As a former JJBL All-Star, I feel obligated to report this:

Israel rallied behind Yaniv Green's 26 points and 12 rebounds to beat Serbia 87-83 Wednesday, sending the Serbs to their earliest exit from the European Championship in 60 years.

The highly favored Serbian squad featured NBA players Darco Milicic and Marco Jaric. 

Earlier today, the Israelis completed an unprecedented Serbo-Croatian sweep by upsetting Croatia 80-75.

While a number of Israelis have starred in the NCAA and others have been selected in the NBA draft (Israel team players Lior Eliayahu and Yotam Halperin were both 2nd round picks in 2006), we are still awaiting the first Sabra to join the NBA.  For now, Israelis will have to be content with Eurobasket victories and the  success of  the Toronto Raptors' Anthony Parker, the former Maccabbi Tel Aviv star who in a shout-out to his Israeli fans wears the number 18.

This week marked the installation of Arnold Eisen as the new Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.  In appointing Eisen, the Conservative movement has taken the radical step of selecting someone who has actually has signigicant knowledge of the world outside the gates of the Jewish Hogwarts.  (As a side point, I think JTS would be much cooler if it sorted its incoming classes into Houses - who wouldn't want to see a good game of Talmudic Quidditch between Heschel House and Kaplan House?)

Eisen's ascension inspired the Forward to host a forum on the perenially popular topic of the Conservative Movement's ongoing malaise, the theme of outgoing chancellor Schorsch's caustic goodbye speech.  The Forward had the foresight to include some fresher voices along with the usual suspects.

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This week, Reform Grand Rebbe Eric Yoffie spoke at the convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In his speech, Yoffie deplored the "profound ignorance" of Islam in the US, and its demonization by "opportunists." Yet at the same time, Yoffie challenged American Muslims to combat the anti-Semitism that is rampant in the Muslim world.

The Reform movement determined that ISNA was a genuine partner for interfaith dialogue after it shifted its position from terrorism is bad (except when it is against Israel) to terrorism is bad (even when it kills Jews.) ISNA's efforts to allay Jewish concerns were met with skepticism elsewhere in Jewish Alphabet soup.

Yoffie's overture drew criticism from David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee.

"Here is another discredited group eager for mainstream recognition," Harris wrote in a blog on the Web site of The Jerusalem Post. "Inadvertently, in the name of inter-religious dialogue, [Yoffie] gave it."

Fortunately for ISNA, while the URJ represents 1.5 million congregants, a plurality of affiliated American Jews, while the AJC represents...the AJC (although to be fair, it performs its role as the Jewish Brookings Institution quite ably).

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The findings in the most recent Kelman/Cohen studyare not as blazingly obvious as "men want hot women", but they are nonetheless unsurprising.

Based on the responses of more than 1,700 non-Orthodox American Jews of all ages, the study indicates that successively younger age groups show a greater detachment from the State of Israel.

According to the report, which was based on statistics collected as part of the 2007 National Survey of American Jews between December 20, 2006, and January 28, 2007, less than half of Jews under the age of 35 believe Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy, compared to 78 percent of those over 65. Sixty-six percent of Jews aged 50-64 believe it would be a personal tragedy, compared to 54% aged 35-49.

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Controversy continues to swirl around the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York and (as Michael previously noted) its bizarro cousin, the Hebrew-language Ben Gamla charter school in Hollywood, Florida. The criticism of both schools is driven by skepticism regarding the secular nature of the schools. It is easy to dismiss the critics as the usual suspects, from Daniel Pipes to the ACLU, but the schools have also drawn criticism from less ideological figures. Recently in the New York Times Magazine, Jewcy's favorite constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman took the view that the projects of isolating Islam from a Arab cultural curriculum and Judaism from Jewish cultural curriculum were ultimately futile tasks, and therefore both schools were of dubious constitutional legitimacy.

Although it cannot be known for certain before they have begun instruction, Khalil Gibran and Ben Gamla seem poised to teach religion as a set of beliefs to be embraced rather than as a set of ideas susceptible to secular, critical examination. What, after all, is the point of a Jewish cultural school if not to bring the students to appreciation and acceptance of Jewish values? And what are those values if not the outgrowth of Judaism's millenniums of religious faith and practice? Not that Judaism without God is impossible. Secular Zionism sought to redirect yearning for God's redemption toward a national homeland. Likewise, Arab nationalism was born from the effort to supplant Islamic religious membership with a secular, cultural identity. But in both cases, the surgery designed to excise God was only partly successful, and there is ample reason to anticipate a recurrence in the classroom as there has been in the rest of the world.

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