Sean Voisen poses a fascinating question about cultural production:

There is a hypothesis that says that the purpose of sleep is to reinforce certain memories, or rather, neural connections, that were created during the previous day. Sleep does this not in a way that one might expect — by actually strengthening the connections — but rather by subtly washing away the neural connections created during the day that are deemed trivial or unimportant. Leaving only the most important ones remaining. A bit like waves washing gently on a rocky beach over thousands of years — eventually most of the rocks are turned to sand and only the largest rocks remain.

When it comes to the preservation of culture, time, I think, works quite similarly. Take literature, for instance. Of the many millions of bodies of text that have been created over the thousands of years since man first invented writing, only a very few have been continually preserved and set aside as “classics.” The rest were beaten into sand and washed away by the ocean of time.

This
isn’t a random process either. The Iliad or the Old Testament or Beowulf or Hamlet aren’t available to us today by mere fortunate happenstance. Society made great efforts to keep them in circulation and preserve them. If culture is like a brain distributed across a certain population, and time is its sleep, then these cultural works are the synapses that matter. Somehow. Even though when you read them in high school it doesn’t seem that way.

Will the Internet and digital storage media do away with this form of cultural sleep? If everything can be preserved, whether or not it is of significant cultural value, will it? Where then will classics come from? Or will culture break down into nervous chaos — where everything is of equal importance and so nothing is of importance at all — perhaps like the mind of a chronic insomniac?

Even in a digital world, preservation of information still requires time, money and resources, albeit small. Websites come and go. So do blogs. They are more ephemeral even than books. So, perhaps the reverse will be the case — that because we can preserve anything, we don’t produce anything worth preserving, and thus preserve nothing at all. Either way, in the future, the mechanisms by which culture evolves will almost surely be different.

David Klinghoffer, resident Jew at the Discovery Institute, has just come out with a new book: How Would God Vote: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative.

Longtime readers of Klinghoffer's Forward column won't be surprised to find the book maddening in its refusal to engage in serious thinking. He ignores whole swathes of Torah and Talmud; doesn't bother thinking of the actual consequences of his policies; and lines up enough straw men to constitute a fire hazard.

Klinghoffer does surprise on occasion. He praises the idea of reparations to African-Americans for slavery. He downplays the need for global conflict. (Better, he says, to fight "cultural decadence" at home.) And if you're looking for a Republican propagandist for whom opposition to abortion is only a first step toward banning contraception and no-fault divorce, Klinghoffer is your man.

However, as someone who does think the Torah has something to say about economic and political arrangements, I'm looking at this book as an opportunity. Get ready for: How Would God REALLY Vote: A Jewish Response to David Klinghoffer.

I'm looking for volunteers to write a chapter or two of the book. Chapters can come in a variety of genres:

• You can rip tearing holes into Klinghoffer's logic
• You can show where Klinghoffer misunderstands Torah
• You can show how Torah addresses a policy area that Klinghoffer doesn't deal with

With Ari Berman (The Nation), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Village Voice and The Atlantic Monthly) and Sam Freedman (Professor of Journalism, Columbia University and New York Times columnist). The discussion will be moderated by Marissa Brostoff (The Forward).

The event will take place on Wednesday, May 28th at 7 p.m. at the Center for Jewish History, on 15 West 16th Street in New York City. Dessert reception to follow. $10, general admission. $5, students and CJH members. Buy tickets now by clicking here.

Actually, it turns out that Jews indeed had more dignity back then: Rabbi Walter Peiser of Baton Rouge, according to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, "refused to say an invocation to the state legislature in 1929 in protest of Governor Huey Long’s political corruption. Peiser explained to Time Magazine that his prayers would have been 'coarsened and cheapened…by a Chief Executive…unworthy of high office.'"

Know of any rabbis who declined an invitation to the White House lately?

My 10 minutes of googling around the internets didn't find much more of a Jewish response to Long, other than Wikipedia entries on the individuals Seymour Weiss, a close Long confidante, and Dr. Carl Weiss, Long's apparent assassin.

I should be working, but haven't yet licked my blog addiction. News of note:

• Aish HaTorah angle to today's story of twenty-something arms dealer? (Talking Points Memo)

• You know how we keep hearing that Iran's drive for nuclear power must mean it wants to build nuclear bombs? Apparently, the U.S. is working with Iranian neighbor Bahrain to support a civilian nuclear program. Double speak or US-support proliferation race? (AbuAardvark)

• Satmar funding pro-Yiddish, anti-Ben Yehuda propaganda in Israel (Ha'aretz)
  
• Nancy Sinkoff reminds us that sometimes a Mussar sefer is just Benjamin Franklin translated into Hebrew. (the Seforim blog)

• Yesterday marked the 33rd anniversary of America's first gay marriage.

• Return of Jewish terror? 15-year-old loses leg to explosive-filled Purim gift, apparently because of his family's Messianic Jewish beliefs. (Ynet)
  
• Will Bush attack Iran before November? Chris Floyd reads the tea leaves and says yes. Arthur Silber, who has been calling for mobilization against war with Iran for over a year, asks whether our silence is Enabling Evil? (Remember: If the bombs start falling on Iran, you can't say that the American Jewish community hadn't been working for that goal for years).
  
• Saudis to retrain 40,000 clerics to encourage moderation and tolerance. Yeshiva University's Richard Joel might want to try a similar program. (BBC)
  

The Jewish Week reports:

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva University's rabbinical school, issued an apology today for a statement he made that appeared to advocate shooting the Prime Minister of Israel should the government "give away Jerusalem."

The statement, part of a 39-second clip posted on YouTube this week, is from a discussion the rabbi had in Israel with American students learning at Yeshivat HaKotel in Jerusalem. It is not known when the statement was made.

In what appears to be a response to a question about serving in the Israeli army, the rabbi, a leading decisor in the Orthodox community, says: "First you have to know what the army is going to do. If the army is going to destroy Gush Katif, there's no mitzvah to destroy Eretz Yisrael.

"If the army is going to give away Yerushalyim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army - I'd tell them to shoot the Rosh Hamemshalah [Prime Minister]," which prompted laughter from his audience.

"No one should go to the army if they [the army] are doing aveirus [sins," the rabbi continued. "We're talking if the army is seeing to it that the country is secure, if they're doing the right thing.

"I'm not sure if the army is doing the right thing," he added, "we have to look into that."

Rabbi Schachter, much revered by his many students and highly respected throughout the community as a Talmudic scholar, has been known to make blunt, politically incorrect statements in the past. In 2004, his remarks seemed to compare women to animals in expounding on the issue of reading from a ketubah at a marriage ceremony. He said the marriage would be valid "even if a parrot or a monkey would read the ketubah."

Prior to that incident, the rabbi described Jews as superior to other people, noting that "Jews and non-Jews "have different genes, DNA and instincts." His defenders say he is naïve, not mean-spirited, in part because he has little dealing with the community at large, cloistered within the study halls of Yeshiva. They say he speaks casually in class, unaware of the larger ramifications of his remarks.

Critics agree, but note that such a person, despite his brilliance, should not be in such a position of prominence.

For example, Rabbi Schachter was just named as one of two American rabbis to oversee the conversion process for the Rabbinical Council of America in its agreement with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

In a statement issued today, Rabbi Schachter said: "Statements I made informally have been publicly excerpted this week. I deeply regret such statements and apologize for them. They were uttered spontaneously, off the cuff, and were not meant seriously. And, they do not, God forbid, represent my views. Jewish law demands respect for representatives of the Jewish government and the state of Israel."

Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, said: "Rav Schacter has apologized for his off the cuff statements that certainly do not represent his views. Let me make it clear that Yeshiva University repudiates any such statements or any such sentiments."

Activist Dorothy Epstein led a high-power life -- so it's no surprise that two people close to her appeared in The New York Times earlier this month.

Henry Foner, who edited her memoir A Song of Social Significance (Ben Yehuda Press, 2007) was in the hospital for hip replacement surgery. This is the story he told the Metropolitan Diary:

Dear Diary:

The morning after I underwent hip replacement surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, I was visited in my room by the surgeon. I expected the routine inquiry about my condition and almost fell out of my bed when he asked me, as though he were talking to my body, ''Which side are you on?''

Since this is the title of one of the great songs in our country's labor history (''My daddy was a miner, and I'm a miner's son.''), I recovered my senses long enough to point to my left side.

“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”

A week later she appeared in a happier report: The story of how a kid from the projects of Brooklyn made it to an upstate, small-town college -- thanks to the foundation that Gelber directs.

Dorothy Epstein, who never relaxed her gratitude for the free public education she received at Hunter College during the Great Depression, would be very proud.

Writing in The American Interest, Mark Kleinman offers suggestions on how to treat intoxicants to minimze harm:

Deny alcohol to problem drinkers. When someone gets caught drinking and driving, we take away his license: his driving license, that is. The “license” to drink—legal permission to buy and consume alcohol in unlimited quantities—is presumed to be irrevocable. But why? We know that someone who drinks and drives is a bad citizen when drunk, but not that he is a bad driver when sober.

If someone is convicted of drunken driving, or drunken assault, or drunken vandalism, or repeatedly of drunk and disorderly conduct—if, that is, someone demonstrates that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when drunk—then why not revoke his (or, much more rarely, her) drinking license?

Former NPR and Dateline reporter John Hockenberry offers a post-mortem on network television news (MIT Technology Review):

I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

Aaron Freeman moves from comic Torah to parsha performance art in his latest video.

Note: Sensitive souls should consult with rabbinic guidance before replicating this stunt at home. (crossposted to JewSchool

Baymes piece purports to help Jewish schools through the defeat of a strawman.

He neglects the fact that 80 area students and their parents wanted to go to a Jewish high school -- but couldn't get the chance.

It had nothing to do with some abstraict fear of Jewish high schools.

It had everything to do with people running those schools - who had no idea of they were doing.

And this "lay leadership" included ______, X of the United Synagogue, and ____ of JTS.

My daughter's school closed down two weeks before it should have started because of Jewish professionals who meant well, but acted incompetently.

Stop using nameless "they"s as scapegoats of all your problems. Maybe the problems are the way you're going about your business. How hard would it be to have a real investigation, a questioning of what sort of service board members provided by their presence on the board? If they could damage one school badly, I wonder what other damage they're wreaking in Jewish communal life?

Stanley Milgram's (in)famous conformity experiment which is usually always described as being 'too unethical to perform today' has been replicated., this time ensuring that no unethical stress was put on the subjects.

The good news came from the experimenter:

Although each of these safeguards came with a methodological price (e.g., the potential effect of screening out certain individuals, the effect of emphasizing that participants could leave at any time), I wanted to take every reasonable measure to ensure that our participants were treated in a humane and ethical manner.

The study found that levels of obedience were about the same now, as they were in the early 1960s when the original experiment was first run.

And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences. While exempting themselves, these same figures impose increasingly Draconian "law and order" solutions on the masses to ensure that even small infractions of the law prompt vigorous prosecution and inflexible, lengthy prison terms.

As Matt Stoller recently noted in an excellent post on the bipartisan orthodoxies that are untouchable in political debates, "there are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done" (buying and consuming illegal drugs) and "2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world." It's almost impossible for the non-rich to defend themselves effectively against government accusations of criminality, and judges have increasingly less sentencing discretion to avoid imposing harsh jail terms. Punishment for crimes is for the masses only, not for members in good standing of our political and corporate establishment.

Where our political elite break the law, our leading media stars and pundits fulfill their central purpose by dutifully arguing that establishment figures who have broken the law have done nothing wrong and deserve protection, even our gratitude, when they do so. In the view of our establishment, even mere civil liability -- never mind criminal punishment -- is deeply unfair when imposed on lawbreaking corporations, as we see in the "debate" over telecom immunity.

This same warped principle is also expressed in how our establishment scorns the work John Edwards did in representing maimed or dead individuals against the corporations which, through recklessness or negligence, destroyed their lives. From a letter from Theodore Frank of the American Enterprise Institute to the New York Times today (h/t Jay Diamond):

There is a critical distinction between Mitt Romney's and John Edwards's wealth. Mr. Romney, as a businessman, made investments that created wealth. Mr. Edwards, as a trial lawyer, made his money through lawsuits that merely took from one pocket and gave to another, and probably destroyed wealth in the process. (Mr. Edwards's multimillion-dollar medical malpractice verdicts almost certainly hurt the quality of health care in North Carolina.)

Little wonder that Mr. Romney understands that to improve the economy, one needs to expand the pie, while Mr. Edwards's policy proposals focus entirely on the redistribution of the existing pie without thought for the future adverse consequences to the size of the pie.

Anything that results in accountability for our largest corporations is inherently bad, even when they're found under our legal system to have broken the law or acted recklessly. Thus, John Edwards' self-made wealth is deeply dishonorable and shameful because it came at the expense of our largest corporations and on behalf of the poor and dirty masses, while Mitt Romeny's wealth, spawned by his CEO-father's connections, is to be honored and praised because it benefited our establishment and was on behalf of our glorious elite.

After decades of thinking about going to watch a TV show being taped, and six months after applying on the Daily Show web site, we were scheduled Wednesday to watch the Daily Show being taped. It was the same night as our kids' parent-teacher conferences, but really: What's more important? Hearing good news about our kids, or bad news about our political leaders?

So our course was clear.

But then along came the Writers Strike.

Really, though, the Writers Strike is about more than just good parenting. Watch this clip, in which the writers for the Daily Show explain it all in the manner we've come to expect from America's finest news source: