Clearing out the articles....
Apr. 9th, 2006 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On the Spanish Flu, and how it relates to today
The 1918 Flu Killed Millions. Does It Hold Clues for Today?
By GINA KOLATA
Flu researchers know the epidemic of 1918 all too well.
It was the worst infectious disease epidemic ever, killing more Americans in just a few months than died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam Wars combined. Unlike most flu strains, which kill predominantly the very old and the very young, this one — a bird flu, as it turns out — struck young adults in their 20's, 30's and 40's, leaving children orphaned and families without wage earners.
So now, as another bird flu spreads across the globe, killing domestic fowl and some wild birds and, ominously, infecting and killing more than 100 people as well, many scientists are looking back to 1918. Did that flu pandemic get started in the same way as this one? Will today's bird flu turn into tomorrow's human pandemic?
And what, if anything, does that nearly century old virus and the pandemic it caused reveal about what is happening today?
The answer is: a lot and not enough. The 1918 pandemic showed how quickly an influenza virus could devastate American towns and cities and how easily it could spread across the globe, even in an era before air travel.
It showed that a flu virus could produce unfamiliar symptoms and could kill in unprecedented ways. And it showed that a bird flu could turn into something that spreads among people.
But the parallels go only so far, researchers say. For now, they are left with as many questions as answers.
In the fall of 1918 flu struck the United States and parts of Europe hard and traveled to every corner of the world except Australia and a few remote islands. A few months later, it vanished, burning itself out after infecting nearly everyone who could be infected.
The virus arrived at even the most improbable places, like isolated Alaskan villages. In one such village, Wales, 178 of its 396 residents died during one week in November, after a mailman arrived by dog sled, bringing the virus along with the mail.
Public health officials tried in vain to contain its spread. In Philadelphia, people were exhorted not to cough, sneeze or spit in public.
But the virus spread anyway. On Oct. 3, Philadelphia closed all of its schools, churches, theaters and pool halls. Still, within a month, nearly 11,000 Philadelphians died of influenza.
Anyone who doubts that flu deaths can be horrific need only read the memoirs of physicians like Dr. Victor C. Vaughan, who treated influenza victims in 1918.
Dr. Vaughan, a former president of the American Medical Association, was summoned by the surgeon general to Camp Devens, near Boston, where the flu struck in September. He later described the scene in his memoirs.
The men, Dr. Vaughan wrote, "are placed on the cots until every bed is full, yet others crowd in."
"Their faces soon wear a bluish cast; a distressing cough brings up the blood stained sputum," he continued.
"In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cord wood," Dr. Vaughan said. "This picture was painted on my memory cells at the division hospital, Camp Devens, in the fall of 1918, when the deadly influenza virus demonstrated the inferiority of human inventions in the destruction of human life."
Still, scientists are left with an abiding mystery: Where did the 1918 virus come from?
Investigators know more than they once did. They know exactly what the virus looked like, thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, chief of the division of molecular pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and his colleagues, who obtained snippets of preserved lung tissue from three victims of the 1918 flu and managed to fish out shards of the virus and piece together its genes. Although the 1918 virus was a strain different from the A (H5N1) virus that is now killing birds, it was, Dr. Taubenberger found, a bird flu.
What is not known is how the 1918 virus moved from birds to humans.
One clue could come from knowing what flu viruses existed before the 1918 pandemic. Perhaps the 1918 virus entered the human population before 1918 in a more benign form then mutated to become a killer. Or perhaps it suddenly showed up in humans, jumping directly from birds to people.
To find out, Dr. Taubenberger and Dr. John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital are looking for human flu viruses that existed before 1918. London Hospital has a collection of human tissue obtained from 1908 to 1918. Dr. Taubenberger is searching for flu viruses in lung tissue from people who died of pneumonia in those years, hoping to use the same methods that allowed him to piece together the 1918 virus to resurrect a flu virus that was in humans before 1918.
The 1918 virus also is teaching researchers about experimental vaccines that scientists hope will protect against a variety of influenza strains. The plan had been to make a sort of universal flu vaccine that would protect against various flu viruses. Then people would not need a flu shot each year, and the vaccine might stop pandemic flu strains from ever gaining a toehold.
But, says Dr. Terrence Tumpey, a microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although the experimental vaccines protect against ordinary human flu viruses, they do not protect against the 1918 virus. Nor do they protect against today's A(H5N1) bird flu virus.
That leaves scientists with a puzzle. If they are worried about a 1918-like flu, they want a universal vaccine to protect against it, and they wonder what makes these bird flus so impervious? At this point, no one knows, Dr. Tumpey says.
Another abiding mystery is that neither the 1918 influenza pandemic nor any other human influenza pandemic began with a flu pandemic that killed birds. And, scientists add, if the 1918 pandemic had begun that way, it would have been noticed. Even if the deaths of wild birds went undetected, the deaths of domestic fowl would have been recorded.
Wild birds are inured to most flu viruses — clouds of the viruses normally infect them, living in their gastrointestinal tracts but causing little or no disease. Sometimes, those flu viruses infect poultry and, while they usually cause little illness, some flu strains can be lethal to fowl and economically devastating to farmers.
That, Dr. Taubenberger says, "has been recognized for 150 years." In the 1920's, scientists even isolated viruses from what they used to call fowl plague and what is now known to be bird flu. They were not the same viruses that infected humans.
The problem is in deciding what all this means.
The history of the 1918 flu can take scientists only so far, Dr. Taubenberger said.
"We don't know how the 1918 pandemic evolved and how the virus emerged into a form that was the finished product," he said. "What we sequenced was a virus that was ready for prime time, not its precursor."
"Ultimately," Dr. Taubenberger said, "the answer to the big question is, We don't know. There is no historical precedent for what is going on today."
At Sept. 11 Trial, Tale of Missteps and Management
At Sept. 11 Trial, Tale of Missteps and Management
By SCOTT SHANE and NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, March 30 — Three weeks of testimony and dozens of documents released in the sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui have offered an eerie parallel view of two organizations, Al Qaeda and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and how they pursued their missions before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Al Qaeda, according to a newly revealed account from the chief plotter, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, took its time in choosing targets — attack the White House or perhaps a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania? Organizers sized up and selected operatives, teaching them how to apply for a visa and how to cut a throat, a skill they practiced on sheep and camels. Despite the mistakes of careless subordinates and an erratic boss, Osama bin Laden, Mr. Mohammed tried to keep the plot on course.
Mr. Mohammed, a Pakistani-born, American-trained engineer, "thought simplicity was the key to success," says the summary of his interrogation by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is all the more chilling for the banal managerial skills it ascribes to the man who devised the simultaneous air attacks.
If Mr. Mohammed's guiding principle was simplicity, the United States government relied on sprawling bureaucracies at feuding agencies to look for myriad potential threats. The C.I.A. had lots of information on two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, but the F.B.I. did not know the men had settled in San Diego, where Mr. Mohammed had instructed them to "spend time visiting museums and amusement parks" so they could masquerade as tourists.
At the F.B.I., a few agents pursued clues that would later prove tantalizingly close to the mark, but they could not draw attention from top counterterrorism officials. A Minnesota F.B.I. agent, Harry M. Samit, warned in a memorandum that Mr. Moussaoui was a dangerous Islamic extremist whose study of how to fly a Boeing 747-400 seemed to be part of a sinister plot.
"As the details of this plan are not yet fully known, it cannot be determined if Moussaoui has sufficient knowledge of the 747-400 to attempt to execute the seizure of such an aircraft," Mr. Samit wrote on Aug. 31, 2001. He had already urged Washington to act quickly, because it was not clear "how far advanced Moussaoui's plan is or how many unidentified co-conspirators exist."
But to high-level officials, the oddball Moroccan-born Frenchman in Minneapolis was only one of scores of possible terrorists who might be worth checking out. An F.B.I. official in Washington edited crucial details out of Mr. Samit's memorandums seeking a search warrant for Mr. Moussaoui's possessions, and said that pressing for it could hurt an agent's career, Mr. Samit testified.
The picture of a large and lumbering bureaucracy trying to defend against a small and flexible enemy is striking, said Timothy J. Roemer, a member of the national Sept. 11 commission.
"It's like the elephant fighting the snake," said Mr. Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "One of the impressions of Al Qaeda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is their ability to change course and put new people into their plan and dynamically respond to the challenges day to day."
The United States government, he said, "is almost the opposite."
"We're slow to change," he said, "slow to adjust, and we're building a huge bureaucracy."
The court testimony, Mr. Roemer said, has reinforced his belief that "Moussaoui was an Al Qaeda mistake and a missed opportunity for the F.B.I."
The jury at Mr. Moussaoui's sentencing trial in federal court in Alexandria, Va., began deliberating on Wednesday about whether he qualifies for the death penalty for not telling American officials of the approaching terrorist attacks. If jurors decide he does qualify, they will then have to make a second decision as to whether he should be executed.
The outlines of the events on both sides in the weeks leading to the Sept. 11 attacks are well known. But the voluminous evidence presented at the trial have added details and color to the public history of the plotters and how American counterterrorism officers failed to stop them.
There are snippets of highly classified National Security Agency cables and glimpses of the C.I.A. inspector general's report on the agency's performance before the attacks, which remains secret. There are numerous new F.B.I. e-mail messages and memorandums that fill in the details of agents' suspicions and why they were not heeded.
But the 58-page "Substitution for the Testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," a detailed account of what Mr. Mohammed has told investigators since his capture in Pakistan in 2003, and an attached two-page statement written by him, give the most direct view to date of the man who conceived and organized the attacks.
"I know that the materialistic Western mind cannot grasp the idea, and it is difficult for them to believe that the high officials in Al Qaeda do not know about operations carried out by its operatives, but this is how it works," Mr. Mohammed wrote in his statement to his interrogators. "We do not submit written reports to our higher ups. I conducted the September 11 operation by submitting only oral reports."
Mr. Mohammed comes across as a hands-on, midlevel manager who sometimes handled details, like perusing a San Diego telephone book he bought at a market in Karachi, Pakistan, for English-language schools and flight schools.
But he delegated what he could to others. He had Abu Turab al Jordani, a Qaeda veteran from Jordan, train the less sophisticated "muscle" hijackers, teaching them to use their knives on animals and how to storm a jetliner cabin. He allowed Mohammed Atta, appointed "emir" of the hijackers, to make final decisions on targets and on the date of the attack.
Mr. bin Laden repeatedly pressed Mr. Mohammed to move ahead with the hijacking plot, the document says. He pushed, for example, to strike on May 12, precisely seven months after the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Ever the pragmatist, Mr. Mohammed put him off. In fact, Mr. Mohammed "noted that he disobeyed bin Laden on several occasions by taking operatives assigned to him by bin Laden and using them how he best saw fit."
One restriction on the plot was the small number of Qaeda devotees who had, or could get, visas to enter the United States. Mr. Mohammed used Mr. Midhar and Mr. Hazmi because they had visas — despite his doubts about their minimal English and lack of sophistication.
But he also considered Mr. Moussaoui less reliable because of time he had spent in the West. Mr. Mohammed "stated that Westerners have a different point of view because of their freedom," the summary says.
The sentencing trial made clear the frustration of the Minneapolis F.B.I. office in its repeated efforts to interest bureau headquarters in Mr. Moussaoui.
Gripping testimony came from Mr. Samit, who arrested Mr. Moussaoui on Aug. 16 and quickly became convinced that he was a terrorist who knew about an imminent hijacking plot. Mr. Samit said that he had sent about 70 warning messages about Mr. Moussaoui, but that they had produced no results.
The agent said he had been puzzled at the reluctance of Michael Maltbie, a supervisor with the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at bureau headquarters, to seek a search warrant for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings from a special intelligence court.
Mr. Samit seemed unable to satisfy Mr. Maltbie's demand that he provide a tangible link between Mr. Moussaoui and a foreign power, a requirement for a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He thought he had sufficient evidence from two French intelligence reports showing Mr. Moussaoui had recruited someone to fight in Chechnya for an Islamist group allied with Mr. bin Laden.
But on Aug. 24, 2001, a frustrated Mr. Samit sent an e-mail message to Charles Frahm, a friend and, at the time, an F.B.I. liaison to the C.I.A., asking for information to help make his case. "We're trying to close the wiggle room for F.B.I. headquarters to claim there is no connection to a foreign power," he wrote.
Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers asserted that Mr. Maltbie had undermined the effort to obtain a search warrant by deleting some details from Mr. Samit's requests. Mr. Samit said Mr. Maltbie had told him he was reluctant to press for a warrant because doing so would be risky for his career and "he was not about to let that happen to him."
At the time, the bureau had become wary of applying to the intelligence court because a well-regarded supervisor had angered the court's chief judge in a previous case.
Days later, with the attacks in New York and Washington, the scale of the destruction astonished even Mr. Mohammed. According to the summary, he said he "had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was."
A Lives article on teaching in coal country
Coal Miner's Granddaughter
By BATHSHEBA MONK
Over lunch one day, I tell a friend that I'm taking a teaching job at a community college in Tamaqua, Pa., not far from where I was born. After a lifetime of staying away, I moved back to the state two and a half years ago and now live in Allentown, but I haven't been back to the coal region since I was 18.
My friend, an antiques dealer who goes picking in the area, says he drove through there last Tuesday. "It looks like there was a nuclear accident in Tamaqua and the survivors stayed on," he says, and laughs. I pretend to laugh with him, but it feels as if he's making fun of my mother. I can do that. He can't.
Although Tamaqua is only an hour northwest of Allentown, it might as well be in another country in another time. On the first day of school, as I drive up Route 309 over Blue Mountain, the car engine strains to make the steep grade, then my cellphone cuts out. On the edge of town, I see a worn sign that says "Coal for Sale" that must be 30 years old. Abandoned strip mines surround and define both the town and the people, who look flinty, dust-covered, squinteyed.
At a stoplight, I stare at a fat boy delivering fliers to houses from a canvas pushcart. He turns to give me an angry look, then suddenly darts his cart into the street toward me. I lock my car door and plead with the light to change. He reaches the car and rams my door as the light turns green. I shift gears, turn left and gun it up an almost-90-degree hill, zoom over the tracks in front of a slow-moving freight train, past row houses that have been clinging to the hill for a hundred years, crest over a street that is so steep it actually seems to be tilting backward and finally pull right up into the parking lot of Lehigh Carbon Community College.
The class I am teaching is Technical Reporting. That's what the nice dean told me. "So much real-life experience!" he had exulted over the phone. "Just what these kids need. And being from here, you can relate to them."
I have 10 students, who are already seated when I enter the classroom. Eight are boys, who slouch low. Baseball hats stitched with contractors' names are pulled down over their eyes. One wears a sleeveless T-shirt and rotates his right arm in front of him, admiring his triceps. The two women are housewives. One has embroidered teddy bears on her turtleneck sweater.
They are here because John Morgan, who basically invented thermal underwear and made his fortune here, bequeathed part of that fortune to build this campus so that any student who graduated from Tamaqua High could have two years of free college and wouldn't have to leave town. Which is a hell of a booby prize, I think, because my view is that there is no reason to stay. My agenda in agreeing to teach this class isn't to give these students skills to help them thrive in Tamaqua. It's the opposite: to inspire them to leave. I carry totems in my briefcase — bus schedules to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and beyond. Is there anyone more obnoxious than a missionary?
To get to know them, I ask each student to tell me what he or she wants to be: construction manager, heavy-equipment operator, logistics specialist. "Cop," one housewife says. "Why not D.A.?" I press. She doesn't answer. I tell the boys that unless they are bald or have a scalp disease, I would like them to please remove their hats, which none do. So I move on to my "real-life experience": Army in Germany, real-estate manager for a big insurance company in Boston, small-business owner in Allentown. I have lived all over the world, I say. And listen! I, myself, grew up in a coal patch near here. I name the patch. The hats are pulled even lower.
The fact is that I come from a long line of people who pick up and leave when things stop working out. My grandfather migrated from Poland to Hazelton, Pa., to mine coal, and when the mines closed, my father hitchhiked two hours south to Bethlehem to roll steel, and when the furnaces shut down, my brother moved to Nigeria, where he drills for oil. It seems natural, American really, to move on. Aren't most of us descended from people who did just that?
I ask the class to write what they hope to learn from me on index cards I give out, and they hand the cards to me as they file out. How to write a bid proposal. How to create a technical manual. No one, it seems, wants to learn how to escape.
At the bottom of one card a student has written: "Who do you think you are?"
On ESPN and dominoes
After Luck With Poker, ESPN Bets on New York Dominoes
By COREY KILGANNON
The next big thing in sports programming is ... dominoes?
To the occasional domino player, it is a stretch to even call this quiet game of straight-faced strategy a sport. But anyone who has spent time in a Latino neighborhood in New York City could testify that dominoes played there — with the slammed-down tiles, the verbal sparring, the bragging and bluffing — is no parlor game.
From the opening bid, a simple sidewalk match will quickly escalate into a raucous, freewheeling spectacle: a mini-fiesta where salsa and cigars, Bacardi and brown-bagged beers have as much a role as the little colored tiles with dots.
The games almost always draw spectators, so perhaps it is no surprise that the ESPN sports network has declared dominoes the next big spectator sport and is promoting it as both a colorful cultural touchstone and a highly competitive game, complete with rankings, formal tournaments, celebrity events and sponsors.
Encouraged by the success of televised poker, the network has begun combing New York City for top players and colorful clubs for its coverage, and has been taping segments on formal tournaments and casual neighborhood games.
Hourlong domino shows now run on Tuesday nights at 10 on the network's Spanish-language sports channel ESPN Deportes. Hoping it will be popular with English-speaking viewers, network officials plan to show similar programming on ESPN2 starting in June.
"We think it will be the next cool thing," said Lino Garcia, the general manager of ESPN Deportes. "We're connecting with the best places dominoes is played, so naturally we're going to start in uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, the places where it really happens."
Mr. Garcia said he hopes to repeat the success the network has had with poker — its World Series of Poker is its highest-rated regular series. Like poker, domino games offer plenty of suspense and drama at the table, with clever decision-making and reading the strategies of other players all pivotal to winning. The network will also televise the world championships next year from the Dominican Republic.
The plan, Mr. Garcia said, is not only to present dominoes in world-class tournaments and flashy celebrity domino events the way the network showcases poker, but also to capture the excitement and charm of "the highly energetic games on street corners and small clubs in basements where guys go every day."
New York's neighborhoods are filled with characters who come together to play on Spanish Harlem sidewalks, Bronx parks and in basement and backroom clubs in Washington Heights. Older men in caps and young men in muscle-T's and gold chains go at it, slapping dominoes onto flimsy tables, speaking in Spanish in games lubricated by Presidente beer and salsa music.
This was the scene recently at a dominoes club in the Bronx called Hijos y Amigos de Altamira, which means children and friends of Altamira, a town in the Dominican Republic. Housed in rented space above a bar on Westchester Avenue, the club, which is one of those being scouted by ESPN, is a band of countrymen — almost every member is from Altamira, a small town that prides itself on its crop of baseball and domino players.
"I've been playing dominoes all my life, but I never thought I'd see it on TV," said Augusto Montan, 55, one of the club's members. "We always thought of it as a game to pass the time, but it does have all the elements people love: the competition, the trash-talking, the color, and it's old school."
The club embodies exactly what ESPN is looking for in a neighborhood domino setting. Young and old men alike sat at domino tables and shuffled a mess of face-down tiles and then picked their domino hands. Members have nicknames like el Natural. Their wives, girlfriends and daughters play bingo and tend to the homemade Dominican food and serve $2 beers from a small bar. The children race around, practicing traditional Latin dance steps and gathering at tables to watch, learn and root.
"Dominoes is the national pastime of Dominican Republic: it's as simple as that," said one club member, Louis Keyser, 72. "Over there, a little kid gets a bat and ball put in his hand as soon as he can walk, and from the moment he's tall enough to see the table, he learns how to play dominoes."
The club's origins go back to 1983, when a handful of men began a regular domino game in the basement of a Bronx apartment building where one of them, Juan Martinez, was the superintendent.
There are now 42 members, mostly from the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Dues are $10 a month, and through fund-raising events and contributions the club collects enough money to help members with needs ranging from rent or funeral costs for family members.
Dominoes, which some experts date to ancient Egypt, is played worldwide, and in New York it is popular in African-American, Chinese and Caribbean neighborhoods. But Hispanic players like to stake a claim that the game is truly theirs. Styles of dominoes vary by country — Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, for example, generally use seven tiles per player, while Cubans tend to and use nine pieces. Instead of players taking turns making moves in the usual clockwise rotation, some Latin players take turns counter-clockwise.
While the game's basic objective is simple enough — to get rid of one's tiles first by placing them next to tiles of matching dots on the table — the best players are expert at using memory counting to calculate what tiles an opponent is likely to be holding.
Luis Guzman, the well-known Puerto Rican actor, said in an interview that the domino table was an arena where the very dramas of life play out: love, hatred, revenge. Tempers can flare and lifelong relationships can begin and end around a domino game.
Mr. Guzman recalled that when he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it seemed that every male Latino played dominoes.
"My pops would play for hours on end; all the men did," he said. " I know best friends who stopped talking to each other for years because of one game. After 10 years, one would still be saying, 'Man, why'd he play that one when he knew the other guy was holding the 6-3?' I know a guy who jumped out a second-story window and broke both legs after losing a domino game.' "
At the Altamira Club, the players had varying opinions about how old-school domino players accustomed to casual, free-flowing action would react to being analyzed and scrutinized by ESPN, which plans on installing a dozen table-level cameras, along with others overhead and around the club.
"I think being on TV would make some of our players nervous," said Mr. Montan, "but then again, I could name at least few guys right now who would eat it up."
On being the sibling of a disabled person
Siblings of Disabled Have Their Own Troubles
By GRETCHEN COOK
When he was growing up in Oregon, Graham Seaton found it virtually impossible to bring children home from school to play.
"I knew there was something wrong with my place," he recalled. "But I didn't know how to explain what that was."
He knew that he would have to tell his friends why they could play only in his bedroom — and only with the door locked. And that, ultimately, he would have to explain what was "wrong" with his older brother Burleigh, who is profoundly autistic.
"I just didn't have the words," he said.
Now 30, Mr. Seaton said he realized that as a child, he felt he could not ask his parents for those words.
"I was so aware I couldn't make a big deal with my family," he said. "My parents already had enough on their hands."
An estimated seven million "typically developing" American children have siblings with disabilities, according to the Arc of the United States, a leading advocacy group for the mentally retarded. Those children face many of the same challenges — and joys — as their parents, but they also face other problems. Some resent the extra demands placed on them at an early age by their disabled siblings, and many feel neglected by their often overburdened parents.
Some children say they fear "catching" their siblings' disabilities. Others may wish that they, too, were disabled, so that they could get all the attention their siblings do. And many suffer embarrassment about their siblings' inappropriate behavior or abnormal appearance, and then feel guilty about it.
These are difficult emotions for children to struggle with, and Don Meyer, director of the Arc's sibling support project, says the needs of siblings like Mr. Seaton are often overlooked. Most assistance organizations and support groups are intended for disabled children themselves or for their parents.
"These brothers and sisters will likely have the longest-lasting relationships of anyone, relationships easily in excess of 65 years," Mr. Meyer said. "They should be remembered at every turn."
Still, many siblings welcome the early maturity and responsibility that come with having a disabled brother or sister. They are often well versed in the details of their siblings' disabilities, and they take pride in being able to explain them in sophisticated ways. For example, Hannah, 16, of Dearborn, Mich., who did not want her last name used out of concerns for her privacy, said she related better to adults than to children her age because of having to cope with her brother Ian's autism.
But that maturity does not inoculate her from embarrassment about Ian's outbursts, particularly during church services.
"Sometimes he'll kind of start making noises, and then sometimes he'll kick and flail his arms, or he'll start rocking and crying," Hannah said. "My mother will take him outside, but it's still, like, okayyyyy. ..."
Suzanne Ripley, who has two sons with cerebral palsy, says that a child's disability can embarrass parents, too, but that embarrassment can be more acute for siblings, especially those in the throes of adolescent conformity. Young siblings are also prone to teasing from other children, who do not have the social inhibitions of adults.
But Ms. Ripley, the director of the National Dissemination Center for Children With Disabilities, based in Washington, notes that adults can often be just as rude.
"People tend to be uncomfortable with anyone who's different, so they look for a second and then look away," Ms. Ripley said. "Imagine how that would make you feel" as a child.
Parents like Ms. Ripley are likely to seek comfort through talking with others about their conflicting emotions. But children may not have the sophistication to do so or they may feel guilty about acknowledging any negative feelings they have.
Hannah, for example, says she loves her 13-year-old brother and feels terrible about her reactions to his outbursts.
"I know it's not his fault and that's the way he is, and so I shouldn't really be embarrassed, but sometimes I am," she said.
But she said she did not discuss those feelings with her parents.
"They'd get that, 'Oh well, you can deal with it' kind of attitude," she said. "I know they would listen, but they would get defensive."
Ally Cirelli, a 9-year-old in Towson, Md., whose sister is developmentally disabled, says the biggest complaint she hears from her peers is that the disabled siblings get all the attention.
Some are so jealous of their siblings that they wish they had their own disability, and the special treatment that comes with it, she said. But Ally, too, avoids talking to her parents about her feelings. And she is quick to backpedal when she does talk about it, insisting that her sister, Katie, 8, does not embarrass her "all that often," and that she is "really fun" to play with.
Mr. Meyer, of the Arc, says children need a place where they can openly discuss these concerns and emotions. To fill this gap, he started the sibling support project, which is based in Seattle and provides information and holds discussion groups for children around the country. In 2005, Mr. Meyer also published "The Sibling Slam Book: What It's Really Like to Have a Brother or Sister With Special Needs," a collection of candid remarks by 80 children.
Mr. Meyer said that when asked about the most embarrassing moment of their lives, few of the children cited anything having to do with their disabled siblings. Instead, most recounted the usual teenage humiliations: problems in romantic relationships or dealing with parents.
And that, Mr. Meyer says, underscores an important point: "When I talk to parents about embarrassment (about disabled siblings), I ask them to keep in mind that it's an age-related condition," he said. "That's the good news, that a lot of that seems to be resolved by even their late teens."
The work of disability advocates and the mainstreaming of children with special needs in schools and in the wider society has fostered more awareness of — and less discomfort with — disabilities.
Ms. Ripley, for her part, says she has noticed a change in public attitudes, especially when she is struggling to maneuver with her sons in public places.
"I'm finding that people are more and more helpful," she said. "That didn't used to happen."
Bill Strikes at Low-Nutrition Food in School
Bill Strikes at Low-Nutrition Foods in School
By MARIAN BURROS
The days when children consume two orders of French fries in the school cafeteria and call it lunch may be numbered. A bipartisan group in Congress plans to introduce legislation today that would prohibit the sale in school not only of French fries but also of other fatty or sugary foods, including soft drinks.
Under the bill, an amendment to the National School Lunch Act, high nutritional standards would be required of all food sold on school premises. That means not just in cafeterias but in vending machines, school stores and snack bars as well, even at fund-raising events.
The measure, which has strong bipartisan support in both houses, would do on a national level what many school districts have been trying to do for years: require that the schools set an example by providing only healthful food and so perhaps reduce the incidence of childhood obesity.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, has watched what goes on in the school her two teenage sons attend.
"We talk a lot about healthy nutrition, we teach the kids about the food pyramid, and then they go down the hallway and get the high fat, high sodium and high junk available in the vending machines," Ms. Murkowski said. "We need to be consistent. People are beginning to connect the dots between rising health care costs and obesity."
Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who has been pushing such a bill since 1994, said: "Congress is finally catching up with what parents have believed for a long time. Members of Congress are hearing from their constituents and recognizing this has become a national problem. I think finally members of Congress are asking, 'Why do we have soft drink vending machines in our schools?' "
The bill would apply to all foods other than the official school lunch, the meal for which schools receive government aid and which is already covered by other high-nutrition standards. Currently, sale of the other foods is permitted in school if they contain at least 5 percent of the recommended daily allowance of protein and certain vitamins and minerals. This standard applies regardless of the product's level of calories, fat, added sugars or sodium.
Under that approach, French fries, ice cream, candy bars, cookies, chips, snack cakes and doughnuts are allowed. Seltzer, jelly beans, chewing gum, lollipops, cotton candy and breath mints are not.
The new list of foods would take into account whether a product promoted obesity or chronic illnesses. The choices would come from recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, which expects to have a report ready this fall.
Enforcement would rest with the Department of Agriculture, which currently has authority only over the official school lunch. "The agency has done a good job with the official school lunch and could do a good job with all other food," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which worked closely with Congress on the legislation.
Supporters of the bill have been marshaling evidence to contradict the usual criticism of proposals to serve only nutritious food in schools: that children will not eat it and that schools cannot afford to lose the revenue brought in by fatty or sugary products. A survey by the Agriculture Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that of 17 schools that began offering healthful options, 12 actually increased revenue while only one lost, marginally; the four others reported no change.
The American Beverage Association, a trade group, said the legislation was unnecessary because since last August members of the association have limited sales of full-calorie soft drinks to 50 percent of offerings in high schools. They are not available in lower grades.
Frito-Lay, a leading manufacturer of snack foods, had no comment.
Despite the strong support for the bill among lawmakers, Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, was skeptical.
"My fear," Dr. Brownell said, "is that the food industry, with the soft drink industry taking the lead, will work its hardest to weaken or kill this act."
On the Gospel of Judas
With a PDF excerpt of the text
In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Correction Appended
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.
In this text, scholars reported yesterday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four gospels in the New Testament. Here Jesus is said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, "you will exceed" the other disciples.
"You will be cursed by the other generations, and you will come to rule over them," Jesus confides to Judas in the document, which was made public at a news conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington.
Though some theologians have hypothesized the "good Judas" before, scholars who have translated and studied the text said this was the first time an ancient document lent specific support to a revised image of the man whose name in history has been synonymous with treachery.
Scholars say the release of the document will set off years of study and debate. The debate is not over whether the manuscript is genuine — on this the scholars agree. Instead, the controversy is over its relevance.
Already, some scholars are saying that this Gospel sheds new light on the historical relationship between Jesus and Judas. They find strands of secret Jewish mysticism running through the beliefs expressed by some branches of early Christianity.
But others say the text is merely one more scripture produced by a marginalized Christian cult of Gnostics, who lived so many years after Jesus' day that they could not possibly produce anything accurate about his life. For these reasons, the discoveries are expected to intrigue theologians and historians of religion and perhaps be deeply troubling to some church leaders and lay believers.
"We will be talking about this gospel for generations to come," said Marvin Meyer, a professor of religion at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.
The discovery in the desert of Egypt of the leather-bound papyrus manuscript, its wanderings through Europe and Long Island, and now its translation, were announced by scholars assembled by the National Geographic Society. The 26-page Judas text is believed to be a copy in the Coptic language, made around A.D. 300, of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.
Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the society, said the manuscript, or codex, was considered by scholars to be the most significant ancient, nonbiblical text found in the past 60 years. Previous major discoveries include the Dead Sea Scrolls, which began coming to light in the late 1940's, and the Nag Hammadi monastery collection of Gnostic writings found in 1945 in Egypt.
The latter, including gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, have inspired recent Gnostic scholarship and shaken up traditional biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs among early followers of Jesus. Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
"These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was," said Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics.
Mr. Garcia said, "The codex has been authenticated as a genuine work of ancient Christian apocryphal literature," citing extensive tests of radiocarbon dating, ink analysis and multispectral imaging and studies of the script and linguistic style. The ink, for example, was consistent with ink of that era, and there was no evidence of multiple rewriting.
"This is absolutely typical of ancient Coptic manuscripts," said Stephen Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at the University of Münster in Germany. "I am completely convinced."
Experts said the handwriting appeared to be that of a single professional scribe. He is anonymous, as is the original author in Greek.
The word "gospel" means "good news," and generally refers to accounts of Jesus' life. Though someone is named in each, the titles are not necessarily those of the true authors. The consensus of scholars is that the four canonical gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — were probably not written by any of the original disciples or first-person witnesses to the life of Jesus, although they were probably written within the first century.
Scholars have long been on the lookout for the Gospel of Judas because of a reference to what was probably an early version in a treatise written by Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, in 180. He was a hunter of heretics, and no friend of the Gnostics, whose writings proliferated in the second through fourth centuries.
"They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas," Irenaeus wrote.
Unlike the four standard gospels, the Judas document portrays Judas Iscariot as alone among the 12 disciples to understand Jesus' teachings.
Karen L. King, a professor of the history of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is not involved in the Judas project, said this gospel might well reflect the debates that arose in the early centuries.
"You can see how early Christians could say, if Jesus' death was all part of God's plan, then Judas's betrayal was part of God's plan," said Dr. King. The standard gospels either give no motivation for Judas's betrayal or attribute it to the pieces of silver or the influence of Satan.
At least one scholar, James M. Robinson, said the new manuscript did not contain anything likely to change traditional understanding of the Bible. Dr. Robinson, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, was thegeneral editor of the English edition of the Nag Hammadi collection. "Correctly understood, there's nothing undermining about the Gospel of Judas," he said.
Dr. Robinson noted that the gospels of John and Mark both had passages that suggest that Jesus not only picked Judas to betray him, but actually encouraged Judas to hand him over to those he knew would crucify him.
In a key passage in the new-found gospel, Jesus had talks with Judas "three days before he celebrated Passover." That is when Jesus is supposed to have referred to the other disciples and said to Judas: "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
By that, scholars said, Jesus seems to have meant that in helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.
Rodolphe Kasser, a Swiss scholar of Coptic studies, directed the team that reconstructed and translated the script, which was written on 13 sheets of papyrus, both front and back. The manuscript was a mess of more than 1,000 brittle fragments.
The effort, organized by the National Geographic Society, was supported by Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, in Basel, Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, an American foundation.
The 66-page codex also contains a text titled James, a letter by Peter and pages provisionally called Book of Allogenes, or Book of Strangers.
Discovered in the 1970's in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States. Dr. Robinson, of Claremont, said that an Egyptian antiquities dealer offered to sell him the codex in 1983 for $3 million, but that he was unable to raise the money.
The manuscript moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N.Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was then given the name Codex Tchacos.
When efforts to resell the codex failed, Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation for conservation and translation. Ted Waitt, founder and former chief executive of Gateway, said the Waitt Institute gave the geographic society a grant of more than $1 million for the restoration.
Officials of the project announced that the codex would ultimately be returned to Egypt and housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. For now, the Gospel of Judas will be the center of attention in a television show, magazine article, two books and an exhibition by National Geographic.
On Passover in Berlin (with recipes!)
Ghosts of Passovers Past
By ANNA WINGER
Berlin is not the first place most people would choose to celebrate Passover. Although the city now claims a burgeoning Jewish population, there isn't a single kosher butcher, supermarket horseradish is mixed with cream and as for matzo, well, good luck.
There is no continuum of Jewish life here; no longstanding local traditions remain. The Jews who now live in Berlin are mostly newcomers like me, making things up as we go along. I moved here from New York in 2002, to be with my German husband. Since then I have held yearly Seders with an increasingly large and diverse group of friends. They are other Jewish New Yorkers and their German partners, a couple of Israelis, a French Jewish family with many daughters, the occasional Latin American Jew and one Norwegian. Last year we were 23 in all.
The Passover meal varies from home to home, but there are basic parameters: nothing that contains leavening (bread, beer), no milk at a meal with meat, no pork or shellfish. The elements of the Seder plate (parsley, horseradish, egg, haroset, lamb bone) are always the same. And red wine is important, since each person drinks four times throughout the ceremony and more, if they like, during the meal.
At first the question was not so much what to feed all these guests, but how. You would think it would be easy to pull together a Seder in Berlin, since many typically Jewish foods are mainstream German fare too: potato pancakes with applesauce, poppy-seed cake, rye bread. Sauerbraten looks and tastes a lot like brisket. Even matzo balls bear a striking resemblance to Knödel, starchy balls that are usually served as a side dish with gravy. But the devil is in the details. Knödel, for instance, are made with bread. While many variations are available — whole wheat, spelt, potato flour — unleavened meal of any kind is impossible to come by. (Conversely, when my husband made a traditional German Christmas meal for my family in Cambridge, Mass., last year, duck breasts and red cabbage were easy to find, but when he asked for Knödel mix at Whole Foods, he was led directly to the wide range of matzo meal in Aisle 4. But that's another story.. . .)
My parents are anthropologists, and as a child, I often lived with them in the remote locations where they tended to do their research. Wherever we were, my mother was ritualistic about American food. We ate fried chicken in the middle of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Africa on the Fourth of July. She drummed up Thanksgiving turkeys in Mexico and Nepal. I was not going to be swayed by the lack of matzo meal in German supermarkets.
And so, in the spirit of potluck, my Seders involve more than a little improvisation. One year, as a symbolic gesture, I ordered a frozen kosher lamb bone for the Seder plate from Munich, but that was overdoing it. We use nonkosher meat from the local organic butcher. The tsimmes is made from sweet potatoes tracked down at a Thai market near our apartment. In the States, chopped liver is made with schmaltz, which poses a problem here: Jewish schmaltz is made from rendered chicken fat, German schmaltz from pork; I use olive oil. One friend makes great horseradish with beets from scratch. Another, who comes from five generations of Jews in Atlanta, makes haroset with grape juice instead of kosher wine. My friend Patricia glazes the roast lamb with Turkish pomegranate syrup. (Berlin has one of the biggest Turkish populations of any city outside of Istanbul, so Turkish products are widely available, and many of them, including freshly baked macaroons, are perfect for Passover.) Handmade chocolate-covered walnuts and an incredible array of dried-fruit delicacies come from the Greek store across the street from me. What appears to be a jewelry store behind KaDeWe, Berlin's largest department store, turns out to be an Israeli food depot selling delicious baba ghanouj and, yes, matzo.
There is a Koscherei in my neighborhood that is rarely open, a small place selling salt, bad wine and good gefilte fish. Just before the holidays, it becomes a crossroads for Jews of every stripe who are united only, perhaps, by the uncanny sensation of preparing for a holiday on what is just a normal working day to the rest of the city. People greet one another in Hebrew or Russian. Sometimes they speak English to me. No one speaks German, although everybody can. We have little in common, but the mood is optimistic because it is an interesting time to be living in Berlin. Sixteen years after reunification, the city is finally coming into its own again. Before the war it was a center of Jewish life, and now we have the opportunity to participate in its rebuilding.
To love Berlin is to accept its history and to live with its ghosts. After we bought our apartment, my husband and I had all the wallpaper stripped and the original walls replastered. In our daughter's room, we found paintings of characters from fairy tales: a blue Puss in Boots, Hansel and Gretel, a grandmother and her gingerbread house. Based on the last layer of wallpaper removed, we were told that these paintings were made around 1930. I went downstairs and asked my oldest neighbor, a man who was born in the building, about the people who lived here then. "A Jewish family," he said. "Almost everyone in our building was Jewish before the war." Then he told me how they had been rounded up in the courtyard and taken away. He didn't remember the event himself, he said, but his mother had described it, and the image had always stayed with him.
I walk through that courtyard every day. In my daughter's room, we plastered around the paintings, leaving them exposed like frescoes, our own makeshift memorial. And when we tell the story of Exodus together around our dining-room table each year, we honor the families who lived here before us. We eat tsimmes made with Thai sweet potatoes, roast lamb with Turkish glaze and sweet, Georgian haroset. We celebrate, Jews and Germans together, because Berlin is a city with a terrible past but a promising future, and this is our home now.
Beet Horseradish
1 large beet, scrubbed
¼ pound fresh horseradish (about 4 inches)
3 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon suga
1 teaspoon salt.
Place the beet in a medium pot, cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer until the beet is easily pierced with a fork, about 1 hour. Cool, peel, then coarsely grate into a large bowl. Peel the horseradish and grate using a fine grater or food processor. In a small bowl, stir together the horseradish, vinegar, sugar and salt, then pour this over the beets and mix well. Makes about 2 cups. Adapted from Patricia Ferer.
Roast Lamb With Pomegranate Glaze
For the glaze:
1 cup pomegranate syrup 1 cup honey
1 cinnamon stick
3 allspice berries
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 sprig rosemary
Juice of 1 lemon
For the lamb:
1 rack of lamb
Olive oil
Salt and ground black pepper.
1. Place a roasting pan in the oven and preheat to 450 degrees. To make the glaze: combine all ingredients except lemon juice in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and strain. Stir in the lemon juice.
2. To make the lamb: rub the lamb with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place in the pan, fatty side down, and roast for 10 minutes. Baste with glaze, turn over and baste the other side. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes, or until a meat thermometer inserted reads 125 degrees. Let stand several minutes before slicing. Serve with extra glaze. Serves 4. Adapted from Patricia Ferer.
Chopped Liver With Olive Oil
¼ cup olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
12 ounces chicken livers, drained
Salt and ground black pepper
4 hard-boiled eggs
Finely chopped parsley (optional).
1. Heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the chicken livers and a pinch of salt and sauté, stirring occasionally, until the livers are cooked through, 5 to 7 minutes. Cool the mixture for at least 10 minutes and chop by hand or in a food processor, depending on the consistency you prefer. Season to taste.
2. Mash the eggs, leaving them chunky, and combine with the liver mixture. Add parsley, if using, and more olive oil if necessary. Makes about 2 ½ cups.
Poppy-Seed Torte
1 ½ cups poppy seeds
1 teaspoon baking powder or 3 tablespoons potato starch
6 eggs, at room temperature, separated
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
Powdered sugar.
1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Grease a 9-inch springform pan and line the bottom with parchment or waxed paper.
2. Using a coffee grinder, grind the poppy seeds in batches for about 20 seconds. (The seeds will become slightly sticky.) Combine with the baking powder in a large bowl.
3. In a mixer fitted with a paddle, beat the egg yolks until slightly thickened. Slowly add the sugar and vanilla. Slowly pour in the butter, then add the poppy-seed mixture. Beat until combined. Return the mixture, which will be very thick, to the large bowl.
4. Using a clean bowl and a whisk, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Fold them into the batter and pour it into the prepared pan. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out fairly dry. Cool on a wire rack for at least an hour before unmolding. Dust with powdered sugar before serving. Serves 12.
Another article on Judas
Without Judas, History Might Have Hijacked Another Villain
By DAVID GIBSON
IN churches around the world today, Christians will hear the familiar story of Christ's Passion that begins Holy Week: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal at the hands of Judas Iscariot, the death on the cross.
But in the publication last week of what is described as an ancient text called the Gospel of Judas, Judas is portrayed not as the treacherous apostle but rather as a hero of the Easter story who helps fulfill salvation history by betraying his beloved Jesus at the messiah's own bidding.
A feast for theological debate, surely, but after centuries of Christian rancor and persecution directed at Jews, much of it magnified through the lens of a caricatured Judas, a question of history arises, too. Would the terrible legacy of anti-Semitism have been different had a text like the Gospel of Judas been in the Christian canon from the start? If, in effect, the "bad Judas" were not in the picture?
Jewish and Christian scholars agree that the dynamic of early Christianity — a Jewish sect that failed to win over its own people — almost guaranteed a divorce with all the bitterness of a family feud. At first, Jewish authorities had the upper hand. But very quickly, as the Romans waged war against the Jews and as Christianity drew huge numbers of converts from the Gentile world, the tables turned, and Christians became the dominant camp. Even as a powerful force, however, Christian believers often adopted the victim's posture and took every opportunity to batter the increasingly beleaguered Jews.
In this campaign, Judas Iscariot became the perfect foil.
"Every great hero story needs a great villain, and Judas serves that literary purpose," said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author who was a theological adviser last year to the Off-Broadway play "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot."
It didn't take some Christian apologists long to discover that. In the second century, a bishop, Papias, was already relating a legend that Judas ended his days so bloated he could not see out of his swollen eyes and could not walk down a wide road. Papias wrote that Judas stank and urinated pus and worms, and was so immobile he was crushed by a chariot. By the Middle Ages, the ugly archetype of Judas as the personification of Judaism began to take hold: a hunched figure with a large nose and red hair who would do anything for money, including betray Christians. Dante cast Judas into the lowest ring of his "Inferno," and the Passion plays that became part of the Holy Week traditions often showed Judas being tormented in hell by demons. (The Roman Catholic Church never officially pronounced on the eternal fate of Judas.)
But scholars say it can be dangerous to overplay the role of Judas in the history of anti-Semitism because it might obscure the underlying causes of tensions between Christians and Jews. Even if Judas is erased from the Passion narratives, there are many more passages in the New Testament that foes of Judaism can seize on.
Erasing Judas "would change the iconography but it would not change the problem of anti-Judaism in a general sense," said Amy-Jill Levine, a professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and an adviser to National Geographic for its television account of the research it sponsored on the Judas papyrus. "Even if you turn Judas into a hero he is still just one character," Ms. Levine said. "The Passion narratives are much more complex."
Ms. Levine and others say that gospel passages like the famous "blood cry" of Matthew 27:25 were initially far more responsible for Christian animus against Jews than was the figure of Judas.
Rabbi Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and an expert on early Christianity, notes that in the canonical Gospel of John, Jesus urges Judas to carry out his betrayal without delay so that God's will might be done: "What you are going to do, do quickly." It is much the same message as that in the Judas gospel.
If the account in John had been dominant through Christian history, rather than the gospel accounts that condemn Judas, Rabbi Schiffman said, "then that would have led to interpretations in which one of the bigger Christian symbols of anti-Semitism would have been removed."
Still, scholars also suspect that if Judas as the great traitor hadn't existed, Christians would probably have invented someone like him to legitimate the messy process of their religious separation from Judaism. The likeliest candidate for an alternative Jewish bad guy, they say, would be Caiaphas, the high priest who handed Jesus over to Pontius Pilate and the Romans. "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish," Caiaphas says in John.
In the end, whoever wound up shouldering the role of the Passion's villain, experts say that it would have had little effect on the course of history between these sibling religions. But those same experts also believe that the current debates provoked by the Judas gospel, while not undoing a painful history, could help Christian-Jewish relations now and in the future.
"Maybe if Judas can be 'rehabilitated,' then perhaps some of those old issues could be set aside," said Marvin Meyer, a bible scholar at Chapman University and an expert on the Judas gospel who will appear on tonight's National Geographic program.
"If you take away Judas as the bad guy, it is one step back from blaming all the Jews," Rabbi Schiffman said. "It could have led to less anti-Semitism." But, he emphasized, "it would not have eliminated anti-Semitism."
The 1918 Flu Killed Millions. Does It Hold Clues for Today?
By GINA KOLATA
Flu researchers know the epidemic of 1918 all too well.
It was the worst infectious disease epidemic ever, killing more Americans in just a few months than died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam Wars combined. Unlike most flu strains, which kill predominantly the very old and the very young, this one — a bird flu, as it turns out — struck young adults in their 20's, 30's and 40's, leaving children orphaned and families without wage earners.
So now, as another bird flu spreads across the globe, killing domestic fowl and some wild birds and, ominously, infecting and killing more than 100 people as well, many scientists are looking back to 1918. Did that flu pandemic get started in the same way as this one? Will today's bird flu turn into tomorrow's human pandemic?
And what, if anything, does that nearly century old virus and the pandemic it caused reveal about what is happening today?
The answer is: a lot and not enough. The 1918 pandemic showed how quickly an influenza virus could devastate American towns and cities and how easily it could spread across the globe, even in an era before air travel.
It showed that a flu virus could produce unfamiliar symptoms and could kill in unprecedented ways. And it showed that a bird flu could turn into something that spreads among people.
But the parallels go only so far, researchers say. For now, they are left with as many questions as answers.
In the fall of 1918 flu struck the United States and parts of Europe hard and traveled to every corner of the world except Australia and a few remote islands. A few months later, it vanished, burning itself out after infecting nearly everyone who could be infected.
The virus arrived at even the most improbable places, like isolated Alaskan villages. In one such village, Wales, 178 of its 396 residents died during one week in November, after a mailman arrived by dog sled, bringing the virus along with the mail.
Public health officials tried in vain to contain its spread. In Philadelphia, people were exhorted not to cough, sneeze or spit in public.
But the virus spread anyway. On Oct. 3, Philadelphia closed all of its schools, churches, theaters and pool halls. Still, within a month, nearly 11,000 Philadelphians died of influenza.
Anyone who doubts that flu deaths can be horrific need only read the memoirs of physicians like Dr. Victor C. Vaughan, who treated influenza victims in 1918.
Dr. Vaughan, a former president of the American Medical Association, was summoned by the surgeon general to Camp Devens, near Boston, where the flu struck in September. He later described the scene in his memoirs.
The men, Dr. Vaughan wrote, "are placed on the cots until every bed is full, yet others crowd in."
"Their faces soon wear a bluish cast; a distressing cough brings up the blood stained sputum," he continued.
"In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cord wood," Dr. Vaughan said. "This picture was painted on my memory cells at the division hospital, Camp Devens, in the fall of 1918, when the deadly influenza virus demonstrated the inferiority of human inventions in the destruction of human life."
Still, scientists are left with an abiding mystery: Where did the 1918 virus come from?
Investigators know more than they once did. They know exactly what the virus looked like, thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, chief of the division of molecular pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and his colleagues, who obtained snippets of preserved lung tissue from three victims of the 1918 flu and managed to fish out shards of the virus and piece together its genes. Although the 1918 virus was a strain different from the A (H5N1) virus that is now killing birds, it was, Dr. Taubenberger found, a bird flu.
What is not known is how the 1918 virus moved from birds to humans.
One clue could come from knowing what flu viruses existed before the 1918 pandemic. Perhaps the 1918 virus entered the human population before 1918 in a more benign form then mutated to become a killer. Or perhaps it suddenly showed up in humans, jumping directly from birds to people.
To find out, Dr. Taubenberger and Dr. John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital are looking for human flu viruses that existed before 1918. London Hospital has a collection of human tissue obtained from 1908 to 1918. Dr. Taubenberger is searching for flu viruses in lung tissue from people who died of pneumonia in those years, hoping to use the same methods that allowed him to piece together the 1918 virus to resurrect a flu virus that was in humans before 1918.
The 1918 virus also is teaching researchers about experimental vaccines that scientists hope will protect against a variety of influenza strains. The plan had been to make a sort of universal flu vaccine that would protect against various flu viruses. Then people would not need a flu shot each year, and the vaccine might stop pandemic flu strains from ever gaining a toehold.
But, says Dr. Terrence Tumpey, a microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although the experimental vaccines protect against ordinary human flu viruses, they do not protect against the 1918 virus. Nor do they protect against today's A(H5N1) bird flu virus.
That leaves scientists with a puzzle. If they are worried about a 1918-like flu, they want a universal vaccine to protect against it, and they wonder what makes these bird flus so impervious? At this point, no one knows, Dr. Tumpey says.
Another abiding mystery is that neither the 1918 influenza pandemic nor any other human influenza pandemic began with a flu pandemic that killed birds. And, scientists add, if the 1918 pandemic had begun that way, it would have been noticed. Even if the deaths of wild birds went undetected, the deaths of domestic fowl would have been recorded.
Wild birds are inured to most flu viruses — clouds of the viruses normally infect them, living in their gastrointestinal tracts but causing little or no disease. Sometimes, those flu viruses infect poultry and, while they usually cause little illness, some flu strains can be lethal to fowl and economically devastating to farmers.
That, Dr. Taubenberger says, "has been recognized for 150 years." In the 1920's, scientists even isolated viruses from what they used to call fowl plague and what is now known to be bird flu. They were not the same viruses that infected humans.
The problem is in deciding what all this means.
The history of the 1918 flu can take scientists only so far, Dr. Taubenberger said.
"We don't know how the 1918 pandemic evolved and how the virus emerged into a form that was the finished product," he said. "What we sequenced was a virus that was ready for prime time, not its precursor."
"Ultimately," Dr. Taubenberger said, "the answer to the big question is, We don't know. There is no historical precedent for what is going on today."
At Sept. 11 Trial, Tale of Missteps and Management
At Sept. 11 Trial, Tale of Missteps and Management
By SCOTT SHANE and NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, March 30 — Three weeks of testimony and dozens of documents released in the sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui have offered an eerie parallel view of two organizations, Al Qaeda and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and how they pursued their missions before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Al Qaeda, according to a newly revealed account from the chief plotter, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, took its time in choosing targets — attack the White House or perhaps a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania? Organizers sized up and selected operatives, teaching them how to apply for a visa and how to cut a throat, a skill they practiced on sheep and camels. Despite the mistakes of careless subordinates and an erratic boss, Osama bin Laden, Mr. Mohammed tried to keep the plot on course.
Mr. Mohammed, a Pakistani-born, American-trained engineer, "thought simplicity was the key to success," says the summary of his interrogation by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is all the more chilling for the banal managerial skills it ascribes to the man who devised the simultaneous air attacks.
If Mr. Mohammed's guiding principle was simplicity, the United States government relied on sprawling bureaucracies at feuding agencies to look for myriad potential threats. The C.I.A. had lots of information on two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, but the F.B.I. did not know the men had settled in San Diego, where Mr. Mohammed had instructed them to "spend time visiting museums and amusement parks" so they could masquerade as tourists.
At the F.B.I., a few agents pursued clues that would later prove tantalizingly close to the mark, but they could not draw attention from top counterterrorism officials. A Minnesota F.B.I. agent, Harry M. Samit, warned in a memorandum that Mr. Moussaoui was a dangerous Islamic extremist whose study of how to fly a Boeing 747-400 seemed to be part of a sinister plot.
"As the details of this plan are not yet fully known, it cannot be determined if Moussaoui has sufficient knowledge of the 747-400 to attempt to execute the seizure of such an aircraft," Mr. Samit wrote on Aug. 31, 2001. He had already urged Washington to act quickly, because it was not clear "how far advanced Moussaoui's plan is or how many unidentified co-conspirators exist."
But to high-level officials, the oddball Moroccan-born Frenchman in Minneapolis was only one of scores of possible terrorists who might be worth checking out. An F.B.I. official in Washington edited crucial details out of Mr. Samit's memorandums seeking a search warrant for Mr. Moussaoui's possessions, and said that pressing for it could hurt an agent's career, Mr. Samit testified.
The picture of a large and lumbering bureaucracy trying to defend against a small and flexible enemy is striking, said Timothy J. Roemer, a member of the national Sept. 11 commission.
"It's like the elephant fighting the snake," said Mr. Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "One of the impressions of Al Qaeda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is their ability to change course and put new people into their plan and dynamically respond to the challenges day to day."
The United States government, he said, "is almost the opposite."
"We're slow to change," he said, "slow to adjust, and we're building a huge bureaucracy."
The court testimony, Mr. Roemer said, has reinforced his belief that "Moussaoui was an Al Qaeda mistake and a missed opportunity for the F.B.I."
The jury at Mr. Moussaoui's sentencing trial in federal court in Alexandria, Va., began deliberating on Wednesday about whether he qualifies for the death penalty for not telling American officials of the approaching terrorist attacks. If jurors decide he does qualify, they will then have to make a second decision as to whether he should be executed.
The outlines of the events on both sides in the weeks leading to the Sept. 11 attacks are well known. But the voluminous evidence presented at the trial have added details and color to the public history of the plotters and how American counterterrorism officers failed to stop them.
There are snippets of highly classified National Security Agency cables and glimpses of the C.I.A. inspector general's report on the agency's performance before the attacks, which remains secret. There are numerous new F.B.I. e-mail messages and memorandums that fill in the details of agents' suspicions and why they were not heeded.
But the 58-page "Substitution for the Testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," a detailed account of what Mr. Mohammed has told investigators since his capture in Pakistan in 2003, and an attached two-page statement written by him, give the most direct view to date of the man who conceived and organized the attacks.
"I know that the materialistic Western mind cannot grasp the idea, and it is difficult for them to believe that the high officials in Al Qaeda do not know about operations carried out by its operatives, but this is how it works," Mr. Mohammed wrote in his statement to his interrogators. "We do not submit written reports to our higher ups. I conducted the September 11 operation by submitting only oral reports."
Mr. Mohammed comes across as a hands-on, midlevel manager who sometimes handled details, like perusing a San Diego telephone book he bought at a market in Karachi, Pakistan, for English-language schools and flight schools.
But he delegated what he could to others. He had Abu Turab al Jordani, a Qaeda veteran from Jordan, train the less sophisticated "muscle" hijackers, teaching them to use their knives on animals and how to storm a jetliner cabin. He allowed Mohammed Atta, appointed "emir" of the hijackers, to make final decisions on targets and on the date of the attack.
Mr. bin Laden repeatedly pressed Mr. Mohammed to move ahead with the hijacking plot, the document says. He pushed, for example, to strike on May 12, precisely seven months after the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Ever the pragmatist, Mr. Mohammed put him off. In fact, Mr. Mohammed "noted that he disobeyed bin Laden on several occasions by taking operatives assigned to him by bin Laden and using them how he best saw fit."
One restriction on the plot was the small number of Qaeda devotees who had, or could get, visas to enter the United States. Mr. Mohammed used Mr. Midhar and Mr. Hazmi because they had visas — despite his doubts about their minimal English and lack of sophistication.
But he also considered Mr. Moussaoui less reliable because of time he had spent in the West. Mr. Mohammed "stated that Westerners have a different point of view because of their freedom," the summary says.
The sentencing trial made clear the frustration of the Minneapolis F.B.I. office in its repeated efforts to interest bureau headquarters in Mr. Moussaoui.
Gripping testimony came from Mr. Samit, who arrested Mr. Moussaoui on Aug. 16 and quickly became convinced that he was a terrorist who knew about an imminent hijacking plot. Mr. Samit said that he had sent about 70 warning messages about Mr. Moussaoui, but that they had produced no results.
The agent said he had been puzzled at the reluctance of Michael Maltbie, a supervisor with the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at bureau headquarters, to seek a search warrant for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings from a special intelligence court.
Mr. Samit seemed unable to satisfy Mr. Maltbie's demand that he provide a tangible link between Mr. Moussaoui and a foreign power, a requirement for a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He thought he had sufficient evidence from two French intelligence reports showing Mr. Moussaoui had recruited someone to fight in Chechnya for an Islamist group allied with Mr. bin Laden.
But on Aug. 24, 2001, a frustrated Mr. Samit sent an e-mail message to Charles Frahm, a friend and, at the time, an F.B.I. liaison to the C.I.A., asking for information to help make his case. "We're trying to close the wiggle room for F.B.I. headquarters to claim there is no connection to a foreign power," he wrote.
Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers asserted that Mr. Maltbie had undermined the effort to obtain a search warrant by deleting some details from Mr. Samit's requests. Mr. Samit said Mr. Maltbie had told him he was reluctant to press for a warrant because doing so would be risky for his career and "he was not about to let that happen to him."
At the time, the bureau had become wary of applying to the intelligence court because a well-regarded supervisor had angered the court's chief judge in a previous case.
Days later, with the attacks in New York and Washington, the scale of the destruction astonished even Mr. Mohammed. According to the summary, he said he "had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was."
A Lives article on teaching in coal country
Coal Miner's Granddaughter
By BATHSHEBA MONK
Over lunch one day, I tell a friend that I'm taking a teaching job at a community college in Tamaqua, Pa., not far from where I was born. After a lifetime of staying away, I moved back to the state two and a half years ago and now live in Allentown, but I haven't been back to the coal region since I was 18.
My friend, an antiques dealer who goes picking in the area, says he drove through there last Tuesday. "It looks like there was a nuclear accident in Tamaqua and the survivors stayed on," he says, and laughs. I pretend to laugh with him, but it feels as if he's making fun of my mother. I can do that. He can't.
Although Tamaqua is only an hour northwest of Allentown, it might as well be in another country in another time. On the first day of school, as I drive up Route 309 over Blue Mountain, the car engine strains to make the steep grade, then my cellphone cuts out. On the edge of town, I see a worn sign that says "Coal for Sale" that must be 30 years old. Abandoned strip mines surround and define both the town and the people, who look flinty, dust-covered, squinteyed.
At a stoplight, I stare at a fat boy delivering fliers to houses from a canvas pushcart. He turns to give me an angry look, then suddenly darts his cart into the street toward me. I lock my car door and plead with the light to change. He reaches the car and rams my door as the light turns green. I shift gears, turn left and gun it up an almost-90-degree hill, zoom over the tracks in front of a slow-moving freight train, past row houses that have been clinging to the hill for a hundred years, crest over a street that is so steep it actually seems to be tilting backward and finally pull right up into the parking lot of Lehigh Carbon Community College.
The class I am teaching is Technical Reporting. That's what the nice dean told me. "So much real-life experience!" he had exulted over the phone. "Just what these kids need. And being from here, you can relate to them."
I have 10 students, who are already seated when I enter the classroom. Eight are boys, who slouch low. Baseball hats stitched with contractors' names are pulled down over their eyes. One wears a sleeveless T-shirt and rotates his right arm in front of him, admiring his triceps. The two women are housewives. One has embroidered teddy bears on her turtleneck sweater.
They are here because John Morgan, who basically invented thermal underwear and made his fortune here, bequeathed part of that fortune to build this campus so that any student who graduated from Tamaqua High could have two years of free college and wouldn't have to leave town. Which is a hell of a booby prize, I think, because my view is that there is no reason to stay. My agenda in agreeing to teach this class isn't to give these students skills to help them thrive in Tamaqua. It's the opposite: to inspire them to leave. I carry totems in my briefcase — bus schedules to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and beyond. Is there anyone more obnoxious than a missionary?
To get to know them, I ask each student to tell me what he or she wants to be: construction manager, heavy-equipment operator, logistics specialist. "Cop," one housewife says. "Why not D.A.?" I press. She doesn't answer. I tell the boys that unless they are bald or have a scalp disease, I would like them to please remove their hats, which none do. So I move on to my "real-life experience": Army in Germany, real-estate manager for a big insurance company in Boston, small-business owner in Allentown. I have lived all over the world, I say. And listen! I, myself, grew up in a coal patch near here. I name the patch. The hats are pulled even lower.
The fact is that I come from a long line of people who pick up and leave when things stop working out. My grandfather migrated from Poland to Hazelton, Pa., to mine coal, and when the mines closed, my father hitchhiked two hours south to Bethlehem to roll steel, and when the furnaces shut down, my brother moved to Nigeria, where he drills for oil. It seems natural, American really, to move on. Aren't most of us descended from people who did just that?
I ask the class to write what they hope to learn from me on index cards I give out, and they hand the cards to me as they file out. How to write a bid proposal. How to create a technical manual. No one, it seems, wants to learn how to escape.
At the bottom of one card a student has written: "Who do you think you are?"
On ESPN and dominoes
After Luck With Poker, ESPN Bets on New York Dominoes
By COREY KILGANNON
The next big thing in sports programming is ... dominoes?
To the occasional domino player, it is a stretch to even call this quiet game of straight-faced strategy a sport. But anyone who has spent time in a Latino neighborhood in New York City could testify that dominoes played there — with the slammed-down tiles, the verbal sparring, the bragging and bluffing — is no parlor game.
From the opening bid, a simple sidewalk match will quickly escalate into a raucous, freewheeling spectacle: a mini-fiesta where salsa and cigars, Bacardi and brown-bagged beers have as much a role as the little colored tiles with dots.
The games almost always draw spectators, so perhaps it is no surprise that the ESPN sports network has declared dominoes the next big spectator sport and is promoting it as both a colorful cultural touchstone and a highly competitive game, complete with rankings, formal tournaments, celebrity events and sponsors.
Encouraged by the success of televised poker, the network has begun combing New York City for top players and colorful clubs for its coverage, and has been taping segments on formal tournaments and casual neighborhood games.
Hourlong domino shows now run on Tuesday nights at 10 on the network's Spanish-language sports channel ESPN Deportes. Hoping it will be popular with English-speaking viewers, network officials plan to show similar programming on ESPN2 starting in June.
"We think it will be the next cool thing," said Lino Garcia, the general manager of ESPN Deportes. "We're connecting with the best places dominoes is played, so naturally we're going to start in uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, the places where it really happens."
Mr. Garcia said he hopes to repeat the success the network has had with poker — its World Series of Poker is its highest-rated regular series. Like poker, domino games offer plenty of suspense and drama at the table, with clever decision-making and reading the strategies of other players all pivotal to winning. The network will also televise the world championships next year from the Dominican Republic.
The plan, Mr. Garcia said, is not only to present dominoes in world-class tournaments and flashy celebrity domino events the way the network showcases poker, but also to capture the excitement and charm of "the highly energetic games on street corners and small clubs in basements where guys go every day."
New York's neighborhoods are filled with characters who come together to play on Spanish Harlem sidewalks, Bronx parks and in basement and backroom clubs in Washington Heights. Older men in caps and young men in muscle-T's and gold chains go at it, slapping dominoes onto flimsy tables, speaking in Spanish in games lubricated by Presidente beer and salsa music.
This was the scene recently at a dominoes club in the Bronx called Hijos y Amigos de Altamira, which means children and friends of Altamira, a town in the Dominican Republic. Housed in rented space above a bar on Westchester Avenue, the club, which is one of those being scouted by ESPN, is a band of countrymen — almost every member is from Altamira, a small town that prides itself on its crop of baseball and domino players.
"I've been playing dominoes all my life, but I never thought I'd see it on TV," said Augusto Montan, 55, one of the club's members. "We always thought of it as a game to pass the time, but it does have all the elements people love: the competition, the trash-talking, the color, and it's old school."
The club embodies exactly what ESPN is looking for in a neighborhood domino setting. Young and old men alike sat at domino tables and shuffled a mess of face-down tiles and then picked their domino hands. Members have nicknames like el Natural. Their wives, girlfriends and daughters play bingo and tend to the homemade Dominican food and serve $2 beers from a small bar. The children race around, practicing traditional Latin dance steps and gathering at tables to watch, learn and root.
"Dominoes is the national pastime of Dominican Republic: it's as simple as that," said one club member, Louis Keyser, 72. "Over there, a little kid gets a bat and ball put in his hand as soon as he can walk, and from the moment he's tall enough to see the table, he learns how to play dominoes."
The club's origins go back to 1983, when a handful of men began a regular domino game in the basement of a Bronx apartment building where one of them, Juan Martinez, was the superintendent.
There are now 42 members, mostly from the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Dues are $10 a month, and through fund-raising events and contributions the club collects enough money to help members with needs ranging from rent or funeral costs for family members.
Dominoes, which some experts date to ancient Egypt, is played worldwide, and in New York it is popular in African-American, Chinese and Caribbean neighborhoods. But Hispanic players like to stake a claim that the game is truly theirs. Styles of dominoes vary by country — Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, for example, generally use seven tiles per player, while Cubans tend to and use nine pieces. Instead of players taking turns making moves in the usual clockwise rotation, some Latin players take turns counter-clockwise.
While the game's basic objective is simple enough — to get rid of one's tiles first by placing them next to tiles of matching dots on the table — the best players are expert at using memory counting to calculate what tiles an opponent is likely to be holding.
Luis Guzman, the well-known Puerto Rican actor, said in an interview that the domino table was an arena where the very dramas of life play out: love, hatred, revenge. Tempers can flare and lifelong relationships can begin and end around a domino game.
Mr. Guzman recalled that when he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it seemed that every male Latino played dominoes.
"My pops would play for hours on end; all the men did," he said. " I know best friends who stopped talking to each other for years because of one game. After 10 years, one would still be saying, 'Man, why'd he play that one when he knew the other guy was holding the 6-3?' I know a guy who jumped out a second-story window and broke both legs after losing a domino game.' "
At the Altamira Club, the players had varying opinions about how old-school domino players accustomed to casual, free-flowing action would react to being analyzed and scrutinized by ESPN, which plans on installing a dozen table-level cameras, along with others overhead and around the club.
"I think being on TV would make some of our players nervous," said Mr. Montan, "but then again, I could name at least few guys right now who would eat it up."
On being the sibling of a disabled person
Siblings of Disabled Have Their Own Troubles
By GRETCHEN COOK
When he was growing up in Oregon, Graham Seaton found it virtually impossible to bring children home from school to play.
"I knew there was something wrong with my place," he recalled. "But I didn't know how to explain what that was."
He knew that he would have to tell his friends why they could play only in his bedroom — and only with the door locked. And that, ultimately, he would have to explain what was "wrong" with his older brother Burleigh, who is profoundly autistic.
"I just didn't have the words," he said.
Now 30, Mr. Seaton said he realized that as a child, he felt he could not ask his parents for those words.
"I was so aware I couldn't make a big deal with my family," he said. "My parents already had enough on their hands."
An estimated seven million "typically developing" American children have siblings with disabilities, according to the Arc of the United States, a leading advocacy group for the mentally retarded. Those children face many of the same challenges — and joys — as their parents, but they also face other problems. Some resent the extra demands placed on them at an early age by their disabled siblings, and many feel neglected by their often overburdened parents.
Some children say they fear "catching" their siblings' disabilities. Others may wish that they, too, were disabled, so that they could get all the attention their siblings do. And many suffer embarrassment about their siblings' inappropriate behavior or abnormal appearance, and then feel guilty about it.
These are difficult emotions for children to struggle with, and Don Meyer, director of the Arc's sibling support project, says the needs of siblings like Mr. Seaton are often overlooked. Most assistance organizations and support groups are intended for disabled children themselves or for their parents.
"These brothers and sisters will likely have the longest-lasting relationships of anyone, relationships easily in excess of 65 years," Mr. Meyer said. "They should be remembered at every turn."
Still, many siblings welcome the early maturity and responsibility that come with having a disabled brother or sister. They are often well versed in the details of their siblings' disabilities, and they take pride in being able to explain them in sophisticated ways. For example, Hannah, 16, of Dearborn, Mich., who did not want her last name used out of concerns for her privacy, said she related better to adults than to children her age because of having to cope with her brother Ian's autism.
But that maturity does not inoculate her from embarrassment about Ian's outbursts, particularly during church services.
"Sometimes he'll kind of start making noises, and then sometimes he'll kick and flail his arms, or he'll start rocking and crying," Hannah said. "My mother will take him outside, but it's still, like, okayyyyy. ..."
Suzanne Ripley, who has two sons with cerebral palsy, says that a child's disability can embarrass parents, too, but that embarrassment can be more acute for siblings, especially those in the throes of adolescent conformity. Young siblings are also prone to teasing from other children, who do not have the social inhibitions of adults.
But Ms. Ripley, the director of the National Dissemination Center for Children With Disabilities, based in Washington, notes that adults can often be just as rude.
"People tend to be uncomfortable with anyone who's different, so they look for a second and then look away," Ms. Ripley said. "Imagine how that would make you feel" as a child.
Parents like Ms. Ripley are likely to seek comfort through talking with others about their conflicting emotions. But children may not have the sophistication to do so or they may feel guilty about acknowledging any negative feelings they have.
Hannah, for example, says she loves her 13-year-old brother and feels terrible about her reactions to his outbursts.
"I know it's not his fault and that's the way he is, and so I shouldn't really be embarrassed, but sometimes I am," she said.
But she said she did not discuss those feelings with her parents.
"They'd get that, 'Oh well, you can deal with it' kind of attitude," she said. "I know they would listen, but they would get defensive."
Ally Cirelli, a 9-year-old in Towson, Md., whose sister is developmentally disabled, says the biggest complaint she hears from her peers is that the disabled siblings get all the attention.
Some are so jealous of their siblings that they wish they had their own disability, and the special treatment that comes with it, she said. But Ally, too, avoids talking to her parents about her feelings. And she is quick to backpedal when she does talk about it, insisting that her sister, Katie, 8, does not embarrass her "all that often," and that she is "really fun" to play with.
Mr. Meyer, of the Arc, says children need a place where they can openly discuss these concerns and emotions. To fill this gap, he started the sibling support project, which is based in Seattle and provides information and holds discussion groups for children around the country. In 2005, Mr. Meyer also published "The Sibling Slam Book: What It's Really Like to Have a Brother or Sister With Special Needs," a collection of candid remarks by 80 children.
Mr. Meyer said that when asked about the most embarrassing moment of their lives, few of the children cited anything having to do with their disabled siblings. Instead, most recounted the usual teenage humiliations: problems in romantic relationships or dealing with parents.
And that, Mr. Meyer says, underscores an important point: "When I talk to parents about embarrassment (about disabled siblings), I ask them to keep in mind that it's an age-related condition," he said. "That's the good news, that a lot of that seems to be resolved by even their late teens."
The work of disability advocates and the mainstreaming of children with special needs in schools and in the wider society has fostered more awareness of — and less discomfort with — disabilities.
Ms. Ripley, for her part, says she has noticed a change in public attitudes, especially when she is struggling to maneuver with her sons in public places.
"I'm finding that people are more and more helpful," she said. "That didn't used to happen."
Bill Strikes at Low-Nutrition Food in School
Bill Strikes at Low-Nutrition Foods in School
By MARIAN BURROS
The days when children consume two orders of French fries in the school cafeteria and call it lunch may be numbered. A bipartisan group in Congress plans to introduce legislation today that would prohibit the sale in school not only of French fries but also of other fatty or sugary foods, including soft drinks.
Under the bill, an amendment to the National School Lunch Act, high nutritional standards would be required of all food sold on school premises. That means not just in cafeterias but in vending machines, school stores and snack bars as well, even at fund-raising events.
The measure, which has strong bipartisan support in both houses, would do on a national level what many school districts have been trying to do for years: require that the schools set an example by providing only healthful food and so perhaps reduce the incidence of childhood obesity.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, has watched what goes on in the school her two teenage sons attend.
"We talk a lot about healthy nutrition, we teach the kids about the food pyramid, and then they go down the hallway and get the high fat, high sodium and high junk available in the vending machines," Ms. Murkowski said. "We need to be consistent. People are beginning to connect the dots between rising health care costs and obesity."
Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who has been pushing such a bill since 1994, said: "Congress is finally catching up with what parents have believed for a long time. Members of Congress are hearing from their constituents and recognizing this has become a national problem. I think finally members of Congress are asking, 'Why do we have soft drink vending machines in our schools?' "
The bill would apply to all foods other than the official school lunch, the meal for which schools receive government aid and which is already covered by other high-nutrition standards. Currently, sale of the other foods is permitted in school if they contain at least 5 percent of the recommended daily allowance of protein and certain vitamins and minerals. This standard applies regardless of the product's level of calories, fat, added sugars or sodium.
Under that approach, French fries, ice cream, candy bars, cookies, chips, snack cakes and doughnuts are allowed. Seltzer, jelly beans, chewing gum, lollipops, cotton candy and breath mints are not.
The new list of foods would take into account whether a product promoted obesity or chronic illnesses. The choices would come from recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, which expects to have a report ready this fall.
Enforcement would rest with the Department of Agriculture, which currently has authority only over the official school lunch. "The agency has done a good job with the official school lunch and could do a good job with all other food," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which worked closely with Congress on the legislation.
Supporters of the bill have been marshaling evidence to contradict the usual criticism of proposals to serve only nutritious food in schools: that children will not eat it and that schools cannot afford to lose the revenue brought in by fatty or sugary products. A survey by the Agriculture Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that of 17 schools that began offering healthful options, 12 actually increased revenue while only one lost, marginally; the four others reported no change.
The American Beverage Association, a trade group, said the legislation was unnecessary because since last August members of the association have limited sales of full-calorie soft drinks to 50 percent of offerings in high schools. They are not available in lower grades.
Frito-Lay, a leading manufacturer of snack foods, had no comment.
Despite the strong support for the bill among lawmakers, Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, was skeptical.
"My fear," Dr. Brownell said, "is that the food industry, with the soft drink industry taking the lead, will work its hardest to weaken or kill this act."
On the Gospel of Judas
With a PDF excerpt of the text
In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Correction Appended
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.
In this text, scholars reported yesterday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four gospels in the New Testament. Here Jesus is said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, "you will exceed" the other disciples.
"You will be cursed by the other generations, and you will come to rule over them," Jesus confides to Judas in the document, which was made public at a news conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington.
Though some theologians have hypothesized the "good Judas" before, scholars who have translated and studied the text said this was the first time an ancient document lent specific support to a revised image of the man whose name in history has been synonymous with treachery.
Scholars say the release of the document will set off years of study and debate. The debate is not over whether the manuscript is genuine — on this the scholars agree. Instead, the controversy is over its relevance.
Already, some scholars are saying that this Gospel sheds new light on the historical relationship between Jesus and Judas. They find strands of secret Jewish mysticism running through the beliefs expressed by some branches of early Christianity.
But others say the text is merely one more scripture produced by a marginalized Christian cult of Gnostics, who lived so many years after Jesus' day that they could not possibly produce anything accurate about his life. For these reasons, the discoveries are expected to intrigue theologians and historians of religion and perhaps be deeply troubling to some church leaders and lay believers.
"We will be talking about this gospel for generations to come," said Marvin Meyer, a professor of religion at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.
The discovery in the desert of Egypt of the leather-bound papyrus manuscript, its wanderings through Europe and Long Island, and now its translation, were announced by scholars assembled by the National Geographic Society. The 26-page Judas text is believed to be a copy in the Coptic language, made around A.D. 300, of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.
Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the society, said the manuscript, or codex, was considered by scholars to be the most significant ancient, nonbiblical text found in the past 60 years. Previous major discoveries include the Dead Sea Scrolls, which began coming to light in the late 1940's, and the Nag Hammadi monastery collection of Gnostic writings found in 1945 in Egypt.
The latter, including gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, have inspired recent Gnostic scholarship and shaken up traditional biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs among early followers of Jesus. Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
"These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was," said Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics.
Mr. Garcia said, "The codex has been authenticated as a genuine work of ancient Christian apocryphal literature," citing extensive tests of radiocarbon dating, ink analysis and multispectral imaging and studies of the script and linguistic style. The ink, for example, was consistent with ink of that era, and there was no evidence of multiple rewriting.
"This is absolutely typical of ancient Coptic manuscripts," said Stephen Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at the University of Münster in Germany. "I am completely convinced."
Experts said the handwriting appeared to be that of a single professional scribe. He is anonymous, as is the original author in Greek.
The word "gospel" means "good news," and generally refers to accounts of Jesus' life. Though someone is named in each, the titles are not necessarily those of the true authors. The consensus of scholars is that the four canonical gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — were probably not written by any of the original disciples or first-person witnesses to the life of Jesus, although they were probably written within the first century.
Scholars have long been on the lookout for the Gospel of Judas because of a reference to what was probably an early version in a treatise written by Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, in 180. He was a hunter of heretics, and no friend of the Gnostics, whose writings proliferated in the second through fourth centuries.
"They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas," Irenaeus wrote.
Unlike the four standard gospels, the Judas document portrays Judas Iscariot as alone among the 12 disciples to understand Jesus' teachings.
Karen L. King, a professor of the history of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is not involved in the Judas project, said this gospel might well reflect the debates that arose in the early centuries.
"You can see how early Christians could say, if Jesus' death was all part of God's plan, then Judas's betrayal was part of God's plan," said Dr. King. The standard gospels either give no motivation for Judas's betrayal or attribute it to the pieces of silver or the influence of Satan.
At least one scholar, James M. Robinson, said the new manuscript did not contain anything likely to change traditional understanding of the Bible. Dr. Robinson, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, was thegeneral editor of the English edition of the Nag Hammadi collection. "Correctly understood, there's nothing undermining about the Gospel of Judas," he said.
Dr. Robinson noted that the gospels of John and Mark both had passages that suggest that Jesus not only picked Judas to betray him, but actually encouraged Judas to hand him over to those he knew would crucify him.
In a key passage in the new-found gospel, Jesus had talks with Judas "three days before he celebrated Passover." That is when Jesus is supposed to have referred to the other disciples and said to Judas: "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
By that, scholars said, Jesus seems to have meant that in helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.
Rodolphe Kasser, a Swiss scholar of Coptic studies, directed the team that reconstructed and translated the script, which was written on 13 sheets of papyrus, both front and back. The manuscript was a mess of more than 1,000 brittle fragments.
The effort, organized by the National Geographic Society, was supported by Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, in Basel, Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, an American foundation.
The 66-page codex also contains a text titled James, a letter by Peter and pages provisionally called Book of Allogenes, or Book of Strangers.
Discovered in the 1970's in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States. Dr. Robinson, of Claremont, said that an Egyptian antiquities dealer offered to sell him the codex in 1983 for $3 million, but that he was unable to raise the money.
The manuscript moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N.Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was then given the name Codex Tchacos.
When efforts to resell the codex failed, Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation for conservation and translation. Ted Waitt, founder and former chief executive of Gateway, said the Waitt Institute gave the geographic society a grant of more than $1 million for the restoration.
Officials of the project announced that the codex would ultimately be returned to Egypt and housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. For now, the Gospel of Judas will be the center of attention in a television show, magazine article, two books and an exhibition by National Geographic.
On Passover in Berlin (with recipes!)
Ghosts of Passovers Past
By ANNA WINGER
Berlin is not the first place most people would choose to celebrate Passover. Although the city now claims a burgeoning Jewish population, there isn't a single kosher butcher, supermarket horseradish is mixed with cream and as for matzo, well, good luck.
There is no continuum of Jewish life here; no longstanding local traditions remain. The Jews who now live in Berlin are mostly newcomers like me, making things up as we go along. I moved here from New York in 2002, to be with my German husband. Since then I have held yearly Seders with an increasingly large and diverse group of friends. They are other Jewish New Yorkers and their German partners, a couple of Israelis, a French Jewish family with many daughters, the occasional Latin American Jew and one Norwegian. Last year we were 23 in all.
The Passover meal varies from home to home, but there are basic parameters: nothing that contains leavening (bread, beer), no milk at a meal with meat, no pork or shellfish. The elements of the Seder plate (parsley, horseradish, egg, haroset, lamb bone) are always the same. And red wine is important, since each person drinks four times throughout the ceremony and more, if they like, during the meal.
At first the question was not so much what to feed all these guests, but how. You would think it would be easy to pull together a Seder in Berlin, since many typically Jewish foods are mainstream German fare too: potato pancakes with applesauce, poppy-seed cake, rye bread. Sauerbraten looks and tastes a lot like brisket. Even matzo balls bear a striking resemblance to Knödel, starchy balls that are usually served as a side dish with gravy. But the devil is in the details. Knödel, for instance, are made with bread. While many variations are available — whole wheat, spelt, potato flour — unleavened meal of any kind is impossible to come by. (Conversely, when my husband made a traditional German Christmas meal for my family in Cambridge, Mass., last year, duck breasts and red cabbage were easy to find, but when he asked for Knödel mix at Whole Foods, he was led directly to the wide range of matzo meal in Aisle 4. But that's another story.. . .)
My parents are anthropologists, and as a child, I often lived with them in the remote locations where they tended to do their research. Wherever we were, my mother was ritualistic about American food. We ate fried chicken in the middle of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Africa on the Fourth of July. She drummed up Thanksgiving turkeys in Mexico and Nepal. I was not going to be swayed by the lack of matzo meal in German supermarkets.
And so, in the spirit of potluck, my Seders involve more than a little improvisation. One year, as a symbolic gesture, I ordered a frozen kosher lamb bone for the Seder plate from Munich, but that was overdoing it. We use nonkosher meat from the local organic butcher. The tsimmes is made from sweet potatoes tracked down at a Thai market near our apartment. In the States, chopped liver is made with schmaltz, which poses a problem here: Jewish schmaltz is made from rendered chicken fat, German schmaltz from pork; I use olive oil. One friend makes great horseradish with beets from scratch. Another, who comes from five generations of Jews in Atlanta, makes haroset with grape juice instead of kosher wine. My friend Patricia glazes the roast lamb with Turkish pomegranate syrup. (Berlin has one of the biggest Turkish populations of any city outside of Istanbul, so Turkish products are widely available, and many of them, including freshly baked macaroons, are perfect for Passover.) Handmade chocolate-covered walnuts and an incredible array of dried-fruit delicacies come from the Greek store across the street from me. What appears to be a jewelry store behind KaDeWe, Berlin's largest department store, turns out to be an Israeli food depot selling delicious baba ghanouj and, yes, matzo.
There is a Koscherei in my neighborhood that is rarely open, a small place selling salt, bad wine and good gefilte fish. Just before the holidays, it becomes a crossroads for Jews of every stripe who are united only, perhaps, by the uncanny sensation of preparing for a holiday on what is just a normal working day to the rest of the city. People greet one another in Hebrew or Russian. Sometimes they speak English to me. No one speaks German, although everybody can. We have little in common, but the mood is optimistic because it is an interesting time to be living in Berlin. Sixteen years after reunification, the city is finally coming into its own again. Before the war it was a center of Jewish life, and now we have the opportunity to participate in its rebuilding.
To love Berlin is to accept its history and to live with its ghosts. After we bought our apartment, my husband and I had all the wallpaper stripped and the original walls replastered. In our daughter's room, we found paintings of characters from fairy tales: a blue Puss in Boots, Hansel and Gretel, a grandmother and her gingerbread house. Based on the last layer of wallpaper removed, we were told that these paintings were made around 1930. I went downstairs and asked my oldest neighbor, a man who was born in the building, about the people who lived here then. "A Jewish family," he said. "Almost everyone in our building was Jewish before the war." Then he told me how they had been rounded up in the courtyard and taken away. He didn't remember the event himself, he said, but his mother had described it, and the image had always stayed with him.
I walk through that courtyard every day. In my daughter's room, we plastered around the paintings, leaving them exposed like frescoes, our own makeshift memorial. And when we tell the story of Exodus together around our dining-room table each year, we honor the families who lived here before us. We eat tsimmes made with Thai sweet potatoes, roast lamb with Turkish glaze and sweet, Georgian haroset. We celebrate, Jews and Germans together, because Berlin is a city with a terrible past but a promising future, and this is our home now.
Beet Horseradish
1 large beet, scrubbed
¼ pound fresh horseradish (about 4 inches)
3 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon suga
1 teaspoon salt.
Place the beet in a medium pot, cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer until the beet is easily pierced with a fork, about 1 hour. Cool, peel, then coarsely grate into a large bowl. Peel the horseradish and grate using a fine grater or food processor. In a small bowl, stir together the horseradish, vinegar, sugar and salt, then pour this over the beets and mix well. Makes about 2 cups. Adapted from Patricia Ferer.
Roast Lamb With Pomegranate Glaze
For the glaze:
1 cup pomegranate syrup 1 cup honey
1 cinnamon stick
3 allspice berries
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 sprig rosemary
Juice of 1 lemon
For the lamb:
1 rack of lamb
Olive oil
Salt and ground black pepper.
1. Place a roasting pan in the oven and preheat to 450 degrees. To make the glaze: combine all ingredients except lemon juice in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and strain. Stir in the lemon juice.
2. To make the lamb: rub the lamb with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place in the pan, fatty side down, and roast for 10 minutes. Baste with glaze, turn over and baste the other side. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes, or until a meat thermometer inserted reads 125 degrees. Let stand several minutes before slicing. Serve with extra glaze. Serves 4. Adapted from Patricia Ferer.
Chopped Liver With Olive Oil
¼ cup olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
12 ounces chicken livers, drained
Salt and ground black pepper
4 hard-boiled eggs
Finely chopped parsley (optional).
1. Heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the chicken livers and a pinch of salt and sauté, stirring occasionally, until the livers are cooked through, 5 to 7 minutes. Cool the mixture for at least 10 minutes and chop by hand or in a food processor, depending on the consistency you prefer. Season to taste.
2. Mash the eggs, leaving them chunky, and combine with the liver mixture. Add parsley, if using, and more olive oil if necessary. Makes about 2 ½ cups.
Poppy-Seed Torte
1 ½ cups poppy seeds
1 teaspoon baking powder or 3 tablespoons potato starch
6 eggs, at room temperature, separated
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
Powdered sugar.
1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Grease a 9-inch springform pan and line the bottom with parchment or waxed paper.
2. Using a coffee grinder, grind the poppy seeds in batches for about 20 seconds. (The seeds will become slightly sticky.) Combine with the baking powder in a large bowl.
3. In a mixer fitted with a paddle, beat the egg yolks until slightly thickened. Slowly add the sugar and vanilla. Slowly pour in the butter, then add the poppy-seed mixture. Beat until combined. Return the mixture, which will be very thick, to the large bowl.
4. Using a clean bowl and a whisk, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Fold them into the batter and pour it into the prepared pan. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out fairly dry. Cool on a wire rack for at least an hour before unmolding. Dust with powdered sugar before serving. Serves 12.
Another article on Judas
Without Judas, History Might Have Hijacked Another Villain
By DAVID GIBSON
IN churches around the world today, Christians will hear the familiar story of Christ's Passion that begins Holy Week: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal at the hands of Judas Iscariot, the death on the cross.
But in the publication last week of what is described as an ancient text called the Gospel of Judas, Judas is portrayed not as the treacherous apostle but rather as a hero of the Easter story who helps fulfill salvation history by betraying his beloved Jesus at the messiah's own bidding.
A feast for theological debate, surely, but after centuries of Christian rancor and persecution directed at Jews, much of it magnified through the lens of a caricatured Judas, a question of history arises, too. Would the terrible legacy of anti-Semitism have been different had a text like the Gospel of Judas been in the Christian canon from the start? If, in effect, the "bad Judas" were not in the picture?
Jewish and Christian scholars agree that the dynamic of early Christianity — a Jewish sect that failed to win over its own people — almost guaranteed a divorce with all the bitterness of a family feud. At first, Jewish authorities had the upper hand. But very quickly, as the Romans waged war against the Jews and as Christianity drew huge numbers of converts from the Gentile world, the tables turned, and Christians became the dominant camp. Even as a powerful force, however, Christian believers often adopted the victim's posture and took every opportunity to batter the increasingly beleaguered Jews.
In this campaign, Judas Iscariot became the perfect foil.
"Every great hero story needs a great villain, and Judas serves that literary purpose," said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author who was a theological adviser last year to the Off-Broadway play "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot."
It didn't take some Christian apologists long to discover that. In the second century, a bishop, Papias, was already relating a legend that Judas ended his days so bloated he could not see out of his swollen eyes and could not walk down a wide road. Papias wrote that Judas stank and urinated pus and worms, and was so immobile he was crushed by a chariot. By the Middle Ages, the ugly archetype of Judas as the personification of Judaism began to take hold: a hunched figure with a large nose and red hair who would do anything for money, including betray Christians. Dante cast Judas into the lowest ring of his "Inferno," and the Passion plays that became part of the Holy Week traditions often showed Judas being tormented in hell by demons. (The Roman Catholic Church never officially pronounced on the eternal fate of Judas.)
But scholars say it can be dangerous to overplay the role of Judas in the history of anti-Semitism because it might obscure the underlying causes of tensions between Christians and Jews. Even if Judas is erased from the Passion narratives, there are many more passages in the New Testament that foes of Judaism can seize on.
Erasing Judas "would change the iconography but it would not change the problem of anti-Judaism in a general sense," said Amy-Jill Levine, a professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and an adviser to National Geographic for its television account of the research it sponsored on the Judas papyrus. "Even if you turn Judas into a hero he is still just one character," Ms. Levine said. "The Passion narratives are much more complex."
Ms. Levine and others say that gospel passages like the famous "blood cry" of Matthew 27:25 were initially far more responsible for Christian animus against Jews than was the figure of Judas.
Rabbi Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and an expert on early Christianity, notes that in the canonical Gospel of John, Jesus urges Judas to carry out his betrayal without delay so that God's will might be done: "What you are going to do, do quickly." It is much the same message as that in the Judas gospel.
If the account in John had been dominant through Christian history, rather than the gospel accounts that condemn Judas, Rabbi Schiffman said, "then that would have led to interpretations in which one of the bigger Christian symbols of anti-Semitism would have been removed."
Still, scholars also suspect that if Judas as the great traitor hadn't existed, Christians would probably have invented someone like him to legitimate the messy process of their religious separation from Judaism. The likeliest candidate for an alternative Jewish bad guy, they say, would be Caiaphas, the high priest who handed Jesus over to Pontius Pilate and the Romans. "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish," Caiaphas says in John.
In the end, whoever wound up shouldering the role of the Passion's villain, experts say that it would have had little effect on the course of history between these sibling religions. But those same experts also believe that the current debates provoked by the Judas gospel, while not undoing a painful history, could help Christian-Jewish relations now and in the future.
"Maybe if Judas can be 'rehabilitated,' then perhaps some of those old issues could be set aside," said Marvin Meyer, a bible scholar at Chapman University and an expert on the Judas gospel who will appear on tonight's National Geographic program.
"If you take away Judas as the bad guy, it is one step back from blaming all the Jews," Rabbi Schiffman said. "It could have led to less anti-Semitism." But, he emphasized, "it would not have eliminated anti-Semitism."
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Date: 2006-04-10 02:53 am (UTC)Moms pay big for other mothers' milk -- but doctors warn non-nursing women of health risk to babies (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/04/09/MNGLKI6FTA1.DTL)
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Date: 2006-04-10 02:53 am (UTC)Moms pay big for other mothers' milk -- but doctors warn non-nursing women of health risk to babies (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/04/09/MNGLKI6FTA1.DTL)
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Date: 2006-04-10 03:23 am (UTC)