Greg Myre of The New York Times published an important story about the demographics of Jerusalem today.

The article analyzes some of the implications of the statistics illustrated in the graph at left:

"In a 1967 census taken shortly after the war, the population of Jerusalem was 74 percent Jewish and 26 percent Arab. Today, the city is 66 percent Jewish and 34 percent Arab, with the gap narrowing by about 1 percentage point a year, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.

Jerusalem’s profound religious and historical significance makes its status perhaps the single most explosive issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that status clearly would become even more contentious were the balance of the population to tip toward the Arabs. This is a specter that worries Israelis, even as the 40th anniversary of their victory in the June 1967 war approaches."

The article goes on to describe the well-known fact that Jerusalem remains highly segregated, in fact, it remains two separate cities– West Jerusalem, which is largely Jewish, and East Jerusalem, which is largely Arab.  While the author mentions the city’s weak economy, he does not state clearly that Jerusalem is, in fact, the poorest city in all of Israel.

The article also notes that the large majority of Israelis treasure Jerusalem but would not want to live there:

"A poll released last week captured the Israeli ambivalence over Jerusalem. More than 60 percent of Israelis said they would not want to give up Israeli control of the city’s holy sites, even as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Yet 78 percent of Israelis said they would not consider living in Jerusalem or would prefer to live elsewhere in Israel."

One anecdote from a Jewish woman who decided to leave Jerusalem after being harassed by an ultra-orthodox woman who disapproved of her attire captures some of the angst that people feel about living in Jerusalem, but, in my view, this brief story only scratches the surface of the intolerance that ultra-Orthodox Jews, the haredim, have toward other Jews, not to mention anyone else of a different persuasion or ethnicity.

In my own experiences visiting Jerusalem on eleven occasions, I have felt unwelcome at the Kotel (this is the general description of the site of the Western Wall) almost every time that I go to pray at the Western Wall.  I’ve been harassed by the ultra-orthodox on multiple occasions.  Unlike many non-Orthodox Jews who now avoid going to the Wall to avoid being harassed, I’ve developed my own way of dealing with it:  I make sure to go to the Western Wall as many times as possible in order to assert the fact that the Holiest place in Judaism is not the exclusive territory of the haredim.

According to the article, Jews are leaving Jerusalem because a minority of Jewish fundamentalists are, in effect, chasing them away.  Unfortunately, this trend will only have the residual effect among Jews of leaving more polarized and intolerant people in Jerusalem.

The haredim are not likely to change their ways anytime soon.  If the Israeli government would officially recognize the legitimacy of Conservative and Reform Judaism and take concrete steps to officially allow greater religious pluralism among Jews in Israel, perhaps more Jews in Israel would want to live in Jerusalem and this would not be the poorest city in the State of Israel.  Such contructive change might have a positive ripple effect across a wide range of the socio-economic issues that plague Jerusalem.  Well, I can at least dream…   

The new President of France has strong Jewish ethnic origins and understands the roots of Zionism and the case for the existence of Israel.  Below, I have excerpted parts of an article written by Raanan Eliaz in the European Jewish Press that outlines the Sarkozy family’s origins and experience during the Holocaust.  There is plenty of debate over whether Sarkozy’s Jewish ethnicity will materially influence French policies in the Middle East.

Puting this question aside, but drawing on my own family history and my father’s negative experiences with French anti-Semitism, in my view it’s a big deal that someone of Nicolas Sarkozy’s background, who is also a vocal supporter of improved relations with the United States, is the new leader of France. Bonne Chance, Monsieur President!

From the article:

"In an interview Nicolas Sarkozy gave in 2004, he expressed an
extraordinary understanding of the plight of the Jewish people
for a home: "Should I remind you the visceral attachment of
every Jew to Israel, as a second mother homeland? There is
nothing outrageous about it. Every Jew carries within him a fear
passed down through generations, and he knows that if one day he
will not feel safe in his country, there will always be a place
that would welcome him. And this is Israel." (From the book "La
République, les religions, l’espérance", interviews with Thibaud
Collin and Philippe Verdin.)

Original article: ejpress.org/article/16491

I’ve written about the Domari, the gypsies of East Jerusalem, on numerous occasions in this blog.  The Dom are gypsies of North Indian origin who have lived in East Jerusalem for approximately 800 years.  They currently number about 3,000 people, and a courageous woman, Amoun Sleem, leads a group of the Dom who want to break the shackles of illiteracy and subsistence living through efforts at building a community, keeping alive their ancestral shared language, and teaching adults and children computer literacy and basic self-help business skills. 

I’ve visited Amoun on numerous occasions over the past five years and met her extended family.  I celebrated my most recent birthday in Jerusalem with Amoun and Anat Hoffman of the Israel Religious Action Center. Anat and her colleagues at the IRAC have actively helped the Dom for years and originally introduced me to Amoun.

Amoun and her clan have impressed me as honest, resilient people who would like to be self reliant but have fallen through the cracks of the Israeli social system.  Rejected and ignored by Israelis and Palestinians alike, most of the Dom are beggars.

I’ve attached their most recent newsletter Download domari_newlsetter_4_07.pdf which describes their current situation and how you can help.  The newsletter notes that a $10,000 matching challenge grant to help the Domari is waiting for anyone to make a tax deductible gift to help them….

The Domari are at the absolute bottom of the socio-economic ladder in Israel and they could use a helping hand.  Please join me in helping them to stand on their own. 

To find out more about how to make a tax deductible gift, you can contact drc@domresearchcenter.com or Rachel Canar at the Israel Religious Action Center at rachel@irac.org .

Rabbi Michael Melchior recently participated in the fourth Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism.  Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, founder of the Islamic movement in Israel, made a very important speech in which he condemend Holocaust deniers.  I have excerpted a portion of the article covering the event, which was publsihed in Haaretz (click here for full article):

February 13, 2007

The founder of the Islamic Movement in Israel condemned Holocaust denial in the Muslim world on Sunday, rejecting statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Also, Darwish accused his audience of not understanding Muslims or their concerns, and he protested Israel’s refusal to support the recent Saudi Arabian peace initiative involving Hamas and Fatah. "Why are you trying to distance yourselves from Muslims as if they were the devil?" he said. …

In many conversations that I have had with experts on Islam about the absence of outrage against Muslim extremism by the so-called "Silent Majority" of Muslims, we invariably get caught up debating the question of the persistence of this deafening silence from moderate Muslims.

When a constructive Muslim voice is expressed in a public forum, we should all take note and remember the importance of the event and the  courageousness of such people.  The fact is that Islamic pluralists who speak out against hate invite threats and death edicts (fatwa) from fundamentalist extremists who actively promote anarchy and the cult of death through martyrdom thoughout the Middle East.

I don’t agree with everything that the Sheikh had to say, but I am willing to give him the room to be constructive and to ask for more Muslims to join him in bringin more voices to light from the Silent Majority.

The latest newsletter from the Domari Gypsies of Jerusalem is a testament to the leadership of Amoun Sleem and to the resilience of the Domari, whom I have gotten to know over the past four years.  On my most recent visit to Jerusalem I had the chance to share a special dinner with Amoun and my friends from the Israel Religious Action Center.  At the dinner, I met a new Domari volunteer, Eli Rosenblatt, an American Jew who came to Jerusalem from Serbia last September in order to help the Domari.  Eli had been helping the Roma Gypsies in Serbia and learned about the Domari through an Internet search which also led him to this blog.  This is the kind of Internet matchmaking story that brings me great personal gratification.

Take a moment to read the Domari newsletter and consider that this group of scarcely 3,000 people of North-Indian ancestry has been living at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder in Jerusalem, which is Israel’s poorest city, for over 800 years.

Amoun Sleem’s dream is to start a Domari-owned and operated bakery business in Jerusalem.  If you would like to learn more about this project and would like to help turn this dream into an entrepreneurial reality, please contact Rachel Canar of the Israel Religious Action Center at rachel@irac.org.

Download domari_newsletter_1_07.pdf

Moni Mordechai, who served as public relations advisor for the Tzohar forum of rabbis and for Rabbi Michael Melchior when he served in ministerial posts, has written an important opinion piece in YNet News.com titled "Unworthy Rabbis". 

This article is a concise critique of the negative social and political impact which the ultra-orthodox haredim are having on Israeli society.  In my view, it exposes a root cause of much of the internal conflict and contradiction which plagues Israel’s policymakers and ripples through the country’s socio-political infrastructure.

I quote a section of the article below:

"As a Jew who belongs to the broad branch of Judaism and refuses to view religious practice as the only important thing, and as someone who views Judaism as an important cultural source, and who defines himself as a secular traditionalist, the word "rabbi" is a romantic one, possessing charm and power.

However, to my regret, today it is empty of meaning. I met very few truly relevant rabbis, who were leaders. In my mind rabbis are more closely associated with shady deals, religious enforcement, efforts to convince Jews to become religious, and racism.

An example of this can be found in news reports from recent weeks: Rabbis in Bnei Brak ruled that apartments must not be rented out to Arabs and foreign workers. At this time, ultra-Orthodox rabbis are trying to overpower El Al because it was forced to fly on the Shabbat and were able to defeat bus companies Dad and Egged, who ran an advertising campaign that included a bare male chest.

Leading religious-Zionist rabbis decided that in order to address the rift between religious Zionism and the rest of the people, all of us should be made to become religious.

Those are not my rabbis. In fact, no kippah-wearing rabbi can be referred to as my rabbi, not because the term is simply irrelevant for modern life, but rather, because most of those people hold on to a conservative, anti-democratic worldview that is sometimes racist and anti-humanitarian, all under the guide of kindness."

Forced ritual in religious practice, racism, discrimination… and these are rabbis? 

When we consider the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian question, when we consider the foreign policy challenges that Israel faces at multiple levels, let’s not forget that a minority of politically empowered fundamentalists in Israel effectively deny the right to worship to the vast majority of Jews in Israel, that they do not recognize the legitimacy of Reform or Conservative Judaism in Israel or in America, and that they do not tolerate diversity.

It is hard for me to see how Israel can resolve conflicts with others when it cannot resolve fundamental conflicts of Jewish identity in the State of Israel in order to embrace the 13.3 million Jews that are all that remain of global Jewry.  I hope that will see more progress in the direction of religious pluralism in Israel in 2007.

So you are interested in learning about the Zohar?  A great introduction to the Kabbalah comes in the form of Rabbi Larry Kushner’s first fictional novel, Kabbalah: A Love Story. I just finished it and recommend it highly.  The story weaves its characters together with important elements of religious philosophy and Iberian Jewish history.  It also successfully links Jewish mysticism with the rationalist cosmology of Einstein’s concepts of space-time.  I was drawn into the dual love stories whose temporal juxtaposition is at the core of the mystical thesis of the novel, and also a central tenet of the mystical unity of Kabbalah.

I know Rabbi Kushner from our synagogue because he is the Emanu-El Scholar in-residence at the Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco.  We have been fortunate to have him with us for several years, and I was delighted to discover in the novel some personal touches that other congregants who have worshipped with Rabbi Kushner will also recognize.   

Excerpts from two of my favorite passages are below:

                                    REINAFIDANQUE 

I understand now.  The botzina d’qardinuta is the seed point of beginning,and the alma d’ahtay is the mother-womb of being.  Botzina d’qardinuta, it is the flash of light.  Alma d’ahtay, it is the unattainable and ultimate womb.  But these two must become one.  You are the darkness; I am the spark.  Botzina d’qardinuta and alma d’ahtay.   

…

"Then what do you mean when you talk about God?"

"There are two ways to understand our relationship with God.  The first is classic theism . . .  In that model, God can be represented as a big circle.  . . . And you a little circle below it. . . . there is another model.  It has a more Eastern ring, but it has been around in Western religion, too.  In this model God is still a big circle. . . . The little circle . . . still represents you, but . . . it is within the big circle of God.  You would call this mystical monism.  It’s all one and it’s all God.  God is simply all there is.  And therefore, the separateness of anyone or anything is illusory because everything is a manifestation of God!  God is the ocean, and we are the waves."

Jerusalem
December 11, 2006

We stood on the side of the road in silence, looking across the valley at the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque from Mount Scopus. Only the gathering evening wind and the steady idle of the Mercedes taxi’s engine accompanied us while we looked out into the encroaching darkness.  It was almost 6 PM, and my Israeli driver, who has shepherded me through ten trips to Israel since 2002, had brought me to this historic site before my dinner meeting to enjoy a few quiet moments and admire the lights of Jerusalem.

We had just left the Kotel, where I observed the 32nd anniversary of my father’s passing by reciting the Jewish mourner’s prayer, the Mourner’s Kaddish, at the Western Wall.

As we contemplated the Old City, we heard a new sound.  A melodic and melancholy chant now blended with the swirling wind and rose through the valley from the Al-Aqsa Mosque to reach us on Mount Scopus.  It was the muezzin’s evening call to prayer , multiplying through a succession of loudspeakers from the minarets of the numerous mosques that dotted the darkening landscape in front of us.

“Do you know how to pray?” my driver asked, piercing the silence.

With my own recent prayers still in my head, I quickly replied, “Yes, of course I do.”

His query surprised me, since my own experience is that spirituality and prayer come from within and need no formal instruction.  But my first reaction misinterpreted what he was really saying.

“I don’t know how to pray”, he asserted. “I am a Jew, and I live in Israel, and that’s it. . . . I think that the Jews who live outside of Israel know much more about prayer than many Jews here in Israel.  To be a Jew outside of Israel, you have to want to be a Jew and want to learn how to pray.”

I felt saddened as I considered his heartfelt statement, but I didn’t know how to respond.  I closed my eyes and asked myself how differently he, an Israeli Jew, would feel about his own Jewish identity if the State of Israel actually embraced religious pluralism.

And for a moment, as I strained to hear the now fading melody of the muezzin, I imagined what that Israel would be like.

Photographs (click on image to enlarge)

The Western Wall in the foreground with the golden dome of Al-Aqsa Mosque above it, in a picture I took in June 2006.

The view of Al-Aqsa Mosque from Mount Scopus, December 11, 2006, at approximately 6 PM .

Dan Primack of Private Equity Week recently launched an interesting new VC bloggers hub at PEHub.  It is similar in concept to the Venture Capital Feedburner Network, but it is visually distinguished through the caricatures that link the roster for each blogger who is part of PEHub–  I think that is a nice  touch.

I was drawn into the lively debate surrounding Bart Shachter’s two initial posts with his rendition of the "VC Model is Broken" story.  While Bart’s "maiden voyage" into the blogosphere generated a number of comments, which is good, most of the comments objected to the tone of his post, which is not so good.

As someone who posts extensively on religious issues and current events in Israel and the the Middle East, I am very sensitive to the propensity for blog posts to be hurtful to others. I don’t recommend Islamic fundamentalist analogies when one is trying to make an otherwise important and valid point about valuations in the venture capital business. 

Putting the "delivery vehicle" aside,   Bart does make an important point about the current M&A environment.  I have written about this topic in this blog on October 30: Yes, Too Much Money Is Chasing Too Few Deals in VC.

Bart accurately suggests that, to be successful as a VC today, you need to re-calibrate your investment parameters to fit the current investing environment.

It’s been clear for some time that we live in a world of $50 million to $150 million acquisition exits for many VC-backed companies.  This is particularly tough if you have $35 million – $50 million invested in a company with a post-money well north of $50 million and get caught at the low end of that exit range. My partner, Keith Benjamin, has written extensively on his blog, www.sfventure.com, about the trend of "take-unders" as opposed to take-overs that has characterized VC for several years.

The most recent VC industry data (see below) reports inflation in pre-money valuations for second rounds over the past two quarters.  This is troubling because, in my view, it is unsustainable and unjustified by the reality of the capital markets.

I’ve noted in other posts that VC’s need to be students of the capital markets as well as students of technology.  Merely finding and investing in a great company isn’t good enough if the capital structure is a mess–  unfortunately it’s the LP’s who end up paying the highest price for lack of investment discipline by VC’s. 

The results of outlier investments such as YouTube and Google should not be relied upon to benchmark investing valuation parameters.  Two data points do not define a sustainable trend.

Click on the picture for a better resolution image.

The Sunday New York Times ran a story on November 5 about how it is now socially acceptable among Spaniards to uncover the Jewish heritage that Spain forcibly purged and took great pains to eradicate for 500 years.

"Now it’s trendy to have Jewish roots," according to Javier Castano, who is an expert on Spain’s Jewish history at the Higher Council for Scientific Research in Madrid.  The full article is worth reading (click here).

I enjoyed my own experience traveling in Spain and exploring its Jewish and Muslim past in the summer of 2005 with my family.

It is unfortunate that today deep anti-Semitism continues to scar Spain. The New York Times reporter, Renwick McLean, also makes this point in quoting Jacobo Israel Garzon, president of the Federation of Jewish communities in Spain:

"A contradictory element in all this is that a new anti-Semitism is also developing in Spain.  It uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as its source, but it passes very quickly from anti-Israelism to anti-Semitism."

The expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from Spain in 1492 effectively gutted the country of its intelligentsia and economic engine, a socio-economic trauma from which Spain has, in effect, never emerged.

A demographic footnote: the article tallies the Jewish population in Spain at 40,000 – 50,000, which overstates the most recent demographic source data that I have published elsewhere in this blog.  According to the Jewish Agency for Israel, the most recent census data available on their site is from 2002, which estimates the total Jewish population in Spain at 12,000. I doubt it has increased materially since that time, unless, of course, this trendiness is leading to a wave of Jews declaring a new Spanish aliyah.