAC on my laptop, and it came through without bumps and stops. I could have waited, of course, to see McCain's speech, but I wanted to watch it in Zarqa just so I could say I watched it in Zarqa. In any case, let me raise a question with Todd, per Jay Carson, Bill Clinton's spokesman, whose long memo attacks Todd floridly, though without the very bad words President Clinton apparently used himself. Carson argues that Todd ignored Clinton's notable accomplishments, instead focusing his story on some of Clinton's dubious friends, including one who allegedly collects "genitalia-shaped soaps," which is not something I will try to explain to my friends in Zarqa, or even in the more cosmopolitan Amman. In his memo, Carson asks "Who didn't VF call?," and answers, in part: "The 200,000,000 people in 100 countries whose lives will be impacted by commitments made by Clinton Global Initiative members." Todd, we're both reporters. In our depressing, post-shoe-leather age, we still adhere to the idea that interviews matter, that we can make our stories better by talking to actual people. So what happened? Phone out of service? No cell coverage? Why didn't you call those two hundred million people? Or at least one hundred million of those two hundred million people? I worked at Conde Nast not so long ago, and I happen to know that the company owns thousands of telephones, and has signed up for a very advantageous long-distance calling plan. So what's going on? Why did you limit yourself to calling dozens of ex-Clinton aides, as well as people with direct knowledge of the President's business and personal life? Carson's memo is not limited to the nonsense like the nonsense outlined above. Perhaps the silliest bit of his memo concerns what Carson calls Vanity Fair's "penchant for libel, which has led to numerous lawsuits." Magazines do commit libel on occasion, of course, and I don't believe, like some in journalism, that suing for libel is immoral, but to suggest that a publication is unethical because it is frequently sued for libel is akin to suggesting that a person is pro-crime because he has been frequently mugged. I'd have to say, from my distant perch, that the arguments mustered against Todd are comprehensively unconvincing, though, Todd, really, it couldn't hurt to pick up the phone a million or two more times.

Two weeks ago, I spoke with Barack Obama about the Middle East, Zionism, and his favorite Jewish writers. Since my blog is both fair and balanced, I had a lengthy conversation with Senator John McCain earlier this week about many of the same subjects. The two candidates, who are scheduled to address the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, D.C. early next week, have well-developed thoughts on the Middle East, and their differences are stark. Obama sees the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as one of America's central challenges in the Middle East; McCain names Islamic extremism as the most formidable challenge. Obama sees Jewish settlements as "not helpful" to peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians; McCain does not offer a critique of the settlements, instead identifying Hamas' rocket attacks on the Israeli town of Sderot as the most pressing problem. And both men take very different positions on the issue of Philip Roth. In our conversation, McCain took a vociferously hard line on Iran (and a similarly hard line on Senator Obama's understanding of the challenge posed by Iran). He accused Iran of not only seeking the destruction of Israel, but of sponsoring terrorist groups - Hamas and Hezbollah - that are bent on the destruction of the United States. And he said that the defense of Israel is a central tenet of American foreign policy. When I asked him why he is so concerned about Iranian threats against Israel, he said - in a statement that will surely placate Jewish voters who are particularly concerned about existential threats facing Israel - "The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust." Here is an edited transcript of my talk with McCain: Jeffrey Goldberg: Is the Zionist cause just, and has it succeeded? John McCain: I think so. I'm a student of history and anybody who is familiar with the history of the Jewish people and with the Zionist idea can't help but admire those who established the Jewish homeland. I think it's remarkable that Zionism has been in the middle of wars and great trials and it has held fast to the ideals of democracy and social justice and human rights. I think that the State of Israel remains under significant threat from terrorist organizations as well as the continued advocacy of the Iranians to wipe Israel off the map. JG: Do you think the Palestinian cause is just? JM: In respect to people like Mahmoud Abbas, who want to have a peaceful settlement with the government of Israel, to settle their differences in a peaceful and amicable fashion. If you are talking about Hamas or Hezbollah, which are dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel, then no. It depends on who you're talking about. JG: Senator Obama told me that the Arab-Israeli dispute is a "constant sore" that infects our foreign policy. Do you think this is true, and do you think that the Arab-Israeli dispute is central to our challenges in the Middle East? JM: Well, I certainly would not describe it the way Senator Obama did - JG: He wasn't referring to Israel as an "open sore," he was referring to the conflict. JM: I don't think the conflict is a sore. I think it's a national security challenge. I think it's important to achieve peace in the Middle East on a broad variety of fronts and I think that if the Israeli-Palestinian issue were decided tomorrow, we would still face the enormous threat of radical Islamic extremism. I think it's very vital, don't get me wrong. That's why I've spent so much time there. The first time I visited Israel was thirty years ago, with Scoop Jackson and other senators, when I was in the Navy. I visited Yad Vashem (Israel's Holocaust memorial) with Joe Lieberman the last time I was in Israel. So my absolute commitment is to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But the dangers that we face in the Middle East are incredibly severe, in the form of radical Islamic extremists. JG: Do you think that Israel is better off today than it was eight years ago?

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Dunkin' Donuts' spokeswoman Rachael Ray got herself in trouble with certain segments of the blogging community for wearing what appears to be a keffiyeh in an ad for iced coffee. With the help of resident Atlantic design genius Jason Treat, I propose the following costume change to help Ray avoid any future Middle East-related wardrobe malfunctions: Of course, this will lead to a boycott of Dunkin' Donuts across large sections of the Muslim world, but, on the other hand, Jews eat a lot of doughnuts.

Interesting news from Bahrain.

From Lyndon Johnson:

'In a taped conversation from June 25, 1967, about three weeks after Israel defeated three Arab armies, Johnson relates a conversation with Soviet Premier Alexey Kosygin. "He couldn't understand why we'd want to support the Jews — 3 million people — when there are 100 million Arabs," the president said. "I told him that numbers do not determine what was right. We tried to do what was right regardless of the numbers."

Seth Gitell takes us back to Israel's 30th anniversary party, which featured Barbra Streisand, Golda Meir and the Fonz. I remember watching this primetime special, which was co-written by the patriarch of one of my favorite Hollywood families, Buz Kohan, father of Jenji "Weeds" Kohan and David Kohan, who gave us "Will and Grace," which is not, I learned in Pakistan, a favored show of at least some Islamic fundamentalists, but that's another story.

It turns out that, in addition to a shared aversion to boiled frog stories, Jim and I are both unhappy with the the term "Homeland Security," which for Jim has the ring of a "Teutonic-in-the-bad-sense" Orwellianism. For me, the term has more of the Russian in it than the German, but I see his point. In any case, I attach myself to Jim's strongly-held feeling that the department should change its name. That, or make it's official anthem "The Song of the Volga Boatmen."

A highlight of my currently non-thriving screenwriting career was working on a script for the delightful and neurotic Sydney Pollack, who died yesterday at the age of 73. My writing partner, Richard Taylor, and I had pitched Sydney a story about high-level corruption in Washington, which was just chum for Sydney, who was fascinated by Washington, and therefore fascinated by sleaze, greed and moral failure (see: Absence of Malice, Michael Clayton, etc.) We wrote a first draft, and then Sydney and his executives brought us out to L.A. to review our progress. It turned out that we hadn’t made much progress. We met at the offices of Mirage Enterprises, the company he ran with the director Anthony Minghella, who, strangely and horribly, died just two months ago. The office, in Beverly Hills, wasn’t over-adorned. I’ll always remember the photograph, hanging in the bathroom, of a very young Sydney taking instruction from a very round Alfred Hitchcock, and, of course, it’s not easy to forget the Oscars placed indifferently on Sydney’s shelves. Sydney ordered salads from California Pizza Kitchen (you’d think he could do better, but there you are) and then he took us to school. The script at that point was 132 pages long, and, weirdly, there was something wrong on every page. We emerged from the conference room five hours later, completely wrung out. For a while inside, we had fought back: Sydney: “Fellas, I just don’t get this. How could she be flirting with a guy you told us three pages ago was dead?” Me: “Well you see, Sydney, he wasn’t really actually dead, the death was just a metaphor--” Sydney: “Yeah, okay, now on page four….” After a while, we stopped fighting, because he exhausted us – the Sydney Pollack you see on screen (Ross has an excellent, and illustrative, clip) was the Sydney Pollack we saw in his office. And also because he was right. It wasn’t all misery, of course. He was a wonderful storyteller, and also a world-class obsessive. He took a fifteen-minute break to explain how he packs for overseas trips. I started writing down the monologue, it was so captivating: “You see, fellas, what I do is I check the weather averages for each place I’m heading, and that way I can know exactly what sock I’m going to need for each destination, so I don’t pack any more socks than necessary, just the socks of appropriate weight for the prevailing weather conditions…” And so on. The business with the socks struck me as unnecessary, by the way, because he flew his own plane and could bring three suitcases of socks, but never mind. We saw him several times after that, and each time the movie got better. Once, early in the process, I visited him on the set of The Interpreter, which was being produced by a friend of mine, Kevin Misher, and we talked a bit about screenwriting. The most exciting part of that visit was my encounter with Nicole Kidman (she gave me a piece of gum – Orbit Sugarfree Bubblemint, which is really the world’s best gum, and not because Nicole Kidman gave me a piece), but the next most exciting was watching Sydney work. His energy and enthusiasm were astonishing. Things happen in Hollywood and Sydney didn’t get the chance to make our movie. Rich and I are cautiously pessimistic about its chances. We hope, of course, that it gets made. If it does, and if it’s any good, it will be because Sydney Pollack laid his hands on it.

Those of us who have a hard time believing that even the most irrational Iranian leader would actually sacrifice Persian civilization on the altar of anti-Zionism ought to pay attention to this story, about the tendency among Islamists toward national suicide. And while I'm at it, Bradley Burston, one of my favorite columnists, has a real barn-burner up at Ha'aretz, a warning to the Palestinians about their self-destructive tendencies. I've been writing recently about the existential threat that Israel will face if a Palestinian state isn't created. What I neglect to note is that the Palestinians already live in a state of national non-existence.

Jodi Kantor's alternately amusing and disturbing visit to Boca Raton and environs, in which she found many elderly Jews willing to say ill-informed things about Barack Obama, is a reminder that the rupture in black-Jewish relations is still very real (and that Crown Heights story didn't help, either). I would have been happier had some of these alte kockers expressed some substantive criticism of Obama. But it's important to remember that, despite all of these problems of perception, and of actual racism, Jews are still far more likely than other whites to vote for a black candidate for President. I wouldn't be surprised if Obama ends up with 70 or 75 percent of the Jewish vote. The Appalachian Jewish vote might be problematic -- those Kentucky Jews are hardheaded, all five of them -- but overall, I imagine that, at the very least, he'll do better than Carter did in 1980.

Max Boot writes, "Sort of like the Israelis and Palestinians, Jeff Goldberg and I seem to be talking past one another." I wonder which one I'm supposed to be? In any case, Max went on to write, "I argued on CONTENTIONS that the reason Israelis aren't dismantling the settlements (and that President Bush isn't pressing them to do so) has nothing to do with the views of American Jewish groups and everything to do with the dismal record of recent Israeli concessions in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. In both cases (as well as at the Camp David negotiations in 2000) Israelis thought that territorial concessions would lead to peace. Instead they led to the empowerment of terrorists. It's an obvious point, and one I'm sure he's familiar with, but one that Jeff never mentioned in his article." Then he states that I objected "only to one part of my critique," the one concerning the vile Walt and the vile Mearsheimer. The reason I did so, Max, is I felt that you were accusing me of something atrocious, so I thought I ought to knock it down. Also, I'm allergic to long posts. But if you want to discuss the substance of the dispute, I'm happy to. Maybe the great Rosner can referee. Two quick points: Like many people on the right, Max focuses mainly on the problems Israel would face by leaving the West Bank, but he doesn't address the problems Israel brings on itself by staying, and I don't mean merely what he might think of as the goo-goo moral issues concerning the long-term effects of occupation on the society that is doing the occupying. I'm talking about the demographic threat to Israel's Jewish and democratic nature. The second point concerns Walt and Mearsheimer: One of their many sins, perhaps one of their bigger sins, was to make impossible an open conversation in the Jewish community about the impact of pro-Israel lobbying. By accusing American Jews of acting against the best interests of their country, they not only made themselves worthy heirs to Father Coughlin and a long list of antique Jew-baiters, they sent us into a defensive crouch. It is actually okay to talk about Aipac's priorities, and even its power, despite the odious specter of Waltsheimer. Discussion of Aipac's power doesn't bother me, because I believe that its power derives mainly from the fact that most Americans, and most members of Congress, actually like Israel and support Israel. (Unlike Waltsheimer, I've actually interviewed members of Congress on this subject.) It's the first rule of lobbying: Lobbying can only be successful over the long-term if the cause in question is one Congress is predisposed to support anyway. But on Max's substantive points, concerning the best course of action Israel could take to protect itself from external threats, and from demographic challenges to its Jewish nature, I'm ready to rumble. Actually, I'm not entirely ready, because I'm leaving for the Middle East soon, but I'll rumble anyway.

Maybe I'm not a jihadist, after all.

The democratic social service organization Hezbollah trashes a television station in Beirut.