Israel Vanquishes Iran…on the Chess Board
An Israeli chess grandmaster took the Guinness record for simultaneous chess games from the Jewish state’s arch-foe Iran on Friday after a marathon 19-hour match against 523 players.
A Guinness representative confirmed the new record on Israeli army radio.
Alik Gershon, 30, won 86 percent of the games he played against amateurs in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. He won 454, lost 11 and drew the other 58.
He needed to win at least 80 percent to seal the record, which previously stood at 500 simultaneous games.
As he played his final move on the very last chess board at around 5:30 am (0330 GMT), Gershon shook the player’s hand before raising his arms in victory as the first light of dawn broke over the square.
“This is a very exciting day,” he beamed, shortly after receiving his certificate from the British Guinness official who witnessed the event.
“It was very difficult, it was a supreme effort,” he said. “There were some strong players there.”
Asked how he felt beating his Iranian rival, he laughed.
“It’s a very sweet feeling. It’s something which we prepared for a very long time,” he said. “Failure wasn’t an option. I am very, very happy that I made it.”
The tournament had started under the blazing midday sun on Thursday with Gershon shaking hands with every single player as he walked along rows of tables lined with chess boards.
Training for the event, which was sponsored by the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and the Israeli Chess Federation, was purely physical and included a lot of jogging and swimming, the former Israeli champion said.
“There are a lot of kilometres to walk and you have to stay focused,” he told AFP on Thursday, noting that his Iranian rival, Morteza Mahjoob, walked 40 kilometers (25 miles) to secure his record.
Mahjoob set his record in August 2009 in a feat which took him 18 hours and with less than five seconds for each move.
“Hopefully all our wars against Iran will be on the chess board,” said a smiling Gershon. “For such wars, I am prepared.”
Off the board, the rivalries are more strongly felt, with Israel and Iran being implacable foes.
Iran’s firebrand President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is notorious for oft-repeated denials of the Nazi Holocaust and for saying that the Jewish state will one day be wiped off the map.
Last week, Ahmadinejad visited Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, coming the closest he has ever been to the Jewish state, in a trip that was denounced as provocative by Israel and the United States.
The two governments and other world powers accuse Iran of using its nuclear energy program to hide efforts to produce an atomic bomb, a charge Tehran vehemently denies.
Iran refuses to recognize the Jewish state and is a strong supporter of both the Islamist Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which fought a devastating 2006 war with Israel.
Article Taken from: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.2f057538640f1e680daa7203d3609eff.3f1&show_article=1
The Social Network: Another Aaron’s Golden Calf
Touted as the first acclaimed drama of the awards season, heralded as a generation-defining epic, there couldn’t be more pomp following The Social Network’s ass out the door. The ads may declare, in pointy all-caps, that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s nascent founder played by Jesse Eisenberg, is a genius, a punk and a billionaire, but they leave off one of the film’s other significant points about him: he is a curly-haired pasty-faced J-E-W.
More specifically, a Jew desperately trying to rise above the impotent fates of his circumcised brethren.
Aaron Sorkin, the seasoned television writer whose small screen work has featured the uninterrupted prosperity of liberal, educated, upper-tax bracket Jews, offers his first Heebish protagonist on film in Zuckerberg. While memorable characters such as Toby Ziegler on The West Wing or Dan Rydell and Jeremy Goodwin on Sports Night have all served as Sorkin’s post-religious culturally identifying mouthpiece, his Zuckerberg goes in a different direction. Where those characters have never wavered from the heritage that bred them to be talented wordsmiths (Sorkin’s Jews are always writers or creators), Zuckerberg can’t seem to run away fast enough.
Early in the film, Mark and best friend-cum-adversary Eduardo Saverin are at a Caribbean themed Alpha Epsilon Pi party populated with cherubic, wooly Jewfaces. The scene is punctuated by a boy in a yarmulke, rocking out on a set of steel drums. Later in the film, after Facebook inevitably takes off, he yells at Eduardo about what’s at stake should the site fail: “I’m not going back to Caribbean night at the Jewish fraternity…Did you like being nothing? Did you like being nobody?!” There is no question that the Caribbean party was lame, but what made it that way? Was it the uninterested gaze of the Asian chicks, the non-sequitorial Niagara Falls videos playing onstage? I have a sinking feeling that the trouble was the yarmulke, sitting atop the head of a rhythmless Yid goofing off on the steel drums. For the celluloid Mark and Eduardo, the real party had no yarmulkes, no Jews. The real party was at the hallowed, veritably jizz-stained walls of the Phoenix final club, whose exclusivity compels busloads of freshman hardbodies to disrobe and get doused with champagne. Who wouldn’t want to be those goys?
My curiosity about the Jewish overtones of the film led me to Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg’s college roommate and the first non-founder to put up a Facebook profile. “It’s offensive to suggest that Mark created Facebook to improve his social status, particularly to the many of us who were his friends.” A brother at AEPi with a penchant for banging a bongo, it’s entirely possible that Arie was the schmuck goofing on the steel drums. Built like a scruffy teddy bear with a smile to match, he moved to Tel Aviv after Harvard, straight to the center of a culture the film’s Zuck tries to avoid. It is clear, from the moment I ask about it, that the idea of the film strikes a nerve. “Regardless of whether or not the film is good, it bothers me. This is something that actually happened, these are events that I witnessed over the course of a few years. To see it all get misconstrued is unsettling.”
At a press conference for the film, director David Fincher didn’t mince words: this is not a biopic. Still, the filmmakers have attracted a shit-storm given that they made a film about real people, most of whom refused to cooperate with them. For example, actor Jesse Eisenberg portrays Mark in a manner that has been described as similar to someone with Asperger’s, an affectation that has been attributed to the CEO. “That is ridiculous,” Arie tells me. “It’s offensive to Mark, and it’s offensive to people with Asperger’s that people feel they can casually diagnose somebody that they know nothing about.”
But what of Zuckerberg’s Judaism? “I can’t really speak to that; it’s none of my business. He liked AEPi, so did Eduardo.” I tell him about the scene where Mark declares he can’t go back to life at a Jewish fraternity. “I never got any sense that Mark or Eduardo were embarrassed to be Jewish. Eduardo was in the Phoenix, and he sometimes brought his friends from AEPi to hang out there.” Mark has since gone back to speak at an AEPi convention and is featured prominently on the organization’s famous alum listing on its website. If he has tried to drop his affiliation, he has done a pretty terrible job, especially for someone who very nearly runs the Internet.
Sitting in a room with opposing counsel, Eisenberg’s Zuck is asked when he first shared his idea for Facebook with Eduardo. “It was at a party at Alpha Epsilon Pi”. The attorney needs clarification. “What’s that?” Mark takes a moment to answer, his face, which barely emotes throughout the film, is seen to almost sink, ever so slightly. “The Jewish fraternity.” Disdain. Shame. The silver screen Mark doesn’t want anyone to know of his Jewish beginnings.
The Farnsworth Invention, Sorkin’s 2007 Broadway play about the invention of television, featured a prominently Jewish David Sarnoff battling the unlikely Idahoan inventor, Philo Farnsworth. The reconciliation of his religion and his business savvy, two opposing worlds, form Sarnoff’s character arc while he is vilified for stealing Farnsworth’s technology. The Social Network tells roughly the same tale eighty years in the future, with Mark Zuckerberg a cross between both roles. Perhaps all of Sorkin’s Jews languish, on some level, in the depths of stereotypical self-loathing. The murky waters here are that the film assumes that being a Jew isn’t that cool. I, for one, don’t believe that is a given, and neither, it seems, does Mark Zuckerberg.
Written by Jonathan Poritsky for The Heeb Magazine
http://www.heebmagazine.com/the-social-network-another-aarons-golden-calf/
