Latest news with #Talmud
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Letter: Commentary on death penalty is wrong about Hebrew Bible
'Death penalty in keeping with principles of the Bible' (Reading Eagle, June 4), which asserts that the Hebrew Bible generally supports capital punishment, brings to mind comedian Lewis Black's advice that if you want to understand what the Hebrew Bible means, ask a Jewish person. The letter is based on an understanding of the Hebrew Bible that is, forgive the pun, dead wrong. The Hebrew Bible is understood not simply by reading the text itself but through studying the Talmud, an explication of the biblical text by ancient rabbis and sages. Wrestling with the text reveals its true meaning. The letter says Exodus 21:14 demands the death penalty for premeditated murder, but how is premeditation proven? To convict someone of premeditated murder under Jewish law, the court required two witnesses, according to Numbers 35:30. The Christian Bible accepts this principle in John 8:17. In Jewish law, two witnesses must testify that they warned the assailant he could be sentenced to death if he commits murder. The witnesses had to testify they heard the assailant assent in case the assailant was deaf. Premeditation under biblical law was extremely difficult to prove. Many other legal requirements were imposed. Historians doubt anyone was ever convicted of premeditated murder under Jewish law. Marshall Dayan Pittsburgh
Memri
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Memri
Chinese Influencer Tianjiao: The Jews View Non-Jews As Dirty, The Rabbis And Talmud Spew Hatred; They Do Not Deserve Our Pity, They Share In The Blame For The Massacres And Persecution They Have Suffe
On November 11, 2024, the Tianjiao Talks channel on Duoyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, published a video titled 'Why Are The Jews Unworthy of Sympathy.' In the video, Chinese influencer Tianjiao said that the Jews consider other peoples to be 'dirty' and 'forsaken by God,' and she said that Jewish rabbis spew hatred of other peoples and espouse teachings such that billions of non-Jews deserve to die. She elaborated that the Talmud and Jewish educational philosophy teaches that only Jews have the right to wage war and that they have the right to take married women from among the pagan nations they wage war against. She also said that some people say that the Jews deserve sympathy because they have 'wandered' for 2,000 years and have suffered persecutions, but that their suffering 'is connected to their sins.' She added: 'Those who deserve pity must also have some blame. When a people who consider themselves superior to us view us as ants, why should we keep trying to curry favor with them?' Tianjiao: "Jews consider themselves to be God's 'Chosen People.' In their eyes, other ethnic groups are dirty, forsaken by God, and inferior races that don't even have the right to live. "A past speech by an Israeli rabbi once triggered a huge storm online. Rabbis are a special class among Jews – originally meaning 'teacher,' but now broadly referring to sages and spiritual leaders of the Jewish people. A rabbi named Rabbi Mizrachi said: 'At least six billion people in the world do not deserve to live. Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Nepalese, Thais, and so on... There are so many of them. They are all pagans, and every second they are alive makes God angry. According to our doctrine, they do not deserve to live and should be sentenced to death immediately.' One must know that for a Jews to become a rabbi, he must undergo so-called 'Orthodox' Jewish education, studying canonical Jewish texts such as the Tanakh and the Talmud. And yet such hateful spiritual leaders are the outcome. So just how terrifying is the Jewish educational system? Let's take a look at the Talmud, the most important religious text in Judaism. "This book, second only to the Bible in the eyes of Jews, imparts what kind of educational philosophy? The Talmud says that only Jews have the right to wage war, and only Jews may seize women during war. In Jewish law, a married woman may only be taken by others if she is taken captive – but since non-Jews are not granted the right to wage war, only Jews may wage war against pagans, so Jews are the only group allowed to take married women. Many people say that the Jews wandered the world for 2,000 years, suffering countless persecutions and massacres throughout history, and that we should sympathize with them. Moreover, [they say that] Jews are smart and good at business, and can be useful to us. But as the old saying goes, 'those who deserve pity must also have some blame.' The suffering the Jewish people have experienced is connected to their sins. When a people who consider themselves superior to us view us as ants, why should we keep trying to curry favor with them?"
San Francisco Chronicle
23-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
City College of San Francisco poised to select outsider as chancellor over interim chief
Veteran educator Carlos Osvaldo Cortez is expected to be named next week as the 11th chancellor in 13 years to lead the financially troubled City College of San Francisco, edging out the interim chancellor, the Chronicle has learned. The seven trustees are in contract negotiations with Cortez, and a majority favor him over Interim Chancellor Mitch Bailey, said knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Bailey has fallen out of favor with the faculty union, which strongly influences the majority on the seven-member board of trustees. The chancellor selection echoes a constant debate at City College over the best approach to restoring the college to good fiscal health and increasing enrollment. The faculty union and its supporters on the board want to dip into reserves to boost spending, saying this approach is the best way to attract more students. By contrast, Bailey says he wants to 'adjust college operations to align with current resources,' a practice that matches expectations of accreditors and state officials. The college has been under an accreditation warning sanction over its governance and finances since early 2024. Chancellor selections are secretive, with deliberations happening behind closed doors. At City College, they are a near-annual ritual. If approved, possibly at the May 29 board meeting, Cortez would become the school's fifth permanent head since 2012. There have been six interim chancellors during that time. The selection of Cortez over Bailey would be the second time in a year that the trustees have replaced a chancellor who sought greater financial stability by aligning spending with revenue. Cortez is seen as faculty-friendly. In the San Diego Community College District, where Cortez was chancellor from summer 2021 through spring 2023, faculty pay increased modestly, by an average of 2.5% in 2022 and 4.5% a year later, after a period of small increases before he arrived. Cortez quit that job after a year and a half. He was paid a total of $1.36 million during his short tenure, including $546,601 for his final four months, according to Transparent California, a database of California public employee salaries. While chancellor in San Diego, Cortez made news in 2022 when he was forced to cancel his belated welcoming ceremony at Petco Park after receiving complaints for inviting Alice Walker as keynote speaker. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of 'The Color Purple' has for years been accused of antisemitism, including for penning a poem in which she called the Talmud, the book of Jewish law, 'poison,' and for her support of conspiracy-theorist David Icke. After 20 months on the job, Cortez announced in March 2023 that he was taking 'extended emergency leave' to care for his ill parents. On May 1, district officials announced that he had resigned to be with his parents in Florida. By that fall, however, he was a finalist for the chancellor's job in three Bay Area college districts: Peralta in the East Bay, Contra Costa and San Mateo. Court records show that on Jan. 19, 2024, police in Florida arrested Cortez on suspicion of driving under the influence. Ultimately, he pled no contest to the reduced charge of reckless driving. In a phone conversation, Cortez declined to answer a reporter's questions without authorization from City College. But he said the Florida charge was due to a 'mixture of prescription medicine.' While Bailey has not suggested layoffs, he has adopted an approach that acknowledges financial instability at the college of 44,000 full- and part-time students. Salaries eat up 90% of the general fund, compared with 82% statewide, and next year the college will lose millions of dollars in extra state funding that has kept it afloat since 2018 due to severe enrollment loss. Reserves are at 16% of general fund expenditures, far below the 33% average across other colleges. Among the ideas Bailey references in a May 8 budget update are reducing the number of single classes that attract few students and currently make up 70% of academic offerings. Instead, Bailey wants faculty to consider teaching more groups of classes that carry large numbers of students toward their degrees. It's an idea that does not sit well with the union, the American Federation of Teachers, Local 2121. 'In a dizzyingly shallow presentation, Interim Chancellor proposes cuts to 70% of College with no analysis,' the union headlined its essay accusing Bailey of targeting ethnic studies classes. The union essay called for 'serious leadership' that would tap into its $31 million reserves to pay for more academics, not less. Alexis Litzky, a communications professor and outgoing chair of the Academic Senate, called the union's description of Bailey's idea for boosting more popular classes a 'mischaracterization of the chancellor's presentation.' She said Bailey is not suggesting that the college axe classes but that faculty review course offerings so that City College can 'evaluate options for updating our programs and schedules.' The Academic Senate works with both the union and administrators. Litzky said the college has been confronting its accreditation missteps by working with a state assistance team, and that Bailey's budget workshops have been helpful in educating the college community about its finances. 'It actually feels like we're going in the right direction,' she said. Cortez, 50, earned his doctorate at the University of Southern California, focusing on 'African American Womanist political historical contributions to social welfare and education policy reform,' according to his employment bio. During his academic career as an instructor and administrator, Cortez served as dean of instruction at Berkeley City College and, before becoming chancellor in San Diego, was president of San Diego College of Continuing Education. The Chronicle reached out to trustees in each of the Bay Area college districts where Cortez applied since leaving San Diego, as well as to trustees of Madison College and Pasadena City College, where he was a finalist in April 2024 before he withdrew his name from consideration. Cortez told the Chronicle he had decided he didn't want to live in Madison. Only one trustee responded, agreeing to comment without being identified because the person was not authorized to speak about it publicly. 'He is very charismatic. He dazzled us,' said the board member from Pasadena. But the college did not select Cortez as its leader. The trustee declined to say why. San Diego trustees did not respond to requests for comment. Professor Inna Kanevsky, who teaches psychology at San Diego Mesa College and got into a public dispute with Cortez over the Alice Walker episode, said she was 'sad to hear' that he was the leading candidate at City College. Cortez drew ire from the free-speech group FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — when he blocked Kanevsky on social media after she complained that the Walker invitation would harm Jewish students. FIRE told the college district that the action violated Kanvesky's First Amendment rights. The chancellor then deleted his own account.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
I Teach Jewish Studies. There's a Bitter Irony to What the Trump Administration Is Asking of My Campus.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to 60 institutions of higher education across the United States, warning them of potential enforcement actions if they do not address what the department calls 'the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year.' The small liberal arts college in New York where I teach Jewish Studies was among these 60 schools. As the sole permanent tenure-track faculty member in Jewish Studies at my school, I would really rather be spending my time helping students pore through complicated legal arguments in old tracts of the Talmud, or evaluating the differences between rationalist and anti-rationalist trends in medieval Jewish thought, or thinking about the knotted course of Jewish emancipation in modern Europe. But in the past year, as our campus has become embroiled in contentious protests about Israel's war in Gaza and debates over our college's responsibility to respond to it, my academic discipline of Jewish Studies has become unavoidably politicized. Since last fall, when our school had its Gaza solidarity encampment, Jewish students have come to my office to speak about their feelings about the campus climate. My Jewish students, contrary to what the Trump administration would have us believe, hold a broad spectrum of opinions about Israel and Palestine, the current war, and the environment on campus. I have a Jewish student who received disciplinary action from the school for leading the protests, and a Jewish student who felt sufficiently threatened by some of the rhetoric coming from the protesters that they did not want to leave their room for several days. And I have many Jewish students in the mushy middle between those two poles, sympathetic to some criticism of Israel's war while also feeling that some of the anti-Israel rhetoric has gone too far. But what all my students, Jewish and non-Jewish, share, no matter their feelings about Gaza and campus protests, is disdain for the exploitation of real concerns about antisemitism on campus to fuel a broader crackdown on liberal education in the United States. And that is what they see coming from the Trump administration right now. When they look at the actions of the Trump administration, my students observe a broad assault on the very concept of a liberal, humanist higher education, an ideal which all of us at this institution share. They see an administration cutting funding for necessary academic research to make examples of universities, even when that will hurt Jewish see an administration detaining a Columbia alumnus with a valid green card for, while he was a graduate student, protesting the actions of the state of Israel, even while the administration admits he was not breaking the law. And they see an administration which entered office with detailed plans to dismantle higher education in this country root and branch, and is now seizing its opportunity to do just that. My students see all that, and no matter their disagreements over Gaza and campus protests, they are unified in doubting the Trump administration's commitment to genuinely fighting campus antisemitism. When the Trump administration is telling German politicians to abandon their post-Holocaust commitment to keeping far-right extremists out of government, and appointing officials with long histories of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories to high office, my students across the political spectrum doubt that Donald Trump and his administration are serious about fighting antisemitism. Rather, they see a government using the pretext of fighting antisemitism to destroy the foundations of the liberal arts education that all my students, despite wide political differences, cherish and value. And that, in turn, makes them less likely to want to speak up at all, even when they do have legitimate concerns about antisemitism on campus. Contrary to what the Trump administration seems to think, I have seen my students in class have productive, sensitive discussions about the complicated histories of the Israeli and Palestinian national movements, and how these histories redound today. I have seen them disagree respectfully, engaging with and learning from each other. But they are less likely to do that if they fear an errant word could be taken up by national politicians and turned against the college as a whole. Much of my time is spent thinking and teaching about the transformations in Jewish identity that occurred as Europe as Jews gradually left the ghettos and acquired equal rights of citizenship. Though the specific histories differ according to time and place, what my students observe is that there is a reason Jews have tended to support liberal political movements advocating religious freedom, pluralism, and equality under the law. As a long-persecuted minority, Jews tend to do better in such political environments. Trump, in contrast, is pointing us away from the liberal, pluralist values that have secured Jewish thriving in the United States, and toward an earlier model by which Jews related to sovereign governments: the court Jew, those Jews of Europe who made themselves indispensable to non-Jewish rulers by providing financial services and other support to the crown. In return, these Jews received temporary protection and an improvement in their social status—but these protections were always temporary, always something that could be taken away if times got tough and the ruler needed a scapegoat. Becoming a temporary protected class of the sovereign is always a dangerous position for a minority to be put in. Earlier this year, our college received another directive from the Department of Education informing us that in the name of fighting 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' initiatives—a right-wing bogeyman that is as universal and as spectral an enemy for Trump now as Communism was for the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—we are no longer permitted to educate students about implicit biases during freshmen orientation, as we have long done. This directive, however, came with a large asterisk: We are still permitted to educate students about antisemitism. Antisemitism education, in other words, receives a special carve-out from broader anti-DEI policies. Jews get to be the special minority group receiving temporary protection from the government. Not only does this separate Jews from other groups with which we might stand in solidarity, but it makes it impossible to educate students about the actual forms that antisemitism today takes. Imagine, for example, trying to teach about the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the deadliest anti-Jewish violence in American history, but being banned from teaching about the shooter's well-documented hatred of immigrants, which he linked to his hatred of Jews, whom he blamed for bringing immigrants into the United States. The mere thought of teaching about antisemitism this way is absurd, and yet this is precisely what the Trump administration's policy of allowing us to teach our students about antisemitism but banning education about xenophobia and anti-immigrant hatred would accomplish. By making Jews his personal pet minority—his court Jews, so to speak—Trump is making it impossible for us to link antisemitism to other forms of bigotry, and thereby to understand it in its real historical context. My students learn about this history, and they see parallels between the long history of governments temporarily protecting Jews and how the Trump administration is now instrumentalizing Jews and Jewish safety, turning us into scapegoats for a larger crackdown on higher education across the country. Right now, Trump may say that he is acting on behalf of Jews. But a government that can detain student activists extrajudicially if it does not like their speech is a government that has abandoned its commitment to the liberal values that have made the United States possibly the greatest place for Jews in diaspora over many centuries. By claiming to be acting on behalf of Jews while engaging in a preconceived right-wing ideological fight against the American university, the Trump administration gets a double win. They can claim to be acting on behalf of a powerful minority group, feeding into antisemitic narratives of shadowy Jewish power behind the scenes, while disguising the true nature of the Christian nationalist influences standing behind this campaign against higher education. Then if people start to actually miss the valuable research being done at these institutions of higher learning, American Jews will be made to take the fall for an assault on higher education that the American right has wanted to undertake since long before Oct. 7, 2023. There is real antisemitism on college campuses and in American society more broadly, and it deserves to be addressed. But that would mean investing more in education, to learn critical lessons from history. And it would mean having difficult but necessary discussions about Israel and Palestine and their relationship to Jews and Palestinians living in the United States, discussions involving the kind of questions I know my students are fully capable of posing. But my students tell me they are now less likely to speak out, knowing how easily their concerns can be exploited by a hostile administration. So when the Trump administration sends a letter to our college, turning us into a symbol of the liberal arts education model he is trying to decimate, I want to send them a letter right back, saying: 'Stay away from our campus. Our students deserve better than to be your pawns.'
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Column: We live in Mike Davis' L.A. — but not the one you think
Hellish wildfires. Whiplash weather. Destructive winds. Debris flows. Torrential rains accenting punishing droughts. Welcome to the Los Angeles Mike Davis predicted. The late urbanist first made waves in the 1990s for forecasting an L.A. that would be one ecological and manmade disaster after another. His work quickly made him controversial among civic boosters, who dismissed him as a negative nabob who didn't want the city to thrive. Today, Davis is one face on the Mt. Rushmore of L.A.'s prophets, alongside Joan Didion, Carey McWilliams and Octavia Butler. His words, more than anyone else's, have been cited by writers and pundits across the world in this annus horribilis where nothing seems to be going right and everything seems to be getting worse. Read more: Mike Davis, 'City of Quartz' author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies With respect to his fellow titans, none of them ever assailed the poultry industry for bragging about reaping "profit from the influenza-driven restructuring of global chicken production.' That's exactly what Davis wrote in a 2006 book warning about the threat of avian flu, complete with a photo of a menacing white rooster on the cover. Davis is the man of the moment, the person whose work all Angelenos should parse like a secular Talmud — but his premonitions of hellfire and brimstone aren't what we should heed most. The rest of the nation has eagerly waited for Los Angeles to collapse into tribal warfare and anarchy the moment a mega-catastrophe happened. If ever there was a time for that, it would be now, after the Palisades and Eaton fires. While local political leaders have mostly fumbled or squandered the moment, it's regular folks who have risen to the occasion. They have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for recovery efforts via everything from benefit concerts to donation jars at restaurants. Volunteers continue to clean up burn areas and gather supplies, with the promise to fire victims that they will not be abandoned. Welcome to the Los Angeles Mike Davis wanted. As someone who has read most of Davis' work and knew him personally, I can say that his writings were cris de coeur more than lamentations. He was less Jeremiah and more John the Baptist, preparing the way for who would ultimately save L.A.: Us. 'Although I'm famous as a pessimist, I really haven't been pessimistic,' Davis told me in 2022, the last time we saw each other, months before he died of esophageal cancer at 76. 'You know, [my writing has] more been a call to action." To cast him as an apocalyptic wet blanket is a disservice to a writer remembered by friends and family as all heart — a man who had faith that while L.A. would eventually go up in flames, it would emerge from the ashes stronger than ever. 'Mike hated being called a 'prophet of doom,'' said Jon Wiener, a retired UC Irvine history professor who hosts the Nation's weekly podcast and was a co-author of Davis' last book, 'Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.' 'When he wrote about environmental disasters, he wasn't offering prophecy — he was reporting on the latest in climate science, and considering the human cost of ignoring it.' Even while he was writing "City of Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear," Davis was picking away at 'Set the Night on Fire,' which he invited Wiener to shepherd toward publication. 'He wanted to show that the young people of color of Los Angeles had played a heroic part in fighting for a more equal future for their city' as a way to teach a new generation of activists to not lose hope in even the most dire of times, Wiener said. I asked Wiener what his longtime friend would say about post-fire L.A. 'While hundreds of millions [are] being raised to rebuild big houses in the Palisades and Altadena,' Wiener responded, Davis would remind folks not to forget 'the people who had worked there as gardeners, housekeepers, nannies and day laborers ... [who] are having trouble paying the rent and feeding their kids.' Read more: Advocates gather to demand equitable fire recovery for longtime Altadena residents, immigrants and others Thankfully, Davis wouldn't have had to say that. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and others have stepped up to help those affected, even as some of their volunteers have lost jobs and housing. Social media remains packed with fundraisers to buy new equipment for gardeners, patronize food vendors and find jobs for the unemployed. Such efforts bring comfort to Davis' widow, Alessandra Moctezuma, and their son, James Davis. In a phone call from their home in San Diego, the two told me how they've grieved the tragedy in L.A. from afar. Moctezuma attended Palisades High and hiked above Altadena with Davis while he was writing 'Ecology of Fear' in the mid-1990s. On social media, she saw photos of her alma mater in flames, posts from friends who lost everything in Palisades and videos of hills burned beyond recognition. 'He loved it up there,' she said, remembering that they lived in Pasadena, just seven minutes from Eaton Canyon. 'I was already feeling all the emotions from that, and that's when people started sharing Mike's articles.' She and James are grateful that people are citing Davis as a way to cope with the calamities of the past month — but the two urge readers to go beyond his best-known quotes and works. 'The problem is a lot of people misinterpret a lot of my dad's work as schadenfreude, when it's really not,' James said. The 21-year-old feels his father was, above all, trying to warn about the dangers of unchecked development, especially in more recent writings. In the pages of the London Review of Books and the Nation, Davis tracked how California had changed during his lifetime, from a state with a wildfire season centered mostly on wilderness areas to one where the menace of conflagrations is year-round — and everywhere. James recalled a 2021 documentary in which a gaunt, gravelly-voiced Davis told an interviewer, 'Could Los Angeles burn? The urban fabric itself? Absolutely,' over shots of burning suburban tracts that looked eerily like what happened in Altadena and the Palisades. 'He talks about not just the possibility but inevitability about how there could be a giant fire burning down Sunset Boulevard,' James said. 'That's exactly what happened.' With his love for Southern California and its people, Davis would 'be happy to see all the mutual aid happening," James said. "That's the kind of stuff he advocated for.' Moctezuma, an artist and curator, agreed. Her students at Mesa College filled four big U-Hauls with supplies and drove to Pasadena. 'Just seeing everyone sharing, that's one of the things Mike always talked about,' Moctezuma said. 'The kindness of people and importance of organizing — and the next step is organizing ourselves to help ourselves." She recounted one of her late husband's favorite Irish proverbs: Under the shelter of one another, people live. 'I'm sure he'd have a lot of things to say right now,' Moctezuma continued. 'He'd probably start looking into all sorts of things — the response from firefighters and politicians, regular people. Everyone would be interviewing him." Then she got quiet. 'He'd be heartbroken to see everything burnt down. And if his health was good, he'd be up there helping.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
