In the wake of the Mumbai massacre, do you think we can give our Quixotic obsession with Jewish-Muslim “dialogue” a rest, at least until after all the Jews get up from shiva? Don’t worry, it’s only a few days, then all the professional dialoguers can go back to dialoguing all they want.

Speaking only for myself, not for The Jewish Week, I find it obscene for there to be any ecumenical activity with any Muslims in the next week, not even with “the good ones,” as vague and obscure they are, other than to receive condolences. The Arab communities and the Palestinian Authority always display enough dignity to suspend peace negotiations whenever there are Palestinians (or any Arabs killed), and no one in the Jewish peace camp ever begrudges them their hours of pain. Let’s have a little Jewish dignity, for a change, and focus on the Jewish dead and the Jewish mourners.

I don’t want to hear dialoguers tell me that there is “Islamaphobia” in the Jewish community, not this week. If there can’t be enough pain and soldiarity in the professional Jewish community — including Jewish journalists — to suspend “business as usual,” and offer a primal scream, then let some Samson come and tear down the pillars, for we are no longer a functional community with any transcendent reason to exist. If there is business as usual this week, after Mumbai’s (and Chabad’s) 9/11, then we Jews have nothing left but our cute and essentially meaningless ethnic curiosities.

Alliances are fine, but there are times when if you don’t just keep quiet and mourn than the word you’re looking for is assimilation, not alliance, which presumes two parties of equal dignity, and an agenda that presumes some caring for your own and not just a surrender to the other.
    
Here’s a question for the professional dialoguers who don’t like Islamaphobia: At what point, last Friday, should the Holtzbergs in the Chabad House have gotten phobic?

I got news for you, after the 80 years (going back to the Hebron massacre) I’m getting pretty damn phobic, myself. To tell a Jew not to be Islamophobic is like telling a European Jew in the 1940s that there are some pretty terrific Christians out there who saved us. Thanks. The fact is, any European Jew who wasn’t Christian-phobic in the 1940s was either dead or lucky, and any Jew who isn’t Islamophobic, until proven otherwise, in the 21st century, will likely end up the same. Funny, I know plenty of Upper West Side Jews who have more of a phobia about evenagelicals from Nebraska than they do about Islamists.

Here’s a story, “Rescue Workers Shocked At Chabad Massacre Site” from Yediot that is must-reading, with photographs that are must-viewing.

Foreign Minister Livni said today, “There is no doubt that among the targets chosen by the terrorists were Jewish and Israeli targets, which are viewed as Western. The world is under attack, and it makes no difference whether it takes place in India or elsewhere. There are extremist Islamic elements who do not accept our existence and do not accept the values of the Western world…. The Chabad house in Mumbai is located at the end of an alley, and it is clear that it was chosen as a target.”

Go back over the newspaper stories, in The New York Times and elsewhere, and notice how absent the word “Islamist” is from the reports. Everything is blamed on “militants” or “terrorists” but who are they? What’s their great cause? Were they Hindus? Buddhists? Gay marriage advocates, or pro-lifers? Suddenly the greatest journalists choose to spare you the answer. You can bet if Jewish settlers who attacked the Tel Aviv Hilton or the Haifa Bahai, the Times would tell you right in the headline that these killers were Jews; in Mumbai, we were left to guess who these “militants” were. When do we get to have a dialogue about that?

I received an e-mail about one of the Mumbai victims, a Bobover chasid, whose story has been entirely ignored. Of course, there were so many victims, most stories, other than the Chabad couple, have yet to be told. I don’t have a link for this, or any verification, but in these unusual circumstances I’ll post some unverified excerpts from the Bobover e-mail:

“The residents of Kiryas Bobov in Bat Yam are having difficult accepting the painful news, that [Rabbi] Bentzion Chroman [also spelled Kroman] is no longer with them. He, too, was among the victims in the Mumbai Chabad House, a mashgiach for the Volover Rebbe of Boro Park Shlita. He is survived by a wife and three children, with the oldest being 3 and a half  and the youngest 3 months….

“Bentzi, as he was known, was a popular figure … educated in his early years in Bobov Yeshiva in Bat Yam, and from there to Yeshiva Kochav Yaakov. He was married in 5762 to the daughter of Rav Dovid Levin of Ganei Tikvah. Shortly after their wedding they settled in Bat Yam, near Bentzi´s parents.

“The young couple decided not to burden the parents, and they purchased their home with their own funds, and Bentzi then entered into the kashrus world, deciding to be self-sufficient, not wishing to place the burden of supporting his family on anyone else.

“This however did not bring an end to his [studies], and he had a late night shiur and was a regular occupant of the large Bobov beis medresh in Bat Yam during the nighttime hours…. During the last Yomim Noraim [Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur], friends commented on the intensity of his tefillos.”

He visited India following Shabbos, Nov. 22, and was scheduled to return home on the fateful Wednesday. “He packed up his belongings in the hotel and headed to the Mumbai Chabad House to say goodbye to Rav Gavriel and Rebbitzin Rivka, to daven and to thank them for their hospitality. It appears the terrorists arrived shortly after him – and it is believed he tried to run for his life. His body was found on the fifth floor, shot at point blank range.”

A Brooklyn-based Kruman Foundation has been established to assist the Kruman family, backed by such prominent leaders such as Rabbi Aaron Twersky (Brooklyn Law School), Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld (Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills) and Rabbi Yechiel Kaufman(Cong. Anshe Sfard). The site has some beautiful pictures of Kruman and his young children.

Please visit Chabad for updates on the Holtzbergs, photos and videos of their life at the Rohr Chabad Center in Mumbai, and where to contribute in their memory.

When was the last time anybody reading this blog tried to have a dialogue — even a conversation, as we regular people put it — with a Bobover chasid, to better know him or her, to better understand them? When was the last time anyone tried having a real conversation with a Chabad emissary, to understand him or her? How many dialoguing Jews — who made fun of McCain for mixing up Shia and Suni — know the difference between Bobov and Belz, or really understand the Chabad teaching’s about Moshiach (and, for most, it has nothing to do with the rebbe.)

Click that link to Chabad.org to find the Chabad nearest you — there are links to more than 1,000 Chabads, with telephone numbers. Call them up. This is a week for Jews to dialogue talk to each other.  

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I never met Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg or Rebbetzin Rivkah Holtzberg, martyrs of the Mumbai massacre, but I met more than a thousand of their spiritual brothers and sisters, the shluchim and shluchot, the rebbe’s emissaries, and here’s what they always told me when the situation was darkest.

Chabad doesn’t quit. They stood their ground in Czarist Russia, and they didn’t quit after the Holocaust, and they didn’t abandon Crown Heights after the 1991 riot. Chabad doesn’t quit even in Islamic countries that might blow up any minute, such as Morocco, where Chabad still operates in a city called “Gazablanca.”

They were working in the spiritual and anti-Semitic ruins of East Berlin when religion was criminalized, before the wall fell, and they were working in the ruins of Dnepropetrovsk before that Ukrainian city was open to the West and it could have meant a trip to the gulag. Chabad is still in the Congo amidst Africa’s “world war,” and they’re still working in inner city neighborhoods where experts say “there are no Jews there anymore,” except there are.

They didn’t sign up to be American “clergy” whose idea of activism is announcing how their partisan politics are – surprise! – identical to Torah values. No, the Chabad idea of activism is to enlist for a lifetime in Siberia, or Beijing, or Mexico, or Mumbai, a life in the trenches, on the front lines — the first wave in God’s infantry.

Even as I write this, Chabad is planning to re-open the Chabad House at 5 Hormusji Street, the now-famous Nariman building in Mumbai.

Jews don’t run. Chabad doesn’t run. Tonight, in India, Rabbi Tzvi Rivkin and Rebbetzin Noa will be open for Friday night davening and hosting people for Shabbos meals on Brunton Cross Road in Bangalore; Rabbi Baruch Shanhev and Rebbetzin Rachel Tova will be open for davening and Shabbos meals on Club House Road in Manali; Rabbi Guy Efraim and Rebbetzin Maya will be open for davening and Shabbos meals in Anjuna Village; and tonight, you can bet on it, there will be Shabbos in Mumbai.

Jews lit candles in the Warsaw Ghetto until they ran out of wicks, and tonight Jewish women in Mumbai will be lighting Shabbos candles not a second after 5:42 p.m., India time. That’s what Jews do. That’s what Chabad does.

Maybe some Jews will be less inclined to backpack or do business in India, but plenty of Jews will still pass through Mumbai and Chabad will be there when they do.

There’s a war on — a spiritual war as much as a shooting war — and Chabad knows it. The Lubavitcher rebbe is their Churchill, even from the Other World. Good men and women will die, but Chabad will never surrender. They call their youth group Tzivos Hashem, the Army of God. The Holtzbergs were in it when they were young. Their two-year-old baby, Moishele, will be in it soon enough.

When the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died in 1994, all the experts wondered how soon would Chabad fold.

This is what Chabad did. A Chabad carpenter sawed wood from the rebbe’s lectern to build a casket; a Chabad burial society gently poured water over the rebbe’s body and wrapped him in a shroud; straw was placed on the floor and the rebbe’s body was placed on it; and then they drove to the cemetery and laid the rebbe in the ground. That night they davened Maariv. The next morning they showed up for Shachris. Then, over the next 15 years, they sent out several hundred shluchim and shluchot – including the Holtzbergs — representing the rebbe.

Chabad did what they had to do when the rebbe died and they’ll do the same now.

Almost every year I go to their international get-together of the rebbe’s emissaries – the most recent was held last Sunday, although Rabbi Holtzberg, perhaps by Providence, stayed in Mumbai for one last Shabbos with his wife and child.

At the annual gatherings, I’d meet some of the 3,500 emissaries from places that seem far from the front pages, except they all seemed to end up on the front pages: Chabadniks from Thailand, before the tsunami; from New Orleans, before Katrina; from the Congo and turbulent Africa, before their wars; and Chabadniks from India. They are the most heroic young people ordained in the last 20 years. I never met the Holtzbergs, but I never met a Chabadnik who wasn’t a happy warrior.

Back in the 1990s, many journalists thought it mattered that the rebbe didn’t have a successor. In fact, it never mattered at all. What happened was that each of the shluchim became de facto rebbes, emissaries of the rebbe, in their corner of the world.

Chabad will not abandon Mumbai. The Holtzbergs, never to be forgotten, will be replaced in the trenches, as soldiers always will.

The Mumbai rebbe is dead. Long live the rebbe.

This is the season of Mashiv HaRuach, “He makes the wind blow and the rain fall.” And this was Shabbat Mevorchim, the Blessing of the New Month — Chanukah’s month, Kislev, beginning Thanksgiving night, Nov. 27.

Here’s a lovely and wistful niggun, The Fields of November by Norman Blake, a great Nashville musician who some may first remember from Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline,” and a player in the band with the Carter Family and Johnny Cash. It’s music for late November. (”Fields of November” is the name of the album but scroll down to Track 11 for the tune itself. The link works best with Internet Explorer or Firefox).

If you can’t be wistful in November…

It was on Kislev 6 (Nov. 21, 1620), that 102 spiritual refugees, carried by the winds at sea aboard the wooden Mayflower for 65 days, landed on Plymouth Rock.

November was the month when Noah — along with family and animals — boarded another wooden ship, the Ark.

An old New Yorker cartoon depicted the Ark sailing away, while on a distant hilltop could be seen a unicorn, eyes filled with tears.

It began to rain — to flood — on Cheshvan 17. It was the Hebrew year of 1656, exactly 4,113 years ago.

 Kislev 27 (this year on Dec. 24, the night of Chanukah’s 4th candle): The rain stops, 40 days after it starts. The end of the rain is followed by 150 days of the water’s swelling and churning, during which the water reaches a height of 15 cubits above the mountain peaks.

Sivan 1 (next May): The waters calm, subsiding at the rate of one cubit every four days.

Sivan 17: The ark touches down on Mount Ararat.

Av 1 (next July): Mountain peaks break the water’s surface.

Elul 10 (next August): Forty days after the mountain peaks become visible, Noah opens the ark’s portal and let’s fly a raven.

Elul 17 (next September): Noah sends the dove.

Elul 23: The dove is sent a second time, returning with an olive leaf.

Cheshvan 27 (next November): The ground has fully dried. Noah, his family, and the animals leave the wooden ship.

The total time that Noah spent in the ark: One year and 11 days, according to the lunar calendar, or one complete solar year.

Look here for Chasidic insights into the flood. (Chabad was the source for these flood dates).

And please, check out the annual gathering of Chabad shluchim, this Sunday at 5:30 p.m. The great Yehuda Avner, a top aide to several prime ministers, including Rabin and Begin, will be the lay keynote speaker, and the state-by-state, country-by-country roll call of Chabad emissaries from every continent, ending in a 5,000-man dance, is must-see TV. You can see it broadcast as it happens right here. I circle this on my calendar months ahead of time, I haven’t missed one of these exhilerating evenings in at least 15 years. But into everyone’s life floodwaters rise, and so I’ll be elsewhere, sailing away.

With Rahm Emanuel in the news, let’s catch up with some of the other Clintonistas.

There’s been much discussion over the oddity of Bush advisor Karl Rove suddenly being a member of the media (Fox News), to the extent that an analyst is. (Some analysts are, indeed, journalists, but too many are “homers,” as predictably devoted to their home team as Phil Rizzuto was in the Yankee both).

Actually, Rove’s switch and partisanship is exactly akin to old Clinton hands Paul Begala (CNN), James Carville (CNN), and to a lesser extent George Stephanopolous (ABC), crossing from dark side to another. Of course, there was consternation in some quarters when Nixon hands William Safire and Pat Buchanan turned into newspapermen, and all of the above have been valuable and insightful, in their way. (As was Rizzuto).

But what’s with Paul Begala and chasidic diamond merchants?

It’s not quite as bad as John McCain repeatedly saying “my friends,” but James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal noticed a strange repetition by Begala:

“George Bush is about as much a rancher as I am a chasidic diamond merchant.” — Paul Begala, CNN, Oct. 8, 2004.

And,  “If McCain is a maverick reformer, then I’m a chasidic diamond merchant.” — Paul Begala, CNN, Sept. 5, 2008. 

Now, really, what’s that about? Imagine the roasting if Sarah Palin or Pat Buchanan said, “then I’m a chasidic diamond merchant” even once, let alone repeatedly spilling out the idea that chasidic diamond merchants would be the ultimate in absurd analogies. Wouldn’t Palin or Buchanan, were they to have said what Begala said – at least twice —  be psychoanalyzed by every Democrat in America? Surely, Begala meant no harm but it is odd, isn’t it?

2: The price of gasoline, you might recall, was edging past $4.75 not that long ago. While working the Democratic convention (Aug. 25), Carville complained to Anderson Cooper, “I haven’t heard anything about gas prices” from the convention speakers, and everyone — at least on the Upper West Side — knows that the Weimer-like inflation of gas prices was Bush’s fault. (Do I even have to add “allegedy”?)

Way back, when John Edwards was still lying to his wife and running for president, he said high gas prices were the result of “corporate greed.” It was a sentiment widely echoed at Upper West Side Shabbos tables.

This past Sunday, Nov. 16, I pulled into a service station in Hackensack, N.J. and filled up my car at $1.91 a gallon, almost a 40 percent decrease from earlier this year.

If Bush was damned and responsible for high gas prices in June, how can he not be praised and responsible for low prices in November? And are ExxonMobile and Sunoco executives really less greedy? Or maybe the price of gas, always, and always was, the commodity whose pricing is most reliant on international rather than domestic politics and economics.

It never was really Bush’s fault in the first place. Could a president as “incompetent” as Bush really have reduced gas prices 40 percent? If he was so clever to do so as an election-eve manipulation, why are gas prices still dropping? And does anyone think, for even a second, that ExxonMobile executives are any less greedy now than they were in June?

Maybe Carville, and a lot of other people, are either completely cynical or completely ignorant as to any president’s ability to set the price of gas. (Surely, Obama will not be blamed if gas prices triple by 2012). Bush’s failures as a president are not a license for serious analysts to blame him for everything and anything. There ought to be a forensic examination of the last eight years, but not a senseless free-for-all, more partisan than cerebral.

3: There are late notes to the principal and then there are late notes worthy of framing. Here’s one, dated Nov. 4, to Rabbi Binyamin Krauss of the Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy (SAR).

Dear Rabbi Krauss,

Please excuse Joseph and Isaac Block for being late to school today. They came to watch me vote.

Sincerely,

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Joseph, a third-grader, said, “I saw her vote and got her autograph. I also saw Bill Clinton. She thought signing this letter was funny.”

According to Isaac, Hillary said “she recognized me from the last time she saw me.”

Isaac is in kindergarten. He believed her. But that’s what’s beautiful about Election Day in America. It’s a reason to believe.

There’s been some interesting reconsiderations of abortion lately, on the left and the right.

Some of the hardiest culture warriors in the conservative camp are beginning to realize that abortion is the new Prohibition, morally justifiable but not worth the political cost: making abortion abolition a litmus test for candidates (knocking several off McCain’s short list for vice president, when threatened with a convention floor fight), is as futile and foolish as keeping up the fight against moonshine and demon rum.

Writing in The Weekly Standard (Nov. 17), P.J. O’Rourke argues that one of the conservative movement’s failures has been “our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business,” particularly about abortion. “Democracy–be it howsoever conservative–is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them….

“If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest.” There’s room “with the public’s blessing” to reconsider using taxpayers’ money for abortion, or the idea of parental consent for underage girls, let alone to “tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail.” But O’Rourke concedes, “The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.”

(O’Rourke adds, “Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters.”)

Meanwhile, on the left, Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, recently e-mailed a challenge to the usual leftist orthodoxies about abortion. He is not in favor of mandatory parental consent or notification but is in favor of some other form of a cooling-off process between the demand for an abortion and the procedure itself.

In defiance of almost all liberal rabbis who justify abortion (in terms of Jewish law) with the argument that Judaism sides with the health of the mother over the survival of the fetus, Rabbi Lerner argues that abortion has too often become a form of belated birth control and that the mother’s health usually has nothing to do with it.

Lerner writes: “I believe that an abortion should be thought of as ‘justifiable homicide’ rather than as an act like cutting one’s hair or removing unwanted growths on one’s face. It is a serious act. And despite the yowlings of some that ‘every woman takes this act very seriously and suffers the emotional pain,’ I know that this is not true.

“I worked for several years at a public sponsored clinic in Richmond, California, in the years when I was getting my training for my license as a psychotherpist after I had received my ph.d. in psychology, and I witnessed numerous (yes, numerous) instances in which abortion was essentially a form of birth control for many young women.

“And I’ve personally known many other couples where the abortion was done for reasons that I’d consider rather light.

“In the final instance, I believe that this decision cannot be governed by law but should be in the hands of the woman who has to carry the pregnancy to term, or not. But I do believe that a process of meeting with a female psychotherapist, a female spiritual counselor, a female financial counselor, and a feminist rights counselor for an hour or two sometime before an abortion takes place, and in circumstances that guarantee absolute confidentiality, could be a reasonable condition that a society might set before financing such an abortion.

“I think that such mandatory counseling could be a statement by the society that we take seriously the lives of the unborn, that we are prepared to offer various supports for women who do carry a pregnancy to term (including financial supports for after the child is born), and yet that we acknowledge that it is a woman’s personal right to make this decision for herself once she has participated in this counseling.

“…. I do wish that liberals, progressives, and feminists would create in our communities an ethos that supports this kind of process rather than simply leaving the whole thing to the desires the individual woman without any public display of support or caring for her such as that which I propose. Creating an ethos, of course, is very different from creating a law, and it is the law approach that I oppose.”

Born in the Bronx to Russian Jewish immigrants, Studs Terkel (who was to become “the walking anthology of all things Chicago) didn’t particularly see himself as Jewish, except as an agnostic’s ethnic curiosity. But his recent death underlined, for me, at least, the serious difference between Stud’s leftist politics and that of Bill Ayers.

The left of Ayers, and his Weather Underground, was nihilist, born of rage, leading to bombings and death, to a culture of loathing for anyone who disagreed.

The left of Studs was, “l’shaym Shamayim” (for the sake of Heaven), born of a love for humanity, a joy for conversation with anyone that had a story to tell, right or left.

The Chicago Sun-Times obituary noted that his parents ran a rooming house, the Wells-Grand Hotel, and he “spent his youth among the odd collection of hotel guests, some seeking work, others avoiding it. He credited his unusual residence with sparking within him an interest in the personal stories of regular people.”

Studs worked in theater, radio and television, but he was perhaps most compelling as an interviewer, which was really just a fancy word for old-time Bronx (and Chicago) shmoozing, just a conversation between friends with the “record” button on.

Said the obit: “He developed an interviewing style often referred to as ‘oral history,’ becoming a virtuoso of the tape recorder.” Studs once said:

“A tape recorder is a revolutionary instrument. It’s no good for a talk with a movie actress or a politician, because they’re so plastic. But a tape recorder on the steps of a housing project is something else again. There a person who a moment ago was just a statistic starts talking to you and becomes human, becomes a person. Then it gets exciting.”

According to the Sun-Times, Studs said in 1980: “If there’s something I want to do, it’s create a sense of continuity — that there is a past and a present and that there may be a future. And that there isn’t any present unless you know the past.”
For someone who left his religion behind, he nevertheless was a terrific guest on “Speaking of Faith,” heard here on WNYC.

And on the Nov. 1 “Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor led a sing-a-long for Studs to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “Dusty Old Dust,” better known as “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You.”

Sing along:

Oh here’s to a man who lived long and well
Died yesterday, born in 1912
A sickly child, weighed only four pounds
Arrived on the day the Titanic went down

SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
GOODBYE STUDS TERKEL GOODBYE AND FAREWELL
AND I’VE GOT TO BE DRIFTING ALONG

He was a great man and I knew him, kid.
No one lived better than Studs Terkel did.
A child of Chicago and of radio
He lived 96 years before he let go.

He was a talker, in bars and cafes
He’d start a story and it went on for days
He talked to you like you were his best friend
And then when the evening came to an end (he said)

SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
GOODBYE STUDS TERKEL GOODBYE AND FAREWELL
AND I’VE GOT TO BE DRIFTING ALONG

He was pals with Algren, and with Mahalia
He knew success and he knew about failure
An historian of life on the street
He talked to the bums like they were the elite

He had a TV show back in the day
Which he wrote himself and did his own way
When he was blacklisted as a left-winger
He left with a smile as he gave them the finger. (SAID)

SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
GOODBYE STUDS TERKEL GOODBYE AND FAREWELL
AND I’VE GOT TO BE DRIFTING ALONG

A radio man for about fifty years
Interviewed rebels and brave pioneers
Skeptics, philosophers, artists, and cranks,
Generals but also the guys in the ranks.

Had wild white hair and sparkling eyes
A man of vast spirit and diminutive size
Loved cigars and martinis and stories and jokes
At the end of the evening he’d say to the folks

SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
GOODBYE STUDS TERKEL GOODBYE AND FAREWELL
AND I’VE GOT TO BE DRIFTING ALONG

He lived in Chicago on the North Side
And there yesterday Studs Terkel died
He gave a big smile and waved as he went
Believing Obama would become president.

If you believe in the unbroken circle
Then I expect we will rejoin Studs Terkel
And until that beautiful bright shining day
We gather around him and quietly say

SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
SO LONG IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YOU
GOODBYE STUDS TERKEL GOODBYE AND FAREWELL
AND I’VE GOT TO BE DRIFTING ALONG

 Ali Abunimah, editor of Electronic Intifada, is quite upset that Obama is pallin’ around with Rahm Israel Emanuel, the son of a so-called “terrorist” with Menachem Begin’s Irgun, back in the 1940s. Emanuel, of course, was Obama’s first appointment, as chief of staff.

 From “Hussein” being the middle name we wondered about, Rahm’s middle name — Israel — now has every Haman in the Arab world wondering how the son of an Irgun guy is Obama’s new Mordechai.

 Abunimah, you should know, was one of the “terrorists” that Obama used to pal around with in Chicago, while Obama was still in the Illinois legislature and in the pews of Jeremiah Wright. Abunimah, along with Bill Ayers, was at that party for Rashid Khalidi that the Los Angeles Times wrote about back in April and that McCain-Palin became so outraged about, six months later, in the last days of the campaign when there was no longer time to have a reasonable discussion about it.

 Some wise guys think Abunimah was the source of the controversial video of the get-together, the video that the McCain campaign asked for in its final days although the existence of the video was known to anyone who cared since April; known to everyone but the crackerjack McCain staff.

 Back in 2007, Abunimah wrote about Obama in Electronic Intifada: “I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker.” In and around 2000, “Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

 Their last meeting was in the winter of 2004. It was a time when Obama, writes Abunimah, “was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies.” Polls showed Obama trailing. “As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.’ He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, ‘Keep up the good work!’”

 (Obama strategist David Axelrod — who, by the way, is said to have signed Rahm Emanuel’s ketubah — denied Abunimah’s account of the conversation.)

 For more than two years, Jews (including me) wondered which was the real Obama, the one supporting Israel when speaking to AIPAC, or the one apologizing to Abunimah? According to the L.A. Times story, “the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.”

 I’ll admit, he had me wondering.

 But now, as Lesley Gore sings, it’s Judy’s turn to cry. Abinumah’s turn, anyway. Abunimah, writing in Electronic Intifadah (Nov. 5) headlined: “Obama picks pro-Israel hardliner for top post.” Abunimah tells his readers: Emanuel’s father, Benjamin, a pediatrician, “helped smuggle weapons to the Irgun,” when the Irgun “carried out numerous terrorist attacks on Palestinian civilians including the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946.”

 I should interject, the bombing of the King David still delights me and would have delighted me even more had I been alive to enjoy it. If that makes Dr. Emanuel and Prime Minister Begin “terrorists,” well, as leftists like to say — and as someone who voted for Obama I must be a leftist — one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

  Once again, Mr. Abunimah: “Emanuel continued his father’s tradition of active support for Israel; during the 1991 Gulf War he volunteered to help maintain Israeli army vehicles near the Lebanon border when southern Lebanon was still occupied by Israeli forces.”

 Additionally, “In Congress, Emanuel has been a consistent and vocal pro-Israel hardliner, sometimes more so than President Bush. In June 2003, for example, he signed a letter criticizing Bush for being insufficiently supportive of Israel…. In July 2006, Emanuel was one of several members who called for the cancellation of a speech to Congress by visiting Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki because al-Maliki had criticized Israel’s bombing of Lebanon. Emanuel called the Lebanese and Palestinian  governments ‘totalitarian entities with militias and terrorists acting as democracies’  in a speech supporting a House resolution backing Israel’s bombing of both countries that caused thousands of civilian victims.

 ”Emanuel has sometimes posed as a defender of Palestinian lives, though never from the constant Israeli violence that is responsible for the vast majority of deaths and injuries…. Emanuel has never said anything in support of millions of Palestinian children whose education has been disrupted by Israeli occupation, closures and blockades. Emanuel has also used his position to explicitly push Israel’s interests in normalizing relations with Arab states and isolating Hamas.”

 Over the course of the campaign, concludes Abunimah, “Obama publicly distanced himself from friends and advisers suspected or accused of having ‘pro-Palestinian’ sympathies. There are no early indications of a more balanced course.”

 Hail to the chief.