NPR did an OK story on Madoff's effect on Jewish charities yesterday, ably reported by the able Tovia Smith, but it included a line that irritated me no end. See if you can spot my button-pusher in this excerpt:
Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman
Philanthropies â one of the foundations not invested with Madoff â says
every phone call and meeting these days starts with a conversation
about who got hit.
…A few organizations have already shut down, including the
Massachusetts-based Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, an
organization that ran Israel trips for teens. It lost $8 million and
closed up, as did the California-based Chase Foundation, which gave
more than $12 million to at-risk youth in Israel.
The trips to Israel aren't for simply "teens." They are for Jewish teens. This is a form of discrimination that people find perfectly acceptable, which bugs some young non-Jews I've run into, still it is a fact: it's for Jewish teens, so that they will fall in love with Israel and meet other Jewish kids and marry them. The Lappin Foundation wasn't just about frikkin trips. It was–there it is in the first sentence–about intermarriage and assimilation, the two horns of my Jewish dilemma. Journalists who try to shade this truth are doing their listeners a great disservice. Imagine hiding a Catholics-only or evangelical Christians-only policy from the sophisticated ears of NPRia.
