SAJAforum

CONVENTIONS: AAPI's most honorable guests

I got a mass email today from Dino Teppara, the Director of Legislative Affairs for AAPI, the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (our 2007 Q&A with Dino here). It spells out the agenda for the group's Legislative Day event in DC, tomorrow. And while I've always known that AAPI is an influential group, it's useful to see just who is speaking at the day-long event:

• Congressman John Fleming of Maryland
• Congressman Jim McDermott of Maryland
• Three members of the American Jewish Committee
• Nick Rathod, one of the more high-profile desis in the White House
• Congressman Bill Cassidy of Maryland
• Congressman Joe Crowley of New York
• Congressman Ed Royce of California
• Richard Boucher, Asst. Secretary of State

Here's the group's platform for the day, which can be read in full here:

• Increase the size of entering medical school classes & residency positions nationwide
• Protect the 20/220 Pathway and keep medical school affordable
• Supporting IMG visa waivers
• Protecting Medicare and Medicaid Physician Reimbursements
• Establishing meaningful liability reform nationwide

And this is the full day's agenda:

POLITICS: Muslim conference prompts gay-evangelical love, peace, harmony

President-elect Barack Obama's selection of conservative fundamentalist minister Rick Warren, who supported California's Proposition 8 in last month's elections, to deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration has caused many of Obama's progressive supporters to feel a sense of "betrayal," as Neil Buchanan has written at Dorf on Law. Singer, songwriter, and Prop 8 opponent Melissa Etheridge, who is openly lesbian and has been a longtime activist for gay rights and other progressive causes, had much the same initial reaction. While she had never previously heard of Warren, she wondered whether Warren was a "hate spouting, money grabbing, bad hair televangelist like all the others," and whether she should boycott the inauguration on account of his selection.

Given the controversy, Etheridge was "stunned" to learn that Warren would be giving the keynote address at the Muslim Public Affairs Council's annual convention in California -- where Etheridge herself was scheduled to appear with Junoon's Salman Ahmad to perform "Ring The Bells," a song they had co-written "call[ing] for peace and unity in our world." (Since December, apparently, is "Using Music to Change the World Month," the MPAC performance was intended to initiate a broader "Ring the Bells for Peace" Campaign, which you can read more about here.)

Etheridge says that she initially contemplated canceling her appearance at MPAC on account of Warren's appearance. However, as she recounts at the Huffington Post, Etheridge ultimately decided on a different approach to the situation:

MUMBAI ATTACKS: Info about Chabad and the Jewish Center

[See SAJAforum's full coverage of the Mumbai attacks]

When Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka left Brooklyn in 2003 to manage the Nariman House, the Jewish outreach center in Mumbai, they probably never imagined that their journey to serving the Jewish community would come to an end in the most unimaginable ways. Both Rabbu Holtzberg and his wife were killed during the terrorist attack of the Jewish center yesterday.

Below you will find audio clips from the series of SAJA Webcasts on Mumbai attacks where Rabbi Israel Derrin, emissary of Chabad in Connecticut, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, spokesman for the Chabad movement and Prof. Ari Goldman, a professor a Columbia Journalism School who has written extensively about religion. 

1. Rabbi Israel Derrin talks about Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and the services that he and the Chabad house in Mumbai provide to the Jewish guests and the Jewish community living in Mumbai.

2. Rabbi Israel Derrin explains the tradition of Chabad houses and the Chabad-Lubavitch movement which focuses on providing spiritual as well as material help for members of the Jewish community.

3. Columbia J-school professor Ari Goldman talks about his personal experience meeting Rabbi Holtzberg and the tradition behind sending emissaries such as Holtzberg and his wife to a specific outpost to serve the Jewish community.

4. Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin talks about Rabbi Holztberg and the amazing work he and his wife Rivka had been doing in the community.

Here is a piece from yesterday's TNR where Naresh Fernandes talks about the rich tradition of Jews in India.

Please post your comments below.

RELIGION: Rare Muslim-Jewish project in Canada

A note from Mark Persaud, president of  the Canadian International Peace Project:

Canada’s largest Jewish and Muslim community organizations are joining together in a groundbreaking partnership. The Jewish-Somali Project will engage the resources of the Jewish community to provide mentorship to young Somali professionals, as the first in a series of what partners in the project hope will be a series of collaborative ventures, under the auspices of the Canadian International Peace Project.

The full announcement is below. Please post your comments.

PREZ RACE: Parallel to Obama in Kochi, Kerala

[See SAJAforum posts, sources and resources on the 2008 presidential race]

Gulu Ezekiel, one of the leading sportswriters in India, sent me a link this morning to an unusual story from Indian Express. It has an intriguing headline about a city in the state of Kerala: "Barack Obama's Kochi Link":

Barack Obama and Barak Salem share more than the similar-sounding first names. The US presidential candidate’s struggle in a racial America has parallels with Salem’s fight against bias in Kerala’s Jewish community
By E.P. Unny

Of all places Indian, Barack Obama might find a particular resonance with Kochi. Here in the Jewish quarter from 1882 to 1967 lived Abraham Barak Salem. The sound-alike middle name apart, “Jewish Gandhi” as Salem was known in these parts created the kind of little history that should engage America’s first black Presidential candidate. As one with the most dissected first, middle and last names, Obama can let the pundits quibble a bit more over the Arabic/Swahili ‘Barack’ and the Hebrew ‘Barak’ and turn to the Salem story for easier parallels.

Born into a poor family, Salem went on to become the first graduate from his disadvantaged Jewish subgroup dubbed meshuchrarim meaning freed slaves by the local “white” Jews. Jews came to Kerala over the centuries in waves and the late arrivals considered themselves genetically and religiously purer and whiter than the early ones. They had an even sharper bias against the likes of Salem who were technically part of their own congregation at Kochi’s Paradesi Synagogue, where today tourists vastly outnumber the dwindling Jewry.

In Salem’s days the congregation was sizable enough to perpetuate what historians saw as apartheid and visiting Jewish scholars themselves disapproved of. The Salem subgroup had no right to chant prayers in full and had to sit mostly silent in the synagogue’s anteroom.
The list of don’ts stretched from marrying into the ‘white’ families to being seen wearing gold in Jew Town.

[You can read the rest of the story of Barak Salem in the Express piece.]

Yes, the Jewish area of Kochi (formerly Cochin) is known as "Jew Town," but it doesn't have the kind of negative connotation the term has in the U.S.

More about the Cochin Jews here in a Wikipedia entry; in "Who are the Jews of India?" by Nathan Katz; in  Salman Rushdie's "The Moor's Last Sigh" (Amazon link; New York Review of Books review); and this entry in Lime Soda, a blog.

Please post your comments below.