Betrayed by Madoff, Yeshiva U. Adds a Lesson

I've started to think about planning my courses for next semester. One of them is an introductory course on Judaism, and I usually include a segment on Jewish ethics. Perhaps this time we should discuss business ethics according to Jewish teachings. Tomorrow's New York Times has an interesting article on the soul-searching going on at Yeshiva University in the wake of the Madoff scandal - Betrayed by Madoff, Yeshiva U. Adds a Lesson.

In Rabbi Benjamin Blech’s philosophy of Jewish law course, students pondered whether Jewish values had been distorted to reward material success.“This overrides everything else,” said Rabbi Blech, who has taught at Yeshiva for 42 years. “It is an opportunity to convey to students that ritual alone is not the sole determinant of our Judaism, that it must be combined with humanity, with ethical behavior, with proper values, and most important of all, with regard to our relationship with other human beings.”....

Rabbi Blech... said he, too, worried that community expectations had steered students away from public-service professions like teaching and toward more lucrative jobs.“In elevating to a level of demiworship people with big bucks, we have been destroying the values of our future generation,” he said. “We need a total rethinking of who the heroes are, who the role models are, who we should be honoring.”....

Rabbi Blech, for his part, turned to the Ten Commandments, noting that some focus on a person’s relationship with God, others on relationships with fellow human beings. He said that “both tablets are equally important.”

“Just because you eat kosher and observe the Sabbath does not make you good,” he explained. “If you cheat and steal, you cannot claim you are a good Jew.”

Links to articles on impact of Madoff on Jewish community

Minneapolis - Jewish groups reeling over Madoff scheme.

JTA article on Picower foundation and the groups it gave money to. This was a very large foundation - half a billion dollars in assets. In 2007 they gave about $2.5 million to Jewish groups.

Washington, D.C. - Local toll runs high in Madoff collapse.

Palm Beach, Florida, charities damaged by Madoff.

Baltimore - Jewish charities not struck by Madoff collapse.

Article on Boston and the views of Boston Jewish community leaders, in the Boston Globe.

And .... if you're curious to read an anti-Semitic article on Madoff, take a look at James Petras's article in Dissident Voice. His article is cloaked in a lot of Marxist and anti-Israel rhetoric, but is anti-Semitic nonetheless. (To get more of a flavor of his rhetoric, see his article, "Barack Obama: 'America's First Jewish President'"; see also this ADL article that includes a discussion of him). Dissident Voice, by the way, is the journal that has published Daniel McGowan's defense of Ernst Zundel, the convicted Neo-Nazi now sitting in a German jail for Holocaust denial. Update: McGowan has now written his own anti-Semitic take on Madoff for Dissident Voice: The Madoff Victims: Schadenfreude, not Anti-Semitism.

Why Hanukkah Still Matters

Edgar Bronfman has a nice column in the Washington Post on Hanukkah and the meanings it has (and can have) for American Jews -Why Hanukkah Still Matters.

He writes:

But the success and confidence of "assimilated" American Jews is also what makes them capable of creating a new kind of Judaism, one that may grow and thrive with freedom. The interest is there, among both in-married and intermarried families, but the knowledge is lacking. Jewish education must replace the fight against anti-Semitism as the focus of Jewish communal life. American Jews have the opportunity to create a Jewish practice that is based not in fear but in hope. And hope, after all, is the theme that runs so powerfully through both the Maccabees' story of triumph against all odds and the rabbis' story of the lasting power of a single flame.

The first step toward carrying on Judaism is to begin learning. American Jews should not let Christmas define Hanukkah--they should define it for themselves, based on knowledge of its multi-layered texts and traditions. I am convinced that Judaism still has much to offer to the world, with its spirit of questioning, its focus on living ethically, its communal ethos. And there may be a message for the world in the Hanukkah story. If the Maccabees had not been victorious, would monotheism have survived? Would Christianity or Islam ever have come into being? Perhaps the Hanukkah story should be cause for celebration outside the Jewish community as well as within.

It's an interesting question - if the Maccabees had not succeeded, would Judaism have survived as a separate religion? Would Christianity or Islam ever have come into being? I sometimes think about historical nexus points, where a single event would have led to a significant change in the future. (For a much more obscure example - what if King Sennacherib had succeeded in his siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E.? It's possible that the kingdom of Judah would have been dissolved into the Assyrian empire, as the northern kingdom of Israel had been - in which case there would have been no Bible and no Judaism either).

Khaye, the Daughter of Yiftach

I'm in the midst of grading final exams for my Hebrew Scriptures course, and one of the questions that I set the students was an analysis of the story of Yiftach and his daughter, one of the most troubling stories in the Bible, in Judges 11. Yiftach makes a vow to sacrifice the first thing that comes out of his house if he is victorious in his battle against the Ammonites. He is victorious, and when he comes home, his daughter, who is his only child, runs out dancing with timbrels to greet him. It is she whom he must sacrifice. He does not retract his vow, and the implication at the end of the story is that he sacrificed her, after she spent two months in the hills mourning her virginity with her friends.

There is no moral condemnation of Yiftach in the story, as there is also no moral condemnation of Abraham in Genesis 22 when he prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac. In both cases, God has commanded or permitted the sacrifice of the child. The difference, of course, is that Yiftach actually goes through with it.

The story depicts the daughter of Yiftach as acquiescing in her father's vow. She says, "You have opened your mouth to YHWH - do to me according to what came out of your mouth, since YHWH has wreaked vengeance on your enemies, on the Ammonites." Since God has fulfilled his side of the vow - it was he who brought the Ammonites defeat at the hands of Yiftach - then Yiftach has to fulfill his side of the vow, and bring the sacrifice.

Would she really have acquiesced so calmly? (She is calm - her father is upset, panicked). My students, in their essays, explain her agreement with her father as submission to his will as the patriarch of the family who is due his daughter's obedience. I resist this interpretation - frankly, it seems tragic and sad that a young woman could agree to her own destruction.

So I have written a poem to express my own feelings about this story.

An Only Daughter

“To God Himself she is an only daughter”
an only daughter – bas-yekhide
who sits at God’s right hand,

his sister Khaye, green eyes and black braids*

Who else is an only daughter?
“She was his only daughter; aside from her he had neither son nor daughter”

And what did he say about her?
“Whatever comes, indeed comes, out of the doors of my house to greet me when I return in peace from the sons of Ammon will be for YHWH and I will raise it up as something raised-up.”

But it was not peace, it was war
He did not return in peace from the sons of Ammon,
He returned in war –
“He struck them from Aroer up to Minnit, twenty cities, as far as Avel-Keramim, a very great blow, and the sons of Ammon were subdued before the sons of Israel.”

I didn’t hear the old man’s words when he made his vow
He was in the Fortress of Gilead
but our house was in the Land of Good.
I don’t know why he went back there – his brothers used to call him
the Son of the Whore, the Son of the Other Woman
What did he owe them?
But when they called, he came
He still wanted them to give him his true inheritance
So he agreed to that strange scheme
To fight the sons of Ammon
And get what in return?
To be a judge – “his hand against every man, and every man’s hand against him”

What did he say when he saw it was his daughter, his only daughter?
“I opened my mouth to YHWH, and I cannot go back”
His name is Opener and indeed he opened the way but could not return on it
She was his troubler who brought him low

I danced out of the house with the drums in my hand
when I heard that Abba was returning
at last, from all the wars
Maybe this time he would stay in the Good Land
He was wearing his armor, with his sword on his hip
He looked at me,
suddenly, his eyes opened wide and he said,
“Alas, my daughter! I opened my mouth to YHWH, and I cannot go back.”
Go back from what? I opened my mouth to ask Abba,
and then I saw the sword in his hand
His eyes weren’t looking at me anymore
But at the tip of that sword

I look back on that scene from a great distance now
It’s almost as if I’m an observer now – the old weary grizzled man, the young girl with the drum in her hand, the men behind him unloading the donkeys
As he spoke, he slid his hand onto the hilt of his sword and pulled it out of the scabbard
then he was standing holding it almost at her throat

I don’t know how I was able to say it, I don’t remember how I was so calm
“Let this thing be done for me; let me alone two months and I will go and descend upon the hills, and I will weep for my virginity, I and my friends.”

He looked at the sword in his hand
The men behind him froze, the ropes in their hands falling to the ground
He looked down again at me
I was such a little gir
The sword fell, its tip digging into the ground

Sudden movement –
the men behind him took the load off the donkeys
Opener/Yiftach left the sword in the dust
He walked through the doors of his house

And I?
I went into the hills
I descended into the hills
And I never came back.

Sometimes it is possible to change the ending of the story

But the other girl? That one,
O, she returned to her father’s house, and
he did to her as he had vowed

“My sister Khaye with her eyes of green
A German burned her in Treblinka.”

And the four days of mourning of the daughters of Israel?
the tenth of Tevet, the twenty-seventh of Nissan, the seventeenth of Tammuz, and the ninth of Av

Note: Khaye is a reference to a poem by Binem Heller, "My Sister Khaye," which was written in memory of his sister who died at Treblinka. It was set to music by Chava Alberstein for her recording "The Well," which she did with the Klezmatics.

Foundation That Relied on Madoff Fund Closes

Another foundation is being forced to close its doors due to Madoff's Ponzi scheme - The Picower Foundation. It lost approximately $1 billion. One Jewish group that it gave money to is the Jewish Outreach Institute.

Jewish organizations that lost money with Madoff

Update: For another list, see article in the Forward. The list below has been updated from the Forward article.

The The New York Times has a list of Bernard Madoff's clients who have lost truly stunning amounts of money. They include some iconic Jewish organizations. Information below is from the NYT article and several others (see this Forward article). It is a truly grim story of betrayal of personal and institutional trust. There is a particularly horrifying detail from a story in the New York Jewish Week -

One private investor here said he was still in disbelief that all of his money was gone after he had entrusted it to a man who “over the years was a pillar of the community.”

“The whole story is so bizarre that it surpasses understanding,” he said. “I have known him for 20 years. Our relationship was close enough that when he was raising money for a cause because a family member was ill, I made a contribution and he hugged and kissed me. Knowing that relationship, it is impossible he could do this to me and all the other organizations and people he did it to. ... How a human being could turn that way on fellow human beings and charities and organizations that he respected and admired, I can’t fathom.”

In an article from the Forward, a statement on the impact on the Jewish community:

Mark Rosenblum, director of the Jewish Studies Center at Queens College said: “This is a much more Draconian hit on American Jewish philanthropy than the generalized credit crunch has been. This one man has demonstrated a capacity to radically impact American Jewish philanthropy and, even more important, elements of American civil society.”

Here's the list:

American Friends of Yad Sarah $1.5 million
American Jewish Congress (more than 2/3 of its endowment was invested with Madoff - he was treasurer of the board)
American Technion Society - $72 million
L. Bravmann Foundation $5 million
Chais Family Foundation (had assets of $178 million in May 2007)
Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun $3.5 million
Eisenberg Family Foundation $5.1 million (in 2006, donated $950,000 to Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey)
Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity $15.2 million
Forward Foundation $355,000
Hadassah $90 million (this is truly awful!)
Hillel Foundation $20,000 (thank God it's not more!)
Jewish Federation of Greater Washington $10 million
Jewish Foundation of Greater Los Angeles $6.4 million
Los Angeles Jewish Community Foundation $18 million
Jewish Community Centers Association of North America $7 million
Jewish Funds for Justice $3.9 million
Charles and Mary Kaplan Foundation (Rockville, MD) $29.2 million
U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg's foundation - $12.8 million
Julian J. Levitt Foundation $6 million
Madoff Family Foundation $19.1 million
Maimonides School $5 million.
North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System $5.7 million
Ramaz School $6 million
Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation $7 million
SAR Academy $1.2 million
Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation $145 million (has given money to Brandeis)
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology $6 million
Yeshiva University $100 to $125 million (Madoff also served as the board treasurer)
Mortimer Zuckerman Trust $30 million

Total known thus far: approximately $814 million

Other Jewish groups mentioned in articles that are tied to Madoff which may have lost money -

Kav Lachayim (received money from Madoff Family Foundation)
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Gurwin Jewish Geriatric Center
Wunderkinder Foundation (Steven Spielberg) - has funded the Chabad charity Children of Chernobyl (in 2006, 70% of its dividend income and interest was handled by Madoff)
Lautenberg Foundation has given to the United Jewish Appeal of MetroWest ($352,000 in 2006)
American Committee for Weitzmann Institute (Chais Foundation donated money $1.4 million to them)
Hillel: Foundation for Jewish Campus Life (received $300,000 from Chais)
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (money received from Chais)
The Shapiro Family Foundation has given to Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston, Jewish Home for the Aged in Palm Beach, and the Anti-Defamation League
Fifth Avenue Synagogue
State of Israel Bonds

An interesting article from Business Week on the Madoff scandal.

This is, of course, only a small part of the $50 billion that is reported to be lost in the Ponzi scheme, including billions of dollars invested by banks, hedge funds, and rich individuals.

Miniature Home

When I was a girl, I had a dollhouse full of tiny furniture that I had bought at the local five and dime, Erwin's. My mother built it for me. The dollhouse itself has long since disappeared, but I kept the furniture in a box, and when I moved to my current house, I set up the furniture as tiny rooms along a shelf. I love miniature things.

Bathroom

Kitchen

Living Room

Dining Room

Den

Bedroom

Sukkah in the snow and cardinal on the sukkah

My blog format has been changed today because I learned how to add a photo to the header. I took this one today - it shows my backyard in snow, complete with my sukkah, which I've left up, having given up on putting it and taking it down again after Sukkot. I like the look of the sukkah in the snow.

The photo below was taken this summer, showing our local cardinal perched on one of the sukkah's beams.

Bill Ayers in his own words

For those who can stand it, read Bill Ayers' apologia today in the New York Times.

For cogent analyses, see David Adler and Hilzoy.

More on the Mumbai attacks

An article in the New York Times outlines how the Mumbai attackers seem to have proceeded. One "black inflatable lifeboat" landed on the Fisherman's Colony fishing pier with ten men on it plus their supplies. This location is only three blocks from Nariman House, where the Chabad House was located. They joined other attackers - including some who had arrived in Mumbai days before. There were other boats that landed as well - up to four others. Up to 40 terrorists were involved in the attacks, and not all of them may be dead or captured.

The first location hit was the train station - Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. They went then to the Leopold Cafe, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, and Nariman House. Nariman House was not the first target.

Indian officials are now specifically linking "elements in Pakistan" to the attacks. American intelligence officials point to Lashkar-e-Taiba, "which has long been involved in the conflict with India" over Kashmir.

(From CNN - the Indian prime minister "indicated that the gunmen came from" Karachi, Pakistan).

The leader of an Indian commando unit said, that the attackers were “very, very familiar with the layout of the hotel.” The terrorists "who appeared to be under 30 years old, were 'determined' and 'remorseless.'" Two of them may have had British passports.

Another rabbi at the Nariman House was found dead - Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, who was a mashgiach in Mumbai.

Al Qaeda behind Mumbai attacks?

Post begun Wednesday, November 26 (read down for updates): I spent the day pleasantly, hanging out with my family and getting ready for Thanksgiving tomorrow. My father and I went over to Newton to buy the kosher Thanksgiving turkey (yum!). I plucked the remaining feathers tonight (kosher birds for some reason always have a few remaining feathers that have to be removed). I read most of a book that I bought at the SBL a couple of days ago - Amy-Jill Levine's A Misunderstood Jew, which is very interesting and well-written.

And then - at least a hundred people killed in terrorist attacks in Mumbai/Bombay today. One of the bloggers at TNR points out how these attacks were different from earlier ones in the city. They were aimed not at Hindus (which we would expect if this were part of ongoing Muslim-Hindu violence), but at foreigners - Americans, Britons, and Israelis (the Chabad House in Mumbai was attacked and some people were killed there - the local Chabad rabbi and his family have disappeared - this is at a place called Nariman House).

He speculates about the culprit in Bombay:

But these Bombay attacks are different. The targets are not obviously Hindu at all--they are the main tourist locations in the city, and they were after Americans, British and Israelis. They went after a building called Nariman House, where several Israeli and Jewish families live. It was international, not domestic considerations which seems to be have been driving them. Also they seem very well-resourced. Apparently they came into the city on boats, used hand grenades and automatic weapons. It suggest some sort of Al Qaeda connection.

The New York Times has very good coverage - one of their blogs has been updating all day. They pointed to an interesting phenomenon - how much the attacks are being reported by new social media such as Wikipedia (which has a page up on the attacks) and by Twitter - Mumbai.

Update: I'm watching CNN-IBN right now via the CNN site. They're live-streaming the CNN India affiliate. This technology continues to astonish me. The terrorists have not yet all been captured or killed. There is an ongoing hostage situation at the Nariman House, with a number of people being held hostage there. At another hotel (Oberoi), there are still terrorists holding hostages, and government forces are now attacking them. There are also terrorists holed up in the Taj Hotel, which is on fire. There was another hostage situation at Cama Hospital. Some high anti-terrorist officials have been killed (one of the attacks was on a police station).

Now, a live interview with L. H. Advani (leader of the parliamentary opposition in India). First he spoke in English, now in Hindi I would guess. Advani said that this terrorist attack must have been planned for months.

Now reporting - terrorists came into Mumbai by boat, hijacked police vans.

Update: CNN-IBN is reporting that three people have managed to escape from Nariman House, two Israelis (mother and child), one Indian. Two or three of the floors of the house are rented by Israelis, others rented by Indians.

Another update (November 28): Nariman House has been stormed and there has been fighting there for over 12 hours. 5 bodies were found, and Haaretz has identified two of them as belonging to Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivkia. "The couple ran the Chabad's local headquarters, which was one of 10 sites attacked. The Holtzberg's toddler son, Moshe, was smuggled out of the center by an employee, and is now with his grandparents. Representatives from the Israeli embassy and ZAKA rescue service personnel began the process of identifying the victims of the terrorist attack on the Chabad center in Mumbai."

(By the way, the Wall Street Journal for today has some very interesting articles on the businesses likely to be affected by the attacks - the articles really detail well for the uninformed, like myself, how much Mumbai is an international commercial center).

I've been reading a number of websites discussing who might have launched these attacks - the group that claimed responsibility for these attacks, calling itself "Deccan Mujahadeen," a group called the Indian Mujahadeen, who have claimed responsibility for earlier terrorist attacks this year in India; a couple of Pakistan based terrorist groups that were organized about twenty years ago to fight against the Indian presence in Kashmir (Laskhar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammed) - or a combination of the above. Most of the sites I've read argue that Deccan Mujahadeen is just a name, not an actual group.

But if the terrorists are just an Indian group, or a mixed group of Pakistani/Indian terrorists, organized with local aims (to destabilize the Indian government; to disrupt peace talks between India and Pakistan; to highlight the complaints of Indian Muslims), then why aim at foreigners? Previous attacks have targeted Indians. It's the international connection that makes me think of Al Qaeda involvement. The attack on the Jewish center especially makes me think of Al Qaeda. As someone commented on Harry's Place - if the goal was to strike at Israel or Israelis, then the Israeli consulate would have been a target, or an El Al office. But instead a specific Jewish center was chosen.

I think that people have largely forgotten that after the 9/11/01 attacks, there were a number of Al Qaeda attacks directly targeting Jews in various countries. The one I specifically remember is an attack on the synagogue on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, which actually killed a large group of visiting tourists. Another occurred on November 15, 2003, in Istanbul - attacking two synagogues, Bet Israel and Neve Shalom.

But another question is - why the Chabad center in particular? There are Jews living in Mumbai, both Baghdadis and Bene Israel. Their synagogues were not attacked.

Chabad is an international organization, with its headquarters in Brooklyn. It's much better known than the Bene Israel or Baghdadi Jewish communities. I suspect that it was chosen, instead of those two Indian Jewish groups, because it was so well known and has an international presence. Attacking Chabad could be seen as an attack on Jews everywhere. This would be another reason to suspect Al Qaeda involvement.

Who could be behind the Mumbai attacks and why?

An interesting Reuters article on who could be behind the Mumbai attacks and why?. One interesting point made in the article:

The Mumbai attacks appear to have been carefully coordinated, well-planned and involved a large number of attackers. A high level of sophistication has also been a hallmark of previous attacks by the Indian Mujahideen.

The Mumbai attacks also focused clearly on tourist targets, including two luxury hotels and a famous cafe....

The tactics -- a military-style assault on soft targets, singling out foreigners, and taking hostages -- are rare and do not fit the usual methods of militant attacks on civilian areas.

However, similar attacks have been carried out before, notably the May 2004 attacks in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar. Gunmen attacked two oil industry installations and a foreign workers' housing complex in the city, taking more than 50 hostages and killing 22 of them. The attackers asked hostages whether they were Christian or Muslim before deciding whom to kill.

Obama daughters to attend Sidwell Friends school

The Obamas have chosen the school that their daughters will attend in Washington - Sidwell Friends School. I usually wouldn't pay attention to what school the President's children go to, but this interested me because my mother attended Sidwell Friends high school when she was growing up in Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s.

The school was not integrated until 1956 (the year in which I was born), according to a February 16, 1956 New York Times article, which highlights the fact that the children of Senator James O. Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi, who was virulently opposed to integration of the schools, attended Sidwell Friends. This means that the school my mother went to was all-white. I do recall her saying that the children of foreign dignitaries went there, but it seems unlikely that any of them would have been non-white.

It's pretty remarkable that a school that was part of the white, segregated power elite of Washington will now educate the daughters of the first African-American president. My grandparents were part of that segregated elite - my grandfather, Richard Wilson, was the Washington bureau chief of the Des Moines Register and Tribune for many years, wrote a column for the Washington Star, was president of the National Press Club in 1940, and was active in the Gridiron Club. The deed to the house they bought in Bethesda, MD in 1948 contained a restricted covenant that forbade them to resell the house to Jews or blacks. (Incidentally, the Supreme Court in 1948 ruled that such restricted covenants were unconstitutional). (At the time the National Press Club was also restricted to white male journalists; in 1955 it was opened to black male journalists, and in 1970 to women).

When I was growing up and we used to visit my grandparents in Washington, I always felt a sense of discomfort walking around D.C. I knew that the city was segregated, that blacks were the majority of the population, but that white people held the power there. It felt like a colonized city (of course, that's not the terminology I thought of at the time). When I've visited more recently I've felt much more comfortable, although of course there are still great disparities of wealth and poverty in the city, often along racial lines. We also used to visit them at the house they owned in the West Virginia mountains (which was called "Ball Alley"), about 75 miles from D.C.

I loved my grandparents and I loved visiting them, especially at Ball Alley - but increasingly through the 1960s and 1970s I heard them making racist remarks about black people. (Although my recollection is that my grandfather was also involved in hiring the first black columnist for the Star - Carl Rowan, who had written for the Minneapolis Tribune, which was part of the same newspaper chain). I remember that they were very frightened by the riots in Washington in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, which probably was a factor in their increasing antipathy to blacks. I recollect my grandmother talking about the riots and telling us how close my grandfather was to the violence.

This is a photograph of nine presidents of the National Press Club, taken in 1971. My grandfather is the second from the right (the tallest man - he was 6' 3").

I wonder what my grandparents would think now if they knew that the children of an African-American president of the United States were going to the school their daughters had gone to in a segregated Washington, D.C.

Racist Reactions to Obama's Election

Unfortunately, this is not a "post-racial" country: a roundup of articles on racist reactions to Obama's election:

Election spurs hundreds of race threats, crimes.

Anti-Obama racial incidents reported in several cities.

Opinion: Racist Incidents Follow Obama Victory

Chronicle of Racist Incidents and Threats Against Obama

Since election day, the number of threats against the president-elect, and racial or violent incidents directed at his supporters, have soared. The Secret Service is concerned, calling it the highest number of threats against a President-elect in memory, but the national media until this weekend have largely ignored the disturbing pattern.

A couple of examples:

* In a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into "The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool," saying the money would go to the person picking the date closest to when Obama was attacked. "Let's hope we have a winner."

* In Idaho, the Secret Service is investigating a "public hanging" sign erected by a man upset with the election outcome, the Bonner County Daily Bee reported Thursday. A handmade sign posted on a tree reads "FREE PUBLIC HANGING" written in large letters beneath a noose fashioned from nylon rope. The most prominent name on the sign is "OBAMA," according to the Bee. "That's a political statement. They can call it whatever they want, a threat or whatever," the creator of the sign, Ken Germana, told the Bee.

Hate Graffiti Targets Obama Backers in Torrance.

Vandals over the weekend attacked homes in south Torrance that displayed support for President-elect Obama, spray-painting cars, walls, trees and campaign signs with swastikas and racial slurs. One Hollywood Riviera resident awakened to find a large Nazi symbol on a tree, the N-word across her garage door and the phrase "Go back to Africa" scrawled across a front wall. "They had painted a big swastika on my car and spray-painted out my bumper sticker," she said Monday. "It was pretty shocking. Immediately my heart began racing." Torrance police Sgt. Bernard Anderson said officers took four vandalism reports Sunday morning. The Daily Breeze located a fifth home that was hit. One couple who live near Calle Mayor found the words "Hitler" and "Nazi" painted in black on their Volkswagen.

Gang angry at Barack Obama win beat me, says Staten Island teen.

A black Muslim teenager said he was beaten on Election Night by four white men furious that Barack Obama was elected the nation's next President. Ali Kamara, 17, was walking home when four white men leaped from a gold car and started kicking him and smashing him with a baseball bat at about 10 p.m. near his Staten Island home. "I see the car coming. They looked at me and said, 'Obama!' They were not happy. They had hoodies on. They started hitting me with bats and my body started vibrating," said the Curtis High School, S.I., student.

Obama Victory spawns racist, derogatory remarks - from "The Appalachian," student newspaper of Appalachian State University. "At least one t-shirt has been seen around Appalachian’s campus with the phrase, 'Obama ’08, Biden ’09' displayed on it."

Racist Graffiti at Colgate University. Catch the photos of the graffiti - one reads "They were born to be slaves and serve white people."

Church parishioner claims pastor humiliated her over Obama signs.

Whoever voted for Obama shouldn't receive Holy Communion.

Ithaca College Celebrates

The students in my classes this morning told me that there was a huge, spontaneous party last night after it was announced that Barack Obama had won the presidency - and I just found a couple of videos on line showing the scene, from the CNN iReport website.

Ithaca College Celebrates - iReport.com

Ithaca College Celebrates 2

Yes We Can!

I stood last night at Castaways (a local bar in Ithaca) with my friends and we watched Barack Obama win this historical election. Amazing! Watching the students from Spelman College and the people at Ebenezer Baptist Church - this has been a long time coming!

Obama's grandmother dies

Obama's grandmother died very eary this morning. Joe Klein of Time Magazine has a moving obituary about her - To The Mountaintop.