Lieberman Will Not Run For Re-Election

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman will announce on Wednesday that he will not seek a fifth term, according to a person he told of his decision.

Mr. Lieberman, whose term is up in 2012, chose to retire rather than risk being defeated, said the person, who spoke to the senator on Tuesday.
“I don’t think he wanted to go out feet first,” the person said,.

A longtime Democrat who lost a bitter primary battle to Ned Lamont in 2006, Mr. Lieberman won re-election as an independent that year, largely benefiting from a weak showing by the Republican candidate, who received less than 10 percent of the vote.

But Linda McMahon, the wealthy pro-wrestling tycoon who spent $50 million on an unsuccessful Senate race last year, has already signaled she may run again in 2012.

Aides to Mr. Lieberman were in Stamford late Tuesday making preparations for his announcement on Wednesday.

One aide, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement, said Mr. Lieberman arrived at his decision around Thanksgiving but postponed revealing his decision until after the legislative effort that culminated in the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays in the military – an effort in which Mr. Lieberman played a central role.

Mr. Lieberman’s decision comes as potential challengers start to emerge. On Tuesday, the state’s former Democratic secretary of state, Susan Bysiewicz, announced on her Facebook page that she intended to run for Senate next year.

A person close to Representative Christopher Murphy, a three-term Democrat from Connecticut, said he was considering a run for Mr. Lieberman’s Senate seat and would announce his intentions in the coming weeks.

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What the Rabbi Said

“A husband you want?” the old rabbi mumbled in Yiddish-accented English.

I was probably the last person you would expect to be going to a kabbalist rabbi for a blessing to marry. I’d stopped being religious 10 years earlier, uninterested in pursuing the typical Orthodox Jewish lifestyle of settling down and having babies straight out of college.

But the summer I turned 38, I freaked out about the approaching Four Zero — which was old even for the nonreligious world — so I went to Israel, where I had lived in my 20s, to visit old friends and figure out where my life had gone wrong. On my last day there I ran into the mother and father of my best friend from high school. Without prompting, my friend’s mother insisted I go see the rabbi she’d entrusted with such weighty matters.

“He told me exactly when both my daughters would get married,” she gushed, writing down the phone number on my newspaper. “He also saved my husband from death,” she added, gesturing at him.

As she told me the story of how doctors had given her husband only days to live until the rabbi prayed and cured him, the man himself — 60-something and in seemingly good health — stood next to her, rolling his eyes and literally snorting in disbelief.

He was like many Modern Orthodox people who consider themselves to be very grounded and rational (aside from the whole Creationism thing, the Moses-Parting-the-Red-Sea thing, and the God-Giving-the-Ten-Commandments-on-a-Mountain thing). They don’t believe in anything bordering on the alternative, like kabbalah, especially rabbis with supernatural powers.

I might have stopped being Orthodox, but its indoctrination had left me with the sense that nearly anything — God, spiritualists, healers, psychics and witches — might be equally possible. Thus I found myself in an airless Jerusalem classroom with this old rabbi, who had a white beard so long I couldn’t see his mouth and glasses so thick I couldn’t see his eyes.

“Yes, I want a husband,” I admitted aloud for the first time.

He held a heavy Hebrew book out to me. “Open a page, any page,” he said, like a magician. “Read me a word on the page.”

I opened the book, pointed my finger toward the center, and read one of the random Hebrew words: “Kishuf.”

“You know what this means?” he asked.

“Witch?”

“No, no,” he said. “Not witch. A curse. Someone has cursed you. This is why you are not married.”

Of all the things he could have said — that I wasn’t married because I didn’t pray daily, or eat kosher food, or observe the Sabbath (not to mention my nonvirginal dating habits) — a curse was the last thing I’d expected. Who would curse me? I mean, if there were such a thing as a curse.

“We need to make pidyon nefashot,” he said, referring to a “redemption of the soul,” similar to the ceremony that Jews do before the Day of Atonement. “You pay me 400 shekel,” he said. “Cash.”

“But I don’t have 400 shekels here,” I protested.

“You go to A.T.M.,” he said, pointing to the door. A.T.M. — this was a word he knew. I told him I’d come back, and I walked out into the hot August sunshine, thinking I’d never see him again.

“What kind of sucker does he think I am?” I asked myself as I walked toward the bus stop to go back to my hotel. “A hundred bucks for a prayer I already know.” But the problem with being raised religious is that no matter how much skepticism you acquire later in life, you’re never quite sure about your own instincts; you always secretly suspect that the rabbis are right about everything. After all, I did stop observing the Jewish laws, and look where it got me.

After I went to the A.T.M., I cut through the line of religious women in the waiting room of the rabbi’s makeshift office. I wondered if he would remember me.

“You have money?” the rabbi asked. He remembered me. He took the cash and placed it in a plastic baggie. Then he waved it over his head like a lasso, gesturing me to repeat after him in a prayer that meant, roughly: “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. This money will go to charity, while I will go onto a good, long life and to peace.”

Then he blessed me: “You will meet a man who will love you and give you Jewish children. He will please you sexually and love you more than he loves his mother.”

“Amen,” I said, but I thought: Is that even possible for the kind of men I date?

“Give me your passport,” the rabbi said. He brought the document close to his milky eyes, examining it for hidden, ancient secrets as if it were a Dead Sea Scroll. He sat down in the rickety chair and started writing furiously; it looked as if he was copying my passport. The ballpoint pen scratched loudly in the otherwise silent room. In addition to relieving me of my $100 for “charity,” was he also going to steal my identity?

I moved closer to the rabbi’s desk. On the tiny piece of paper he’d written down columns of numbers, like a complex equation. Finally he slammed the pen down on the desk and handed me my passport.

“Sagur b’Hanukkah,” he announced. Done on Hanukkah.

“But that’s only four months away,” I said.

“Hanukkah,” he repeated. “Sagur.” It will be done.

Forget the oil lasting eight days. Meeting my husband in four months — that would be a real Hanukkah miracle.

Back in the United States I didn’t think about the rabbi’s blessing until winter was upon me once again. I was still single, forced to go to the holiday parties alone. Each night I looked around these warm, loud rooms with their Christmas trees or Hanukkah menorahs, looking at every man longingly and thinking, “Are you the one?”

But the holidays passed unremarkably, and when my oldest friend teased, “Hey, weren’t you supposed to meet your husband?” — much to both our surprise, I broke down in tears.

“I thought I’d meet my husband too,” I cried. I really thought the rabbi would come through for me. I felt cheated, ashamed. I remembered when I was 10 years old and I laid out my white dress on the chair beside my bed because I had learned that the messiah was supposed to come on Passover. The messiah didn’t come then. My husband didn’t now.

I keep trying — but never really succeed — in giving up my faith. So nine months later, in September, when I met a cuddly guy and we started seeing each other, I thought, Maybe we could be engaged by this Hanukkah — the rabbi never actually said exactly which one.

But then Mr. Cuddly dumped me right before the holidays, no doubt sensing my mounting expectations. I went to his best friend’s holiday party anyway, taking extra care with my appearance so Cuddles could see what he was missing. He didn’t notice me, so I drank and flirted randomly, singing karaoke with whoever was up at the mike, until I finally, drunkenly, decided to leave.

“Where are you going?” a deep voice boomed from the coat room as I scoured the winter wool pile. I couldn’t see the guy’s face in the darkness, but I recognized his voice as my karaoke partner (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”). “Don’t leave yet,” he said, taking my hand and leading me to an empty room in the back. His name was Solomon, and he had dark, curly hair, a thick-lipped smile and soft musician’s hands, which played with mine as we chatted for the next hour until the party petered out.

I didn’t think much of it until two days later, when I got a voice mail message from him: “Amy, this is Solomon. I met you at the bar the other night — I just wanted to say Happy Hanukkah.”

I called him back, and the next day we met for brunch. It was the first day of Hanukkah.

That was one year ago. We recently moved in together. Our courtship has been rather seamless, lacking the usual drama inherent to my relationships. I even moved across the country to be with him, confident I had the rabbi’s blessing.

I didn’t tell Solomon the story about the rabbi’s blessing right away, because he doesn’t believe in religion, in rabbis, in curses, in people who have more power than others. I’m not sure I do either, despite recent events. Even if Solomon does turn out to be “the one,” I wonder if it will be because the rabbi predicted it, or because the rabbi’s prediction caused me to make it so.

No matter. Religiously dictated or not, a miracle is still a miracle.

Kissinger Told Nixon If Soviet Union Sent Its Jews To The Gas Chambers, It Would Not Be An American Concern

President Richard M. Nixon at his desk in the Oval Office, where a secret taping system had been installed.

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YORBA LINDA, Calif. — Richard M. Nixon made disparaging remarks about Jews, blacks, Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans in a series of extended conversations with top aides and his personal secretary, recorded in the Oval Office 16 months before he resigned as president.

The remarks were contained in 265 hours of recordings, captured by the secret taping system Nixon had installed in the White House and released this week by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

While previous recordings have detailed Nixon’s animosity toward Jews, including those who served in his administration like Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, these tapes suggest an added layer of complexity to Nixon’s feeling. He and his aides seem to make a distinction between Israeli Jews, whom Nixon admired, and American Jews.

In a conversation Feb. 13, 1973, with Charles W. Colson, a senior adviser who had just told Nixon that he had always had “a little prejudice,” Nixon said he was not prejudiced but continued: “I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.”

“The Jews have certain traits,” he said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

Nixon continued: “The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.

A moment later, Nixon returned to Jews: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

At another point, in a long and wandering conversation with Rose Mary Woods, his personal secretary, that veered from whom to invite to a state dinner to whether Ms. Woods should get her hair done, Nixon offered sharp skepticism at the views of William P. Rogers, his secretary of state, about the future of black Africans.

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

These tapes, made in February and March 1973, reflect a critical period in Nixon’s presidency — the final months before it was “devoured by Watergate,” said Timothy Naftali, the executive director of the Nixon Library.

Mr. Naftali said that there were now only 400 hours of tapes left to released, and that those would cover the final months before the tape system was shut down in July 1973 after Alexander Butterfield, who was a deputy assistant to Nixon, confirmed its existence to the Watergate committee.

Mr. Naftali said he intended to have those tapes — actually, given changing technologies since Nixon’s time, CDs, and available for listening online at the library’s Web site — released by 2012.

An indication of Nixon’s complex relationship with Jews came the afternoon Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit on March 1, 1973. The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

In his discussion with Ms. Woods, Nixon laid down clear rules about who would be permitted to attend the state dinner for Meir — he called it “the Jewish dinner” — after learning that the White House was being besieged with requests to attend.

“I don’t want any Jew at that dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign,” he said. “Is that clear? No Jew who did not support us.”

Nixon listed many of his top Jewish advisers — among them, Mr. Kissinger and William Safire, who went on to become a columnist at The New York Times — and argued that they shared a common trait, of needing to compensate for an inferiority complex.

“What it is, is it’s the insecurity,” he said. “It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.”

Nixon also strongly hinted that his reluctance to even consider amnesty for young Americans who went to Canada to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War was because, he told Mr. Colson, so many of them were Jewish.

“I didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those lists; I don’t know how the hell they avoid it,” he said, adding: “If you look at the Canadian-Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately Jewish. The deserters.”

New York, RFR CEO To NY Times: Jaffa Protesters An Isolated Sect of Radical Cursing Jews

Aby J. Rosen

Mr. Rosen, 50, whose given name is pronounced ABE-ee, is a principal of RFR Holding, a development and property management company with offices in Frankfurt and New York.

RFR’s real estate holdings include the Seagrams Building and Lever House in Manhattan; current projects include the redevelopment of the Gramercy Hotel and 530 Park Avenue.

Q How do your duties differ from those of Michael Fuchs, your business partner and friend since kindergarten?

A Michael deals with the banking and taxation issues; he runs our German office. I run the day-to-day business of this company; I deal with all the projects here.

Q And how does New York compare with the rest of the world?

A It’s doing better. New York as an industry is the best city for real estate. You’re in a very transparent market. If you need to liquidate, you make three phone calls and you could sell something, even in the worst market. It is also less forgiving; if you make a mistake you can lose money.

Q You encountered some rough patches in the downturn.

A In the last cycle we bought a lot of inventory. Sometimes we overpaid for something, but we believe time will catch up.

We have reshuffled all of our debt — we bought some back, refinanced it, and pushed up maturity dates to 2015, 2016 — and there’s not one piece of debt that went back to the lenders. We bought back and reshuffled over $3.5 billion worth of notes.

Ninety-nine percent of our headaches are gone.

Q Was this an arduous task?

A We’ve been working on this for the last three years. We always work on our debt, but what we’re not used to dealing with is an overleveraged asset. If you believe in the asset, you deleverage and put in more equity.

Q What is your average debt level as measured by loan to value?

A We are luckily back up to the 50 percent level. The market has rebounded. We usually never went up to 80 percent over all.

Q Let’s talk about some of your current projects.

A We bought 530 Park Avenue, on 61st Street, next to the Regency. We’re converting it from a rental to a high-end condo. We should be going to market in about 12 to 14 months. There’s One Jackson Square, a condo downtown where we are just finishing up the construction and we are about 80 percent sold. We’re selling the retail off there. On the West Side, on 81st Street, we have a prewar building called the Avanova. We bought it from the developer.

Q You recently ended a partnership with the hotelier Ian Schrager at the Gramercy Park Hotel.

A We came to a very fair arrangement — the number is confidential — and I will continue doing this hotel by myself. We’re adding two new restaurants and a whole bunch of new services, and we’re changing the aesthetics. We had owned three hotels with him. Ian is pursuing a different career right now — he’s doing a lot of work for Marriott.

Q Some say the split was the result of two big egos colliding.

A Definitely the case. We made a lot of money together, but we had differences.

Q Are you still friends?

A We’re very much friends. I just had lunch with him.

Q What’s going on with 610 Lexington, proposed site for the Shangri-La Hotel, which got caught in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the original lender?

A We’re still building a hotel there. We own the building next door, Seagrams. When the Lehman dust settles, this will settle.

Q And how about your plans for a luxury hotel in Jaffa, Israel, on what was determined to be an ancient burial site? That project has generated protests here.

A They’re basically radical Jews; it’s an isolated sect. They actually cursed me and the site, but had to revoke the curse because it was non-Jewish bones.

Q Are you disappointed that your town house on East 94th Street sold for $6 million below asking?

A Yes, because I put so much into it. I own a few town houses. It’s like buying a good piece of art.

Q How big is your art collection?

A I have at least 700 pieces.

Q And your favorites?

A I like ’50s and ’60s American art. I have 85 or 90 Warhols.

Q Did you know Andy Warhol?

A I met him a long time ago. He was very shy. Everybody bugged him, because he was such a known guy. It’s not like you and me, who can disappear in a crowd.

Q Yes, but you’ve also frequented the society pages, no?

A I could go out to five parties a day if I wanted to. I don’t. I have attachments to my wife and kids — and about 20 pieces of art.