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Former colleague Charles Paul Freund (pictured) has a good piece over at Reason‘s Hit & Run blog on the various popes’ relations with the Jewish community of Rome. Some of the historical details are cringe-inducing. Pope Paul IV, for instance, established the Jewish ghetto, the miniscule boundaries of which were to house the city’s Jewish population between the 1550s and 1870, when the Vatican lost control of most of the city.
OK, tell me you did not see this one coming. The digital Talmud? Why not? In fact, I am amazed that there isn’t an entire seminary curriculum loaded onto iPods somewhere. What happens to doctrine when you hit shuffle? Here is a taste of reporter Alex Mindlin’s report in (naturally) The New York Times: “At the door, handing out leaflets beside the Jews for Jesus and the teenage collectors for Jewish charities, was a 23-year-old entrepreneur named Yehuda Shmidman, who was passing out glossy brochures showing a bearded, black-hatted Orthodox Jew, in silhouette, wearing a pair of white ear buds. Shmidman’s product, the ShasPod, is a solution to a vexing question: How does a commuter study a 2,711-page book?”
One of my all-time favorite editors, the late Ralph Looney of the Rocky Mountain News, used to say that he was never amazed when errors made it into the newspaper. He was amazed that the typical daily newspaper contains as few errors as it does.
One of the toughest clauses in the basic religion-beat reporter contract is the one that states: “Thou shalt write at least one or two stories every year during every major religious holiday and these stories may not be recycled more than once a decade.” Ugh.
Yasser Arafat was laid to rest Friday at his former West Bank headquarters. As Reuters related the story, "A chaotic crush of mourners filling the air with gunfire forced a hasty burial." In response to this mob action, "only a small clutch of beleaguered senior officials and security officers in a tight circle saw his casket lowered into a black marble grave."
I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last words of Daniel PearlEdited by Judea and Ruth Pearl Jewish Lights Publishing, 260 pages, $24.99
Let me jump in here quickly to respond to Doug’s post on the issue of Jewish Christians, Buddhist Jews and other hard to define, emerging niche spiritualities. For journalists, this is a case in which it is almost impossible to write anything without starting linguistic warfare.
