Rabbi Sol Solomon’s celebrity interviews, Rabbinical Reflections (sermons), songs, and other appearances on the show.
INDEX: http://davesgoneby.net/?p=25407
Segment aired April 4, 2015 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
All content (c)2015 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of March 29, 2015.
Much to many people’s surprise, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected for a third term as the Prime Minister of Israel. Everyone assumed Labor would win. Everybody thought Netanyahu’s hard-line, status-quo policies were on the way out, and peaceniks were on the way in. Well, pre-April fool! Or technically, Adar fool, since it’s the Jewish calendar we’re dealing with.
But let’s be clear: for all Israel’s weariness of war, and for all the country’s gratitude to the United States for support, for money, for defense, for money, for money, for money . . . Israeli voters nevertheless sent a strong message and a mandate. The safety and security of Eretz Yisroel comes before everything else. It comes before friendship, before negotiations, before swallowing the latest Palestinian PR. They said to Netanyahu: “Give us strong borders and a promise that you won’t sell our country down the river—Jordan or Nile—and we’ll vote for you again.” He did, and they did.
Therefore, much to the chagrin of President Barak Oblivia, Bibi is back. And the shocking part is: he did it, not by kowtowing to the left, not by lying about the potential for peace with our sworn enemies, but by facing facts. The Arabs hate us, they won’t even recognize Israel on their maps or GPS systems, and any chance they get, they’d gladly send the Jews on a blind date with Robert Durst.
In his campaigning, Bibi went so far as to say that on his watch, there would never be a Palestinian state, which is harsh to hear even for a die-hard Zionist like yours truly. I’ve always said, I have no objection to a Palestinian state . . . in Algeria, in Curacao, maybe somewhere north of Omsk. The two-state solution, however, just seems like a disaster on the drawing board: unsafe, untenable, and you know it would just turn Jerusalem into a ping-pong ball. Filled with explosives.
Still, you’re not allowed to say that. If you’re a diplomat or a head of state, you’re supposed to make believe there’s always room for negotiation, that the Arabs really will lay down their arms and be all neighborly-like. Because, hey, they’ve been such good citizens in Yemen, Tunisia, Iraq, Syria, Libya – fill in the name of a country; the Muslims have probably terrorized it.
Our President won’t admit that, of course. It’s like he’s living in the movie “Candyman.” If you say the name “Moslem” five times to a camera lens, the bad guys’ evil will be unleashed. But here’s news, Mr. Pres, the bad genies are already out of the bottle, and if there’s one country on earth that knows not to trust the Bedouins, it’s their Semitic brethren.
Now, for the sake of diplomacy, Benjy Netanyahu has already gone back on his pre-election speechifying. He says he didn’t really mean there was no solution, that he’s always willing to schmooze with Abbas, and we should take his posturing with a grain of hummus. He’s a politician. He says what he has to to get what he wants. Once he’s got it, then he can be more truthful. Not completely truthful, but a percentage.
Meanwhile, the President, who has been going through an otherwise impressive stretch of lame-duck vigor, is pitching a hissy fit over Bibi’s bonanza. Obama wants to be the next Jimmy Carter, brokering the all-but-impossible peace deal that will cement his legacy for the ages. But lemme tell you, Barack, if you’re listening, which I know you are: with Israel and Egypt, Jimmy Carter did an amazing, impossible, fantastic thing. No one can take that away from him. But if you ask anybody about the legacy of James Earl Carter, 39th President, the response will be: hostages, oil shortage, inflation, Cold War, losing the Panama Canal, and a general American bad mood. In other word, that peanut-brained peanut farmer had as much business ruling the free world as Bill Cosby would have running a rape crisis center. So if Obama thinks he’s got anything to gain by twisting Israel’s arm into a phony truce with terrorists, he’s in for a rude awakening.
And yes, it was rude of Netanyahu to visit America and gab with Republicans when the White House all but begged him not to. But I repeat: maybe, just maybe, Bibi knows whereof he speaks when he cautions that trusting Iran to scrap its nuclear program is like trusting Bill Cosby to run a rape crisis center. I know, I already used that joke, but I’m hungry, and I want to finish this stupid essay and get to my brisket.
Folks in Washington are saying that relations between Israel and the United States are nearly at an all-time low. But I think—or at least, I hope—that’s overstating the case. Deep down, both American parties are very committed to Israel and realize how strategically important it is to the West, as well as its moral right to exist in a post-Holocaustal world. If Obama wants to rattle his saber—and you know, those people are blessed with long sabers—it could be the same kind of bluff and bluster Netanyahu was using to win his election. What actually goes on behind the scenes . . . that’s for statesmen to know and Aaron Sorkin to fabricate.
So I hope this is all just smoke and mishegoss, and that the Democrats—especially their presumptive 2016 candidat-ess—remember that what’s good for Auntie Israel is what’s most prudent for Uncle Sam. Or, put another way, don’t throw the Bibi out with the bathwater.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
Segment aired March 28, 2015 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
All content (c)2015 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews author, mime and artist Paulette Frankl
Topics include: Marcel Marceau, mime, Tony Serra, courtroom sketches.
Segment aired March 21, 2015 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
All content (c)2015 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews SCTV costume legend Juul Haalmeyer
Topics include: Second City Television, costumes, Toronto, Holland
Segment aired March 14, 2015 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
All content (c)2015 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #119 (3/8/2015): Dave’s 500th
aired March 7, 2015 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/SJrDutZ8dpc
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of March 8, 2015.
Some inventions in this world are amazingly useful, life-changing, relevant, exciting, and crucial to every single person on the planet. And then there’s radio. Oh sure, 80 years ago, if you lived on a farm with one telegraph pole and a half-dead chicken, being able to dial your wireless to hear the latest barn dance down the road was a blessing. Think of families in the Forties, gathered around the console to hear Fred Allen, The Shadow, Fibber McGee, Father Coughlin — everyone staring at the speaker as if waiting, waiting, waiting for David Sarnoff to invent television so they wouldn’t look like idiots staring at nothing all night.
Well, eventually, television did come. As did walkmen, and video games and iTunes and Netflix, and now the only people who listen to radio are the ones who — no, nobody listens to radio. Except blind people. And even they’re watching television; they just think it’s radio. However, despite the obsolescence of Arch Obeler, some people still MAKE radio! Don Quixotes tilting at the windmills of modern media, not caring that while the rest of the world is using washer-dryers, they’re still bashing dirty clothes on a rock. Yet that is part of the mystique that still affords radio whatever charm it has left. A human at a microphone reaching through the airwaves to communicate with another human stuck at a red light.
Even in this hypersaturated visual era, some radio personalities have broken through to become superstars: Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, the dead guy who laughed a lot on that car show — yes, radio has been bery bery good to .00003 percent of the population. And then there’s Dave Lefkowitz. Twelve and a half years ago, not content with being an underpaid arts journalist, a marginally produced playwright and an unemployable actor, Dave tried his hand at the media world’s oldest profession. He knew he wanted to do something different but not too different, since Jews are terrified of risk. And he knew he wanted to be funny and interesting and worth spending time with. It never worked with women, so he figured it might work with listeners. In a musical market then dominated by Celine Dion, Britney Spears and Hoobastank, Dave wanted to play Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Tom Lehrer, and Shooby Taylor. (Personally, I don’t think he plays enough Rabbi Moshe Koussevitsky, but that’s just me.) Dave also wanted to talk to heroes of his youth, like Doctor Demento, Joe Franklin, and the opera fanatic who talked like he was castrated but nevertheless was shockingly heterosexual.
These people did appear on Dave’s Gone By, as did Neil Sedaka, Carl Reiner, Carol Channing, Charles Grodin, Bonnie Franklin, Sheldon Harnick, Dick Cavett, Judy Collins and, most importantly, yours truly. I was on that very first episode, October 6th, 2002. It was 11 o’clock at night on a Sunday, so you can tell just how important the station thought this new show would be. That station is still around by the way, except now, all day long, they play news and music in Mandarin Chinese. It’s a brilliant strategy, actually, because you hear it, and then an hour later, you wanna hear it over again. But back then, the station was a lot more eclectic, and Dave came on with his jokes and sketches and theater reviews and oddball segues, and I have to say my radio was never the same again. Because I dropped it in the toilet while I was listening.
But as I said, I was on the debut show, offering my benediction for success and an important public-service segment about monitoring for breast cancer. My small hope was to alert women to the importance of early screening — by having them come down to the station and let me check their boobs for lumps. That didn’t quite work out, but my connection to Dave’s Gone By was solidified that night, joined together…like an unidentified fibrous mass under a nipple. Since then, it has been a joy and an honor to be a dweller in the Daverhood. I get to share my weekly Rabbinical Reflections on this program, where I can rant and rave and embarrass Dave. These reflections have encompassed everything from Coca Cola to gay rights to Regis Philbin to the relentless insanity of the Arab world. Considering some of the things I’ve said, it’s a miracle I haven’t had my head handed to me – literally, by some English yutz in ISIS.
Think about what radio has come to. Go up and down the dial, and what do you hear? Obnoxious debt consolidators, obnoxious mariachi music, obnoxious preachers spouting that Jesus is the answer to everything when we all know that chocolate is the answer to everything. You’ve got your right-wing, talk-radio goons who think our President is worse than AIDS, and you’ve got your hand-wringing, public-radio schlemiels who think we should cut off Israel’s aid. You get one classical-music station that’s always playing Mozart, because nobody can tolerate anything else. And, of course, 20 rock stations doing their own unique formats of top-40 pop, which all uniquely suck dog poop in their own unique ways.
Somewhere in that vast audio wasteland, you also get sports talk, lite jazz–which is what the devil listens to when he’s not torturing bin Laden—and commercials, commercials, commercials, commercials, commercials, commercials, public-service announcements, commercials, station IDs and commercials. Thank haShem for college radio: for a few spots on the dial that have real kids with quirky personalities playing the shitty music that they love. At least it means something to them.
My friend Dave has found a home on college radio, and so have I. Especially since we both like co-eds. UNC Radio may be a pup tent in a land of high rises, but we can speak freely and not fit into some politically correct, constrained, corporate idea of what a deejay is, or what a Rabbi is, or, in the case of Bill Clinton, what “is” is. And besides, everyone says fame and fortune can make you just as miserable as poverty and obscurity. To which I say, “Prove it! Prove it on me! I am so ready to be miserably wealthy, you can’t imagine!”
But I digress. Dave, my friend, my acolyte, my Miller Lite, mazel tov on your 500th radio program of the air. It’s an achievement that speaks to your tenacity, your talent, your endurance, your inflated ego, and your belief that a moribund medium can still reach one or two lonely people out there, in the dark, who aren’t necessarily serial killers.
Radio isn’t always an honorable or dignified profession, but Dave, that’s why it suits you. I wish you 500 more shows – nay, 5,000! 5,000,000! 5 shmagillion – whatever comes after that. I know you’ll keep doing radio as long as the inspiration holds. And when inspiration goes and you have nothing left to say? Well, there’s always blogging.
Until then, Dave Lefkowitz: more you, more me, immortality. This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of March 1, 2015.
(sings) Shout hallelujah, come on, get happy! It’s the Purim holiday Though the rest of the year is crappy We can drink all our blues away.”
Yes, my friends, this Wednesday night, the Purim holiday arrives, bringing with it the chance to celebrate our Jewishness, to dress up in funny costumes, and to recall a time in our history when, like the Crusades and the Holocaust, we were almost wiped out but saved at the last minute. Actually, no Jews died on Purim, so as happy holidays go, this one’s like hitting Lotto on the day your baby’s born.
On Purim, we read the Book of Esther — returning it to her after we’re done — and we rejoice in a holiday that is truly about fun. F – U – N. I spell it out, not because I’m worried the FCC thought I said something else, but because “fun” is not a word we often associate with my tribe, so we grab it when we can get it. And I get it on these Rabbinical Reflections by sometimes sharing jokes with a Jew-y theme and a Purim-packed punchline.
Our first joke is about my cousin Irving, who lives in Brooklyn and gets on a bus. He’s carrying this big duffel bag, and he asks the driver if he can get a senior discount. The driver looks at him funny and says, “You don’t look a day over 40. Show me some ID.” “I left my wallet at home,” says Irving. “All I have is change for the bus. But I still I demand a senior discount.”
“You’re not old enough!” yells the driver. “What are you trying to pull?”
“How dare you!” screams Irving. “I demand my rights!”
The two start arguing and going back and forth and screaming. Finally, the bus driver gets fed up. He pulls to the curb, opens the doors, grabs the duffel bag and hurls it from the bus onto the sidewalk.
“You bastard!” says Irving. “Just because I wouldn’t pay full fare, you try to kill my son?”
Now, this joke trades upon two of the worst stereotypes you can foist upon the Jewish people: we’re cheap and conniving. We would do anything to save a penny, including lying and cheating. How this became a quote-unquote “Jewish” characteristic is beyond me. Ask a Scotsman. And it’s a hard stereotype to fight because I am stingy and proud of it! I’ll clip every coupon, I’ll visit museums only on free nights, I’ll bring a doggy bag to restaurants – not just for my leftovers, but from anyone else who wants to donate. In a world where one percent of the population keeps 90 percent of the money, who am I to play the big shot?
However, to intimate that the Jewish race is so miserly as to commit knowing and brazen fraud is an ugly over-generalization. For every Bernard Madoff, you’ll find a dozen philanthropists. For every Yid who doesn’t tip a waitress, there are two dozen who overpay just so they don’t look cheap. So please, bear that in mind when you see me in the hallway at the multiplex next week, sneaking from “American Sniper” to the SpongeBob movie. I’m already in the building; I should pay twice to go in a different room?
Anyhoo, let’s move on to our next verbal amusement. Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin are sitting in a Berlin bar in the late 1920s. They’re planning and plotting and dreaming and scheming when an American tourist takes the stool next to them. “Hiya,” says the stranger. “I’m Chris from Ohio.”
“Nice to meet you,” says Hitler. “I’m Adolf, and this is my friend, Josef from Russia. We’re in politics, and we’re strategizing a great social undertaking. We’re going to murder six million Jews and a bicycle repairman.”
“Wow,” says the stranger. “Why a bicycle repairman?”
“See?” Hitler whispers to Stalin. “I told you nobody cares about the Jews.”
This joke has a dark underpinning because had these lunatics stayed friendly and non-aggressive, they truly would have succeeded in exterminating the Jewish population. Mercifully, this did not occur because HaShem hardened Hitler’s ego and made him fight on two fronts. Why God waited until 1945 to stop Der Fuhrer is a question that even the wisest Talmudic spin doctors lose sleep over, but since this is Purim, I’m not going to. I’m just going to tell one more joke.
An Italian mafioso and his Jewish lawyer are walking down the streets of Rome when they see a curvaceous lady bend over to fix her shoe. “Mamma mia!” says the mafioso. “I would love to screw her.”
“Really?” says the lawyer. “Out of what?”
Ahh, lawyers. Where would humor be without them? Actually, on the scale of evil, Wall Street tycoons have leapfrogged over attorneys in the annals of disdain — maybe because we need lawyers to put all these stockbrokers in prison. Still, with litigation the second-most popular American pastime after football, it’s hard to stick up for lawyers, since they’ve been sticking up taxpayers for years.
And before women complain that the joke has a sexist component because just the sight of an attractive lady bending over turns grown men into wolverines, please remember that just the sight of an attractive lady bending over turns grown men into wolverines. It’s funny because it’s true. So…
(sings) Hallelujah, come on, get happy We’re gonna laugh at offensive yoks So if hot women get you fappy Grab some baby oil and two old socks
Happy Purim everybody! This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of February 22nd, 2015.
Problems in the Middle East got you down? Sick of the fighting over healthcare and immigration between the left and the right? Constipated by last night’s meal? (I know I am.) We’re still in the ass-end of winter, the Super Bowl has come and gone, and Purim is mainly for kids, so hurray for the Academy Awards, here to give grownups a shpritz of glitz and a glimpse of glamour, if only for a night. It’s a chance to forget our woes and wallow in Hollywood worship. Three-and-a-half hours of people who make more money in a week than you will in a lifetime, patting each other on the back over just how hard their jobs are.
I’m being sarcastic but, you know, you can take 80 million dollars and make a piece of drek, or you can take that same amount of money and create something memorable and touching and fun. Or best of all, you can take 80 million dollars, give me two million, and I don’t give a crap what you do with the rest.
Anyhoo, this year’s Oscar roster is an eclectic bunch. It seems they always are now that they allow something like 37 movies up for Best Picture. There’s been controversy this season over how white all the acting nominees are. Not one best or featured actor is a person of color – unless you count Robert Duvall, who’s grey, or Benedict Cumberbatch, who, if he were a paint, would be eggshell.
This could be pushback from last year, when “12 Years a Slave” won for best picture, and you had African actors up for other prizes. Considering what John Travolta did to that nice Jewish girl Idina Menzel, maybe the Academy is just terrified of what he’d do to “Selma” actors like David Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo.
Up for Best Picture is “Selma” – so I feel bad for her sister, Patti – as is “American Sniper,” which is also controversial because in one scene, Bradley Cooper is holding a baby, but it’s obviously a plastic doll. The screenwriter later tweeted that the first infant got sick and the second didn’t show up, so they had to go with a fake. Still, viewers are crying foul, saying how dare Clint Eastwood ask us to use our imaginations and suspend disbelief. That’s what Fox News is for.
Vying with “Selma” and “American Sniper” for Oscar honors are “Birdman,” “Whiplash,” “Boyhood,” The Grand Budapest Hotel,” The Imitation Game,” and “The Theory of Everything.” “Birdman” is about a washed-up actor who keeps trying to make a comeback on Broadway. Or, as I like to call it, the Tony Danza Story. “Whiplash” stars J.K. Simmons as a music teacher so obnoxious and abusive, he missed his calling and should have become a New York City cop.
Then you’ve got “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” a Wes Anderson confection about an old man who can’t give up the one thing that keeps him young. Or, as I call it, The Bill Cosby Story.
We also have “The Imitation Game,” which tells the tale of Alan Turing, a genius who cracked the Nazi code in World War II, only to be hounded to suicide because he was a faigeleh. The tragedy of Alan Turing is that he voluntarily underwent chemical castration, when all he had to do was find the right woman, marry her, and she’d castrate him every day of his life.
Also up for the big prize is “Boyhood,” a story of adolescence that has the critics kvelling because Richard Linklater shot it over the course of 12 years. That’s not inspiration, that’s laziness. Instead of using makeup and padding to make Patricia Arquette look old and fat, he let God do it.
And finally we come to “The Theory of Everything,” a bio-pic about astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. You know, the guy who wrote “A Brief History of Time,” which everyone bought but no one could understand. Kind of like Reaganomics. The point of the movie is that Hawking didn’t let Lou Gehrig’s disease cramp his mojo, especially since it didn’t affect his brain. Well, not until 2013, when that homely hobbit chose to boycott Israel over its supposed mistreatment of the Palestinians. The only black holes Stephen Hawking should be concerned with are the ones in Muslims’ hearts.
So there you have it: the nominees for the 87th annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles. I would be remiss, however, not to mention one of the nominees for best Foreign Film: “Ida,” about a Polish woman who’s about to become a Catholic nun when she learns that her parents, murdered during the Holocaust, were actually Jewish. You can tell that the movie is Polish because it’s set in 1872. Just kidding. You might also check out the Animated Feature Film nominee called “The Boxtrolls,” just because that’s what they really should rename the remaining women on “The View.”
So everyone get your popcorn, your ballot sheets, your No-Doz for Sunday night, February 22nd, when the Oscars arrive and all’s right with America. I’ll miss Joan Rivers on the Red Carpet. Though she was more fun on the kitchen table. Again, just kidding. In closing, I’d like to thank the Academy, my parents and the Lord. And I’m not even schvartz.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews theatrical producer Stewart F. Lane
Topics include: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Black Broadway, The Will Rogers Follies. theater, Broadway, Jews.
Segment aired Feb. 14, 2015 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
All content (c)2015 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of February 8th, 2015.
What is the purpose of education? In an idealistic sense, it is to broaden the mind, to open young people to a world greater than themselves that they have to wade into in order to become productive members of society. Or, more simply put: live and learn. But one can also say the purpose of education is to take a bunch of kids who are too stupid to be left alone during post-adolescence, and corral them all in one place before we inflict them willy-nilly upon the planet.
Well, you don’t get kids much dumber – or potentially dangerous – than the yutzes at UC Davis, the University of California, Davis. Pro-Palestinian, liberal wackjob teenagers, who comprise the rotting corpse that is the student body, voted to boycott Israel over the country’s treatment of the poor, poor Palis. In a vote that passed 8 to 2, these bleeding-heart buttheads recommended that the University divest itself of all business dealings with the land of milk and honey. The SJP, whose letters stand for Students for Justice in Palestine (though they could just as easily stand for Suck my Jewish Penis), the SJP cheered and waved Palestinian flags as the vote went down in their favor. Best of all, as Jewish and pro-Israel students shuffled out of the meeting hall, the Arab-sympathizers began chanting, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.”
Now, where have we heard that poem before? Oh yeah, every time a Muslim with a grudge and an AK-47 decides to vent his spleen on a bunch of innocent civilians, those are the words: “Allahu Akbar.” It may sound like a religious prayer, but it’s more like a death yell. We heard it from Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people in Fort Hood a few years ago, and we heard it last month, with a French accent, when the Koran Krazies lit into Charlie Hebdo for drawing cartoons.
I don’t need to tell you how I feel about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But I will anyway. As I’ve said fifteen quadrillion times, Israel is a country — the size of a postage stamp — created after the Holocaust for Jewish people to finally have their own homeland. Anyone else on it either has to live by Israel’s rules or get the Allah out. And if you live in a country bordering Israel, or on land Israel gave back in the vain hope of trading acreage for peace, you better not be hostile, or we’re gonna stomp you like a wine glass at a wedding. But alas, up until that time, it’s the Arabs and their misguided sympathizers that do the violence, over and over again.
After the UC Davis vote – that the SJP won – the anti-Semites weren’t even satisfied with that! Two days later, someone painted swastikas on the walls of the Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi. (Actually, they should call it Aleph Epsom-Saltz Chai, but that’s for another time.)
It’s unclear whether this act was perpetrated by Arabs or just white kids goaded by all the latent Hebrewphobia stirred up by the vote. Either way, UC Davis has a nasty hurricane coming. I don’t mean a riot. I mean the whooshing sound of Jewish students exiting a place of higher learning that has sunk to a valley of lower squirming. It’s the sound of Jewish alumni divesting their donations and bequests from UCD and sending them to the UJA. It’s the whooshing sound of freshman applications – and application fees – being turned into paper kites because little Missy Horowitz and her 1500 SAT score now chooses to attend USC or UC Berkeley instead.
People at the University say the graffiti and the protests and threats are coming from outside sources and not the college kids themselves. How convenient. You light a torch and you wonder why someone behind you screams fire. Well, I’m screaming, too. Screaming at the retarded students of UC Davis who buy into this wahh-wahh, right-of-return, push-Israel-off-the-map garbage. And all this time, what’s been happening in the Arab world? More beheadings, hostages being burned alive, kidnapping and attacks – business as usual in the radical Muslim cyclone everywhere they are. And yet Israel is the bad guy.
Students of UC Davis, in my gradebook, you get an F for Flunk and a U for Uninformed. I realize you probably can’t spell, so I’ll put them together for ya: F. U.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
