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It's not just members of the US rabbinate who have engaged in public spats about faith education. Another aspect of the topic features in The Times' correspondence columns today where Rabbi Aaron Goldstein, the minister of Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue, takes a swipe at Rabbi Jonathan Romain, the ubiquitous rabbi of Maidenhead Reform Synagogue. What got up Rabbi Goldstein's nose was his Progressive colleague's expressed sadness at plans to establish a Hindu secondary school because, Romain argued, the Hindu community has been very well integrated into wider society and clearly didn't need a secondary school.

Humanity needs leaders but it needs leaders to help humanity to live in harmony with one another. The time for a colonial mind-set is gone. One people can not subjugate another. I do not believe that the vast majority want this. But they can be led, just as Pharaoh led his courtiers, into believing a destructive narrative. Humanity is not well served by extreme narratives.

Yesterday there was a conference organised by a group called ‘Progressive London”. This was initiated by Ken Livingstone in 2008. Livingstone was the former Mayor of London who told me three times that Israel should not have been created and the man who, on the third occasion, told me with a perfectly straight face that the previous Chief Rabbi, Lord Jacobovits, had said the same thing- obviously wrong and indeed unthinkable [nb the link may not work, the JP is in the throes of changing its technology].

The only ‘progression’ of this Conference is towards a new government.

Harrys Place has already noted the weirdness of the speakers at this event:

Taking a Shabbes afternoon stroll through Jaffa last weekend, and feeling the effects of a liquid brunch, I had the sudden urge to relieve myself. And, spotting the wrought iron gates of a shack set back and largely obscured from the road, I took my chance.

"Zeh docheh" (that is revolting), Michal, my walking partner, hissed as I rejoined her a bladderful lighter, a (provocative) smirk of self-satisfaction emblazoned across my face.

Israeli women love a good hiss, though I immediately recognised this one to be symptomatic of the familiar female frustration that their anatomies – lovely though they are – simply do not allow them to do what ours can with ease.

http://cifwatch.com/2010/01/23/we-will-not-be-silenced/#more-4860

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVmB3BB9-m8

Do you feel under "constant attack"? Do you feel "more frightened and threatened than at any time in your lives?" That's what Jewish friends are telling Baron Mitchell of Hampstead (Parry Mitchell if you knew him before 2002 when he was ennobled) and it is what he told the House of Lords last week during a curious mini-debate on "Tolerance, Democracy and Openness." Lord Mitchell, chair of the Weizmann Institute Friends in the UK and the Coexistence Trust, which promotes good relations between Muslims and Jews, told his fellow peers that there were campuses Jewish students preferred to avoid and many instances on campus where stickers saying "Death to the Jews" were posted and removed only slowly.
 
Recalling the anti-Semitism that his own mother had experienced, Lord Mitchell told the House that "Before the war, some of our leading authors, poets and academics were openly anti-Semitic. Our leading public schools thought that they were being liberal when they imposed a 10 per cent Jewish quota on admissions. Indeed, some still do."
 
This woeful tale stimulated Lord Graham of Edmonton, a fellow Labour peer and veteran of the co-operative movement, to inform the House that: "One of my cousins is Miriam Stoppard. She was the daughter of my Auntie Jenny, who was the sister  of my father, and she married Tom Stoppard. Her mother married Sid, who was a Jew, and they became Jewish. The other daughter, my cousin, was Hazel. She married Preston King and her daughter is Oona King. I am therefore fully alive to the problems of the Jewish race and sympathetic to the points of view that have been made."
 
If you are passing by Westminster on a cold winter's afternoon, drop into the Upper House. It can be very warming and there is rarely a queue.
 

Three IDF rescue teams and an IDF field hospital have been working around the clock seeking for survivors and digging out the dead from the rubble of Port du Prince. International observers have praised their tireless efforts. Perhaps, suggests my friend Martin Green, someone in the UK would like to seek warrants for their arrest as war criminals....