Bagel guru Murray Lender dies at age 81 in Fla.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Murray Lender, who helped turn his father's small Connecticut bakery into a national company credited for introducing bagels to many Americans, has died in Florida. He was 81. Lender, perhaps best known from promoting Lender's Bagels in TV commercials, died Wednesday at a hospital in Miami from complications from a fall he suffered at his home 10 weeks ago, his wife, Gillie Lender, told The Associated Press on Thursday. The couple, who were married more than nine years, lived in Aventura, Fla., and also kept a home in Connecticut. "He was courageous, strong and an example to everyone to show how one should go through life with a vision, ambition, a goal and with success," Gillie Lender said. Lender's father, Harry Lender, immigrated to the United States from Lublin, Poland, in 1927 and opened what would become Lender's Bagels that year in an 800-square-foot bakery in New Haven. Two years later, he had his wife and two sons, Hymen and Samuel, brought over from Poland to join him, according to a history of Lender's Bagels on the company's website. At the time, bagels in America were sold mostly to Jewish families who enjoyed them with lox and cream cheese. Murray Lender was born in 1930, and four years later Harry Lender bought a 1,200-square-foot bakery in New Haven as the business prospered. Hymen, Samuel, Harry and a younger brother, Marvin, all went on to work for the family business. Murray would serve as the company's chief executive and Marvin as president. The Lenders say they were the first to begin selling bagels in packages to supermarkets in 1955. In 1960, two years after Harry Lender died, the Lenders say they started freezing their bagels so they could ship them outside of New Haven without worrying about them becoming stale - the first company to do so. The frozen bagel would make its way to households across the country that had never had them. The Lenders sold the family business to Kraft Foods in 1984. Pinnacle Foods Group LLC has owned Lender's Bagels since 2003. Murray Lender remained the company spokesman after the sale to Kraft, making commercials and appearing on talk shows. "The frozen bagel is convenient, which is important to today's on-the-go consumers," Murray Lender told the AP in 1986. Lender shrugged off criticism by some bagel connoisseurs that Lender's Bagels didn't taste so great. "Taste is a very subjective matter," he told the AP. "It's clear and simple: We make 2 3/4 million bagels a day. Obviously an awful lot of people are happy with it." A passionate devotee of the frozen food concept, he was chairman of the National Frozen Food Association and pioneered the first National Frozen Food Month in March 1984, a promotional effort involving manufacturers across the industry. A stroke 13 years ago left Murray Lender unable to talk, but that didn't dim his enthusiasm for life, his wife said. "Although he lost his speech, he was able to make you understand him with his gestures and his whole body and his expressions," Gillie Lender said. "It was remarkable. He could bring joy into a room." His funeral is set for Saturday in Woodbridge, Conn.

Bedtime for Bozo: Iran will send monkey into space in early 2012

watch out monkeys!

(lil Sugar)(irna.ir) Iran will send monkey into space in early 2012 Noshahr, March 22, IRNA – Head of Iranian Space Agency, Hamid Fazeli, said that the Iranian shuttle, Kavoshgar-5 (Explorer-5) carrying monkey to space will be launched into space during March-August 2012. 'Kavoshgar-5 will carry a biological capsule containing a monkey into space. This is actually a prelude to preparing Iran for sending a human astronaut into space before 2021,' Fazeli told IRNA in an exclusive interview on Thursday. Referring to the fact that the world will witness further success of Islamic Republic of Iran in the field of launching satellites into space, he pointed out that sending Fajr satellite into space which was postponed in 2011 will take place in 2012. Noting that only three countries have succeeded so far to send human astronaut into space, Fazeli pointed out that India is considering to send human astronaut into space by 2016.(h/t JSchanzer)Western countries are concerned the long-range ballistic technology used to propel Iranian satellites into orbit could be used to launch atomic warheads. Tehran denies such suggestions and says its nuclear work is purely peaceful. Last week, Iran launched its second domestically built satellite into orbit, the Rasad 1 (Observation), which it said was for transmitting images and weather forecasts.(jpost)

J Street Defends OWS’s Anti-Semitism

Omri Ceren

(IsraelJewsJudaism) It’s always difficult to untangle when J Street officials actually believe in the anti-Israel policies and anti-Semitic rhetoric that they push and defend, and when they’re just following the commands of donors. The group’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami raised eyebrows by voluntarily injecting himself on the side of anti-Jewish language during the “Israel-Firster” debate, and then later it turned out that J Street had a potential financial incentive to take that stance. On the other hand the group and its partisans seemgenuinely enthused about rolling out the red carpet for Peter Beinart and his exhortation to economically suffocate Israelis who don’t live where he tells them. As for J Street’s call on Obama to pressure Israel in the aftermath of the Flotilla even though the Israelis were in the right on self-defense, that simply had an incoherence borne of conflicted priorities.

So it’s impossible to know which dynamic — donor pressure or personal passion — was at work when J Street officials defended the Occupy Wall Street from criticism of its disgraceful and extensively documented anti-Semitism. In favor of the donor theory, there’s the fact that J Street funder George Soros backed Occupy. On the side of the labor of love theory, there turn out to be deep sociological, institutional, and personal ties between pro-Occupy radicals and J Street officials – so much so that those radicals are now officially “partnering” with J Street on this weekend’s conference.

Most likely it was a little of Column A and a little of Column B, with J Street officials being genuinely sympathetic but wary about the optics of supporting yet another group of anti-Semites.

The debate revolves around a statement by self-declared “Jewish leaders” who, per the statement title, set out to “Denounce Right-Wing Smears of Occupy Wall Street.” The piece specifically attacked the Emergency Committee for Israel, a J Street  bête noire and a major force behind the electoral wipe out of J Street candidates in the 2010 election. Ben-Ami’s name was one of about a dozen on the bottom of the statement, and the press contact for the entire release was J Street VP Carinne Luck.

The upcoming conference will have a core, recognized, pro-Occupy new media presence. The leftwing Jewschool site recently announced that it was going to “partner with J Street” on the conference, including dispatching sponsored bloggers to cover the events. Jewschool actively pushed Occupy and continues to do so, with the most recent sympathetic post getting published just last week. “We are the 99%,” declared another post. An admittedly inaccurate Google site search for “occupy wall street” turns up over 700 hits.

It turns out that J Street officials and Jewschool officials have demonstrably been cooperating to insulate Occupy. For instance, an early version of J Street’s toe-in-the-water press release was published on a site called Occupy Judaism (later versions had additional press contacts). Daniel Sieradski, founding publisher and editor-in-chief of Jewschool owns the site. I’d direct you to the original statement on Sieradski’s site but the whole blog was taken down some time this morning, after I searched for it and found it last night. Luckily it’s still cached here.

J Street officials and Jewschool activists have long worked together to paper over the anti-Semitism of Occupy Wall Street, albeit sometimes with each being once removed from their home organizations. It would be hard to think of two more appropriate “partners” for the J Street conference.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/21/j-street-clumsy-defense-occupy-w...

I had no idea that Daniel Sieradski and JewSchool were owned. I had been under the understanding they were just indie hipsters that were on twitter.