Replay: My China Jewish Studies Lecture Tour of 1991

Several years ago in 1991 I traveled to China and I prayed while touring at the Great Wall outside Beijing.

But that was a sidelight to my China trip. The real purpose of my travel to Beijing was to lecture at the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and conduct other academic meetings throughout China. In Beijing I spoke to the group of fourteen Chinese academics for ninety minutes through a translator. Few of the scholars there spoke much English. I described in some detail my research on the development of Jewish prayer in the time of the Mishnah and Talmud.

Jews: on the Chinese Minds
Who would think that Chinese professors would be interested in Judaism? Professor Kong Fan, director of the Institute, my host, is a specialist in Confucianism. He is also a seventy-fourth generation descendant of that venerable teacher and happy to hear of my admiration for the teachings of Confucius. Professor Zhuo Xinping, deputy director of the Institute and specialist in Christian Studies and Dai Kangshang, specialist in Islamic Studies, and several other scholars and graduate students contributed to the discussion in this seminar.

Were J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller Jewish?

Were J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller Jewish? No, they were not Jews. But many people in China think that they were. An utterly amazing positive stereotype of Jews permeates China.

I felt this great warmth when I visited in 1991 as a professor of Jewish Studies. I was invited to lecture at universities and institutes and was treated like royalty.

Chinese equate Jews with wealth
By ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA, WASHINGTON POST NEWS SERVICE

SHANGHAI, China -- Showcased in bookstores between biographies of Andrew Carnegie and the newest treatise by China's president are stacks of works built on a stereotype.

One promises "The Eight Most Valuable Business Secrets of the Jewish."

Another title teases readers with "The Legend of Jewish Wealth." A third provides a look at "Jewish People and Business: The Bible of How to Live Their Lives."

Professor Alan Segal wrote about the Afterlife, Heaven and Hell

Alan Segal taught religion at Barnard College. We returned just now from his funeral. It is so sad to lose such a brilliant scholar and wonderful friend. We are re-posting our brief notice of his wonderful book.

For ten years Alan worked on this book Life After Death (880 pages, Doubleday, 2004) subtitled, A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion.

This brilliant book is chock full of quality facts and insights and rightfully takes it place among those sweeping, comprehensive and analytical interdisciplinary works on great ideas in western culture.

This is a work by an accomplished scholar for others who seek humanistic understanding. Segal does not advocate for the existence of a realm called heaven or hell. He treats religious ideas in general as mirrors of cultural creativity. Each society writes its own imaginary, fictional account of what the afterlife looks like in accord with its own particular social and historical reality.

Those readers who cherish books that deal with sweeping histories of ideas will find much excitement and nuance here. If you liked the intellectual journey in The Great Chain of Being by Arthur O. Lovejoy or The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, you will find much more to like here.

YouTube Video: Michael Freund Helps Bring Chinese Jews from Kaifeng to Israel

Michael Freund and Shavei Yisrael help bring Chinese Jews from Kaifeng to Israel.
Hat tip to Henry.

Times: Reform Buddhism on the UWS of Manhattan

Not to worry. We are not converting to Reform Buddhism or any other Reform type of relgion.

In 2006 we read about Buddhism With a New Mind-Set - in the New York Times:

"Western spiritual seekers who have focused on meditation have fueled a remarkable growth in Buddhist practice in the United States. So what to do if you are part of an ancient Buddhist tradition that is huge in Asia but has failed to catch on in the United States, in part because it has no real place for meditation?"

The Times reported that Rev. T. Kenjitsu Nakagaki (they call a monk a reverend) has added meditation to his Pure Land Buddhist service in his Upper West Side NY Buddhist Church (they call a Temple a Church). If this sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Reform Judaism, or at least of assimilationist Judaism, reporter Luo makes the comparison more explicit.

"In some ways, the story line is familiar. Religious traditions have long adapted to fit changing cultural circumstances. Consider how Hanukkah, a relatively minor holiday on the Jewish religious calendar, has leaped in importance among many Jews in the face of the crush of attention surrounding Christmas in this country. But while Zen and Tibetan Buddhism — the Buddhist forms that have largely driven the religion's surge among Western practitioners — focus on meditative practices as a way to achieve enlightenment, Shin Buddhism, the Pure Land school that the Buddhist Churches of America embraces, teaches that meditation is ultimately useless because of the inherent human limitations."

Finding this Pure American "give-the-people-what-they-want" philosophy in Buddhism is jarring but not surprising. After all this is the Upper West Side - where women study Talmud and Pure Land Buddhists practice meditation. Wow. Anything goes. //repost from 6/13/06//

Times: 1700 Years of Universal Talmudic Male Literacy Helped the Jews Succeed in America

Times op-ed writer Nicholas Kristof makes a startling observation in the midst of his analysis about why Asians, Jews and West Indian blacks have succeeded at an above average rate in America.

Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy — the better to read the Talmud — some 1,700 years before any other group...The parallel force in China was Confucianism and its reverence for education.

We thank Kristoff for his endorsement of the values and achievements of our learning. We think though that it's not just the literacy of the Talmudic culture, but also the content of what is taught.

A Talmudic life is a traditional, critical and examined life. The entire ethos of Talmudic society, as well as that of its correlatives in the other cases, that is to say, what people read and how they are taught to think - all of that is more important to achievement than the raw skills of literacy.

Here are a few other excerpts from the article.

Rising Above I.Q.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us.

Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.

As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.

West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.

These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.

Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.

“I think the evidence is very good that there is no genetic contribution to the black-white difference on I.Q.,” he said, adding that there also seems to be no genetic difference in intelligence between whites and Asians. As for Jews, some not-very-rigorous studies have found modestly above-average I.Q. for Ashkenazi Jews, though not for Sephardic Jews. Dr. Nisbett is somewhat skeptical, noting that these results emerge from samples that may not be representative.

In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have....

Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”

The Australian: Ian Buruma's Urgent Report on Antisemitism in Asia

Of course, the antisemitic stories that circulate in Asia are "myths" - that is untrue narratives. Still, it's not a rosy picture that Ian Buruma paints of the spread of antisemitism in Asia. This is something we all ought to know about and start working to combat before the stories become "myths" - that is stories that people accept as true because they are part of their faith systems. This is an important article by a writer of substance.

Asia's Jewish myths
Ian Buruma

A CHINESE bestseller titled The Currency War describes how Jews are planning to rule the world by manipulating the international financial system. The book is reportedly read in the highest government circles. If so, this does not bode well for the international financial system, which relies on well-informed Chinese to help it recover from the present crisis.

Such conspiracy theories are not rare in Asia. Japanese readers have shown a healthy appetite over the years for books such as To Watch Jews is to See the World Clearly, The Next Ten Years: How to Get an Inside View of the Jewish Protocols and I'd Like to Apologise to the Japanese - A Jewish Elder's Confession (written by a Japanese author, of course, under the made-up name of Mordecai Mose). All these books are variations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian forgery first published in 1903, which the Japanese came across after defeating the tsar's army in 1905.

The Chinese picked up many modern Western ideas from the Japanese. Perhaps this is how Jewish conspiracy theories were passed on as well. But Southeast Asians are not immune to this kind of nonsense either. Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed has said that "the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." And a recent article in a leading business magazine in The Philippines explained how Jews had always controlled the countries they lived in, including the US today.

In the case of Mahathir, a twisted kind of Muslim solidarity is probably at work. But, unlike European or Russian anti-Semitism, the Asian variety has no religious roots. No Chinese or Japanese has blamed Jews for killing their holy men or believed that their children's blood ended up in Passover matzos. In fact, few Chinese, Japanese, Malaysians, or Filipinos have ever seen a Jew, unless they have spent time abroad.

So what explains the remarkable appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories in Asia? The answer must be partly political. Conspiracy theories thrive in relatively closed societies, where free access to news is limited and freedom of inquiry curtailed. Japan is no longer such a closed society, yet even people with a short history of democracy are prone to believe that they are victims of unseen forces. Precisely because Jews are relatively unknown, therefore mysterious, and in some way associated with the West, they become an obvious fixture of anti-Western paranoia.

Such paranoia is widespread in Asia, where almost every country was at the mercy of Western powers for several hundred years. Japan was never formally colonised, but it too felt the West's dominance, at least since the 1850s, when American ships laden with heavy guns forced the country to open its borders on Western terms.

The common conflation of the US with Jews goes back to the late 19th century, when European reactionaries loathed America for being a rootless society based only on financial greed. This perfectly matched the stereotype of the rootless cosmopolitan Jewish moneygrubber. Hence the idea that Jews run America.

One of the great ironies of colonial history is the way in which colonised people adopted some of the same prejudices that justified colonial rule. Anti-Semitism arrived with a whole package of European race theories that have persisted in Asia well after they fell out of fashion in the West.

In some ways, Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia have shared some of the hostility suffered by Jews in the West. Excluded from many occupations, they too survived by clannishness and trade. They too have been persecuted for not being "sons of the soil". And they too are thought to have superhuman powers when it comes to making money. So when things go wrong, the Chinese are blamed not just for being greedy capitalists, but also, again like the Jews, for being communists, as both capitalism and communism are associated with rootlessness and cosmopolitanism.

As well as being feared, the Chinese are admired for being cleverer than everybody else. The same mixture of fear and awe is often evident in people's views of the US and, indeed, of the Jews. Japanese anti-Semitism is a particularly interesting case.

Japan was able to defeat Russia in 1905 only after a Jewish banker in New York, Jacob Schiff, helped Japan by floating bonds. So The Protocols of the Elders of Zion confirmed what the Japanese already suspected: Jews really did pull the strings of global finance. However, instead of wishing to attack them, the Japanese, being a practical people, decided they would be better off cultivating those clever, powerful Jews as friends.

As a result, during World War II, even as the Germans were asking their Japanese allies to round up Jews and hand them over, dinners were held in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to celebrate Japanese-Jewish friendship. Jewish refugees in Shanghai, though never comfortable, at least remained alive under Japanese protection.

This was good for the Jews of Shanghai. But the very ideas that helped them to survive continue to muddle the thinking of people who really ought to know better by now.

Forbes: Greenberg to Jews - China Good!

If I recall correctly, a good deal of Hank Greenberg's wealth stems from the businesses he built up for AIG in China.

Businessweek reported for instance,

Long Yongtu, the chief negotiator for China's entry into the WTO -- is quick to note that "Mr. Greenberg is the most famous U.S. business leader in this country. Perhaps most important, he is a long-standing friend of the Chinese people."

That he does not mention that aspect of his biography in his Forbes Op-Ed article, detracts from the authority of Greenberg's opinion that we should not boycott the Olympics and that Jews should not call for such a boycott.

Anyway, I agree with MRG on this issue.

Commentary
Jews: Don't Boycott The Olympics!
Maurice R. ''Hank'' Greenberg

I am angered by the ill-advised suggestion by the group of rabbis and other Jewish leaders who have said that the U.S. should boycott the Olympic Games in China. The idea that the Tibet issues in China have any similarity to the Nazi Holocaust demonstrates an appalling misunderstanding of history....more

JTA: ADL Says China is not Nazi Germany

Well, doh, what were the rabbis thinking?

The ADL zaps the China boycott rabbis.

ADL rejects Beijing boycott call

The Anti-Defamation League rejected a call for Jewish tourists to boycott the Beijing Olympics.

The group's statement Thursday came a day after 185 Jewish leaders, mostly clergy representing the major movements, called on Jews not to attend the Olympics. The leaders cited China's role in propping up the Sudan regime while the genocide continues in Sudan's Darfur region, as well as repression in Tibet.

The ADL also said their comparisons with the 1936 Berlin games were inappropriate....

USA Today: Dini's Kosher Restaurant 蒂妮犹太餐厅 Opens in Beijing China

Revolutionary news from China. When I was in Beijing back in 1991, we schlepped around our own boxes of matza and jars of gefilte fish.

Now you can eat out at Dini's. Try it out at:
32 Tianze Lu, Jiangtai Xiang
20m east of Grape restaurant
将台乡天泽路32号
女人街星吧路酒吧街内
6461-6220
www.kosherbeijing.com
6461-3735 (fax)
Open 11am-2pm; 6pm-10pm
Price Y300-Y399 per couple

Beijing Olympics going Kosher with food safety issues driving a mini-boom
By Stephen Wade, AP Sports Writer

BEIJING — Beijing and the Olympics are going Kosher.

The capital's only Kosher restaurant opened 10 months ago, drawing the small Jewish expatriate community, tourists, curious Chinese and even a few Muslims. Business has been so good at Dini's Kosher Restaurant, that part-owner Lewis Sperber is talking about setting up a second branch closer to the Olympic venues in northern Beijing.

Like many restaurateurs and bar owners, Sperber is hoping to benefit with as many as 550,000 foreigners expected to descend on Beijing for the Aug. 8-24 Games.

"What we've thought about is preparing sandwiches and other items at a venue closer than we are now to the Olympic sites," Sperber said. "If people leave the Olympics and want a Kosher meal, we could have a place for them."

Eating Kosher - food that meets Jewish dietary laws - is hardly a raging fad. However, there is a real boom is the number of Chinese factories being certified to export Kosher products. This is driven partially by recent food safety scares in China involving contaminated seafood, pet food and toothpaste....

China to Buddha: Fill out this reincarnation form in triplicate

China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate
The rules effectively exclude the Dali Lama from any role in recognising a living Buddha
Jane Macartney in Beijing

Tibet’s living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China’s atheist leaders. The ban is included in new rules intended to assert Beijing’s authority over Tibet’s restive and deeply Buddhist people.

“The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid,” according to the order, which comes into effect on September 1. more...

Chinese Scholar Xu Xin in the Forward

I met Xu Xin in Nanjing in 1991. I'm happy to say that I helped answer some of his questions while he was engaged in translating the Encyclopedia Judaica into Chinese. When he visited NJ he stayed with us in our home.

He's written a nice article this week for the Forward:

Chinese Open New Chapter With the People of the Book

Xu Xin | 04/20/07

The Chinese and Jewish cultures are both great, rich civilizations. These two major societies developed highly civilized forms in ancient times and persist until today, keeping continuous recorded accounts of their origins. Each of them has had a significant impact on world history, although the two cultures seldom met. As a result, not much was known in China about Jews, Jewish culture and Israel until recently. During my first visit to Israel and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1988, I made the sweeping statement that…Read more

NY Times: Chinese Want to be Kosher - 'Trust, schmust!'

The Chinese understand that Kosher means more customers. Beyond that they do not have a clue. Hence the company that want their chairs to be certified Kosher.

China's plants clamor to go kosher

The People's Republic is home to only 3,000 Jews, but businesses there covet a certification that allows them to tap a $150 billion global market

By Evan Osnos
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published April 1, 2007

BEIJING -- Rabbi Shimon Freundlich picked up the phone in Beijing, and a Chinese factory boss launched his pitch. He wanted to join the growing ranks of Chinese exporters who have earned a kosher seal of approval.

He promised to follow the rules and to welcome surprise inspections. So, the rabbi asked, what's the product?

"Tables and chairs," came the reply.

A bit more enthusiastic than knowledgeable, China's factory owners are clamoring to go kosher. In an odd-couple embrace that only global commerce could produce, more than 2,000 Chinese plants have been certified in the past decade under Jewish dietary laws in hopes of tapping a world trade estimated at $150 billion a year.

Among them, up to 50 factories also have been certified to the stricter standard reserved for Passover, rabbis say. So when Jews worldwide sit down Monday for a Passover Seder, something made in China might well be on the table.

China is churning out a growing list of kosher products, from canned vegetables to candy to unpronounceable enzymes. The New York-based Orthodox Union, which administers the world's largest kosher trademark, is on pace to double in one year the 300 plants it has certified in China.

"Every two weeks we get applications from 15 or 20 new plants," said the Union's Rabbi Mordechai Grunberg, who oversees factories across China.

Until recently, China's underdeveloped infrastructure made it nearly impossible for rabbis to crisscross the People's Republic inspecting factories to ensure, for example, that there is no pork or shellfish anywhere near a production line.

Grunberg learned that lesson in 1981, when he visited Shanghai to inspect a citric-acid plant.

"I got to the hotel and I had no telephone, nobody spoke English, there was no contact to meet me and there were rats," he said. "I went right back to the airport and just waited for the flight back to New York."

He did not set foot in China again for 21 years.

Today, Grunberg can journey to the Tibetan plateau to watch nomadic dairy producers and ensure that no milk is added from non-kosher animals. The next week he can be in China's frigid north, checking for insects in a garlic storehouse.

Hub of global supply chain

The sudden demand for certification underscores China's unique role in global supply chains. Shipments of frozen fish from Alaska and Greenland come all the way to China for processing and kosher inspection, only to be reshipped to the U.S. for sale.

In one case, Freundlich found himself at the crossroads of centuries-old tradition and 21st Century shipping: He faced thousands of pounds of Alaskan fish but had no way to know that each fish met the kosher standard of having fins and scales.

"I checked 37,000 fish, scraping each one with my fingernail, over three days," said Freundlich, who moved to Beijing six years ago to found the Chabad Lubavitch of Beijing, an Orthodox synagogue and education center.

China is discovering that going kosher poses some particular challenges. There are only seven inspectors, or mashgiach, living full-time in China to perform meticulous factory visits, so backup rabbis have to fly in from New York, Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

And there is a steep learning curve for a nation less familiar with matzo balls than with sweet-and-sour prawns and savory pork. Though China had ancient communities of Jews and sheltered as many as 30,000 Jewish refugees during World War II, there are only roughly 3,000 Jews living in China today, rabbis say.

Regardless, factory owners say a growing share of U.S. importers demand a kosher seal, which only a mashgiachcan provide.

Even as the U.S. Jewish population declines through intermarriage and aging, a 2005 survey by market researcher Mintel International Group found that 15 percent of U.S. shoppers buy kosher food all the time, and an additional 58 percent occasionally do so. Most are not Jews but tell pollsters that they consider most kosher food to be healthy and safer.

That is enough to convince Hu Yalong.

"The Chinese people don't know much about Jewish culture, but it doesn't affect the fact that we still want to do business," said Hu, general manager of Anhui Great Nation Essential Oils Co., which earned a kosher certificate last year for its peppermint-oil additives.

Some cultural and language confusion is inevitable. When Avrom Pollak, the rabbi who heads Baltimore-based trademark Star-K, made his first trip to China more than 15 years ago, he visited some caffeine-factory officials who had a tenuous grip on the details of Judaism.

"As I was getting ready to leave, all the employees are standing around, and I could see they were expecting something," the rabbi said. "Finally they said they were waiting for 'the rabbit.' They had been told 'a rabbit would be coming from the U.S.' to see if they were kosher."

Even today, some factories are puzzled that no matter what they do, they can't seem to be eligible.

"I have to tell them, 'There's no way to make a pork dim sum kosher," said Rabbi Amos Benjamin, a Shanghai-based Star-K inspector.

Benjamin has become accustomed to the Chinese business ritual of a long, lavish banquet, even though he usually can't eat anything on the table because it wasn't been prepared in a kosher kitchen.

"They tend to go on for two or three hours, but I'm trying to make one apple last," he said.

'Trust, schmust!'

Likewise, Chinese suppliers often bridle at the notion that even after years of successful inspections, a rabbi will persist in making annual verification visits.

"They say, 'I'm a nice guy and you can trust us.' But we have to say, 'Trust, schmust!'" Benjamin said.

One recent morning, 27-year-old Menachem Piekarski stepped off the plane in the southern city of Hangzhou, his yarmulke and reddish-blond beard setting him apart. He scanned the crowd in the reception area and saw a handwritten English sign: "Mr. Rabbi."

Two young representatives from an organic tea factory were there to greet him. No sooner were they in the car than Piekarski began an endless series of polite but firm questions: Where does the tea come from? Do the machines produce anything but tea?

Piekarski and his hosts roamed through the factory. He examined every machine and every storeroom. He sniffed the tea and scrutinized the boiler.

"How long can you keep tea?" he said of a dust-covered mound of leaves. "It looks like you have tea from the six days of creation."

He peered into storehouses and asked more questions. He scribbled temperatures and tonnages. With only one ingredient, it was a simple visit. Within a couple of hours, he was done. But first, assistant general manager Xie Kangfeng said he was eager to get a seal of approval for all of the company's factories scattered across China.

"Can we do that today?" Xie asked Piekarski through an interpreter.

The factory was still figuring out how this works.

"We can't certify a factory without visiting," Piekarski said. "Not a chance in the world."

China, Google and the Jews

More on Google, a reprint from last year:
Congressman Tom Lantos soundly chastised Google last week for kowtowing to the Chinese by censoring Google.CN, the Chinese language search engine they offer in China.

Lantos is a Holocaust survivor. He is also a member of the House International Relations Committee. His criticism was colored by his opinion that corporate support of authoritarian repression is always wrong.

Invoking the memory of those companies that did business with Hitler's Germany, Lantos challenged our high tech industry, asking their representatives, "Are you ashamed?" According to the New York Times he pressed them, "Was Cisco ashamed of selling networking equipment to the Chinese police? Was Microsoft ashamed of taking down a blog because the government disapproved of its content? Was Yahoo ashamed of turning over data that led to the arrest and imprisonment of Shi Tao, a journalist who had used an anonymous Yahoo e-mail account to leak a government memo to the foreign media? Was Google - yes, "don't be evil" Google - ashamed of setting up a Chinese search engine that filtered out Web sites that the government wanted blocked, sites that used such forbidden words as 'democracy?'"

I sympathize with Lantos and the activist community trying to bring greater democracy to the world. So I browsed to the censored Chinese site, google.cn, and searched for 'Tiananmen Square'. And yes, the results were different from those you'd get by searching the non-censored English site at google.com. The first two search results in the China site led to neutral and probably government sponsored sites. But the third entry linked to a site that had graphic pictures of the 1989 massacre with descriptions like, "The bodies of dead civilians lie among mangled bicycles near Beijing's Tiananmen Square early June 4, 1989." If the censorship of google.cn is intended, it is not very effective.

I agree that all censorship is a threat to freedom and our values. But I also believe that the interests of the State of Israel are important when weighing the merits of international political issues.

So I ask, Is it good for Israel for us here to harshly chastise China for censoring the Internet and limiting its democracy? The answer I have reached is, no, for the following reasons.

China has just in the past weeks refrained from a veto and thus allowed the question of Iran's nuclear weapons program to be reported to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions - a clear victory for Israel.

Further, a Chinese colleague of mine, Professor Xu Xin, has made it clear recently in speeches and through his work on position papers that it is important to Jews and to Israel to foster stronger ties with China.

I trust Xu's judgment. I've known him since 1991 when I met him at Nanjing University. He was translating the Encyclopedia Judaica into Chinese and I discussed with him numerous technical questions. Then in 1996 he stayed at our home in New Jersey when he lectured at a local synagogue.

Xu says, according to Anthony Weiss writing recently in The Forward, that, "In addition to China's growing concern about the dangers of Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons, Beijing has begun pointing to ties between Al Qaeda and Muslim separatist groups in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang. According to Xu, although the Chinese government would not say so openly, Beijing believes that Israel is not a threat. Islamic fundamentalism is a threat."

I do know that Israel has been seeking closer relations with China for a long time. When I visited Beijing back in 1991 I met with the Israeli representative Dr. Yoseph Shalhevet, the liaison officer of the Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities in Beijing. A year later Israel established formal relations with China.

My conclusion then is mixed. Google and the other tech companies ought to be ashamed at the compromises they are forced to make. However, we should restrain our criticism because the interests of the West and of Israel in particular are served by fostering better relations with China in spite of the authoritarian nature of its regime.

[In 1991 I traveled and lectured extensively in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing and Xian, China.]

The Bat Mitzvah of a Chinese Jewish Girl with Lesbian Intermarried Parents

This New York Times story gets our - most touching religious, heartwarming Jewish, mixed up families, "Ain't New York Great" Award.

Notice to the rest of the world: This has nothing to do with ordinary life here in the NY area. Really.

Chinese Orphan’s Journey to Jewish Rite of Passage

Cecelia Nealon-Shapiro, adopted by New York parents 13 years ago, at her bat mitzvah reception last month.

By ANDY NEWMAN

Of the 613 laws in the Torah, the one that appears most often is the directive to welcome strangers. The girl once known as Fu Qian has been thinking about that a lot lately.

Three weeks ago, she stood at the altar of her synagogue on the Upper West Side and gave a speech about it.

Fu Qian, renamed Cecelia Nealon-Shapiro at 3 months, was one of the first Chinese children — most of them girls — taken in by American families after China opened its doors to international adoption in the early 1990s. Now, at 13, she is one of the first to complete the rite of passage into Jewish womanhood known as bat mitzvah.

She will not be the last. Across the country, many Jewish girls like her will be studying their Torah portions, struggling to master the plaintive singsong of Hebrew liturgy and trying to decide whether to wear Ann Taylor or a traditional Chinese outfit to the after-party.

There are plenty of American Jews, of course, who do not “look Jewish.” And grappling with identity is something all adopted children do, not just Chinese Jews.

But seldom is the juxtaposition of homeland and new home, of faith and background, so stark. And nothing brings out the contrasts like a bat mitzvah, as formal a declaration of identity as any 13-year-old can be called upon to make. The contradictions show up in ways both playful — yin-and-yang yarmulkes, kiddush cups disguised as papier-mâché dragons, kosher lo mein and veal ribs at the buffet — and profound.

Yet for Cece, as everyone calls Cecelia, and for many of the girls like her, the odd thing about the whole experience is that it’s not much odder than it is for any 13-year-old.

“I knew that when I came to this age I was going to have to do it, so it was sort of natural,” she said a few days before the ceremony at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue on West 83rd Street where she has been a familiar face since her days in the Little Twos program. Besides, she said with a shrug, “Most of my Chinese friends are Jewish.”...

on Jan. 29, 1994, in Jiangxi Province in southeastern China. She was abandoned to an orphanage because of China’s one-child rule, and adopted by a lesbian couple, Mary Nealon and Vivian Shapiro. (The couple later adopted another Chinese girl, Gabie, now 5.) Cece has been drawing double-takes for a while, like when she used to ride on Ms. Shapiro’s lap on a packed crosstown bus and would burst into the Passover standard “Dayenu.” [more]

Chief Rabbi says it is OK to kill animals for fur

Now don't worry little critter. We are going to skin you and take your fur. But it won't hurt a bit. Because... FIRST WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOU.

RABBI BANS 'LIVING' FUR

February 21, 2007 -- JERUSALEM - Jews must not wear fur skinned from live animals, Israel's chief rabbi said in a religious ruling yesterday.

"All Jews are obliged to prevent the horrible phenomenon of cruelty to animals and be a 'light onto nations' by refusing to use products that originate from acts which cause such suffering," Rabbi Yona Metzger said.

Animal-rights campaigners in Israel and abroad say that animals are skinned alive at fur farms in China.

The ruling stopped short of banning the use of fur from animals skinned after they were slaughtered.

And yes, Heather Mills McCartney has position on this issue that is morally superior to that of the Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel.

Shanghai Synagogues

Hat tip: NEWS FOR MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE

In 1991 we visited these sites with an official government guide.

Shanghai Restores Historic Synagogue
Friday February 9, 2007 1:46 PM
By CHRISTOHER BODEEN
Associated Press Writer

SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Shanghai has started restoration work on one of its two remaining synagogues as part of China's effort to revive Jewish heritage in a city that provided refuge to tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.

In another sign of the new interest, a rabbi ministering to the city's Jewish community said Thursday he believes officials will eventually turn over the other synagogue for regular worship services.

The restoration of the Ohel Moishe synagogue, now a Jewish history museum, is due to take five months. The budget hasn't been revealed, although reports said the government has already spent $1.3 million on fixing up the surrounding area and promoting it as a tourist site.

``Shanghai is a great memory for the Jewish people and it's so much better to have this history in the shape of a building than to simply read about it in a book,'' said Rabbi Shalom Greenberg, who moved to Shanghai in 1998. He is a representative of the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters, an Orthodox Jewish organization based in New York.

Efforts to salvage Shanghai's Jewish history have been driven by both domestic and overseas scholarly interest, as well as by the growing numbers of Jewish expatriates in the booming city.

That trend in turn has been embraced by city leaders, who are eager to cast Shanghai as cosmopolitan and welcoming to foreigners.

China's largest city with a population of 20 million, including more than 100,000 foreigners, Shanghai is also a major industrial and commercial center, home to China's largest stock exchange and other financial markets.

Before World War II, the city boasted a large and influential Jewish community with its own schools, newspapers and at least seven synagogues. Most Jews left after World War II and their synagogues were turned to secular uses or torn down.

After several decades of dormancy, the community is growing again, with about 2,000 Jewish foreign residents in the city. Most worship in private homes due to a lack of access to synagogues. China's communist government, which strictly controls religious activities, does not list Judaism among its five officially recognized religions.

Work began last month on Ohel Moishe, which housed offices and a bookshop before it was converted into a museum of Jewish history in 1996. The project aims to expand its exhibits and restore the brick collonaded building to its original appearance, removing added structures and repainting its white masonry.

While Ohel Moishe will remain a museum, city officials appear to be moving toward allowing regular services at Shanghai's other surviving synagogue, the Ohel Rachel, Greenberg said. Its current owners, the city education bureau, now open it for Jewish services only a few times a year.

``The government understands and I'm sure, hopefully sooner than later, that it will allow it to be used for its original purpose,'' Greenberg said.

Shanghai's Jewish community got its start when the city, one of the world's great seaports, was opened to foreign trade in 1842. Concessions were granted to Britain, the United States and France, leaving the city carved up between Western powers.

The Jewish community, whose leading members were Iraqi immigrants and their descendants, was thriving by the time Jews fleeing the Nazis began arriving a century later. Typical of its success was the real estate tycoon Jacob Elias Sassoon, who built the grander, neoclassical Ohel Rachel in 1920.

Constructed in 1928 by Russian immigrants, Ohel Moishe was the center of a less wealthy but equally cosmopolitan community in the Tilanqiao neighborhood north of the center. The area became even more heavily Jewish during World War II when Shanghai's Japanese overlords, under pressure from their German allies, forced German and Austrian Jews to live there exclusively.

About 30,000 European Jews sought refuge in Shanghai from the Nazi genocide.

The city was restored to China at the end of the war, with Western powers renouncing their claims.

Along with synagogues, Shanghai also boasts scores of Protestant and Catholic churches, most of which were closed for decades after the 1949 communist takeover but have since been reopened. However, while missionaries converted millions of Chinese to Christianity, the Jewish community was almost exclusively foreign.

Officially China is atheistic. Christians, Buddhists, Taoists and Muslims are allowed to worship but only in churches, temples and mosques run by state-monitored groups. Christians who attend underground churches - and most do in China - are often jailed and harassed.

In China and Monsey -- Online Throngs Impose a Stern Morality in China - New York Times

The Times reports on how people use the Internet to bludgeon others into a moral life. This highlights the role the Internet is playing in steering the moral course in our own communities.

Online Throngs Impose a Stern Morality in China - New York Times:

SHANGHAI, June 2 -- It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country's most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack.

'Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons,' one person wrote, 'to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband.'

Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

Google: Democracy - NO; AntiSemitism - YES

Search on Google for "Jew" and you will get this disclaimer at the top of your search results page:

Offensive Search Results We're disturbed about these results as well. Please read our note here.

The link takes you to a page called "explanation.html" with an "explanation" of why you are getting anti-Semitic results from Google. It explains, "Our search results are generated completely objectively ..."

In light of the "progress" Google has made recently in revising its policies in China, perhaps it is time that they revisited their policy on publishing anti-Semitic search results.

The Second Result in the Google Image Search for "Jew"

Here is the current Google policy statement for "Jew":

Google: An explanation of our search results:

If you recently used Google to search for the word 'Jew,' you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for 'Jew' brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for 'Judaism,' 'Jewish' or 'Jewish people,' the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for 'Jew' different? One reason is that the word 'Jew' is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word 'Jewish' when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174 http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like 'Judaism,' 'Jewish people,' or 'Jews' than the single word 'Jew.' In fact, prior to this incident, the word 'Jew' only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for 'Jew' are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google. Some people concerned about this issue have created online petitions to encourage us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Because of our objective and automated ranking system, Google cannot be influenced by these petitions. The only sites we omit are those we are legally compelled to remove or those maliciously attempting to manipulate our results.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,The Google Team

p.s. You may be interested in some additional information the Anti-Defamation League has posted about this issue at http://www.adl.org/rumors/google_search_rumors.asp. In addition, we call your attention to Google's search results on this topic.

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