The Foreign Relations Committee expands its exploration of charges against John Bolton:

In a widening of the inquiry into John R. Bolton’s nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee intends to conduct formal interviews in the next 10 days with as many as two dozen people, Congressional officials said Tuesday. Those to be interviewed include a former deputy director of central intelligence and a former assistant secretary of state. The two officials, John E. McLaughlin and John S. Wolf respectively, have not spoken publicly about Mr. Bolton’s nomination, but both have been described by others as having clashed with him on personnel matters related to intelligence. The list, which Democratic officials said had been broadly endorsed by Republican panel members, also included Thomas Hubbard, a former ambassador to South Korea who clashed with Mr. Bolton over a speech on North Korea. Prospects for Mr. Bolton’s nomination have appeared uncertain since last-minute qualms among some Republican senators forced the Senate committee last week to postpone a confirmation vote. On Tuesday, there were signs that the White House was stepping up its effort to rescue the nomination, with Vice President Dick Cheney placing calls to Republican senators and Mr. Bolton himself visiting Capitol Hill, apparently in a bid to shore up support.

The expanded questioning is an unusual approach for a committee that has already held confirmation hearings and at one point appeared to be on the verge of voting to approve the nominee. The interviews are intended to explore allegations about Mr. Bolton’s treatment of subordinates and intelligence matters that surfaced only after Mr. Bolton’s daylong testimony before the panel on April 11. They will be conducted in private, and some will be conducted by telephone, but they are to be recorded by a stenographer, the congressional officials said. The people being interviewed will not be under oath, but they will be subject to rules that prohibit misleading Congress. Transcripts of the session are to be provided to members of the committee and posted by the panel on a public Web site before it meets to vote on the nomination, in a session now scheduled for May 12, the officials said.

Jennifer Washburn on Columbia’s anti-union campaign:

At Columbia, where the students just concluded a weeklong strike in tandem with their brethren at Yale, a previously undisclosed internal memo (just obtained by The Nation–download here) reveals that the administration has been flirting with union-busting tactics that go well beyond anything an academic institution should contemplate. The memo, dated February 16, 2005, is signed by none other than Alan Brinkley, a well-known liberal historian who is now serving as Columbia’s provost. Brinkley has gone out of his way to assure outside observers, including New York State Senator David Paterson, that “students are free to join or advocate a union, and even to strike, without retribution.” Yet his February 16 memo, addressed to seventeen deans, professors and university leaders, lists retaliatory actions that might be taken against students “to discourage” them from striking. Several of these measures would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act. Such measures include telling graduate student teachers and researchers who contemplate striking that they could “lose their eligibility for summer stipends” (i.e., future work opportunities) and also “lose their eligibility for special awards, such as the Whitings” (a prestigious scholarship and award program). Yet another proposal cited in the memo would require students who participated in the strike “to teach an extra semester or a year” as a condition for receiving their scholarly degree.

It’s unclear whether Columbia’s deans and department chairs ever deployed any of these punitive measures–or threatened to deploy them–during the most recent strike, where hundreds of students, joined by other union sympathizers, participated in rowdy demonstrations along Broadway. But the fact that Brinkley proposed such illiberal tactics is itself highly revealing. It suggests that, when it comes to the universities’ current administrations, the conservatives have it wrong. True, college professors in the United States overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But it is hard to make the case that the governance of these institutions–most of whose trustees and regents have backgrounds in business, not education–can be classified as “liberal.” In fact, in recent years, most major universities have adopted a corporate cost-cutting model–predicated on the elimination of full-time professorships and the downsizing of teaching–that is anathema to the academic culture.

Read the document in question here.

Human Rights Watch releases a new report making the case against Rumsfeld:

The report, Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees, is issued on the eve of the first anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos (April 28). It presents substantial evidence warranting criminal investigations of Rumsfeld and Tenet, as well as Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Gen. Geoffrey Miller the former commander of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “The soldiers at the bottom of the chain are taking the heat for Abu Ghraib and torture around the world, while the guys at the top who made the policies are going scot free,” said Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch. “That’s simply not right.” Human Rights Watch said that there was now overwhelming evidence that U.S. mistreatment and torture of Muslim prisoners took place not merely at Abu Ghraib but at facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq as well as at Guantánamo and at “secret locations” around the world, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the laws against torture. “This pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules,” said Brody. “It resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials to bend, ignore, or cast rules aside.”

A commentary on messianism:

“Where,” the Rabbis asked, “shall we look for the Messiah . . . Shall the Messiah come to us on clouds of glory, robed in majesty, and crowned with light?” The Talmud reports that Rabbi Joshua put this question to Elijah himself. Elijah replied, “At the gate of the city.” “And how shall I recognize him?” cried Rabbi Joshua. Elijah said, “He sits among the sick and destitute.” “What is he doing there?”

“He is . . .changing their bandages, one by one.” Surely if there is a God, we are the hands of God, changing the bandages one by one.

Michael Walzer in Exodus and Revolution:

We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught about the meaning and possibility of politics in its proper form: first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; and third, that ‘the way to the land is through wilderness.’ There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.

Chag sameach to all.

Susannah Heschel on the full story of the orange on the seder plate:

In the early 1980, the Hillel Foundation invited me to speak on a panel at Oberlin College. While on campus, I came across a haggadah that had been written by some Oberlin students to express feminist concerns. One ritual they devised was placing a crust of bread on the seder plate a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians, a statement of defiance against a rebbetzin’s pronouncement that, “There’s as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate.”

At the next Passover, I placed an orange on our family’s seder plate. During the first part of the seder I asked everyone to take a segment of the orange, make the blessing over fruit, and eat it as a gesture of solidarity with Jewish lesbians, gay men, and others ho are marginalized within the Jewish community (I mentioned widows in particular).

Bread on the seder plate brings an end to Pesach—it renders everything chametz, and its symbolism suggests that being lesbian is transgressive, violating Judaism. I felt that an orange was suggestive of something else: the fruitfulness for all Jews when lesbians and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life. In addition, each orange segment had a few seeds that had to be spit out-a gesture of spitting out, repudiating the homophobia that poisons too many Jews.

When lecturing, I often mentioned my custom as one of the many new feminist rituals that had been developed in the past thirty years. Somehow, though, the typical patriarchal maneuver occurred: my idea of an orange and my intention of affirming lesbians and gay men were transformed. Now the story circulates that a man stood up after a lecture I delivered and said to me, in anger, that woman belongs on the bimah as much as an orange on the seder plate My ideas-a woman’s words—are attributed to a man, an the affirmation of lesbians and gays is simply erased.

Isn’t that precisely what’s happened over the centuries to women’s ideas: a transfer to men’s voices? And isn’t this precisely the erasure of their existence that gay and lesbian Jews continue to endure, to this day?

Yehudah Amichai’s “The Diameter of the Bomb”:

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

Arthur Waskow on reconciliation and the four children:

Why should I compromise?” And we answer that we choose the route of compromise because the alternative is the mutual destruction, both moral and physical, of our two peoples. If we fail to compromise, we will lose a vision of the future for our children. The naive child asks, “Why can’t we just love each other?” And we answer that neither of us can live as if history has not happened. Unfortunately, too much blood has already been shed on both sides. It takes time to build trust. The frightened child asks, “How can I be safe?” And we answer that we are both afraid. “How can I be safe if my brother or sister is not safe?”

The wise child asks, “How can we take the steps that walk in peace, toward peace?” This is the question with which we wrestle tonight. But this is a question that goes beyond tonight. For in each one us lives all four children: Each of us bears in our own belly the angry one, the frightened one, the naive one, the wise one. Which of these children shall we bring to birth? Only if we can deeply hear all four of them can we truthfully answer the fourth question. Only if we can deeply hear all four of them can we bring to birth a child, a people, that is truly wise.

Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall, in A Force More Powerful, offer an account of the power of non-violent resistance against modern Pharoahs:

This great civil strike, the most impressive of its kind in Latin American history, had been driven by a decentralized campaign, relying on a cascade of individuals contacting and recruiting one another. But now that it was a force to be reckoned with, some kind of executive organization, to speak for strikers and negotiate with the regime, was needed. On the night of May 5, at the home of Hermogenes Alvarado, people representing students, market women, banks, the professions, commercial employees, day laborers, and bus and taxi drivers met and elected a slightly less representative National Reconstruction Committee. It had five members: a student, a physician, a Mortgage Bank attorney, a commercial employee, and a retired general. The next day the Committee came up with a list of demands, while offering the president a guarantee of safety and suggesting that he leave El Salvador. The opposition was now organized and flexing its muscles.

While the regime had not done anything decisive to quell the resistance, neither did it show any signs of yielding. The general addressed the nation over the radio, hailing those who were still working and accusing strike leaders of trying to ‘sow panic in the different social classes.’ The next day a leaflet announced the formation of a ‘Workers Anti-Revolutionary Committee,’ and Martinez called on business owners to open their doors once again. The dictator, who had so recently aroused great fear, was now reduced to beseeching his people to do what he asked.
Martinez seemed to be losing his appetite for intimidation, telling one official to ‘avoid trouble’ with strikers. ‘In the first days of April, I defeated the insurrectionists with arms, but finally they provoked a strike,’ the general said in an interview shortly after the strike ended. ‘Then I no longer wanted to fight. At whom was I going to fire? At children and youths who did not completely realize what they were doing?’ The general who ha dnot blanched at the killing of thousands of peasants a decade before could not use his weapons when his moment of greatest peril arrived.

A.J. Muste on the Passover story:

What was the sign that God had come? It was a bush that burned and burned and did not stop burning. Moses had had a fire kindled in his heart once, but it went out, or at least died down. God is the Being whose heart does not stop burning, in whom the flame does not die down. What was God all burned up about? The voice that came out of the bush said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people that are in Egypt and have heard their cry by reason of their oppressors.’ It was the physical, economic, and spiritual suffering, the injustice, the degradation to which actual people were subjected here on earth, that caused God concern. And the proof that God had entered into Moses, and that Moses had really been ‘converted,’ was that he had to go back and identify himself with his enslaved people— ‘organize them into Brickmakers’ Union Number One’—and lead them out of hunger and slavery into freedom and into ‘a good land, and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey.’

At the head of the Ten Commandments stand these great words: ‘I am the Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the slave-house. Thou shalt have no other God before me’—before this God who is in the hearts of his prophets as the Eternal Flame that will not let them rest where there is injustice and inequality until these have been done away with and men set about building God’s House instead of the slave-house. To be religious, the Hebrews discovered, is to get out of Egypt into Canaan; to refuse to be slaves or contented draft-horses; to build brotherhood in freedom — because that is what men , the children of God, were created to do! And religious leaders are those who identify themselves with the oppressed, so that men may carry out this, their true mission in the world.”

In the spirit of Pesach (and in protest of James Dobson’s “Justice Sunday”), a favorite Seder commentary:

And so it is related of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiba, and Rabbi Tarfon, that they once met on the night of Passover in B’nai B’rak and continued discussing the departure from Mitzra-yim so far into the night that they forgot what time it was till their students came and said, “Teachers, it is already time to read the morning Sh’ma!”

But there is another story about this story. It is said that when the five rabbis met that night, nineteen hundred years ago, they were stirred by the story of Passover to talk about how to throw off the tyranny of the Roman Empire. And they told their students to let them know at once if the Roman troops came into the neighborhood — to let them know by a code phrase about the morning prayer. So the story goes that they planned a rebellion that night. For when we are slaves, we must talk, but we must do more than talk.