It’s not easy to reach Josh Block, AIPAC’s peripatetic spokesman. Now, thanks to this morning’s Washington Post front page, I know why: Some places, you simply can’t conceal a blackberry:
On a recent Friday evening in the basement of the Finnish Embassy, a half-dozen men, all sweating profusely and wrapped in white towels, turned to resident sauna authority Kari Mokko to settle a dispute.
"Kari," Josh Block, a spokesman for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, said through the vapor, " ‘schvitz’ isn’t a Finnish term, is it?"
"Shivit?" a bewildered Mokko replied when asked about the Yiddish word for steam room. He stood up, sans towel, to ladle some more water onto the sauna’s rocks. "Shwi? What?"
Despite his unfamiliarity with the term, Mokko, the embassy’s press secretary, is running a monthly Power Schvitz for the policy staffers behind Washington’s power players — and the journalists who cover them.
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