When young toughs beat the crap out of a random passerby in Times Square while shouting, “Fuck Jews, fuck Israel,” or some fool heaves concrete through a synagogue window in a Mister Rogers neighborhood in Tucson, it is time for some calm reflection on the call to prayer that has kept Judaism together for 5,000 years: Sh’ma Yisrael. Hear, O Israel.

Jews have come a long way. Had a Supreme Being not eased our forbears’ Red Sea border crossing out of Egypt to escape slavery, they’d have drowned. Forty years in the desert must have been tough. Matzo is no match for thin-crust pizza. Finally, they arrived uninvited into occupied land, followed by Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, the British and a lot of others.

I am leery of uncheckable sources chipped into stone, scratched onto parchment or one-sided accounts from conquerors and the vanquished. Let’s fast forward to today.

I grimace when someone calls me a Iandzman. The Yiddish term suggests Jews are a tightly knit tribe of chosen people, especially the Ashkenazi who repeatedly fled European ghettos a few steps ahead of murderous mobs. True, we share that Shylock taint. Barred from owning land, narrowed options included lending money to rich goyim. But it is a bit more complex.

Jews come in three flavors. The Orthodox live their faith as devout Muslims do, with strict dietary laws, and quibble at length over ancient texts. Conservatives are Orthodox-lite. Reform Jews are relaxed about it all. Those like me were bar mitzvahed to keep mothers happy, are fine with meatball milkshakes, and say, “Oh, right,” if wished a happy new year when it’s not January. But we all share a heritage and culture. We mourn family lost in the Holocaust. And when applying for visas in Muslim countries, we’re all the same.

Israel is only peripherally part of the deal. It is just a country; we don’t have a Vatican. If we had a pope, it would hardly be Bibi Netanyahu. Still, I can think of no Jew, however lapsed, who isn’t happy there is a homeland for those who want it, meant to be a showcase of the do-unto-others creed that defines Judaic morality and a bulwark of democratic stability in the world’s roughest neighborhood.

As kids, we dropped lunch-money quarters into little blue boxes to plant trees in a holy land. They were not meant to buy bulldozers to uproot centuries-old olive trees when frustrated Palestinian kids lobbed rocks.

MORE

TUCSON — Some scenes you never forget. My memory just replayed one morning in Hebron, yet again, and I dug out a dispatch that the Associated Press had sent to newspapers and broadcasters around the world. It began:

“At 9 a.m. sharp, the first sounds were young men hauling junk-metal barricades into place. Next came a fury of flying stones and insults. Then it was the Israelis’ turn. Troops burst from alleys, bellowing karate yells and brandishing M-16s. Mesh-plated jeeps screamed around corners. Some youths were pushed around and arrested. Most fled. Ten minutes later, dead calm.

“It was curfew time in Hebron, the ancient city of the patriarchs, which is the crux of Tuesday’s urgent White House summit aimed at heading off yet more Arab-Israeli war.”

That was in October 1996. Bill Clinton now watches offstage. Yasser Arafat is long gone. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas are still at it. And Palestine today is pocked with thriving Jewish suburbs, “settlements” in an apartheid homeland.

Reality bit hard that morning in Hebron. After a three-hour daily reprieve to buy food, 94,000 Palestinians stayed inside by their radios as leaders at opposite extremes argued over their fate.

Behind iron grillwork, they watched young settlers saunter through town as if they owned it, eating cotton candy on their way to the tombs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Or for Muslims who also revere them, Ibrahim, Ishak and Yaakub.

“They look at us behind our bars like we are lions or monkeys in a zoo,” vegetable vendor Samir Saleb told me. He was less angry than sad. “The Jews walk by and laugh at us. And not only the Jews. The whole world is laughing at us.”

Yet again, all hell has broken loose in the Holy Land. Beyond headlines, the devil is in the details. Decades of broken promises, terrorist provocations, retaliation and colonization are leading toward an inevitable reckoning.

I call these reports “non-prophet” because journalists should avoid guessing about the future. But the message here is plain as writing on the wall. Unless Palestinians figure into the equation, Israel faces grave existential peril.

MORE

Illustration courtesy of Jeff Danziger

TUCSON — Months after the Sandy Hook gunman killed 20 schoolkids and six adults, Wayne LaPierre went to Botswana, eager to make a National Rifle Association promo video, a brave white hunter in mortal combat with a raging bull elephant. It didn’t happen that way.

The New Yorker unearthed the video eight years after the NRA buried it. It shows LaPierre, ham-handed and nervous, botch an up-close execution of his docile prey. Two guides praise him profusely, then shake their heads in contemptuous disbelief behind his back.

With several off-mark bullets, he wounds his quarry. One guide helps him aim a final coup de grace. As he preens for photos with his kill, the other one directs his wife’s tripod-mounted gun so that she can murder her own elephant, standing still a short distance away.

Lots of pictures show Don Jr. and Eric Trump posed triumphantly over noble African beasts they dispatched in similar fashion. But the LaPierres, giddy with glee as they fondle massive ivory tusks and saw off leathery tails, reach to the depths of human depravity.

During the mid-80s, I spent months in the Okavango Delta, that same part of Botswana, researching a book titled Squandering Eden. Later, I tracked supply chains to ivory and rhino horn markets in Asia.

In 1984, Burundi was down to its last elephant. Yet it exported 100 tons of ivory – tusks from 11,000 elephants illegally trafficked from other African countries. Ten million elephants roamed the continent in the 1930s. Today, estimates number them at near 400,000.

The problem is complex in Africa, where mushrooming human populations look askance at lumbering pachyderms that trample crops and devastate trees with their trunks. Game wardens need to cull old bulls in big herds to maintain a natural balance.

But there is money to be made, legitimately or otherwise, on an unruly continent in a world where rich high-rollers, Chinese chefs, Asian healers, and others spare little thought to the population crash, if not extinction, of creatures great and small.

MORE

WINDOW ROCK, Arizona – Patty Dimitriou smiled down at 4-year-old Wynter, contented in her lap on a break from raising hell. “This,” she said, tucking strands of long black hair from behind his copper-toned ear, “ is what America now looks like.”

Exactly. These days, that is easy to forget as meaningless ethnic labels distort a new reality: the American melting pot has cooked down into a savory fusion of home-grown flavors seasoned with every exotic spice a big world has to offer.

Inspiring “diversity” is unmissable up among the dramatic high red rocks of the Navajo Nation, where tribalism means unity, not division. For a sense of it, try to pigeonhole Patty and her husband, Rob Day.

Patty’s mother, Flora, grew up in a dirt-floor hogan with no electricity or plumbing. She slept in her first bed at 11 in boarding school. As a secretarial student in San Francisco, Flora bedazzled Nicholas Dimitriou, an enterprising Macedonian immigrant from Canada. He pursued her back to the reservation and married her.

With a University of Arizona degree, Patty built a thriving public relations firm in Phoenix, hobnobbing with clients in Washington and Europe. When her father became ill in 2015, she moved to Window Rock to manage her parents’ properties.

In heels and a smart dress, Patty drives a Cadillac Escalade with plates that read, “RezDiva.” In hot-babe mode (she doesn’t mind the term), she puts on leathers to roam the West with Rob on her monster motorcycle. An Indian Chieftian.

Rob sums himself up with a laugh: “I’m a half-breed.” In fact, he goes back five generations to the first Sam Day, an Irishman who, bored with life in Ohio, took a job surveying the reservation. He founded a dynasty with Irish, Dutch and Navajo wives.

The Days built some of the first trading posts and discovered ancient ruins. An old family treasure is an aging photograph signed, “To my friend, Sam Day. Theodore Roosevelt.” That was Sam III, who fired up the visiting president’s fondness for Indian heritage.

Rob’s passion is creating artful big bikes, but Day Customs Mechanical can fix or build just about anything. He wakes before dawn to direct far-flung crews but makes it home for dinner with the kids.

Wynter’s face reflects dominant Indian genes. His little sister, Rebel is, as her Grandma Flora jokes, “white as a sheet of paper.”

MORE

TUCSON — No privately run enterprise is more vital than the New York Times in an America at war with itself in a world facing authoritarian takeover and climate collapse. But the staid old Gray Lady, made over and flush with cash, is getting out of hand.

People often fault the Times on specious grounds, ignoring its strengths and missing the point of intended objectivity. But recent cases are deeply troubling, in particular the loss of Donald G. McNeil, Jr., a globe-ranging expert on deadly plagues, when he is so badly needed.

The Times is America’s last family-run newspaper of record, with foreign bureaus and a stringer network extending to 150 countries. Its national reporters exposed truth behind a self-obsessed president’s false absurdities, financial manipulation and treachery.

At its best, it is stunning. Abroad, stories probe distant societies with words and images to show an inward-looking nation how the other 95 percent live. At home, seasoned hands pry open closed doors to reveal our own domestic failings.

The Washington Post excels at national coverage but is thin beyond American borders. Jeff Bezos has infused it with fresh resources but, with his omnivore obsessions and so much else on his plate, he is no Katharine Graham.

But beyond the Times’ hoary slogan – All the News That’s Fit to Print – it now strays into misplaced moralizing, advocacy in news columns, sloppy editing and “content” that on occasion smacks of a high-school paper without adult supervision. Stories that matter are lost in fluff.

This is a personal view. The Times has loomed large in my life since I was a kid. I turned down a job offer in the ‘70s to remain overseas with the Associated Press, then an ad-free non-profit cooperative that was what AP branders mislabel it today: the world’s essential news source.

I’ve written op-eds and a blog for the Times. As International Herald Tribune editor, I answered to its bosses. I realize their challenge to attract young readers who don’t read and want news for free. New income streams are crucial when so many advertisers go elsewhere.

Ben Smith, the paper’s ex-Buzzfeed media writer, has it right: “It is no longer just a source of information. It seeks to be the voice whispering in your ear in the morning, the curriculum in your child’s history class and the instructions on caramelizing shallots for the pasta you’re making for dinner.”

MORE