'I'm Going to Kill You, Cracker,' And Other Greetings of the Day

Midway through the so-called Million Youth March, a teenager, perhaps 15 years of age, brushed by me on his way to the stage. I was standing near the densely packed corner of 119th Street and Lenox Avenue, surrounded by members of the Assata Shakur Freedom Fighters, the Socialist Workers Party, the Umoja Nation, along with a seller of disposable cameras, a lone Garveyite and my friend Tamar Jacoby, the author of the recently published "Someone Else's House," which argues for the revival of the integrationist idea.

The 15-year-old was wearing a T-shirt that featured a photograph of Mayor Giuliani, as well as a text message, which I could not make out. I asked him what the shirt said. He responded: "He's a cracker. He's killing all of us. And we're going to kill you too, you white cracker expletive."
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Farrakhan the Chasid

After spending a delightful afternoon with Minister Louis Farrakhan in his Chicago home, I can report that the leader of the Nation of Islam is actually a chasid of the Satmar sect. Or so he suggests. I consider this a scoop.

We were sitting at his immense dining room table, along with his chief of staff, Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad, who, unlike his boss, doesn't believe that it is worth the Nation of Islam's while to sit down with Jewish journalists. It's not that he's anti-Semitic, you see, it's just that Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League will eventually get to me and order my opinions trimmed to conform to those of the ADL.
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Time to Name Names

Several years ago, at one of the money-wasting general assemblies the Jewish federations fete themselves with, Malcolm Hoenlein, the major American Jew who runs the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, spotted me in a hallway and called me over for a huddle. It turned out that Mr. Hoenlein had a warning for me.
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The Relevancy Standard

There are only two issues of overwhelming importance facing the American Jewish community today: the survival of Israel in the face of Iranian and Iraqi nuclear, biological and chemical terror, and the survival of the American Jewish community itself, in the face of intermarriage, assimilation and general ennui. The rest, as the saying goes, is commentary. Or something even less than that.
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Latvia's Empty Gesture

Janis Lipke lived and died in a squalid and freezing hut by a river in Riga, Latvia. He and his wife, Johanna, lived there without money and without honor. Many of their countrymen saw them as traitors. When I met the Lipkes in their hut in the winter of 1986, there were even rumors afoot in Riga that they were part-Jewish. How else to explain their inexplicable behavior during World War II, when they rescued Jews from the Riga Ghetto, a ghetto maintained -- and then liquidated -- with the enthusiastic help of the Latvian people?
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Kings (and Queens) of Denial

The current state of denial in Jerusalem, New York and Washington:

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: The denier's denier, refusing to recognize that handing over Hebron, which betrayed his father's vision of a Greater Israel, left him looking like a man without principles who might as well just give Yasser Arafat the rest of what he wants.

THE LIKUD PARTY: Israel's ruling party has not yet realized that, with the Netanyahu era over, Yitzhak Mordechai should be anointed the new Likud leader. Mr. Mordechai, who, with David Levy and Avigdor Kahalani, leads Israel's sensible Sephardi center, is the best hope for actual progress in the peace process, and his accession would block the rise of Ehud Olmert, Irving Moscowitz's real estate partner and an all-around mamzer, which he would take as a compliment.
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The Schweitzenbasheringen Problem

It is now time to remember a fundamental fact in the never-ending controversy over Swiss bank accounts and Nazi gold: It isn't all that important.

This might be an inopportune moment to be saying this -- we (by "we" I mean we Jews and our King, H.R.H. Edgar of Seagram's) have got the Alpine skinflints right where we want them, which is...I don't know where, exactly.
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Syrian Spy Story Finds Its Heroes

WASHINGTON -- Major General Moshe Ya'alon, the chief of the military intelligence branch of the Israel Defense Forces, paid last week a hushed-up visit to the Virginia side of the Potomac River. There, he shared with his friends at the Pentagon and CIA the rather distressing news that much of the inside intelligence on Syria that Israel had supplied to the Americans over the past several years has been -- how to put this diplomatically? -- rendered inoperative by recent events.

General Ya'alon was in America on a damage-control mission, but the damage was not of his own making. The damage was done by the Mossad, the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, whose special task, it has recently seemed, is to endanger the State of Israel.
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Births of a Nation

We were an hour into a discussion about the war in Rwanda and the future of Africa when the President of Uganda, the dome-headed capitalist Yoweri Museveni, invited me to sit with him under an acacia tree and talk cow-talk. Mr. Museveni is the owner of a stupendous herd of Ankole cattle, and in the course of conversation I couldn't help but mention my own kibbutz-acquired calf-birthing skills -- one of the only real practical skills this Diaspora Jew possesses.

The mention of kibbutz gave Mr. Museveni pause, and he narrowed his already narrow eyes and asked: "Are you Jewish?" It is my policy never to deny my Jewishness except to tefillin-bearing pubescent Lubavitchers and so I answered yes, even though I worried about the arc of this conversation: Mr. Museveni knew me as a representative of The New York Times Magazine, and Third World intellectuals believe certain things about the leanings of The New York Times.
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The Latest Uganda Plan

Weeds push through the cracked tarmac at the old Entebbe airport, where, 20 years ago this July 4, a Ugandan soldier fired the shot that launched Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign to be prime minister of Israel.

I try to guess the spot where his brother, Jonathan, fell during the Israeli raid on this airport; there are, of course, no markers. The airport is in ruins, closed to visitors and fenced off from the new airport and the new Uganda.
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