I’ll let the pundits pontificate on Obama’s speech and whether he succeeded in satisfying the concerns of American voters about his religious convictions and relations with his pastor. But there are a few passages I think are particularly worth noting: in particular one that moves me and one that disturbs me.

I have taken the position that Pastor Wright’s views, extreme as a few of them may be, have no place in the presidential campaign. Those who are stirring up the issue have a decided interest in smearing Obama and destroying his candidacy and little real concern about Wright’s actual views or whether or not those views have somehow influenced Obama or might impact future policies he might pursue as president.

Other than George Bush, when have we ever witnessed a president whose political program seemed dictated by theology? I really can’t recall any. When have we ever heard a previous president or presidential candidate asked to explain or defend the views of his pastor? It’s simply never come up because Americans have been wise enough to understand that while religion is important to many of us, it would never determine policy. That’s why Obama’s statement that Wright was his pastor and not his political advisor was important.

But Obama wisely didn’t choose this path in his speech. He decided: if they’re going to make Wright the issue then I’ll accept those terms; but I won’t accept their narrow frame of addressing the issue based on a set of the pastor’s alleged extreme views. Instead, I’ll put those views in the broader context of Black experience in this country. I’ll try to make Americans understand WHY Jeremiah Wright might express bitterness toward white America. And I’ll try to do this in a way that will make Americans understand the bitterness while not expecting them to embrace it.

This is what an American politician at his best can do. This is what Bobby Kennedy did. Or Martin Luther King. They ask us to reach out from our own narrow place within American society toward other Americans who live differently than we do. It doesn’t ask us to falsely pretend we are like them. It doesn’t ask us to excuse their weaknesses. It merely asks us to try understand those who have experienced this country differently than we have–who have suffered injustices that we haven’t; who have had work less well paid; who have had less educational opportunity. This is what that blessed Lincoln phrase means: to appeal to the angels of our better nature.

Obama’s critics are appealing to the devils of our worse nature. They want you to think of what divides us. They want you to mistrust Obama. They want you to think that Wright is Farrakhan is Kahane (as one commenter here attempted to argue).

Personally, I don’t know if this speech was like JFK’s famous 1960 Houston speech in which he laid to rest the concern American voters had with his Catholic background. I hope it will serve a similar purpose. I hope that with this speech he has either won the nomination or at least put himself in a position that will eventuallly get him to that point. I don’t know. But I’d like to think so.

Here are a few of the best passages in my opinion:

The [Black] church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

This is a brilliant description of all religions and even political movements. I’ve often described Judaism and Zionism in similar terms. You can’t, unless you are uncharitable or mean-spiritied, dismiss an entire Church or religion or national movement by saying it’s all-cruel or all-ignorant or all-hateful or all-racist. Only demagogues try to do this. Religion is a constant battle between warring impulses for good or ill. It is the task of the believers to ensure that the angels of our better nature triumph in this battle. Obama has captured this so well.

Here again Obama views Wright as a personal embodiment of those contradictions:

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who…on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

My hope is that Americans reading or hearing this speech will see themselves in it. How many of us enjoy relationships with pastors, family members, co-workers or friends in which we make compromises because we feel that overall the relationship benefits us in some way? How many of us accept imperfections in these people because we realize that there is more good than bad in them? And to the Obama haters out there I ask: how many of you have found perfection in your presidential candidates or your pastors or your friends? Let he who has found such perfection cast the first stone against Obama.

In this passage, Obama captures another important issue in the attack on Wright:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear [of Jim Crow and segregation] have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends.

What the Wall Street Journal and John McCain want to do is penalize Jeremiah Wright for his alleged extremism. But the truth is that the latter is merely a mouthpiece for what Blacks really feel. He doesn’t stir up hatred that doesn’t exist. He merely reflects it in his sermons. He is the messenger and not the cause of the problem. So the proper response should be to confront that anger rather than dismiss it. Or as Obama says:

…The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

If anything in this speech will help him win the presidential candidacy or election it will be this paragraph:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This indeed IS the better angels of our nature personified in political language. As is this:

…We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

There are other such passages and I urge you to read or watch the whole thing for yourself.

Now, to the one disappointing passage. We all understand that Obama has a potential Achilles Heel that the right is trying to exploit. They’re trying to insinuate that he’s soft on Israel. It won’t work because Jews aren’t as stupid as Jewish Republicans make them out to be. But it still means that Obama has to watch his right flank in the Jewish community. Which is why he said this unfortunate phrase:

…The remarks that have caused this recent firestorm…expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

The only truth in this statement is that Wright’s comments about Israel DO place overwhelming blame on Israel and U.S. policy and they don’t recognize any Palestinian culpability. And this is wrong. But Obama’s statement above runs to the opposite extreme and makes the statement that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not at all rooted in Israel’s actions. Which is an abject falsehood.

Further, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has almost nothing to do with the “hateful ideologies of radical Islam.” For the conflict is a struggle between competing national identities, and competing claims over land, and not competing religions. Religious enmity is a symptom of the problem, not the root of it. Here Obama got it wrong and not just wrong but egregiously wrong. This paragraph was written for him by an AIPAC hack or someone who’s channeling one. It doesn’t at all reflect the better angels of our nature.

tags A-More-Perfect-Union, jeremiah-wright, obama-speaks-on-race, presidential-campaign, racial-injustice

Last night, we went to see Michael Clayton. I’d read fabulous reviews of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, but I find it harder and harder to see downbeat films full of violence. There’s just too much violence in the real world for me to be able to enjoy it represented on screen. I know it means I’m missing some amazing films and acting.

Michael Clayton is a terrific film. A dramatic thriller involving corporate and legal skulduggery, it features a wonderful cast involving some of the finest actors working today including George Clooney in the lead, Tom Wilkinson in an astonishing performance (not rewarded with an Oscar unfortunately) as a former hotshot corporate lawyer turned raving mystical lunatic, Tilda Swinton (who did win the Oscar in her category), and Sydney Pollack (who also was one of the film’s producers).

To tell the truth, the plot was a little thin. It involves a sleazy multinational agritech corporation a la Monsanto selling a cancer-causing weed killer, which leads to a $3-billion class action suit. My wife (an attorney) and I also laughed at Clooney’s role as his law firm’s “fixer.” The guy (every law firm has one, don’t they?) who makes knotty problems go away with the wave of his hand. Rain-maker partner has a nervous breakdown? No problem. Get him into Betty Ford and clean up the mess after him. Big client involved in hit and run accident? We can make it go away.

But what is marvelous about this film is the character portrayals. Clooney is at his most compelling in the role of a troubled man seeking desperately to find some greater meaning to his life than fixing the worst problems of a group of lawyers who see him as little better than a “human janitor.” He is the good man confronting evil with just his bare wits.

Though Wilkinson’s role and portrayal of a top-flight corporate litigator unraveling in the midst of a professional and spiritual crisis are a bit showy and mannered, it’s still a tour de force. The only reason he didn’t win is the incredibly strong competition he faced in his category.

Tilda Swinton’s performance as general counsel of the sleazy multinational corporation is also a bit showy for my taste. But I’ve liked her in everything she’s been in and she’s a class act. She was especially fine in The Deep End, which I highly recommend. Her Oscar couldn’t have happened to a more deserving actor.

One of the great highlights of the film is the last scene in which Clooney, who is supposed to be dead, confronts Swinton with the unmasking of her evil machinations. The former’s line: “I’m the guy you want to buy, not the one you want to kill” is as dramatically powerful as any of the best lines delivered by Marlon Brando, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart. And of course, Clooney’s selling of this deception to Swinton is her undoing. What is especially great about the scene is that in the midst of it and until the very last second you don’t know whether Clooney is going to allow himself to be bought or stand for something better. I don’t want to explain this for fear of spoiling it for anyone who might see the film.

Watching Clooney in this film brought me so much satisfaction contemplating an actor who got his break on a superior TV show; but who has gone on, unlike most other actors in his position, and created a superb career. He’s picked fine film vehicles for his talent, plus films that have a social conscience. The man has a mind in addition to whatever gifts God gave him. If you compare him to other male stars like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, or Nicholas Cage, the difference is that Clooney is less about the celebrity than about what he can do with the celebrity to advance projects and ideas in which he believes. How many are there like him in Hollywood? A few perhaps. But not many.

On a different note, for any Seattlites reading this we had dinner afterward at Porcella, a very nice Bellevue restaurant which I recommend. I had butternut squash soup with balsamic vinegar, lamb osso buco with lentils and chocolate pot au crème. What was especially lovely was our waiter bringing to our table a 7 year old “assistant” who helped take our order. She also served our food and cleaned away our dishes. Since we have a son about to turn 7 next month, I was intrigued by our eager and precocious young waiter in training. I thought she might be the waiter’s or owner’s daughter. Turns out she was the daughter of customers who were also eating there that night. Natalie, the girl’s name, was so into the idea of waiting tables that the actual waiter took her under his wing and let her join him. I thought it was splendid of him. She had a good time and her parents got to have a nice dinner to themselves. I wanted to leave her a tip in addition to his but she’d already left the restaurant by the time we paid our bill.

Porcella Urban Market
10245 Main Street
Bellevue, WA 98004
(425) 286-0080

tags george-clooney-actor-with-conscience, Michael-clayton, porcella-urban-market-bellevue, tilda-swinton-oscar, tom-wilkinson

Look at this smiling ponim–if it doesn’t make you sick it should. This is the face of a cheat who got off easy. (Phil Sandlin/AP)

Wesley Snipes Cleared of Serious Tax Charges

No felony conviction. A maximum of three years in prison when he faced sixteen. He repays what he owes plus interest and penalties. The federal jury gave him a pretty sweet deal.

I probably haven’t seen any of his movies in ten years or so. But anyone who goes to see this guy’s future movies is aiding and abetting a tax cheat. We average Joes of the world earn our living and pay our taxes. We’re not happy about it but we do it because it’s the right thing to do. We don’t earn $100-million over ten years time. Maybe if we did we’d be as disgustingly greedy as Wesley Snipes. But I’d like to think not. We’d probably just get good accountants and pay what we owed. Not Wesley. He don’t owe nutin’ to nobody. Instead of hiring a good accountant he hires a fraud who tells him he doesn’t owe anything. When the feds finally catch up to him, he does hire the best tax attorney his $100-million can buy to get him off. And he does.

His lawyer says “he will make full amends and pay everything.” How about making amends for the thousands of Americans who will now flock to the tax defiance movement and refuse to pay their taxes and dare the government to come after them? Will he make amends for the impression he’s created among them that they too can get away with murder (or at least cheating)?

If I were the judge I would dictate that Snipes pay his entire $17 million tax bill in pennies and that he be forced to physically carry every single one of them in wheelbarrows to the IRS office. This guy has it too easy. He thinks the world and the government owes him something because of his fame or his wealth or whatever. Well, I’ve got news for him. No one owes him anything.

And if Wesley doesn’t owe anything to us, the rest of his fellow citizen tax payers who have to shoulder the extra burden he imposes on us, what do we owe to him, the Hollywood star?? As far as I’m concerned, let his career go to hell in a handbasket. Don’t go to Wesley Snipes movies.

tags wesley-snipes-tax-cheat

Consider how unlikely it is for Arab Labor (Hebrew language website) to be a hit on Israeli TV. In a nation that generally scorns Arabic, 70% of the dialogue is in that language with Hebrew subtitles. In a TV culture in which 2% of characters are Israeli Arabs, this show showcases them in virtually all the leading roles. The show lampoons Israeli racism toward Arabs, not usually a laughing matter in Israel’s prickly political environment (it also lampoons Israeli Arab attitudes as well to maintain a comedic balance). The idea for the show originated with its Orthodox Jewish producer who turned to an Israeli Arab writer and journalist, Sayed Kashua who writes in Hebrew for the leading Israeli liberal daily.

So how did it happen that this show struck a nerve? Perhaps Israeli society has advanced to the point where it can look at itself and see the warts while laughing at them. Perhaps it can now acknowledge that all is not well in ethnic relations between majority and minority. If this is so, then this bodes well for Israel. Of course, this could all be a fluke as many cultural phenomena are, and the show could flame out and end up having little lasting impact. But I’m betting that won’t be the case.The title, Avoda Aravit, refers, as Isabel Kershner notes in her excellent NY Times article, to the slang term meaning “inferior workmanship.” It establishes the sly ironic tone of the entire show. No one’s ox is spared. Arab Labor is to Israeli society what All in the Family was to 1970s America. It holds up a mirror to both sides of the ethnic divide and finds both wanting. But it does so in a way that allows both sides to see the humanity of the other. In this day and age of hatred and bloodshed, there is a lot to be said for such an approach:

Welcome to Mr. Kashua’s world, which, like the series, “Avoda Aravit,” or Arab Labor, works on multiple, often paradoxical levels. The title is Hebrew slang for second-rate work, and the one that Mr. Kashua chose.

On one hand Mr. Kashua has managed to barge through cultural barriers and bring an Arab point of view — mostly expressed in colloquial Arabic — into the mainstream of Israeli entertainment. On the other, “Avoda Aravit” reflects a society still grappling with fundamental issues of identity and belonging in a Jewish state which, Mr. Kashua says, still largely relates to its Arab minority as “a fifth column or a demographic problem.”

“I wanted to bring likable Arabs into the average Israeli living room,” Mr. Kashua said.

A few days ago, I wrote about the stunning Israeli Arab actress and singer Mira Awad. It should be noted that she plays the daughter on the show and has a clip featured in the Al Jazeera video featured above.

Kashua has written two Hebrew novels, one of which, Dancing Arabs, I’ve featured here with an Amazon link.

tags arab-labor, avoda-aravit, israeli-arabs, sayed-kashua, Straddling-Cultures-Irreverently-in-Life-and-Art, television-comedy

Haaretz just featured a profile of Mira Awad, an Israeli Arab Christian who appears in a new hit TV comedy called Arab Labor. Awad began as a professionally trained musician and recorded demos which no Israeli record company wanted to touch with a 10 foot pole because they are petrified of Arab music. Not necessarily petrified in an overtly racist way. Just petrified of its supposed ‘alienness’ from Israeli pop culture and of their inability to market it to the public:

In guitarist Amos Hadani’s small studio in downtown Tel Aviv she is completing the recording of her debut album, which will comprise songs whose lyrics and music she has written herself, mostly in Arabic.

The long road she has traveled until arriving at the final stages of the album began during her days as a student at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat Hasharon. “Eight years ago I already had demos ready and I tried to interest several people in them. But it didn’t really work out, and at a certain stage I got tired of trying and abandoned music for a number of years,” she recalls. “Arabic is apparently a language that still arouses fear and reservations in Israel. The fact is that no one jumped into the cold water, no one took a risk with me. Most of the reactions about the album had nothing to with the music or the production, and this began to affect me. My career in theater began to gain momentum and I said to myself, ‘Thank God, at least there is another place where I can express my creativity.’”

But as sometimes happens, the mass market may be far more ready to embrace “the other” than the doyennes of pop taste recognize. Visit her MySpace site and listen to Bahlawan and tell me she’s not ready for Israeli prime time. Azini is a song with more rock-pop “chops” recorded with the enormously popular Idan Raichel Project. Awad also recorded a duet with Noa of the Beatles We Can Work It Out that’s making the rounds of YouTube. It’s cute and makes a political statement but doesn’t showcase either of them to best effect. Far more compelling musically are these videos of more “hard core” Arab pop performances featured at MySpace video. As far as I’m concerned Awad has all her bases covered and if an Israeli record company can’t take a risk on her then they can’t take a risk on anything.

One warning: this is a woman who speaks her mind. Hearing Hatikvah doesn’t make her heart beat pit-a-pat. It makes her sad as one might expect coming from an Israeli Arab:

Mira Anuar-Awad was born in an Arab village in the northern part of Israel and has a full Israeli citizenship. She will sing Zman (Time) in the Kdam-Eurovision, combining Hebrew and Arabic. “There will probably be some people thinking I am not eligible to represent Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest because I am not Jewish, and I do feel, to some extent, that this country does not represent my true being” says Anuar-Awad. “When the Israeli national anthem is played I am usually sad and embarrassed cause it doesn’t stand for anyone of my national symbols” Mira adds. These statements by the star of the musical My Fair Lady have caused quite a commotion in Israel, just 5 days before the contest.

In certain Israeli nationalist circles, they can’t understand why Israeli Arabs don’t just shut up and get down on their knees and thank Jews for putting up with their endless whining and carping about discrimination and inequality.

tags arab-labor-tv-show, idan-raichel-project, israeli-arab-pop-singer-actress, mira-awad

The NY Times featured an interesting article about a new Israeli film, The Band's Visit, which sounded absolutely intriguing: The Band’s Visit tells the story of an eight-man Egyptian police orchestra that gets lost in Israel and lands in a dead-end desert town, where bemused and amused locals take the musicians into their homes, and into their weary hearts. Offering a glimpse into a better world, one where the distance between strangers can miraculously melt away, “The Band’s Visit” triumphed at the Israel film academy’s 2007 awards and has reaped accolades at film festivals abroad. So it seems unfortunate — or perhaps simply typical, given the unforgiving nature of ...

James Miller, the award-winning British documentarian who was shooting a film in Gaza about children caught in the crossfire of war, was himself shot and killed by an Israeli patrol in 2003. Though the IDF said the incident was regrettable it claimed there was shooting in the area and that Miller was in the wrong place at the wrong place. The Miller family and eyewitnesses claim there were no hostilities at the time of Miller's killing and that he was deliberately killed. This is how the Independent described the incident: Death in Gaza shows the two journalists leaving the home of a Palestinian family in the turbulent Rafah refugee ...

The bad news is that Pan's Labyrinth didn't win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But the good news is that it won THREE other awards (Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Best Art Direction). And in those categories it was truly deserving. The fantasy characters in the dream sequences of this film are stunning--like very little you've seen before in film. If you haven't yet seen it read my review and go. I was also pleased that West Bank Story won for Best Live Action Short, the first Israeli film to do so. Don't be put off by the hokey website. Kenneth ...

WARNING: If you have not seen the film, the last three paragraphs reveal the fate of the heroine. If you do not wish to know, then stop reading before you reach that point. Pan's Labyrinth is an extraordinary film boasting a touching performance from Ivana Baquero, playing Ofelia, an innocent young girl introduced against her will to the evils of the Spanish Civil War. The visuals of this film are literally out of this world. The special effects are breathtaking involving the creation of several memorable evil dream-fantasy creatures. In fact, the dream sequences in the film are so riveting that the "reality" sequences sometimes pale in comparison. In ...

I know it's Christmas and all, and we should be spreading good cheer across the cosmos. But hell, I'm Jewish and I think it's our God-given right to rain on your parade. Too much cheer makes Jack quite a dull boy. Where would the human race be if everything was always coming up roses? Quite a boring bunch, I'd say. I noticed while I was away my site readership has plummeted to one quarter what it normally is and even given the fact that many blog readers are not reading blogs during the holiday season, it's still about half what I figured it would be. Who knows, maybe not writing for so long (this is only ...