Being a Consumer

Today this is an unashamed lifestyle blog. Sometimes I think we’re put on this earth to consume. As you look around it does seem that way. Everyone is seemingly consuming food all the time. However I don’t mean to discuss the consumption of food, but the consumption of brands. Before I continue I want to make the point that I know things are just an assembly of atoms in a particular form, but that doesn’t render them any less desirable if you hanker after their particular shape or style, whatever the substance.

I am just as bad as anyone else. I find the latest brand irresistible. I look at my daughter’s IPhone and feel an incredible, almost unbearable compulsion to possess one myself. I don’t know the reason, since I already own a great mobile phone, my trusty BlackBerry, and it e mails better than the IPhone. But does it tell me the traffic conditions on the nearest freeway? No, it does not. Do I need to know these traffic conditions? No, of course not, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the facility.

It has a screen that flips from the horizontal to the vertical, how have I lived without this? I am mystified. It is truly touch screen, not a bit but totally. I think I am falling in love, and it’s the real thing.

Mind you I was equally besotted when I purchased, at enormous expense my Sony Viega 42” plasma flat screen television a few years back. Since that time I bought, for much lesser prices, various makes of LCD flat screen televisions. I know the technical arguments why the plasma screen set should be superior, but the truth is, that to our eyes, the opposite is the truth. In this instance cheaper has proven to be better.

Unashamedly I drive a car that others will consider a gas guzzling car of enormous and conspicuous consumption. It is a top of the line Cadillac CTS Sports Luxury model that makes a wonderfully satisfactory growling noise when you stamp on the accelerator, and takes off like a big scalded cat, faster than almost any other big car. When you are stuck in traffic it makes almost no noise at all, and it’s a bit like sitting in your favorite leather armchair. Of course the computer system contains a TV, DVD player and sat navigation system and does everything else you can imagine except give you a rub down with the latest edition of your chosen girlie magazine. This isn’t a good car, it’s a great driving experience. Now, don’t for a second get this beauty confused with its smaller sister, the crappy Cadillac based on its European sister company car, the Saab. This might look like a slightly smaller version of the Detroit super car, but it’s a fake with a capital F. I drove one as a loan out when my car was being serviced and it’s a travesty that the two models have the same brand name of Cadillac. If you want to drive a Cadillac in Europe insist on the import or don’t bother.

But back to my compulsion to buy the new, the flash, the must have gizmo. I did the same when Bose made their more fitted ear phones for noise reduction or listening to my magnificently designed Apple iPod. This is surely one of the great combinations for enhanced and comfortable listening designed. You can wear and listen through this combination of kit for an entire London to Los Angeles air trip and feel no discomfort. Sometimes buying the desirable is also the wisest course.

My Name is Andre

There is nothing much better than being spoiled, other than being spoiled rotten. Yesterday was one of those good days. Holiday turned into a positive pleasure when I was taken aboard a beautiful ship, the Golden Princess, by my lovely family, and dispatched to the Mexican Riviera.

Everything is very wonderful on this ship as it sails to points South except for a video show stuck on the words, “Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, my name’s Andre….” It is playing endlessly in one of the numerous bars despite my repeated requests to the ever smiling, ever friendly crew. I guess its one of those Stepford Wives kind of moments you sometimes experience on a place this well ordered and maintained. Every time I reported this problem to one of the crew they smile, tell me they will immediately deal with the problem, and then, when nothing happens immediately one soon becomes a bit agitated.

Eventually Andre stops greeting me, and it is a great relief, for both Andre and myself, and all the other people in this otherwise quieter area.

The other thing of interest, and I should be charging Apple for this, is the never ending number of people, particularly men, who stop, stare and then ask questions about my MacBook Air. It seems as if everyone wants one.

On the brighter side for those of you not here, is that the weather isn’t so great, but I’m hopeful that this will improve by tomorrow. For now its pina colada time.

Brit TV Rules America - OK?

There was a time when Britain produced some of the best television programs in the World. Everyone recognized this fact but the truth is that it didn’t sell too well in America. The BBC used to regularly pretend that it did. But the facts portrayed a different picture. Yes, “Masterpiece Theater” was on Public Service television, however it didn’t impinge on the wider consciousness of America. This audience might have been getting a diluted flavor of England’s culture from the derivatives of “Till Death Do Us Part” with the American, homogenized version, “All in the Family”, and a similar transfer occurred with “Sanford & Son” which had its genesis with Britain’s comedy classic “Steptoe and Son”. However the truth was that our cultural and programming clout in the States was minimal. We simply didn’t get their culture in its broadest sense. Even though this tradition continues to prosper with the stateside version of “The Office” it still is not accepted across America as mass market.

This changed completely within the last few years when not only did the Brits begin to hold their own on television, but actually started to dominate the TV jungle. Oddly, it was when Britain started producing real mainstream, low brow mass market entertainment television shows such as “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, and “The Weakest Link”. British telly became a totally dominant force with the advent of “American Pop Idol” and all the Simon Fuller, Simon Cowell originated shows that flowed from this inspiration. They took vertical and horizontal integration of an old Variety entertainment format to a new level and it worked all over the world, but particularly in the States.

Much cheaper than drama to stage per minute, but engaging the audience with the real life “journey” of the variety of different contestants who interact with each other, the stylized jury and the voting TV audience. The jury has its villain, its fair guy and its kind Aunty and the proceedings are always watched over by an amusing and witty master of ceremonies who represents fair play for the audience.

Strange and more than a little sad isn’t it, that after all those years of elitist but wonderful Britain trying to force feed the world its high end culture it was England’s end of the pier fun, mass market entertainment that finally conquered the world.

Service With A Smile

Have you ever spent a day shopping and relaxing in Los Angeles? The rest of the world could still learn some lessons. My day started by our parking in The Grove. This is a purpose built, almost Disney type shopping experience for adults. It is so clean, efficient and excellent that you would think it would be hateful and undesirable. Instead of which we parked in the pristine parking lot, which was spotlessly clean and had a choice of descending the immaculately clean stairway, the pristine escalators or the bank of efficient elevators. I chose the escalators and passed lobby areas in which chaps were lounging on settees using the free wifi connections to their laptops.

Arriving at the bottom of the escalator I journeyed less than ten yards and there was a small group of fantastically lithe and well endowed young mothers, complete with new born babies in front of them, doing jumps on the spot. The results were so fantastically pneumatic that I found myself walking into the nearest wall before I was rescued. I quietly uttered the words, “Thank God for California!”

I ate a fantastic breakfast in the sunshine in the same kind of environment. I then went to a bookstore and was looking around when a staff member enquired if `I needed any assistance. I hadn’t bothered them about my wistful search for a book I had no right to find, having forgotten its title, author or year of publication. The ultra efficient, friendly and helpful staff would not be deterred by any of this and found and ordered me this book in a couple of minutes. This is not the service you would get in the UK, or anywhere else in Europe. We still have a lot to learn.

During the day I found unfailing courtesy in restaurants, parking lots, schools and a kids swimming lesson I attended. It wasn’t phony and it was extremely pleasant.

I visited an exceptionally good faith school and the standards were tremendously high. Every school in the UK would do well to imitate it if the children I saw were examples of what can be achieved with well-motivated parents, teachers and kids.

The swimming class was part of a business run by a five time Olympic gold medalist, attended by two of my grand children. I know a bit about swimming but I thought this swimming school was on a whole different level to anything I’ve ever seen before. I am sure there will be many future champions who will come out of this training method. The school was staffed by an excellent team of trainers who really knew what they were doing, and could communicate this to the children of different levels of ability and age that they were training.

All day I heard no one swear, I didn’t see anyone litter, and everyone I met was courteous. This resulted in making the experience of the day much more pleasant. I don’t see anything wrong with any of this and would love to see some of these aspects of life spread to Europe.

A Cold Front Coming?

I am very jet lagged having just arrived in L.A. after that long flight from London. In California the sun is shining, my family are well and even my lap top is working properly! The last time I was here, about 6 months before the sub-prime banking situation unrolled I wrote articles about what was happening, warning of an impending financial disaster of epic proportion. I discussed this with European bankers, economists and political friends, but the size of the financial tsunami wasn’t truly grasped by an of them. I think it still has not been understood. If our leaders deal with this firmly and immediately it can be kept to a recession that we can come out of in a year or two, but if it’s not managed we could tip over into a full blown depression not seen since the last world war. They are still talking about doing the right things, but are not yet doing them.

People in the USA seem, on first sight to have the same problems and worries that exist in Europe. The recession is biting. Prices on a variety of items are going up. Values of housing are going down. Businesses are not paying bills as fast as they should or they were. The results are obvious, individuals and organisations that operated nearer to the margins are going bust. People are cutting back, even here in LA there are all the signs of nervousness, and it’s in a more advanced stage of economic downtown with a seemingly steeper angle of decline.

Projecting just a little bit forward it’s a near certainty that the geographic locations that profited the most in the property driven price explosion offered by sub-prime finance will suffer the most disastrous falls. Florida and California are these places and the chickens are already coming home to roost. Within an hour or two of arrival I was told of a friend who had purchased a desirable residence at auction, previously valued at $800,000 he got the place for a little under half!

So, for every loser in a slump there are those who gain. There is an old adage that states, when America sneezes the rest of the world gets a cold. Well, to me its evident that America has a cold, does this mean we’re all going to suffer pneumonia?

Already the leaders of the world’s richest economies, the G7, have been meeting to figure out ways that they might meet this challenge. They’re applying pressure on the big financial institutions to keep money flowing but they are doing too little too late. The big banks who were all more than ready to profit from the sub prime bubble, easy credit that got us to this situation seem unwilling to do anything to help get us out of the hole their greed helped create. They are going to have to be made to do so, today, as tomorrow could be too late.

It isn’t yet a disaster for the general world economy, but we’re near the precipice.

Still Fighting

There are very few openly pro Jewish and pro Israel politicians in the UK. There are many in the USA. Is this because there are too few Jews in the UK to count politically whereas there is a critical mass of more than 6 million Jewish people in America, not afraid to make themselves clearly heard? Or, could it be, there are many non-Jewish people who would take a Philo Semitic stance based on the facts, but are scared to do so in the UK as there are perceived to be a very voluble contrary group here, namely the Muslim community?

Many people are terribly afraid to defend Israel especially when it’s been hard to do so against a rising current of hate and vitriol.

Recently there had been more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in the way some members of Britain’s Labour party had described leading Conservative and Jewish politicians Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, particularly in their printed material.

There has recently been major political debate about Britain’s faith schools. The point has been made that Islamic schools should employ a more inclusive curriculum, taught in English as Jewish faith schools do. Of course Islamic schools could teach prayers in Arabic just as Jewish schools teach their prayers in Hebrew.

There is in Britain a commonly accepted perception amongst Jewish people that there was and remains a lack of impartiality at the BBC where it concerns Israel. Whilst we all recognise that there is some desire among certain areas of the Corporation’s leadership to correct this imbalance there is a long way to travel before our desire for the BBC’s impartial destination is reached.

We shall shortly be celebrating Israel’s 60th birthday and all those who have fallen to defend her. It is amazing how much this little country has achieved in that short time, and despite all the odds against it. We can all be proud of Israel and her people. They have done remarkably well in almost impossible conditions.

Despite this the British academics again seek to sever connections with Israel’s universities. Of course this ban is abhorrent to any right thinking person. How can anyone protect the right of the Palestinians by taking away the rights of academic congress with Israel? Even Palestinian academics have argued against this ban and were joined by every British newspaper. Even normally anti Israel papers such as the Independent have been firm in their rejection of this ban,

Ask yourself how this ban would be communicated if Israel were really ostracised. You wouldn’t be able to do so without Israeli technology in your mobile phone, nor would you be able to send an email since the processor in your computer is likely to have been designed in Israel, and a great many other technologies were produced in Israel and so on. Who loses if Israel were ever cut off from this country? Probably this country.

This type of ban and the logic for it has no basis in reality. What it’s really about is anti-Zionism and it borders on anti-Semitism. Does anyone seriously believe the spurious reasoning behind this ban? If they were then why is there no ban on academic centres in countries like China for what they did and still do in Tibet or Tiananmen Square. How about Iran, Syria, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Burma and thirty or forty other countries for their abuses of human rights, torture, arrest without trial etc?

We deal with insidious anti-Semitism posing as anti-Zionism all the time. I make it my business to fight it wherever it appears. It is awful that I have to report that this situation is worsening all the time. You would be upset and perhaps as horrified as me to witness this in all its abhorrent forms. Suffice it to say students are being victimised and bullied purely because they are Jewish. I have received threats, and I am not alone, for having the temerity to state that there is another point of view.

Even some Student Unions have joined in this behaviour resulting in a wide variety of insults, physical assaults, threats and intimidation. Remember I am not talking about pre-war Berlin, but present day Britain.

It seems to me that there is a direct correlation between extreme Islamic radical student groups; a hard left union agenda and unreasoning, unceasing and total hatred of anything Israeli. Presently there is some potential for a peace deal in the Middle East. Even some hard line terrorist groups have ceased, albeit begrudgingly and temporarily, attacking Israel; but not the AUT. They choose now to continue their attacks on Israel. What it means is that Israel can never do right in their eyes. There really does appear to be two sets of rules, one for every other country and another for Israel. In addition one feels compelled to ask if the overt racism being experienced by Jewish people in the UK today, particularly in our university campuses would be acceptable if visited on any other racial group. Sadly we know the answer. We have to put a stop to this.

Three hundred and fifty years in this country and we are still fighting.

Being a Liberal

Liberally Jewish

Most of you reading this blog are not Jewish, in fact, for sure, the majority of the group reading this are not Liberal Jews, the group I take pride in belonging to. Some call this Jewish lite. I am not a religious person. I am what I was born into, racially and tribally Jewish, but not a believer in a man or woman with flowing robes on a mountain top, bearded or otherwise. For me if there is a deity it is the good within us all, and the Devil might be the opposite.

Liberal Judaism in the UK has about ten or eleven thousand official adherents. We are small enough a group to be both vertically and horizontally integrated but big enough to be a pain in everyone else’s ideological butt.

I want to see our World being full of love and good people, even when sometimes the logic tells us that the glass is half empty. We need to steer our movement through what promises to be uncharted territory, unlike what has gone before.

There is a common theme running through recent Jewish and Israeli history. This is that there are many terrible and unrelenting enemies of us as Jews, and Israel as a nation. I don’t want to rehearse all the well-trodden paths that most of you are aware of. I will just mention three recent happenings.

During the French riots there have been a very large number of anti-Semitic attacks that both the French Government and the official Jewish representative bodies deny are linked.

The next major incident I want you to consider took place in Bulgaria, a country that very recently joined the European Union. One of their major elected parties publicly stated that their country needed to rid itself of all its Jews. It then went on to list fifteen hundred Bulgarian Jews and their addresses on their web site. The message was clear, here they are, go and get them.

Last and by no means least there is the infamous speech by the President of Iran calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. Imagine how the world would react if a Jewish or Israeli leader called for an Islamic state to be wiped out just because it was Islamic?

When I was getting married many years ago my good friend, Rabbi Lew, told me he would like to see me more at our shaul, then in Dean Street, Central London. It was orthodox and I was the third generation of Klinger who was a member. I felt somewhat embarrassed to tell him that I felt a terrible hypocrite to arrive at the synagogue having to drive because of the distance, and then discreetly park my car. He responded by saying that he wasn’t the Lord’s policeman, but he would like to see me. It struck me as a common sense that the Almighty might well applaud.

I suppose that kind of reasoning is what brought me to Liberal Judaism. Faith coloured by common sense and a feeling for the times we live in. I believe that you will see Liberal Judaism begin to really grow in numbers and vigour. I also believe that as a paradoxical defensive reflex the ultra orthodox movement will grow even faster and bigger in the Diaspora. The real squeeze will be on the former middle ground conformists whose assimilation into a larger heterogeneous society will make them vanish. Their beliefs will result in their own demise. How can they live with the moral dichotomy of their children “marrying out” if they are not inclusive of their grand children?

I believe Liberal Judaism will continue to succeed in exporting its message of inclusiveness; involvement and engagement to the wider, surrounding community and that this will grow and prosper.

Statistics suggests that the British United synagogue membership (similar to the American Conservative movement) is fairly static, Reform numbers are in the doldrums in many respects but the Charedi is growing very fast. It has the high birth rate, the fundamental belief, and seemingly the answers that gets recruits. It looks as though these ultra orthodox people that some consider a throwback to life in Middle Europe in the nineteenth century, might well number between 20 to 40% of all those in the UK who consider themselves Jewish.

This brings one neatly to the other side of this argument. This is really the problem, the very large and increasing number of Jews who don’t count themselves as Jewish. Those that don’t belong to or contribute in any way to any branch of organized Judaism. The folks that might just join a synagogue when they’re getting a bit older and they start to think about not being buried in a Jewish piece of consecrated ground. What a great shame that they only want to be Jewish when they’re dead!

I think that we in Liberal Judaism can, does and should continue to reach out, to reclaim some living Jewish life from people who might yet welcome some of our warmth, our Jewishness, our love. There’s just the chance that being positive will find a receptive audience with a great many people who are looking to place themselves back in the bosom of their faith. Let’s welcome them home, it’s warm inside.