I’ve been on leave since Thanksgiving writing a book which, God willing, should be out this summer.

Many thanks to all the many contributors to this forum.

The acid test issue for Jewish-Christian relations, in my view, is the Election of Israel. And in an October 29 issue with the German newspaper Die Welt, Cardinal Koch had this to say (I translate)

DIE WELT: Now St. Paul was a Jew and was quite close to the synagogue.

Koch: That’s right. Everywhere he went on his journeys, he made the synagogue his first stop and preached to the Jews, and only afterwards did he go to the pagans. In his Letters to the Romans he later described why the Gospel went its own way. He understood the deeper meaning of the rejection of the Gospel by the majority of Jews, so that thereby the message of Jesus would then be brought to the entire world. It is a great mystery that Israel remains the chosen people even though it rejects the Messiah. That is the great question that occupies him.

It is a great mystery. As I wrote in an essay entitled “Zionism for Christians” in 2008,

Ultimately, Jews and Christians must remain a mystery to each other. Christians cannot help but recognize that Providence has sustained the Jews through their long exile, yet they cannot explain why Jews do not recognize Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of their prophecy. Jews cannot help but recognize that Christians are inspired by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yet they cannot explain Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, except to dismiss it as a “world-historical fiction” (in Franz Rosenzweig’s words).

This is a place for Cardinal Koch to start. I look forward to hearing more from him.

But read what Bernanke actually said:

Stock prices rose and long-term interest rates fell when investors began to anticipate this additional [quantitative easing] action. Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth. For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower corporate bond rates will encourage investment. And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.

Just the opposite occurred: Stock prices since have tanked and long-term interest rates have risen. That began in earnest at last week’s G20 meeting in Asia, when some of America’s biggest creditors (the ones who have been buying US Treasuries at a $900 billion annual rate this year) said they might impose exchange controls to keep out the septic tide of dollars.

Bernanke (and the economists Ramesh is reading) think in terms of a closed-economy, one-period model: force a negative rate of return on cash and investors will shift their portfolios into stocks and long-term bonds, creating the wealth effect of which Bernanke wrote. But this is NOT, NOT a closed economy. The US is part of the world economy and the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Shoving more and more money into the world market–increasing the dosage of amphetamines because the patient remains unresponsive–has consequences. These might include exchange controls and severe damage to free markets.

When investors see that sort of thing happening, they decide to accept a small negative return on cash in order to avoid a big negative return on risk assets. And that’s what we saw when the world refused to foot the bill for QE2–also known as Titanic One, as I said last night on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report.

Here’s Michael Barone at National Review Online, on George W. Bush and Iraq:

Bush says that he decided to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the spring of 2006, but waited until after the November election and after recruiting Robert Gates. And, he writes, this president who had been reluctant to interact with generals had a recommendation to Gates for the new commander in Iraq: Gen. David Petraeus.

The surge was announced in January 2007, eight or nine months after Bush decided the previous strategy was failing. Bush argues that if he had acted more quickly, there would have been divisions in the government that would have led Congress to cut off war funding.

“The strategic consequences of defeat would have been horrific,” Bush says. “Embolden Iran — shudders through the Mideast — al-Qaida triumphant.” But now he’s optimistic about Iraq and about democracy in the region.

As the sun pours in, it’s hard not to shiver at how narrowly we avoided disaster and achieved success.

And here’s Debka.com today on Iran’s takeover of Iraq:

Iraqi power-sharing is dead.

Iyad Allawi, whose Al Iraqiya party, won Iraq’s general election last April but last week lost the premiership to the pro-Iranian incumbent Nouri Al-Malaki, was forced to admit Friday, Nov. 12 that “the concept of power-sharing in Iraq was dead now. For Iraq” he said, “there will be tensions and violence, probably.”

That day, too, DEBKAfile’s sources report, Hassan Nasrallah told a closed meeting of his Lebanese Hizballah activists that what happened in Baghdad is destined for Beirut.

He was underlining the new reality in the Middle East where Iran and its allies are beating the West out in one crisis after another, forcing pro-US and pro-Saudi political forces to come to terms with antagonists sponsored by Tehran and serving its interests rather than those of Washington. No one in the region buys the proposition that the Obama administration can count as a successful feat the Baghdad power-sharing deal. It may terminate the eight-month stalemate during which Iraq had no government, but it also brought into the Al Maliki administration the anti-American radical Shiite Sadrists, whose affairs are run from a party headquarters in Iran.

Snip

It is an open secret in Iraq that Maliki himself, whom parliament Friday awarded a month to form a government, is completely under the thumb of the Sadrists and their Iranian masters and in no position to set about healing the deep dissent afflicting the Iraqi people.

The next ton of bricks about to fall on Barack Obama’s head now comes from Lebanon and the Palestinians, both of whom are falling ever deeper into Syria’s clutches. As one well-informed American put it his week: “As Iraq goes, So Goes the Middle East.”

A nation state built around one religion might have worked in the unique, post-Holocaust context of the years after World War II; but today Israelis must ask, Has the idea of an ethnic state become an anachronism? …

Once there was a “Christian Europe.” But today’s great Western cities—London, New York, Paris, Geneva—teem with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus: people of every land and color. Israel’s self-definition as a one-religion state sealed off by a 28-foot-high wall, a network of settlements and segregated highways, projects an image that is disturbing to many, including younger generations of American Jews alienated by Israel’s policies….

A plan for a single-state solution might include the following: (1) With Belgium and Switzerland as models, a new constitution would set up either a binational state or one unified with a one-person-one-vote structure..

Never mind that Britain, Denmark, Malta, Greece and other European nations have state churches; never mind that Germany and other European countries offer citizenship to the descendants of their ethnic kin; never mind that America requires new citizens to swear a loyalty oath far more restrictive than the one Israel has proposed. And never mind that Israel faces Hamas and Hizbollah on its southern and northern borders, entities that have sworn to eradicate Israel with weapons provided by Iran, which also has sworn to destroy Israel, or that the security wall has reduced terrorist acts against Israeli civilians to nearly zero. Of all this, Fr. Junk, S.J., makes nary a mention, nor does he mention that almost all of Israel’s neighbors are Islamic states, something that does not seem to bother him. He does not mention that Israel is the only Middle Eastern state where Muslim women can vote.  There are too many lies, distortions and omissions to merit a detailed refutation; if a self-appointed mediator in a dispute mentions everything except the fact that the other fellow has a knife at your throat and has sworn a terrible oath to bathe in your blood, parsing the text is pointless.

Jews recall that Benedict XVI assured Jewish leaders in Rome this month that when efforts arise to de-legitimize the Jewish State, “I will be there” on Israel’s side. We also recall the words last May of Walter Cardinal Kasper, then head of the Pontifical Commission for Relations with the Jews, who declared that the Church “weakened itself” by “cutting itself off from its Jewish roots for centuries.”

Israel is the center of the life of the Jewish people, and to propose to junk it is a call for the ruin of the Jewish people. Catholics have learned that their welfare is inextricably tied to that of the Jewish people. In the 2008 essay reprinted below, I argue that the national life of the Jews, the People of God in the flesh, is indispensable for the Catholic Church.

The World Bank president got it exactly right:

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) –- The president of the World Bank said in a newspaper editorial Monday that the Group of 20 leading economies should consider adopting a global reserve currency based on gold as part of structural reforms to the world’s foreign-exchange regime.

World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said in an article the Financial Times that leading economies should consider “employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values.”

Zoellick made the proposal as part of reforms to be considered at this week’s G-20 meeting in Seoul.

“Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today,” said Zoellick.

He said such a reform would reflect economic realities and should be considered as a successor to the existing global currency paradigm known as “Bretton Woods II.” Bretton Woods II refers to the system which began in 1971, when U.S. President Nixon ended the dollar’s link to gold as established under the Bretton Woods agreement.

Zoellick said a return to some sort of currency link to gold would be “practical and feasible, not radical.”

“This new system is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and a renminbi that moves towards internationalization and then an open capital account,” he said.

When the G7 experimented with economic co-ordination in the 1980s, the Plaza and Louvre Accords focused attention on exchange rates. Yet the policy underpinnings ran deeper. The Reagan administration, guided by James Baker, the then Treasury secretary, wanted to resist a protectionist upsurge from Congress, like the one we see today. It therefore combined currency co-ordination with the launch of the Uruguay Round that created the World Trade Organisation and a push for free trade that led to agreements with Canada and Mexico. International leadership worked with domestic policies to boost competitiveness.

As part of this “package approach”, G7 countries were supposed to address the fundamentals of growth – today’s structural reform agenda. For example, the 1986 Tax Reform Act broadened the revenue base while slashing marginal income tax rates. Mr Baker worked with his G7 colleagues and central bankers to orchestrate international co-operation to build private-sector confidence.

I checked with friends who do monitor Egyptian TV broadcasts professionally. The story is a hoax. Mrs. Lipkin has been asked about her allegations and can’t quite remember when the broadcast took place. No-one else has seen it.

No-one will accuse me of harboring warm and fuzzy sentiments about Barack Obama. The estimable John Podhoretz denounced me for crossing the line of decency in attacking him not along ago (we’ll let that pass). More than two years ago I published a “Spengler” essay arguing that the then-candidate identified profoundly with the America-hating, fellow-traveling, anthropologist mother who dumped him on his grandparents in Hawaii while she set off to save the Muslim craftsmen of Indonesia against globalization. And I haven’t been shy about elaborating on this view since. We have the first President in history who thinks that the United States is part of the problem rather than part of the solution in the world, and it’s a disaster.

But all the nonsense about secret Muslim affiliation, missing birth certificates, and so forth, is an annoying distraction. This last report like the many before it is a hoax. Sure, it’s funny when  Jay Leno says: “What’s the difference between Obama and Bo? Bo has papers.” The President’s character and ideology are fair game. But let’s stick to facts. Obama has written and said enough to make his views clear. He has a deep personal sympathy for Islam and the Muslim world, the sort of bond that arises from abandonment by father, stepfather and mother. He is a dreadful president, possibly the worst in American history. But there’s no evidence of any kind that he is a secret Muslim, a foreign national, a space alien, or a cyborg.

On February 16, 1938, Strauss wrote to his longtime friend Jacob Klein: “One misunderstands Maimonides simply because one does not reckon with the possibility that he was an ‘Averroist.’ ” Strauss knew, of course, that “to pull Maimonides out of Judaism is to pull out its foundation,” but his recent insights into Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed had led him to the “determination that Maimonides in his beliefs was absolutely no Jew” because he was a philosopher. Strauss had long maintained, as he wrote to Klein, “the incompatibility in principle of philosophy and Judaism.” Eight years earlier in Berlin, he had argued heatedly with Julius Guttmann that “Jewish philosophy” was a contradiction in terms. But he had never overtly proven the claim for a major Jewish figure, and now he was getting ready to do so.

“When I explode this bomb,” Strauss wrote to Klein, “a great battle will be kindled.”

To argue that Jewish religion and reason are incompatible, I believe, is an act of hysteria; man seeks God through reason and God seeks man through Revelation, in Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s formulation. There are serious problems in Maimonides’ philosophy (on which see Michael Wyschogrod’s  “The One God of Abraham” in Abraham’s Promise). Strauss seized on these problems in order to twist Maimonides into his own atheist mold.

What a faker, a fool, a posturer, a rogue Strauss was! The damage he has done to American intellectual life is inestimable. As I wrote some years ago, he played the Gypsy Melchiades to the Macondo of American universities, teaching classics to students who had never read them, knew nothing of Jewish or Christian readings of them, and were generally inclined towards atheism to begin with. The fact that Americans learned Strauss rather than Rosenzweig is perhaps the greatest intellectual disaster to befall the conservative wing of American thinking after World War II.

As Klingenstein reports, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Sholem had this to say about Strauss’ book on Maimonides:

Very soon, Schocken .  .  . is publishing a book by Leo Strauss (whom I tried very hard to get appointed in Jerusalem). The book begins—with admirable courage given that everyone will understand this to be the book of a candidate for Jerusalem—with an unfeigned and copiously (if madly) argued affirmation of atheism as the most important Jewish watchword. .  .  . I admire the moral courage and regret the obviously consciously and deliberately provoked suicide of such a capable mind.

Klingenstein excerpts letters from Strauss to the Jewish scholar Nahum Glatzer (whose popularization of Rosenzweig made English-speaking readers aware of him) in which Strauss begs Glatzer not to denounce him as an apostate, atheist, and saboteur of Judaism. Sadly, Glatzer kept his mouth shut; he should have blown the whistle on Strauss.

The idea that faith and reason are incompatible has a grain of truth–they are quite different–but the idea that the human personality can live without both of them is pernicious. For what it’s worth, here’s my summary of the problem (from a recent review-essay on Rebecca Goldstein):

Why, indeed, would anyone try to prove that God exists? The religious don’t need to, and the atheists don’t want to. “Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and well? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love and ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that he exists?” asked Joseph Soloveitchik, quoting Søren Kierkegaard.

But even the most enraptured lovers pause between sighs to ask whether it is true love or infatuation, and whether the beloved will wax fat as her mother, and whether the lover’s domestic inclination and career prospects make him marriageable. Some things really must be decided by faith, Augustine said, such as, “Who is your father?” DNA testing has transferred that question to science, but we still must take as a matter of faith the answer to the most important question we are likely to ask: Do we really love the object of our affections, or do we love a projection of ourselves on an object of convenience?

Lovers never really will be sure whether they adore a particular human being or an idealized image, for all earthly love contains a bit of both. Every lover has a bit of Pygmalion as well as Paris. Anyone who has loved knows the dizzying alternation of “sky-high jubilation” and the “deathly gloom” of doubt, as Goethe’s Klärchen sang. That is why love does not suppress reason; on the contrary, with desperate appeal, it summons to its service all of reason’s instruments of torture, the better to test the beloved. Precisely because lovers do not trust their passion and resort to reason, lovers’ misunderstandings have been the stuff of comedy (and sometimes tragedy) since Menander.

Those who most love God turn to reason in similar fashion. Reason is a purifying fire. For those who have had a conversion experience, a sense of the divine presence, how can they be quite sure that what they felt was an intimation of God rather than a psychotic delusion? Not for nothing did the prophets inveigh against the ancient Hebrews’ whoring after foreign gods. As the Tanya states, sin is proof of idolatry, for if we actually believed the First Commandment—that the Lord is God—we never would sin. The risk in attempting to approach a God who is wholly other is that we may worship a projection of ourselves.

That is why people of faith emulate human lovers, subjecting their love to trial by reason—not because reason can replace faith but because reason demands to know, “faith in whom?”

There still is a lot of wishful thinking out there. Today’s Jewish Ideas Daily leads with a defense of non-denominational Judaism, under the rubric, “Who Needs Denominations?” Author Yehudah Mirsky wonders whether the Reform and Conservative denominational structure makes sense in today’s world:

If one feature of modern life is the ascendance of reason and science as sources of knowledge and authority, another is expressiveness, the conviction that the truth is to be found in one’s own subjectivity and in the recesses of one’s own experience and passions. This impulse, helped along by new technologies and forms of organization that make for more diffuse structures of authority and belief, and by currents like feminism that link the expressive ideal with the demand for equality, has powerfully reworked all of contemporary religion. In Western societies today, even the most stringent form of traditionalism is chosen; if it does not find an echo in the subjective experience of the individual, it will not long endure.

In short, Rabbi Mirsky thinks that in the modern world every Jew will make up her or her own Judaism to suit “the subjective experience of the individual,” in a free-form sort of organization that allows for such things.

That is substantially what the Reform movement has been doing for years, as I wrote in the Feb. 2010 First Things. The Reform movement has lost a third of its members in the past decade. If you are looking for something the validates your subjective experience, there are lots of other things besides Judaism that will accommodate you. The founder of the ultra-liberal Jewish denomination of Reconstructionism, Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, was himself a Jew of traditional habits, who did not believe in God. The synagogue, he said, is where we say kaddish (act as mourners) for the religion of our fathers. An older generation of Jews felt obligation without believing; their children and grandchildren fall away from Judaism altogether.

Rabbi Mirsky adds,

Today’s American Jewish denominations are very much the products of their time and place and of the specific circumstances of American religious life as a whole, heavily shaped as that life has been by essentially Protestant nomenclature and modes of organization. Interestingly, the denominational structure is dramatically different from that prevailing in Israel or other places in the world. No less interestingly, the denomination registering the greatest current growth, or at least the greatest internal retention rate, is the one with the least centralized structure and the most thoroughgoing demands on the faithful—namely, Orthodoxy.

Jewish denomination structure does indeed derive from Protestant nomenclature, because the liberal denominations are a response to liberal Protestantism in the first place. The founding premise of Reform Judaism is the abandonment of Election and the consequent messianic hope of restoration of the Temple. Conservative Judaism emerged from the German society “Wissenschaft des Judentums” (Science of Judaism) which wanted to keep the outer form of observance with a rationalist inner core. Both are shaped by Christian culture. And that is why neither has any purchase in Israel, where there are few Christians to whom to accommodate. For Israelis, the synagogue is simply normative, traditional Judaism; you go, or you don’t.