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Glick: Obama the Savior April 18, 2008 Rabbi Harvey Belovski: Multimedia tool of antiquity Caroline B. Glick: Revealed Truths vs. revealed lies JWisdom: More than miracles by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky April 17, 2008 Rabbi Avi Shafran: Deconstructing Dayeinu Rabbi Elazar Meisels: Is innovation at the Seder a slap at tradition? JWisdom: Discovering Your Divine Mission, Part III by Rabbi David Aaron April 16, 2008 Jonathan Tobin: A Prayer for Sderot's Children Ethel G. Hofman: Sumptuous Seder JWisdom: The Divine is in the details by Rabbi Mordechai Becher April 15, 2008 Rabbi Dovid Zauderer: Let Charlton Heston Go! Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Jimma, tyranny's enabler JWisdom: Relationships: Beyond Mars & Venus, Part IV by Dr. Lisa Aiken April 14, 2008 The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: The Snitching Supervisor Jonathan Tobin: Forget the Fun and Games! JWisdom: Sincerity is Valued Most by Rabbi Abraham J. 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Recently someone asked me to translate some financial documents that are clearly forged. Should I agree? Jonathan Rosenblum : Israel is unwittingly helping to fuel the international campaign of delegitimization against it JWisdom: Matzah and leaven as a life philosophy by Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D. April 4, 2008 Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: The Mystery of Suffering Caroline B. Glick: Fear of democracy JWisdom: Dirty Jews by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky April 3, 2008 Rabbi Y. Y. Rubinstein: Parents --- and the children who would be them The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Manweiler: Tempted by restaurant dressings? Don't be. Here are recipes that can be made at home, healthier! JWisdom: The importance of retaining a 'slave mentality' by Rabbi Mordechai Becher April 2, 2008 Mitch Albom: Child abuse, disguised as faith Jonathan Tobin: Unreasonable Accommodations JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith with Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Eliminating Jewish Influence over Germans March 22, 2007 J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !) Oct. 29, 2003 Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Nov. 8, 2007 / 27 Mar-Cheshvan 5768 Another Mob Hit: ‘American Gangster'’bests ‘The Godfather’ By George Will http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | "American Gangster" opened last weekend, and many of those who bought tickets — $43.6 million worth from Friday through Sunday — surely came away feeling as Mark Twain did when he said his memory was so powerful he could remember things that never even happened. Many moviegoers must have thought: I remember seeing this brand-new movie before. They did. Its emulations of "The Godfather" are obviously intended to be obvious. But these genuflections to the archetype make "American Gangster" more, not less, interesting as a symptom of something permanent in the American mind — cynicism for sentimentalists. In "The Godfather," bloody murders of Michael Corleone's rivals occur while the movie cuts back and forth from the mayhem to him in church. In "American Gangster," brutalities ordered by Frank Lucas are carried out as he brings a turkey on a platter to a table around which his extended family has gathered in a Thanksgiving tableau that mimics a famous Norman Rockwell painting. Message: Morality can be compartmentalized; family values can coexist with criminality. Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" — one of the best-selling novels in the four centuries since Cervantes essentially invented the genre — has an epigraph from Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." In the novel, some rival Mafiosos meet in a bank, beneath a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, patron saint of American commerce, who, Puzo wrote, "might have approved of this peace meeting being held in a banking institution. Nothing was more calming, more conducive to pure reason, than the atmosphere of money." FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO INFLUENTIAL NEWSLETTER Every weekday NewsAndOpinion.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily update. It's free. Just click here. In "American Gangster," Frank Lucas, proud of the purity of his Blue Magic heroin, upbraids a dealer for selling a less pure product under that name. He denounces the "trademark infringement" that damages "the brand." Message: A drug kingpin can master MBA-speak; the line between commerce and crime is blurry. Lucas, played by Denzel Washington with a grace alternately feline and feral, really lived in the Harlem of the 1970s. He rose to dominate New York's heroin trade by cutting out the (white Mafia) middlemen, buying heroin directly from Southeast Asian producers and having it shipped to America in military aircraft — eventually, in the caskets of Vietnam casualties. Richie Roberts (played by Russell Crowe), the cop who brought Lucas down, had a personal life as disordered as his professional life was tidy. Roberts was dangerously honorable: He found almost $1 million in cash and turned it in, thereby convincing corrupt cops, of whom there were many at the time, that he might turn them in, too. The rewards of corruption were huge as New York became, for several decades, a dystopia. Around the middle of the 20th century, the cowboy, that solitary man living outside civilization, came to town as a private detective, often operating outside the law. Then, in 1972, the movie "The Godfather" managed to present the organization men of organized crime as paragons of individualism. Puzo called them "men who had refused to accept the rule of organized society, men who refused the dominion of other men." That was, of course, balderdash: Every Mafioso in the movie was utterly dominated by the hierarchy, at the apex of which sat Don Corleone. In spite of its self-conscious coldbloodedness, the "Godfather" movie is sentimental. Its picture of Don Corleone judiciously administering the common law of gangsterdom is about as accurate a portrayal of organized crime as Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" is an accurate portrayal of the unwashed brutes who made the Middle Ages a good epoch not to have lived in. "American Gangster," like "The Godfather," invites viewers to admire business acumen for its own sake — when Lucas was brought down, the government seized assets worth $250 million — and entices viewers into the moral vertigo of forgetting the human carnage among users of the high-quality heroin that Lucas's organizational skills enabled him to sell cheap. But the movie, to its credit, repeatedly and abruptly halts its manipulation of viewers by roughly yanking them back to the reality of suppurating needle sores. In "The Godfather," the visible victims were, so to speak, all in the family; they were criminals who had chosen their line of work because they liked it. In "American Gangster," the visible victims include the crying infant on the filthy mattress, next to the mother who has nodded off on a heroin high. The labored and familiar facets of "American Gangster" — facile cynicism about commercial practices and "family values" — echo "The Godfather." The realism of "American Gangster," which is the more mature movie, is its own. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. George Will's latest book is "With a Happy Eye but: America and the World, 1997-2002" to purchase a copy, click here. Comment on this column by clicking here. Archives © 2006 WPWG

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