MINORITY OF ONE: The New York Jewish Week looks at the lives of the small numbers of Jewish students enrolled at historically black colleges. “I create my own Jewish life,” says Abraham Mercado, a place-kicker for the football team at Baltimore’s Morgan State University, where he may (or may not) be the only Jewish student. An Orthodox Jew, Mercado confesses thate he will have to tackle one dilemma on his mostly black campus: Will he kick on Yom Kippur?
A MUSEUM TOO MANY?: Andrew Silow-Carroll of the New Jersey Jewish News questions the wisdom of the effort to build a “National Museum of the Jewish People” in Washington. Instead, he suggests creating a “Wandering Jewish Museum” as a better way of telling the Jewish story. “What if various museums and collections were to combine forces on one terrific traveling exhibition, picking out the choicest artifacts and technologies and bringing them to cities and towns large and small across the country?” he asks.
HEILING (WAX) HITLER: An Israeli woman complained after seeing fellow visitors to the London branch of Madame Tussauds posing for pictures with a wax statue of Hitler, some even extending their arms in Nazi salutes. While the museum initially defended the rights of visitors to choose how they wanted to interact with its statues, Britain’s Jewish Chronicle reports, the museum later backtracked. “We are just as upset by what happened as our Israeli guests were,” a Madam Tussauds spokeswoman said. ” We will be more aware of guests being around that figure and staffing in that area. We just have to hope people use their brains.” The paper notes that the only other Madame Tussauds location displaying a wax Hitler is in Berlin, where a visitor beheaded the figure three years ago.
A JEWISH POSITION ON THE QUARTERBACK POSITION: The Intermountain Jewish News weighs in with a strongly worded editorial on the topic of who should be the Denver Broncos’ starting quarterback, endorsing the team’s decision to relegate the popular Tim Tebow to third-string status. “Fans like Tebow’s personality and his values,” the paper editorializes, before adding: “Like it or not, values don’t win football games; abilities do.”
THE RAV’S JUGGLING ACT: In the Forward, Lawrence Grossman argues that for the late Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “maintaining an Orthodoxy both firmly rooted in the tradition and open to the outside world could be accomplished not according to predetermined formulas, but rather through balancing complex competing values.” The result, Grossman writes, was an “intellectual juggling act.”
BECK (AND BOONE) IN BEVERLY HILLS: The L.A. Jewish Journal drops in on a Beverly Hills viewing party for Glenn Beck’s Jerusalem rally. In attendance: 50 supporters of Israel, most of them Jewish fans of the former Fox broadcaster, as well as Christian pop singer Pat Boone, who told the paper that he hopes to see Israel’s borders expanded. “It’s about restoring the Land of Israel to Davidic boundaries,” said Boone, who also heads the Beverly Hills Tea Party.
