**We apologize for the shakiness of this video, especially since we had been doing so much better lately. This time, we unfortunately misplaced the tripod, so we had to rely on my hand. That being said, I think we did a pretty good job.**

(blog post written for Jewlicious.com).

He’s not quite Kim Kardashian, her sister Khloe, or even John Edwards – but he’s pretty damn sexy.

You know, those sagging man-boobs, that voluptuous beer gut (wait, Muslims can’t drink?) and that carpet of thickly matted chest hair – what more could a secretary desire on her first day of work?

“Do I turn off the light or do you?” the man says in a video, aired on Israeli television earlier this week. ”What is the procedure?”

Rafiq Husseini, a now former top aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas slides completely naked slide into bed, calling an unseen woman to join him, in what was allegedly an effort to trade his political influence for sex  This morning, however, Abbas dismissed Husseini from office and has formed a special committee to investigate allegations of corruption in his administration, West Bank-based Ma’an News Agency reported earlier today.

Along with a full-fledged video crew, former Palestinian intelligence official Fahmi Shabaneh had planted hidden cameras in the apartment, after being tipped off by the woman in question. Through a stream of text messages and meetings, Husseini had allegedly informed the potential secretary that if she wanted to be hired, “she needed to meet him in the bedroom for a little manual labor first,” according to FOX News. Shouldn’t politicians be smart enough by now to understand that if they are stupid (and/or horny) enough to engage in a sex scandal, there’s always bound to be irrevocable evidence?

After the news became public in Israel  through reports by The Jerusalem Post and Channel 10’s Tzvi Yehezkeli, even the editor-in-chief of Ma’an News Agency, Nasser Laham, wrote an editorial urging Husseini to step down, calling Husseini’s indecency an “embarrassment” to the Palestinian people – though, Laham does go on to call for Shabaneh’s arrest and makes sure to highlight all of Israel’s own financial and sexual scandals. In fact, the Palestinian Authority actually has a warrant out for Shabaneh’s arrest for his so-called “collaboration with Israel,” The Jerusalem Post reported.

And just when we thought Israel might be in the clear for once, relatives of Husseini and top aides to Abbas are naturally calling the tapes an “Israeli conspiracy”  blaming the Israeli government, Mossad and Shin Bet for the incident.

I’m sorry, but if a Palestinian politician can’t keep his pants on, it’s absolutely absurd to blame the Israeli government. Did Israel instruct this man to peel off his clothes, slide sexily under the covers and beckon an innocent woman to his bedside? I don’t think so. Likewise, did a team of Republicans conspire to film John Edwards’ extramarital tryst? I don’t think so.

I hope that for once, the media will give Israel a break and not assign blame where blame is so obviously not due. Blame belongs in one place in this scenario, and that place is below Husseini’s forestial belt-line.

_ _

Warning, the video below is quite explicit and disturbing to the eyes, in more ways than one.

Sharon Udasin is a staff writer at The Jewish Week. Follow her on Twitter or e-mail her at sharon@sharonudasin.com.

Frozen Out Of Olympics

Last-minute Israeli ruling keeping figure skater Tamar Katz out of the Vancouver Olympics.

by Sharon Udasin

She could already see herself on the ice in Vancouver.

When New York-based, Israeli-raised ice skater Tamar Katz arrived in Israel last week for a 24-hour, whirlwind visit, Israeli Olympic Committee officials gave her the Olympic outfit and bag she would carry with her to British Columbia to represent Israel in the Winter Games.

But later that day, like a toe loop gone bad, those same officials yanked Katz’s Olympic dream away from her, ruling that she would not be going to Vancouver.

“It was the worst trip to Israel,” she told The Jewish Week Monday.

Katz, 20, who was born in Dallas and trains in upstate Monsey, moved with her family as a child to Metullah, the home of Israel’s only ice skating rink. She had qualified for the 2010 Olympics according to International Skating Union standards.

But Israeli Olympic officials required that she finish in the top 14 at the European Figure Skating Championships last month, where, weak from a virus, she placed 21st.

Katz unsuccessfully called each member individually to plead her case.
“Some of them were willing to listen to what I had to say, but the most important people I had to appeal to were not even willing to listen to anything I said. Some of them even hung up the phone on me,” Katz said.  Continue reading…

The Health Burden Of The Survivors

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

For Jews who escaped Europe during the Holocaust and settled in Israel, the Jewish state really was a kind of Promised Land. Yet from a health perspective, the young
country couldn’t immunize them from the physical and mental burdens they carried with them.

In fact, Europeans who immigrated to Israel after the Holocaust were 2.4 times more likely to develop cancer than those who arrived before the war, according to a recent study published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers at the University of Haifa’s School of Public Health compiled a database of 315,544 Israeli Jews of European heritage born between 1920 and 1945. Lital Keinan-Boker, one of the authors of the study, explained that the data came from the Population Registry as well as the National Cancer Registry. Of the more than 300,000 immigrants studied, 57,496 were born in Europe and immigrated to Israel before or during World War II and did not endure the Holocaust; the remaining 258,048 moved to Israel after the war and had been caught up in the Shoah.

The scientists theorize that the biggest risk factors for these post-war immigrants were prolonged periods of both famine and severe mental stress at an early age. But funding is not yet available to test these hypotheses, wrote Keinan-Boker, who also works for the Israel Center of Disease Control.

“We cannot be sure that all of [the immigrants] were in the camps; some may have been hiding away, some in the resistance movements and some — in the USSR — running away from Poland eastwards,” she said in an e-mail interview with The Jewish Week. “The point is that our information is based on existing databases, not on individual data, and this is why we refrained from using the term ‘Holocaust survivors’; we could not be positive that all of the ‘exposed’ were indeed Holocaust survivors.”  Continue reading…

(blog post also written for Jewlicious.com).

For David Saranga, Twitter and Facebook remain the best weapons in an ongoing battle to maintain a positive image of Israel and make the Jewish State easily accessible and approachable to everyone.

Saranga, the former consul for Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, brought this mission to full speed just over a year ago, when he held live Twitter debates on behalf of the Israeli government during the Gaza war, opened Israel’s YouTube channel and revamped Isrealli.org, the State of Israel’s official blog. His latest task, now serving as a faculty member of the Asper Institute at IDC-Herzliya’s Sammy Ofer School of Communications, is to launch this year’s 10th Annual Herzliya Conference on social networks for the first time and reach out to a broader, ideally younger audience.

“If we want to approach young people as well we have to bring it to the language that they use,” Saranga said.

In the past decade, the Herzliya Conference has become an increasingly vital stage for Israel’s leaders to gather and discuss government policies and national security issues.  This year’s conference begins tomorrow (Jan. 31) and ends on Feb. 3, hosting a wide range of leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Foreign Minister and MK Tzipi Livni, Deputy Foreign Minister and MK Daniel Ayalon and World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder. One of the newest speakers to confirm attendance is Dr. Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, who will join Tuesday evening’s panel: “Prospects of Peace: The Israeli-Palestinian Track.”

In addition to streaming the various panels in real-time throughout the week, Saranga and his team will also be editing and uploading shorter, more user-friendly versions of each panel, which will remain available online after the fact. Conference enthusiasts can meanwhile receive play-by-play updates about the various speakers, panels and issues addressed via Twitter and Facebook.

“People can see the essence of the conference,” added Saranga, who said he’ll be working with a team of 10 people, predominantly students, to accomplish this mission. He has also been working closely with Dr. Noam Lemelstrich-Latar, director of the Asper Institute and dean of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications.

Saranga’s hope is that viewers and readers all over the world will repost and “ReTweet” conference updates to their friends, giving Israel a bigger voice all over the world, and a continued chance to make a positive impact.

“One of the goals of the project is to enlist organizations and private bodies in Israel and abroad, for whom Israel is both relevant and important,” Saranga said. “This is one of the first projects ever undertaken, whose purpose is to enhance the message emerging from the Herzliya Conference, by allowing organizers to tap into the potential of the social network.”

_ _

For live updates, follow @HerzliyaConf and @DavidSaranga on Twitter, or become a fan of the Herzliya Conference on Facebook. To see the preliminary PDF version of the conference program, click here to download. Further details about the new media launch are available here.

Sharon Udasin is a staff writer at The Jewish Week. E-mail her at sharon@sharonudasin.com, or follow her on Twitter.

This is too amazing not to watch. From Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s television show that somewhat resembles Saturday Night Live. Thanks to my buddies at Jewlicious for making me aware of this!

Young Iranian Jews Now Pushing Beyond Old Boundaries

New Persian blood: New York board members of the group 30 Years After, including Shannon and Lauren Hedvat, third and fourth from left, at their launch event in September 2008.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Arranged meticulously across a wooden dining table was a Shabbat meal that could have served 30 — fluffy gondhi, “Persian Meatballs,” still steaming from their broth, Middle Eastern salads and ghormeh sabzi, a green vegetable stew. A Shabbat candle hovered between a spread of tahdig, a crispy rice dish, and shirini polo, a sweet rice blended with almond slivers, orange peels and pistachios.

For the Hedvat siblings — Lauren, Shannon and Brandon — this was just another routine Shabbat meal in Lauren’s Manhattan apartment. It was winter break from Penn Law School for Shannon and Penn Engineering for Brandon, and they decided to cook up a traditional Persian Shabbat dinner for their friends, both Persian and not, many of whom have become frequent guests at the trio’s events.

“Growing up we became accustomed to our parents’ way of entertaining even though they have assimilated too much into the American culture. The warm hospitality of the culture is ingrained in us,” said Shannon Hedvat, 24, the middle of the three. “No matter who was coming over for whatever reason, my parents always had a huge bowl of fresh fruit, nuts and sweets on the table along with tea and coffee.”

Even as they hew to their Iranian heritage and their parents’ culture of hospitality, the Hedvats and other 20- and 30-something Persians, the first to be born in America, are transforming the famously insular Iranian community here in unexpected ways. Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution brought tens of thousands of Persian Jews to Great Neck, the gilded ghetto on Long Island’s Gold Coast, and to Los Angeles, a new generation is pushing beyond its parents’ tight-knit world.

Influenced by the cultural pluralism and openness of America, its  members are entering into mixed marriages with Ashkenazim, something that would have been unheard of a generation ago. They have taken up leadership positions in large Ashkenazi shuls in Great Neck. And they are thrusting themselves into philanthropic and political causes in America, in Israel and worldwide.

“In general, Persians have an attitude of doing their own thing and feeling like other outside factors don’t affect them,” said Bobby Shamsian, 28, a vice president at renewable energy hedge fund TerraVerde Capital Management.  Continue reading…

(blog post also written for Jewlicious.com).

Boarding the E-train en route to my most recent international reporting endeavor, I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect. I was about to tag along with 40-some-odd American peers who were visiting Israel for the first time, not through the auspices of Taglit-Birthright Israel, but under the newly independent wing of Oranim Educational Initiatives. I was placed with the 25- to 30-year-old age group, the eldest of three different groups that Oranim founder, Shlomo “Momo” Lifshitz, was taking to Israel at his own expense.

Initially the largest Birthright trip provider, Oranim split with the huge umbrella organization this past June, following continued disagreements over registration numbers and Lifshitz’s commitment to vocalizing the message, “raise your children Jewish.” Eager to continue supporting the

message he deemed crucial to Israel’s future, Lifshitz decided to launch his own trips, with a particular focus on an older age group of young adults, many of whom no longer even qualified for the Birthright age maximum (no older than 26).

Waiting on line for security that Dec. 27 afternoon, I winced, as my ears picked up on some joking among participants as to whether or not they should be purchasing bottles of Duty Free alcohol before boarding the plane. Oh no, I thought — this is going to be the same alcohol-obsessed, sex-crazed frenzy that swept through the 18-year-old scene on my own trip 2.5 years before (I was 22 at the time). I loved my own Oranim Birthright trip back in June 2007 — in fact, it triggered an obsession with Israel that brought me back there five times since and will likely lead me to spend extended time there at some point soon. But as a reporter, I cringed at the thought of spending 10 days among cliquey girls and guys who were more interested in clubbing than seeing Israel.

Boy, was I wrong.

Sure, group members enjoyed lounging under the Tel Aviv night sky with a beer or two in hand and a hookah nearby, or dancing the occasional evening at a kibbutz pub or Eilat club. And don’t worry, there were enough matches made among these same participants that would render Momo proud. But their ultimate goal — to learn about Israel and take advantage of their free 10-day journey to the utmost. Why risk a hangover when there’s a rocky mountain climb the next morning?

“This whole experience — I love it,” Shira Prigat, one of eight Israeli university students who accompanied the American travelers, told me for my Jewish Week article about the trip. “Everyone has been really excited about hiking. I’ve heard more enthusiastic comments about hiking than about clubbing, which really made me happy.”

What I saw those 10 days was a mature group of mid to late 20-somethings, who were riveted by their tour guide Yariv Ofer, 38, a criminologist and IDF commander turned Oranim staffer, whose knowledge about Israel seemed endless and whose physical prowess could’ve propelled him up the Aggro Crag with a blink of an eye. At every stop — be it a muddy corner of the Mount Carmel forest or the wind-chilled outskirts of a Yom Kippur War bunker — the participants listened to Ofer intently, absorbing his discussions on Israeli history, culture and modern society, and asking questions that sparked countless debates to follow.

“I feel like this room is a melting pot of a wealth of intelligence and knowledge,” said Brandon Cohen, 26, on the last night of the trip. “It left me hungry for more.”

I’m in favor of sending Jews of all ages to Israel, which would be optimal if today’s Jewish community had unlimited financial resources. But after witnessing both my typically younger Birthright trip’s age group as well as the 25-30 group from Oranim, the difference in maturity between the two was astounding to me. Rather than coming to Israel on winter breaks from school, many participants had to take precious vacation days — some even unpaid vacation days — to come on this trip. Their time was precious, and they wanted to get the most out of their 10 days in Israel, willingly waking up as early as possible to maximize their cultural intake.

“I think I took in 50 percent more information than I would have if I had come when I was younger,” said participant Evan Ryan during the group’s closing session. “It’s not a question of if I want to come back to Israel – it’s a question of when I want to come back to Israel.”

His peer, 26-year-old Brad Goldstein, agreed, adding more recently, “Being older, and more mature, and having a better sense of world news, you can appreciate the everday struggle of being in Israel and seeing Israelis.” On the last day of the trip, Goldstein — who himself had come to Israel expecting little — organized a fundraising effort among his fellow trip members, collecting a grand total of 2,000 shekels ($500) from them for Oranim’s future free trip, an idea he said came to him in a hotel shower.

“The amazing leadership of Yariv made me want to share this experience with more people and do anything I could to help that happen,” Goldstein said, noting that he and his fellow group members wanted to do everything they could to make sure that these trips continue.

While $500 will hardly send an entire bus of future participants to Israel (a bus, Lifshitz says, requires $80,000, in comparison to Birthright’s price of $130,000), the money raised by these trip members is certainly a start, and a group of them are already planning fundraising events in the future, entirely independent of the Oranim staff. Oranim already has a host of successful long-term programs in Israel, but if the company wants its 10-day trips to survive independently of Birthright, it is certainly a wise business strategy for Lifshitz to focus his efforts on this older age group. In terms of attracting investors and philanthropists, they will not be competing with Birthright because they are offering an entirely different product — a different, but equally valuable product. If the funds are available, the two can exist simultaneously.

“For the first time in my life, I’m really proud to be a Jew,” said participant Adam Nolan, on the last full night of the trip, as the circle of participants shared their opinions in a small conference room at their Neve Ilan Hotel.

A few seats away, his cousin — David Pinsky — began tearing.

“I just broke out in tears when my cousin said that for the first time he’s proud to be a Jew,” Pinsky said about 15 minutes later, still sniffing. “I feel like with the relationship I’ve built here, I don’t want to leave you guys.”

“I’m going to go home tomorrow night with the feeling that I didn’t go to work,” Ofer said. “I went on a trip with a bunch of my friends.”

Working The Land Of Israel

Participants in the joint Yeshiva University-JNF Alternative Winter Break program working in Chalutza, the new community for Gaza evacuees being built in the Negev. Courtesy of YU, JNF

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

For Yeshiva University sophomore Josh Zimmerman, one of the highlights of his winter break was a day of harvesting peppers, plucking up tangled vegetable roots, picking up garbage from the sand and repairing a decrepit greenhouse for a community of Jewish refugees — all with 11 of his peers in Israel’s Negev Desert.

“We literally worked the land ourselves,” said Zimmerman, a 20-year-old psychology major. “We wer e making a difference from all aspects — hands-on, literally working the land itself, and verbally, by promoting the cause and fundraising for the community.”

Zimmerman and his peers were visiting the region of Chalutza that day, helping to develop a community for Jews who were evacuated from their homes in Gaza’s Gush Katif in 2005. The students headed to Israel with Marc Spear, who is leadership-training director for Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future, which sponsors the Quest Leadership Training Fellowship. Quest is a two-semester, non-credit program offered to both male and female undergraduates.

After a year of intense leadership training and raising $20,000 for an Israeli cause of their choice — in their case, the Chalutza communities for Gaza evacuees in the western Negev — the students traveled to Israel through a first-ever collaboration between YU and the Jewish National Fund, to visit these very communities they had worked so hard to support.
“The trip is the culmination of the semester,” Spear said. “They see the power of volunteering; they see the fact that they can make a bigger difference in the world.”
Though the Quest Program meets weekly like an ordinary course, students do not receive credit for participation and must be willing to commit to the work-intensive syllabus despite their intense dual curriculum at YU.

“We can’t just be another club,” Spear said. “We are going to invest in their future, but they need to invest in us.”  Continue reading…

Funding In-Marriage Out Of His Own Pocket

“You have to try to find Jewish love,” Momo Lifshitz, inset, told his Oranim trip participants, pictured here near the Syrian border. LEFT CREDIT: Sharon Udasin

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Tel Aviv — Tucked into the rocky thickets of Mount Carmel in northern Israel, 43 American 20-somethings gathered in a hotel conference room to play a simple game — using their bodies as place markers, they lined up across the room according to how important they found dating Jews, and Jews alone.

At first, only four people stood on the “date Jews” side of the room. But when the question changed to marriage, four soon grew to 15. And when marriage changed to raising children Jewish, a good 15 more shuffled over.

“If I were going to raise my kids with a religion, I would want it to be Judaism,” said Matt Lakind, 29, from Hoboken, N.J., who had joined the trip with his girlfriend, Erica Roth. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t want them to have any religion, that’s all.”

A week later, after touring Israel from top to bottom, east to west and back again, his opinion changed. “Now coming here I can see there’s actually a whole ethnic culture to Judaism that has been harder to find in the past,” he said. “Now I understand why when people ask where I’m from, I will tell them: ‘I’m Jewish.’”

Lakind and Roth were participating in an inaugural free 10-day trip to Israel, sponsored by Oranim Educational Initiatives, and funded personally by the owner of the organization, Shlomo “Momo” Lifshitz. Though their trip followed an itinerary quite similar to that of the better-known Taglit-Birthright Israel, this 10-day journey was under the auspices of Oranim alone.  Continue reading…