It is the neo-con hypocrites who propound humanism for the, but not for me, who are truly disgusting.

ISRAEL BONDS DON'T MEET COUNTY INVESTMENT STANDARDS
link to palmbeachpost.printthis.clickability.com

"At a special meeting July 18, the committee voted 4-1 to lower two requirements of existing investment policy in order to purchase substandard bonds. The substandard investment was not suggested or supported by staff. The investment was recommended and supported by committee chairman Burt Aaronson. … Chairman Aaronson directed most of the discussion to the necessity of helping the economy of Israel rather than to meet committee standards. We only can hope that when the issue is reviewed by the county commission, free from influence by Commissioner Aaronson, a wiser, more objective vote in the best interest of all the people of the county will prevail."

This is about as frank a discussion of dual loyalty as we are currently allowed here in America. Any more than this and you get reported to Michael Chertoff.

i long ago dated a chinese girl whose parents lived in Hong Kong, worked as executives for IBM in far east, and whose brother went to Harvard med. She was catholic, but not aggressively so.

my grandmother, thinking i might marry this person, came to me with objections that god does not approve of people like me mixing with people like her. she wasn't specific if it was my girlfriend's catholicism that bothered her, as she and she assumed i was protestant of some sort. Or, it might have been that my girlfriend was chinese, and she was not.

the fact that my grandmother, who up to then was a major influence on my life, would try to force me to give up this girl erected a major wall between us. I couldn't talk to her about it i was so upset and disappointed.

turned out, my mother was much more supportive to me in that she wanted me to make up my own mind on these matters.

turned out, i discovered a major difference between my mother and her mother because of this issue.

my grandmother was going through a very difficult time during that period of our lives. my grandfather was very ill with stomach cancer. he was at home periodically being confused and not able to eat.

during that same time her neighborhood was changing. her old friends who lived around her were dying, going to nursing homes, or otherwise moving away. they were being replaced by poor black families who didn't speak much with her or show any kind of familiarity towards her.

it was a difficult time for her and i guess she wanted to resist too much change.

point being, I can understand your situation with your wife by relating it to my situation with this grilfriend.

What I find interesting is your sense of guilt concerning your own activities against your own sect of people.

I feel a loss for the old neighborhoods of my youth. Neighborhoods that are now ridden with crime, drugs, and murder. The Catholic ethnics of the industrial north have been pushed out to the 'burbs, exiled by integration and the inevitable crime that follows.

With this exile and along with the introduction of birth control, the Catholic ethnic has lost it's political power.

Will your ethnic group lose it's political power to assimilation? Possibly, but it won't happen anytime soon, at the least 75 to 100 years from now.

If you are not a committed Zionist, Judaism is a religion. Those who want to preserve it should concentrate on making it more meaningful to its public. Maybe one such improvement would be to take the Israeli flag out of the synagouge.

"What Feldman’s essay points up is that intermarriage is the irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish values are compatible. “We’ve sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when we’ve told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew and an American,” noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “In America you are taught you can marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews.”"

Rosenblatt's analysis probably applies even more strongly to Zionism than to Orthodox Judaism. American and Zionist values are simply completely contradictory in many serious ways, and when someone claims that America and Israel share the same values, many Americans and non-Americans become very uncomfortable.

Because American Jews exercise such strong influence over US society and ME policy, non-Jewish and assimilated Jewish Americans have to start paying serious attention to the fundamental disconnect between American principles and fundamental beliefs of Zionists and many if not most Jewish Americans.

[Noah Feldman's essay can be found at link to nytimes.com

See link to thejewishweek.com
for Rosenblatt's commentary thereon.

I put up a more complete version of this comment at link to eaazi.blogspot.com
.]