The-Forward-2009-06-13
Museum Shooting Seen by Jewish Activists as Part of Surge in Antisemitism
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 11, 2009.
Washington — As federal prosecutors charge James von Brunn with first degree murder, it is still unclear to what extent his attack on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Wednesday represents a shift in antisemitic violence.
In conversations and e-mail exchanges with Jewish communal officials, the FBI made clear in the hours following the attack that von Brunn acted on his own and that the shooting at the museum is being treated as an isolated incident. DC mayor Adrian Fenty called the event an “extremely isolated incident.”
But while accepting the fact that von Brunn acted alone, Jewish activists believe there is still reason to view the attack on the Holocaust Museum as another sign of a dangerous outburst of racial and hate-driven violence.
“The shooting at the Holocaust Museum is part of a wave of hate targeting Jews and Jewish institutions and others,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti Defamation League. “It serves as a painful reminder that the anti-Semites and racists are still out there, and are more prone to act out on their beliefs.”
The incidents making this wave include, according to Foxman, the plot by Muslim extremists to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale, New York, the January shooting-spree targeting non-whites in Brockton, Massachusetts, and the killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by a person with racist views. While the ADL stated that not all incidents targeted Jews, it argued all shared the same motivation of racial hate. Foxman said there is a “cross fertilization” between extremist groups that involves antisemitism, racial hate and anger over the changes America is undergoing.
The theme of Jewish control of the president was recently repeated from left-leaning Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in the past was Obama’s spiritual mentor. In an interview with the Daily Press of Newport-New, Virginia, Wright was asked whether he still speaks with Obama. “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me,” Wright replied. He later said he had misspoken and actually meant to use the word Zionists, not Jews.
“It is not hard to connect the dots and reach a conclusion that these are difficult times,” added Ethan Felson, associate director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Still, he stressed this is a “series of unrelated incidents” that are causing “some angst” within the Jewish community. Part of this angst feeds from the troubling information retrieved Thursday from von Brunn’s personal belongings. In a notebook found in his car and quoted in the prosecutions criminal complaint, the alleged shooter wrote: “The holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media.”
Von Brunn also wrote that the “Jews-Bolsheviks-Zionist are America’s enemies,” and once again quoted the Talmud saying “kill the best gentiles.”
FBI officials said Thursday that von Brunn could also be charged with a separate offense of committing hate crimes.
At least one Jewish activist believes she encountered von Brunn’s hate-filled rhetoric before the Holocaust Museum attack. Jennifer Laszlo-Mizrahi, founder and president of The Israel Project, filed a complaint in December 2005 against the neo-Nazi group known as the National Alliance, which von-Brunn was associated with, after finding their antisemitic and racist propaganda material on the front yard of her Annapolis, Maryland home. Von Brunn lived at the time in Annapolis and was close to the founder of the National Alliance. Laszlo-Mizrahi said she was told by police officers that the person responsible for distributing the flyers was “a cranky old man” and there is nothing that can be done because the materials were protected as free speech.
At the Holocaust Museum, doors remained closed on Thursday and flags were lowered to half-staff in honor of Special Police Officer Stephen Johns, the guard who was killed in the attack. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington and other faith groups held a vigil outside the museum to “express support for unity, love, respect and reflection.”
The House of Representatives adopted unanimously Thursday a resolution honoring the guard killed in the museum attack. The resolution, authored by Florida Democrat Ron Klein, condemns the attack and calls for supporting efforts of the Holocaust Museum to educate against hate and violence. “Today, the United States House of Representatives spoke with one voice: acts of hatred and violence cannot and will not be tolerated in our country,” Klein said.
The museum was expected to re-open Friday morning.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
Head of the House
In Her New Memoir, "Standing By," Alison Buckholtz Writes About Redefining Family During War Time
It may come as a surprise, but there are Jews in the U.S. military. Alison Buckholtz’s Navy pilot husband, Scott, is one of them. Buckholtz and her young children moved across the country to a town with no synagogue, few Jews, and soon no Scott – who would leave for a 7-month deployment. Her new memoir, “Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War,” is an inside look at military culture for a civilian population. Buckholtz addresses the civil-military gap – the widening rift between military and nonmilitary in this country – which emerged after the draft was abolished and suddenly fewer families sent one of their own to war. She opens the curtain on her own family in hopes of disassembling stereotypes, and reveals her struggle to keep her kids’ lives seemingly normal while dad is away at war.
She spoke with the Forward’s Allison Gaudet Yarrow.
Allison Gaudet Yarrow: How did you come to write Standing By?
Alison Buckholtz: My mom pushed me in my stroller during the anti-war rallies. I had a lot of stereotypes about the military. When I met my husband they were shattered. As an outsider turned insider, I could translate what I saw as two Americas.
Do you find yourself having to defend the military?
I avoid being an apologist. I try to keep politics out of it. The frequent, repeated and unpredictable deployments define the current generation of military spouses and families. It’s important that everyone in America know what military families are going through.
Why did you want to get involved with the group, Navy Wives?
My husband wasn’t sure how I would adjust to being a military spouse. When he was selected to be squadron commander, we talked about the role of a squadron commander’s wife – this leadership role among the spouses. I chose to take it on because our 3-year tour was going to be challenging. It was a way to work in partnership. I gave up my job – I had been working for 10 years full time before I entered this world. I’m not getting the kind of stimulation you get from work, but it’s enriching.
Were you surprised to learn there were Jews in the military?
I was very surprised that there was an active community of Jews, that there were rabbis who traveled the world helping Jewish service members celebrate the holidays, and that there were organizations to support Jewish service members. When my husband and I moved, I called the Chaplain’s office on base and asked where I could go. When they referred me to a messianic synagogue nearby I was horrified because I knew enough to know that this was a messianic organization that I didn’t want anything to do with.
But they didn’t know enough.
I was fearful for the other Jewish service members who called in. That’s why we immediately volunteered to be the Jewish lay leaders for the base.
What were your responsibilities?
The Jewish lay leader is certified by the JWB [Jewish Welfare Board] and the Chaplain’s office on base. You’re the main point of contact for Jewish resources. There are 10-15 families. We gather together around the holidays. It wasn’t necessarily what I’d envisioned, but it’s worked out beautifully for the community and we treasure what we have.
How did you create Jewish life for your young family in Anacortes, Washington, a place without any?
We depended on Jewish CDs and DVDs. We couldn’t go to services so we started watching services to give our kids a sense of what a synagogue is and what you do in a Jewish service. We did Shabbat dinner every Friday night at home and each week we added a new tradition.
You talk about the civil-military gap. How does it affect Jews?
Jews are a microcosm of American society. Jewish participation in the military reflects that – just as a certain demographic of Americans don’t serve in the military, that same demographic of Jews don’t serve either.
We have all heard about discrimination in the military. Is antisemitism prevalent?
We’ve been really lucky. We haven’t seen any. I read about some things in the Air Force and other services – troops feeling like they were being evangelized to. I was sensitive to that coming in. It’s been refreshing and encouraging that what we have seen has been well-meaning curiosity.
You write that some families prefer when the service member is away, because his/her presence can be disruptive to family life. Have you experienced this?
You’re counseled to let nature take its course – not to rush becoming a family again. We were lucky because after my husband’s last deployment the four of us did become a family very easily again. We went on a day trip together and there was a paraglider soaring and my husband was holding each of the kids’ hands and they were watching. It was mesmerizing, but instead of watching the paraglider I was watching my husband and kids watch him and point and talk to each other. It was the normalcy of that scene that moved me because nothing about our lives had been normal for a long time. Here we were like any other family. No one knew what we had been through and it didn’t matter because it was over.
More information on Buckholtz’s memoir can be found here. For resources on Jews in the military click here.
Holocaust Shooter Was Known in Hate Groups
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 10, 2009.
Washington — James von Brunn, the 89 year old white supremacist who carried out the Wednesday shooting attack at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, was a well known figure in the back alleys of American antisemitic and racist hate groups.
His mid-day attack left one security guard, 39-year-old Stephen Tyrone Jones, dead and sent shockwaves throughout the nation’s capital and the Jewish community.
The brazen attack, which ended quickly thanks to immediate response by the museum’s security officers, brought to the spotlight the widely ignored violent antisemitic activity of the extreme right. While the FBI has been calling the event an isolated incident, Jewish communal officials are warning that this is the fourth attack or attempted attack against Jewish targets within two months.
The event took place at 12:50 pm. von Brunn parked his car in front of the main entrance to the Holocaust Museum and walked in carrying an unconcealed shotgun. He was immediately confronted by security guards and shot directly at one of them – Stephen Tyrone Jones who was fatally wounded and later died at the George Washington University Hospital. Other security guards shot back at von Brunn. He was taken to the hospital and is in critical condition. According to eyewitnesses, the shooter did not call out and did not state any demands or grievances before opening fire at the guard.
Shortly after the shooting, visitors to the Holocaust Museum were still at the scene, some visibly shaken by the event, others retelling the event to reporters. “We heard shooting and then everyone dropped to the ground,” said Charles Towater who stood close to museum’s entrance when the shooting took place. “I didn’t hear him say anything, I just saw him on the ground, bleeding.”
According to museum officials, there were an estimated 1,700 visitors in the museum at the time, many of them students. Although the shooting incident ended within less than a minute, visitors were kept in the museum until police and FBI completed a thorough sweep of the perimeter and concluded there is no further danger. Among them was former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who came to the museum to watch the dress rehearsal for a play written by his wife, Janet Langhart Cohen. The play, “Anne and Emmett,” a fictional dialogue between Anne Frank and Emmet Till, was supposed to be presented Wednesday evening in front of an invitation-only audience, but was cancelled due to the shooting.
The Holocaust Museum is closed Thursday, June 11, in honor of the slain officer, and is expected to reopen to the public Friday morning, June 12. Groups monitoring activity of racist extremists, including the Anti Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, have long put James von Brunn on their watch lists. A Maryland resident and World War II veteran, von Brunn has a long record of antisemitic statements and publications. His website, The Holy Western Empire, put forward anti-Jewish propaganda and according to the ADL, von Brunn also published a book, called “Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog,” Hebrew for “kill the best of gentiles,” in which he promotes hatred of Jews and blacks.
The Secure Community Network (SCN), which is the Jewish community’s system for coordinating security activities, issued an alert to all Jewish groups and institutes, providing details on the killer and his activity against Jewish targets.
In 1981, von Brunn was arrested outside the Federal Reserve Headquarters carrying a shotgun and trying to perform what he called a “citizen arrest,” after claiming the Jews control America’s banking system. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
The police recovered a notebook from von Brunn’s belongings that reportedly included a list of over 100 possible targets, some of them Jewish. Although the shooter was well known among white supremacist circles, investigators believe he acted alone and was not part of terror network. In the SCN alert, however, Jewish groups were reminded that in recent months there were several attempts to target Jewish institutions and individuals, including the Riverdale New York synagogue and community center, and while there is no apparent connection between the events, they may seem to indicate a rise in antisemitic violence. “SCN encourages our members to continue to be vigilant and maintain appropriate levels of security at your institutions,” the alert concluded.
Holocaust Museum: America at its Best
Opinion
By Michael Berenbaum
Published June 10, 2009.
From its inception, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has regarded itself — and been regarded by others — as a high priority target, and for good reason. Though not a Jewish institution, but a government institution, it is one of the most visible institutions that reflect the prominence of American Jewry — its creators — and the most central American institution dealing with the Holocaust.
For the past 15 years, the museum has spent significant resources on security and held itself to the highest standards. Its security staff is very professional, very well trained and armed. Such professionalism and training showed itself today in the swiftness of their response. Lives were saved. There may have been as many as 2,000 people in the museum when the gunman entered. We deeply mourn the death of Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, a six-year veteran of the museum’s security staff, and salute his colleagues for their immediate and effective response.
The alleged shooter, an 88-year-old white supremacist — let us not give him the dignity of a name — reminds us that danger lurks in many places and that hatred takes many forms. It will be clear over the next several days that he hated Jews, but not only Jews. Racists seem to be unable to confine their hatred to only one group, and this often generates solidarity among the subjects of their hatred, for the safety of one group is inextricably lined to the safety of another and to the effectiveness of law enforcement groups and the rule of law. He proclaimed his hatred on the Web. His heinous act is the loudest proclamation of that hatred.
We should genuinely fear a copycat killer, and other institutions must take appropriate precautions. A lone gunman who is willing to risk his own death can seldom be stopped. Homegrown terrorists are dangerous, as we saw in a Kansas church on the Sunday before last. Venom is also dangerous.
The attack also reminds us of the sheer power of the events now known as the Holocaust; the power to plead for dignity and decency, for tolerance and pluralism, and for an effective response to other genocide and to the condemnation of antisemitism, past and present.
The killer may have been on Holocaust overload.
Pope Benedict recently visited Yad Vashem and forcibly condemned Holocaust denial and antisemitism. And while most Jews regarded his words somewhat disappointedly — they were overly intellectual, somewhat cold and devoid of autobiographic detail, especially when contrasted with his predecessor Pope John Paul II — such subtlety was likely lost on the killer.
President Barack Obama may also have been on his mind. An African-American man, who is clearly brilliant and articulate, accepted by the American people as their president may have been too much for a white supremacist to handle. It shatters his perception of the world, the certainty of his own twisted vision.
The president’s forceful condemnation of Holocaust denial in Cairo was unambiguous and authoritative. So welcome to many of us, it may have been raw meat for such a man of hate. And the president’s visit to Buchenwald in the presence of the president of Germany and the chancellor of Germany, with Elie Wiesel, the most prominent survivor of Buchenwald, as their guide, was a direct refutation of his worldview. New leaders had arisen in Germany — they do not deny the past, they condemn it. The skeleton-like figure who once slept in the barracks of Birkenau had become a world spokesman for human dignity and for embracing the diversity of God’s creations. This too must shatter the worldview of a man filled with hatred.
The president’s visit was America at its best. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is also America at its best — open, diverse, pluralistic, fighting for human dignity and decency, confronting the hatreds that resulted in the Holocaust, the hatreds that would invite its repetition.
Those who visit the museum in the aftermath of this horrendous attack should view their visit as an act of defiance, denying white supremacists and other haters their victory. The death of officer Stephen Tyrone Johns should renew our determination to advance the causes of the museum, for which he gave his life.
Michael Berenbaum was project director of the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is a professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles.
As Layoffs Mount, Which Jewish Executives Shared the Pain?
Only a Minority Took Pay Cuts When Employees Lost Their Jobs
Sacrifices Shared, and Not: A Forward survey of 2006-2007 executive salaries at major Jewish organizations that reduced staff in the past year found no consistent correlation between layoffs and CEO pay cuts.
By Anthony Weiss
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
A tide of red ink is coursing through the hallways and balance sheets of Jewish charitable organizations, leaving slashed programs, reduced allocations and large staff layoffs in its wake. But in the current economic and financial meltdown, the suites of top executives have in many cases stood on high ground, beyond the reach of the crimson lapping below.
The Forward surveyed 21 of the largest and most prominent Jewish organizations that have implemented layoffs over the past year in response to the economic downturn. Of those, only nine top executives revealed that they had taken a reduction in their own pay, and only seven were willing to specify how much of a cut they had taken. Another 10 said that they have not taken a pay cut, and three others declined to reply.
There was no consistent pattern to who had and had not taken a pay cut. Those who did, and those who did not, take salary cuts included some of the lowest and highest earners; nor was there any apparent relationship between salary cuts and the number of layoffs.
Rather, based on a series of interviews, the dividing line appeared to be philosophical rather than numerical. Those who did take pay cuts emphasized that they thought it was an important step to show leadership, or, as a number of executives put it, to share the pain.
“I just think it’s fair,” said Barry Shrage, president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, who took pay cuts and furloughs totaling 7% of his salary, which in 2006-07 was $306,390. “People are looking to those who are supposed to be leaders to do their share.”
Shrage recently laid off nine of his 125 employees — about 7% of his staff — in response to declining revenues and endowment funds.
“It’s not that it made it easier, but I think it would have been a lot harder to accept on the part of the agencies and everybody else if we weren’t doing our share,” Shrage said of the layoffs. “I think people would have been wondering where the leadership is.”
To compile data for this survey, the Forward culled compensation information from federal IRS-990 tax forms, which charities must publish for public inspection. The figures come from 2007, the most recent year broadly available, which documents the 2006–07 tax year. The accompanying data chart includes only base salaries and excludes executive benefit packages, which can be substantial but can vary widely in category and kind, making comparisons difficult.
Debating, Again, the Founding of Israel
Holocaust and Zionist Narratives Collide in Muslim Outreach
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Washington — As the Obama administration deepens its outreach to the Muslim and Arab world, it faces the difficult task of countering Holocaust denial without reinforcing an increasingly popular anti-Zionist narrative that ties the legitimacy of the State of Israel to Jewish suffering in Europe.
And as discussion of the Holocaust becomes more widespread, so does the argument heard from Tehran to Gaza that while Europeans were responsible for atrocities against Jews, it is the Palestinians who are paying the price.
“Discussing the Holocaust and learning its lessons have become an integral part of global culture, and therefore, to a certain extent, the Arabs feel they are on the defensive,” said Esther Webman, research fellow of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, at Tel Aviv University. “That’s why we see in recent years an increase in Arab rhetoric tying the Holocaust to the Palestinian hardship.”
It was into this minefield that President Obama stepped June 4, when he delivered his anticipated speech to the Muslim world from Cairo.
“America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable,” Obama said in his speech. “It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”
Obama’s seemingly supportive statement was, in the eyes of some pro-Israel activists, insensitive at best, or even biased. “It sounds as if he is buying into the Arab narrative,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Foxman was quick to issue a statement in which he accused Obama of making an “egregious error which plays into the hands of the most extreme elements of the radical Muslim world.” The error, Foxman said, was in implicitly asserting that Israel’s legitimacy is based on the suffering of the Jewish people’s “tragic history” and not on their historic ties to the Land of Israel. Obama’s choice of words and his decision to mention only the Holocaust as a reason for the creation of the State of Israel “gave fodder to the many in the Arab world who argue against the legitimacy of Israel,” Foxman said.
Researchers believe that viewing the Holocaust as the sole reason for the creation of the State of Israel and the subsequent Nakba — what the Palestinians call their “catastrophe” — date back to the years after Israel’s 1948 independence. As those views have become more prevalent, there also has been a shift in the Arab world, from “hard” Holocaust denial (totally denying the systematic murder of Jews, as done by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) to a “soft” denial that questions facts about the Holocaust and argues that the Jews are cynically using its memory to justify the occupation of Palestinian land.
“Historically, this is not true,” said Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, who has written extensively on the issue. “The State of Israel would have come to being even without the Holocaust. It was a result of 30 years of intensive work by the Zionist movement.”
Still, Segev believes that Israel shares some blame for perpetuating the myth of a state that “rose from the ashes of the Holocaust.”
Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum argues that the narrative of tying the creation of Israel to the Holocaust has “certain plausibility,” since international support for the Jewish homeland increased after the end of World War II. But Berenbaum agrees with Segev that Israelis themselves bear some responsibility for helping this notion take root.
“How do they want Obama to deny this narrative when the Israelis have done it themselves?” Berenbaum asked. “The Israelis send warplanes from Jerusalem to fly over Auschwitz, and then they claim there is no relationship between the two?”
The assertion of a causal relationship between the murder of Europe’s Jews and the creation of the Jewish state has sparked a renewed debate in Israel, as well.
“In the heat of debate with Holocaust deniers, sometimes this mistake is repeated,” wrote Eli Eyal, editor of the World Zionist Organization’s Kivunim Chadashim (Hebrew for “New Directions”), a magazine on Zionism and Judaism. He argued that David Ben-Gurion understood the problems that could rise from linking the Jewish national revival to the Holocaust and deliberately chose not to mention the link in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
Obama’s speech alone did not spark this debate; there has been growing international awareness that the Arab world is the last enclave in which Holocaust denial is on the rise.
A recent poll conducted by Haifa University found that 40% of Israeli Arabs believe the Holocaust never happened. This is a dramatic increase compared with 28% two years ago, and especially notable, since those surveyed were educated in the Israeli system, which puts great emphasis on Shoah studies. “My explanation is that it is completely a political issue,” said Webman, who is also a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. “What stands behind this approach is an attempt to undermine Israel’s legitimacy.”
Obama’s remarks on Holocaust denial — he called it “baseless, ignorant, and hateful” — were widely criticized in Arab blogs. As’ad AbuKhalil, a visiting professor at University of California, Berkley, wrote in his blog, Angry Arab: “What is his point here: That because of Nazi crimes, the Palestinians need to accommodate Zionist crimes on their land?”
The argument that Palestinians are “paying the price” for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust also has been echoed in statements by left-wing groups throughout Europe; some Germans have argued that their nation now carries a moral burden of taking care of the Palestinians, since their suffering has derived from the Nazi-era crimes against Jews.
Activists on the right also point frequently to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as one of those responsible for spreading Holocaust denial in the Arab world. Abbas, in a 1984 research paper written at the Moscow Oriental College, questioned the existence of gas chambers and suggested that the number of Jews murdered was not more than 1 million. After Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization engaged in negotiations, however, Abbas said, “Today I would not have made such remarks.” In a 2003 interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, he added, “The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it.”
Another contentious issue is equating Jewish suffering during the Holocaust with current Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation. In his Cairo speech, Obama spoke emphatically about the need to recognize Nazi crimes against Jews and to fight anti-Jewish stereotypes used in the Arab world. “On the other hand,” he added, “it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” The term “on the other hand” drew criticism from supporters of Israel, who saw it as equating the Holocaust with the occupation. “How dare Obama compare Arab refugee suffering to the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust?” Israeli right-wing lawmaker Aryeh Eldad asked after the speech.
Berenbaum argues that while the debate over “who suffered more” is legitimate, it is not helpful. “What makes suffering suffering is that it is personal,” he said. “Everyone feels his suffering is the worst.”
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
Child Sex Abuse Bill Poised for Vote Amid Albany Chaos
By Rebecca Dube
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Last summer, New York State Assemblywoman Marge Markey had lunch with Delaware State Senator Karen Peterson. On the menu: a strategy session on how Markey could successfully achieve passage of a bill that would make it easier for sexual abuse survivors to sue their molesters and the institutions that employed them.
In 2007, Peterson got the Delaware legislature to pass a measure repealing the statute of limitations for all child sexual abuse cases, and creating a two-year window during which past victims who had already exceeded the old statute of limitations could file civil lawsuits.
Two years and about 100 lawsuits later, Delaware’s “window” is set to close on July 10. Meanwhile, Markey’s proposal to extend the statute of limitations in New York and create a one-year window for previously time-barred lawsuits is closer than ever before to winning passage — provided it can overcome opposition by religious groups and political chaos in the state Senate.
But the advice Markey got at that lunch has not always been easy to follow, and her bill, scheduled for a vote in the Assembly on June 16, has not enjoyed the direct path to success that Peterson found in Delaware.
Peterson told Markey, a Democrat from Queens, to rely on the persuasive power of
grass-roots activists and to line up as many endorsements as possible. She has done both. The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a group of primarily Catholic abuse victims, and Survivors for Justice, a group of Jewish survivors of child sexual abuse, have been lobbying Albany lawmakers hard.
“You can’t fight the money the church has,” Peterson said in a conversation with the Forward, noting that Delaware is a heavily Catholic state. “All we had on our side was we knew we were right, and we had this incredible group of people that hung with us. That made it happen.”
Survivors for Justice began June 9 running a series of eight radio commercials in English, Yiddish and Hebrew, warning that “there is an epidemic of unreported sexual abuse in the frum community,” and urging passage of the Markey bill. Television commercials will follow. The legislation has become a bitter battleground for Jewish abuse survivors who are outraged that some Orthodox Jewish organizations, including Agudath Israel of America and Torah Umesorah, have joined the Catholic Church in opposing the bill.
Peterson had one more important word of advice for Markey: “Our mantra was, no amendments.”
That bit of counsel has fallen by the wayside. Markey made two significant changes to her bill in order to get it the promise of a vote by the full Assembly. She added language that explicitly includes public institutions in the one-year window, addressing criticism that the bill unfairly targeted religious groups. And she put an age limit — 53 — on who could sue over past abuse, in order to dispel complaints about the possibility of 80-year-old abuse claims prompting lawsuits.
These changes were driven by pragmatism. The age limit particularly upset sexual abuse survivors, and Markey was unhappy about it, as well, spokesman Mike Armstrong said. But he said, “This was something that [will make] it possible to get a majority voting for the bill.”
The other amendment was also a political tradeoff. The Catholic Church has argued that the bill unfairly targets religious institutions while letting public schools off the hook. Other lawmakers told Markey that the issue was a deal breaker.
“We’ve gotten pledges of support now from people who were on the fence,” Armstrong said.
But that support comes with a political risk. Now, Markey and supporters of the bill may have to defend against public employees’ unions and other organizations that see the measure as a threat. The United Federation of Teachers, a powerful union, has said it will not oppose the bill. But a group representing about 700 school superintendents in New York has gone on record against it.
The Delaware bill did include public institutions, Peterson said, but she didn’t know of any civil sex-abuse lawsuits against public schools. In California, a 2003 lawsuit window approved by the state legislature prompted about 1,000 civil suits, with only a handful targeting public institutions. (The California Supreme Court later ruled that the window law did not apply to public schools, but no one knew that at the time the lawsuits were being filed.)
The public-private debate can cut both ways. In Colorado, state lawmaker Gwyn Green introduced a bill for several years running that would have created a window for long-ago sex abuse claims. When the bill included only private institutions, the church attacked it as anti-Catholic. When she expanded it to include public institutions, it was defeated by opposition from public employees’ unions. Green who is 70, recently announced her retirement from the state House and named the failure of that statute of limitations bill as her one main regret.
In New York, at least, Markey’s amendments have not quelled opposition from the Catholic Church and from some Orthodox Jewish groups. The bill is still “terrible public policy,” said Richard Barnes, executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference: “Statutes of limitation exist in law for a good reason, and it is impossible to defend decades-old claims; [and] the bill could seriously impact the ability of the Catholic Church and other not-for-profits to provide health care, social services and education programs.”
Rabbi Avi Shafran, the spokesman for Agudath Israel, agreed: “Our objection was and remains the window provision [temporarily] lifting the statute of limitations.”
The wild card in the debate over Markey’s bill is the New York Senate, which as of the Forward’s press time had entered a state of dysfunction unusual even for Albany. Democrats were struggling to regain control of the Senate after Republicans joined forces with two Democratic members to oust the Senate majority leader in a series of surprise parliamentary maneuvers. Which side will end up controlling the Senate, when the senators will get back to the business of actually legislating, and what they will do with the child sex abuse bill is anyone’s guess.
For her part, Peterson did confront some last-minute surprises when her bill was debated in the Delaware Senate. She remembers lining up her support but worrying about two senators who she thought might oppose the bill. When one of them, known for his eloquent argumentativeness, stood to speak, she said, “I thought, oh, okay, here we go.”
Instead of attacking on the measure, though, the senator disclosed that he had been molested as a child, and said he thought that passing the bill would be the best thing they could do for the state.
“The place went absolutely silent,” Peterson recalled. Her bill passed unanimously after that.
Contact Rebecca Dube at dube@forward.com
Pakistani Rock Star Builds Cultural Bridges
GETTY IMAGES
A Doctor, and a Legend: Salman Ahmad, South Asia’s biggest music celebrity, performs in India (above) and teaches at Queens College.
By Rebecca Dube
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Salman Ahmad, M.D., knows that he is an unlikely rock star.
Make that an unlikely rock star, klezmer jam-session collaborator, celebrity to the Muslim world and United Nations goodwill ambassador.
Not bad for a kid from the suburbs of New York who earned his medical degree to please his parents.
“I should not be doing this, but some force steered me in this direction,” he said, laughing with the air of someone still startled by his good fortune. “I see myself as an instrument, I really do.”
Ahmad, 45, is a huge celebrity throughout South Asia, including in his native Pakistan, where he basically created the genre of Muslim rock music. He and his band, Junoon, which mixes hard rock with Sufi poetry and devotional music, have sold more than 25 million albums worldwide. They’ve been compared to U2, and inspire Beatlemania-level hysteria among fans. But recently, Ahmad’s been reaching out to a new audience: American kids who think “Muslim rock” is an oxymoron.
He teaches a class on Muslim music and culture at Queens College in New York: It’s as if Bono dropped in regularly to lecture undergraduates on Gaelic songwriting. And Ahmad collaborates with renowned klezmer artist Yale Strom on a Queens program called Common Chords, a musical project dedicated to creating harmony, literally and figuratively, among different religions and ethnicities.
“He’s a joy to work with,” Strom told the Forward. “I wish I could say I’ve sold 25 million CDs like he has, but he doesn’t come into a room and say, ‘I’m Salman Ahmad, and I played at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.’ He’s a very humble person.”
JuNOON.COM
Coolest Prof Ever: Ahmad, shown performing in 2006, teaches at Queens College.
Ahmad started teaching at Queens College and playing with Common Chords after running into history professor Mark Rosenblum, director of the Queens College Center for Jewish Studies and the Michael Harrington Center for Democratic Values and Social Change. They literally bumped into each other after Ahmad spoke at a Clinton Global Initiative event. At the time of their collision, Ahmad was fasting for Ramadan, and Rosenblum was fasting for Yom Kippur, so they avoided the buffet together and struck up a conversation, during which Rosenblum made his pitch for Ahmad to come talk to Queens College students.
One appearance turned into a semester of teaching; Ahmad liked it so much, he decided to continue.
“There’s no doubt he’s a legend, and he has groupies who come to his classes,” Rosenblum said, but he stressed that Ahmad isn’t just coasting on his fame. “He’s a key player among religious Muslims engaged against what they see as a hijacking of their religion by violent factions…. He’s fully engaged in the cultural struggle. He’s a great soul who is very, very charismatic. I think he’s got the capacity to teach and to learn, which is rare.”
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Ahmad moved with his family to the idyllic village of Tappan, N.Y., when he was 11 and spent his formative teenage years there. He vividly remembers his first concert, Led Zeppelin at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. When he saw Jimmy Page wailing on a double-necked guitar, special effects smoke curling around the dragons painted on his trousers, the young Ahmad found his calling.
“It was a transformational experience,” he said. “I decided I definitely wanted to be a guitar player.”
He formed a band with his friends. But his parents were equally certain that he should go to medical school and become a doctor. So he did, obtaining his medical degree in Pakistan, all the while continuing to play guitar. The military dictatorship then ruling Pakistan had banned rock music, so Ahmad and his friends pioneered an underground scene.
“I realized music was the only form of expression we had,” Ahmad said. “I became a doctor and I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to play music for one year.’ That year hasn’t ended.”
The conditions in Pakistan now remind him of his oppressive student days. While the government no longer tries to repress music, Taliban forces surging in the Swat valley district of northwestern Pakistan are threatening freedoms, artistic and otherwise.
In 2003, Ahmad starred in a Public Broadcasting Service documentary called “The Rock Star and the Mullahs,” which featured him playing music in Pakistan and debating local hard-line Islamic leaders about the legitimacy of Muslim music. More recently, a disturbing cell phone video of Taliban fighters flogging a teenage girl, allegedly for being seen with a man who was not her husband, prompted Ahmad to return to Pakistan and organize anti-Taliban rallies and concerts.
“Something snapped in my head,” Ahmad said. “Those events, I’ve got to keep on doing.… The Taliban are again trying to impose their extremism on a country of 170 million people who love music.”
He moved back to Tappan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because, he said, he wanted to reconnect with America: “The only way I know how to do that is to play music and meet people.” He toured college campuses across the country and connected with Queens College and the Common Chords program. Sometimes it seems as though he makes a case with high school and college students similar to the one he makes with the Taliban, trying to persuade people that Islam has a proud tradition of music that should be celebrated.
“People ask, ‘How can you be a rock musician and a Muslim?’” Ahmad said. His answer: “Look, we’re making this up as we go along.”
Ahmad said his current musical style is rooted in Qawwali, the traditional Sufi devotional music, fused with the classic rock of Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Santana that he loved in his youth, and seasoned with a healthy dose of Bollywood inspiration.
Both he and Strom have been pleasantly surprised to discover the deep interconnectedness of Muslim and Jewish music, as each improvises on the other’s songs.
“The scales — that was a revelation for me,” Ahmad said. “The phrasing, the notes and the spirit behind them are just so similar.”
“There are certain keys that lend themselves, certain rhythms,” Strom agreed. “Even more than musically, it’s the feeling and the spirit that unifies us. Music creates a bridge to hopefully forge better understanding and mutual respect between Jews and Muslims.”
So far, it seems to be working. As part of his Middle Eastern studies program, Rosenblum asks students to role-play their “opposite”: A Jewish student would have to put himself in the shoes of a Palestinian nationalist, for instance, while a Muslim student argues the case of an Israeli settler. That can be a tough sell. But Rosenblum said he found it gets easier if the students have participated in a Common Chords concert beforehand.
“Let’s not talk about Palestinian nationalism right away; first, let’s talk about this music,” Rosenblum said. “The cultural dimension of an interfaith dialogue turns out to be easier.”
Ahmad is looking forward to his next semester of teaching at Queens College, and will keep busy this summer by trying to organize a huge concert at the U.N. in August to benefit the 3 million people who have been displaced by fighting in Pakistan. Ahmad is hoping to get fellow goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie to attend (he’s been spending a lot of time on the phone with her people). He’s also got a book, “Rock & Roll Jihad” (“a misunderstood word that the extremists have hijacked,” he explained), and a new Junoon album coming out early next year.
Friends in Pakistan often urge him to return and run for political office — his star power would make the campaign a cakewalk. But the spell that Page cast some 30 years ago is still going strong: Ahmad is sticking with his guitar.
“I think that today, social movements are the way to bring long-lasting change,” Ahmad said. “I’m trying to give young people hope…. Pop culture can drive politics.”
Contact Rebecca Dube at dube@forward.com
Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News
Letter from Jerusalem
By Daniel Estrin
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.
The idea behind the paper’s June 10 special edition was to honor Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.
This wasn’t a Sabbath supplement, a chance to balance the news with extra color. This was a near complete replacement of the newspaper itself. Save for the sports section and a few other articles, all the reporters’ notebooks were handed over to poets and novelists, both bestselling and up-and-coming. Their articles filled the pages, from the leading headline to the weather report.
“We really tried to give a real newspaper,” Alon said.
For the liberal, Hebrew language Israeli daily — the country’s oldest — it was a bold but signature move. From its founding in 1918, Haaretz has distinguished its brand by highlighting Israeli cultural, literary and artistic life with a vigor unmatched by its competitors. That, along with its dense in-depth political and business reporting (achieved with smaller type and far fewer photos than Israel’s other dailies) has won it an elite audience, albeit one far smaller than its competitors. Its weekday circulation of some 50,000 compares with 400,000 for Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily, and 160,000 for Ma’ariv, the second largest.
But as the old cliché goes, they are the right readers. “The likelihood of Haaretz readership,” Israeli media analysts Dan Caspi and Yehiel Limor write, “rises with income, education, and age.” Its elite audience gives it an influence disproportionate to its circulation, as does its internationally read English language Internet edition, which features translations of many of the Hebrew stories. Its readership, along with the paper’s dovish political stances, has won it a reputation as Israel’s version of The New York Times.
It’s hard to imagine the Times doing anything like the June 10 experiment, though. For this edition of the paper, nearly all the rules taught in journalism school were thrown out the window. Writers used the first person and showed up in nearly every photograph alongside their interview subjects, including the likes of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres.
Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….” The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: “I didn’t watch TV yesterday.” And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled “Summer Sonnet.” (“Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.”) News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that “hot” is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who’s to say these articles aren’t factual?
Alongside these cute reports were gripping journalistic accounts. David Grossman, one of Israel’s most famed novelists, spent a night at a children’s drug rehabilitation center in Jerusalem and wrote a cover page story about the tender exchanges between the patients, ending the article in the style of a celebrated author who’s treated like a prophet: “I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands — stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity — still exist.” Grossman’s pen transformed a run-of-the-mill feature into something epic.
So, too, did 79-year-old author Yoram Kaniuk, whose novel “Adam Resurrected” was recently adapted for a movie starring Jeff Goldblum and Ayelet Zurer. He went into the field to write about couples in the hospital cancer ward. The thing is, he’s a cancer patient, too. “A woman walking with a cane brings her partner a cup of coffee with a trembling hand. The looks they exchange are sexier than any performance by Madonna and cost a good deal less,” Kaniuk wrote. “I think about what would happen if I were to get better…how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?”
“I got more telephone calls today than I have in years past,” Kaniuk said in a phone interview. “People were very moved, because I wrote it like a writer and not like a journalist. If you see something beautiful and touching, why not write it?” The masterful articles by Kaniuk and Grossman made it seem like there’s actually some hope to be reported in a country flooded with doomsday news bulletins.
The next day, Haaretz’s usual staff reporters were back on the job. Yossi Melman, Haaretz’s commentator on security and intelligence issues, emphasized that he liked the experiment, but said, “It would be very difficult to replace journalists with authors and run a newspaper. We are trained; we know how to do it. For them, you know, there is a tendency to elaborate.”
At the editor’s desk, Alfon sees things otherwise. “I think it is a humility lesson for journalists,” he said. He kept five writers in the newsroom in case of breaking news, but nothing big happened. So the authors’ accounts prevailed, gripping stories were printed and dozens of readers called in with praise.
“Thirty-one writers decided, what are the real events of the day?” he mused. “What is really important in their eyes? They wrote about it, and our priorities as journalists were suddenly shaken by this.”
Contact Daniel Estrin at feedback@forward.com
Whose Holocaust? Plan to Recognize Gay Victims at Memorial Sparks Row
By Alex Weisler
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
A plan to memorialize gay male victims of Nazism amid a collection of memorial stones for Holocaust victims in a quiet half-acre patch of Brooklyn has provoked an outcry.
ALEX WEISLER
Remembrance: At Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park, inscriptions on memorial stones tell visitors the stories of inidividuals murdered by the Nazis. The victims were all Jews, up to now.
New York State Assembly Member Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat whose many Orthodox constituents include numerous Holocaust survivors, has decried the planned addition as a distortion of the Holocaust’s meaning with regard to Jews.
“It’s easy to say, let’s include everybody, let’s be universal, diversity is great,” he said. But he added, “It just isn’t fair. It diminishes and really dilutes what the Holocaust is.”
Hikind and the Holocaust Memorial Committee, steward of the tiny Holocaust Memorial Park in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, are calling for the park’s memorial stones to be restricted to Jewish victims of Hitler. But the plan, approved by the city’s parks department, to commemorate non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime there is proceeding thus far.
On June 9, representatives of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Children of Holocaust Survivors, which proposed the addition, could be found combing the bayside memorial to measure unmarked stone pillars and determine if memorial text could be carved on them, association co-chair Rick Landman said.
The altercation raises a question that Jews have faced with increasing frequency: Whose Holocaust is it, anyway? Roma Gypsies, the disabled and gay men were among those also especially targeted by the Nazis. According to historians, though, only Jews and Roma were targeted for annihilation. Altogether, the Nazis are estimated to have murdered some 11 million from their coming to power in 1933 until their downfall in 1945.
Flanked by Emmons Avenue and Shore Boulevard, at the easternmost end of Sheepshead Bay, the memorial, built in 1997, consists of a tall eternal flame sculpture — engraved with a short statement on the Holocaust and the nations affected by the genocide — surrounded by two adjacent gardens of stone markers, each of which features either a paragraph or two of history or a list of victims’ names.
For $360 per engraved line, donors to the non-profit Holocaust Memorial Committee can pay to have a victim’s name printed on one of the stone markers. The registration form for this service, found on the committee’s Web site, asks donors to provide the victim’s name and a brief history of his or her Holocaust experience. The committee then meets to verify the authenticity of the proposed inscription, committee treasurer and past president Alfred Gollomp said.
Gollomp complained that in signing on to the IALGCHS proposal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the city’s parks department were ignoring a memorandum that gives the Brooklyn-based group control over the park markers.
“The parks department is going over our heads… and Miss Quinn and the City Council probably [don’t] give a damn because of who she is,” he said referring to Quinn, who is gay. “What’s going to happen is going to happen. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
Landman said he’s not looking for a fight with Hikind. He just wants to get his pillars — set to commemorate “the homosexual community,” Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners and the disabled — inscribed.
“To me, I think it’s all part of the history of the Nazi era. Everyone who was innocent and was murdered should be memorialized,” he said. “This is not an attack on the 6 million or their memories.”
At a press conference June 8 to inaugurate the High Line, Manhattan’s newest public park, Bloomberg was asked by a reporter about the controversy and said, “It wasn’t only the Jews that were massacred.” Hikind says it’s this comment that most incenses him.
“That is exactly… making equivalency,” Hikind said. “Victims are victims, but the systematic annihilation, the Final Solution, was directed against the Jewish people and no one else.”
Hikind said he sent a letter to Bloomberg inviting him to change the name of the park to the “Victims of the Nazis Memorial Park.” A broad name like that, he says, would produce no objections.
Jason Post, a member of Bloomberg’s press office, said he didn’t know if the mayor had received Hikind’s letter.
Some Holocaust experts point to a third way of dealing with the problem: acknowledging and memorializing other groups’ suffering as a means of both illuminating their struggles and highlighting the singularity of the Jewish experience under the Nazis.
“In order to understand what is unique about the victimization of the Jews, you must understand where their fate paralleled and where their fate differed from other Nazi victims,” said Michael Berenbaum, the original project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, from 1988 to 1993. Berenbaum, who employed this approach at the Washington museum, said it has since been used at Yad Vashem, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and other institutions around the country and the world.
“He’s 20 years behind the times in the debate,” Berenbaum said of Hikind. “The question becomes how you include [non-Jewish Nazi victims] in a way that speaks about the uniqueness of the Holocaust.”
Though a light rain kept most Brooklynites away from the park on the morning of June 9, those milling about the memorial or strolling bayside offered strikingly different opinions on the city’s plan.
Milena Boev, a child care provider from nearby Bensonhurst, called opposition to including non-Jewish victims “a kind of discrimination.”
“If someone decided to build a park for just the gays and Gypsies, what would the Jews say?” she said. “It’s a bit arrogant.”
But Ellen Retsepter of Sheepshead Bay doesn’t buy it. If the Gypsies need a memorial, she said, then make a memorial for the Gypsies.
“I think it should be just for Jews,” said Retsepter, who works in the financial industry. “I don’t know why you need to combine all the groups together.”
Contact Alex Weisler at weisler@forward.com
Bibi Bails on UNESCO Flap, Angering Wiesel
News Analysis
Getty Images
High Hopes: Obama and Wiesel embrace at Buchenwald.
By J.J. Goldberg
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Israeli-Arab diplomatic sniping over the choice of a new head for the United Nations cultural arm, UNESCO spilled over into an unlikely arena recently, emerging unexpectedly as a sore point in Israel’s relations with the Jewish Diaspora.
The UNESCO conflict now pits Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against some of the world’s best-known Jewish intellectuals over the question of whether to oppose an Egyptian Israel-basher’s candidacy for the U.N. post. In an odd twist, it is the famously hard-line Israeli leader who opposes putting up a fight, to the dismay of some of Israel’s most liberal defenders.
“I am of course more than angry,” said French philosopher-journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy, an outspoken opponent of the Egyptian’s candidacy. “I don’t understand how an Israeli government can choose to support such an antisemite.”
Tense words were also exchanged, according to an Israeli news report, between Netanyahu and Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate Holocaust chronicler, who had joined Levy in protesting the candidacy before Netanyahu reversed positions.
The man at the center of the conflict is the Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, considered the leading contender in September’s vote.
Controversy first erupted over Hosni’s candidacy in June 2008, when he told the Egyptian parliament that if Israeli books were found in Egypt’s acclaimed Alexandria Library, “I will burn them myself.”
Responding to the comments, Israel launched a worldwide campaign to derail Hosni’s candidacy, mobilizing Diaspora Jewish organizations to lobby their governments. The campaign reached a peak May 21, when an open letter denouncing Hosni was published in the French daily newspaper Le Monde, signed by Wiesel, Levy and French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann.
Citing a catalog of Hosni’s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish statements going back to 2001, the authors wrote: “Mr. Farouk Hosny is the opposite of a man of peace, dialogue, and culture; Mr. Farouk Hosny is a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds.” (This translation and spelling was published by the authors in the Huffington Post.)
The publication caused an uproar across Europe, landing the issue on the front pages for the first time. Hosni tried to quell the furor with his own Le Monde op-ed May 27, expressing “solemn regret” for his words but European leaders appeared unimpressed. The French press agency AFP quoted an unnamed UNESCO official May 30 conceding for the first time that Hosni’s “election could be problematic” because “the European bloc is against him.”
But even as the blocking campaign was gaining momentum, Israel was quietly backing away. Weeks earlier, during a May 11 meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Netanyahu had secretly agreed to halt Israeli opposition to the candidate. A classified memo went out to Israeli diplomatic missions May 14, instructing them to drop their blocking efforts. These developments were reported by Haaretz on May 25.
Netanyahu had agreed to back off because, “Mr. Mubarak is a very, very charming host” and a “very persuasive, seductive guy,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, an early opponent of the Hosni nomination. “He’s also a very important ally of Israel, and Hosni is a very dear friend of his.”
Foxman said that while his organization continues to oppose Hosni, he believes that Israel is “entitled” to make its own diplomatic calculations.
Wiesel was not so sanguine. According to several sources, he was in Israel at the time of the May 25 Haaretz report and protested the policy shift to Netanyahu by phone almost immediately. An account in Yediot Ahronot by senior commentator Nahum Barnea claimed that Netanyahu had called Wiesel on a separate matter, to ask that he speak out in support of West Bank settlers, to counter President Obama’s call for a settlement freeze.
Wiesel did not reply directly, Barnea wrote. Instead, he raised the Hosni reversal, charging that he had been embarrassed after extending himself at Israel’s request, only to find himself abandoned.
A source close to Wiesel, however, told the Forward that it was the Nobel laureate who initiated the call, not the prime minister, and that the Yediot report had overstated Wiesel’s anger.
Nonetheless, some observers saw a sort of retort to Netanyahu in a sudden White House announcement May 27, two days after the Haaretz report, that Wiesel would be joining Obama the following week in a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Wiesel had no such plans when he spoke to Netanyahu; indeed his decision to attend was so sudden that he canceled at least one major speaking engagement at short notice.
Several sources close to Wiesel and to the White House confirmed that the invitation had come after Wiesel returned from Israel, but both sides vigorously denied that there was any direct connection between Wiesel’s talk with Netanyahu and his subsequent decision to join Obama at Buchenwald.
The White House had initially planned not to invite any survivor or Jewish representatives to avoid community infighting, according to a political consultant who is close to the White House. At the last minute a White House staffer proposed inviting Wiesel because of indications that omitting community representation would only magnify the infighting. It was also intended, several sources said, to soften criticism of Obama as insensitive to Jewish interests after weeks of America-Israel confrontations over settlements.
At Buchenwald, Wiesel made no secret of his allegiance. Standing next to the president he had been asked to combat, he spoke repeatedly of the “high hopes” inspired by Obama’s “vision” in seeking peace. He made no mention of settlements or Arab threats.
“Mr. President,” Wiesel said, “we have such high hopes for you because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place, where people will stop waging war — every war is absurd and meaningless.”
Then, echoing Obama’s controversial equating of Jewish and Arab suffering in his Cairo speech a day earlier, Wiesel recalled his paradoxical optimism after being liberated in 1945 and said that his hopes had included much of “what now would be your vision for the future, Mr. President. A sense of security for Israel, a sense of security for its neighbors, to bring peace in that place. The time must come. It’s enough — enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for oceans. It’s enough. There must come a moment — a moment of bringing people together.”
Contact J.J. Goldberg at goldberg@forward.com
Pro-Palestinian Advocates Sense Winds of Change in Washington
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Washington — Changes in America’s policy toward the Middle East conflict are sending positive vibrations throughout the small and struggling pro-Palestinian advocacy community.
COURTESY OF ATFP
Advocacy: Ghaith Al-Omari, a leading Palestinian voice.
Activists for the Palestinian cause, who are now describing President Obama’s outreach speech to the Muslim world as “brilliant” and “brave,” are feeling emboldened by a new sense of openness within the administration. Some even have the satisfaction of having had input in the process of preparing the speech itself. A pro-Palestinian organization was among those invited to take part in a group meeting with White House staff to prepare the June 4 speech. Other activists spoke of their feeling that Washington is taking a real interest in them for the first time in years.
After Obama’s inauguration, “There was definitely a change in the manner in which public discourse in Washington is being conducted,” said Kareem Shora, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Shora said he and his colleagues feel the administration is “adding seats around the table” and is willing to listen to more views on Middle East policy.
Shora himself recently experienced this openness when Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed him member of the homeland security advisory council.
The difficulties facing pro-Palestinian advocates are demonstrated in a recent Zogby International poll gauging American public opinion toward key Middle East players. The poll found that only 25% of Americans view Palestinians favorably, whereas positive views of Israelis are shared by 71%. While almost half the respondents in the poll said they wanted to see Obama steer a middle course when dealing with the conflict, a third preferred he lean toward Israel, and only 9% would like to see him lean toward the Palestinians.
Despite this unwelcoming backdrop, Maen Areikat, the new top Palestinian representative in Washington, believes that the new administration’s approach could make his mission easier. “I have encountered no difficulties reaching out and communicating our message. We have good ties with people in the administration,” said Areikat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission to the United States, in an interview with the Forward.
Areikat, 48, comes to the post after nurturing strong ties to American officials during his previous positions with the PLO negotiating team. He is also considered to be close to Palestine’s president, Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinians had no representative in Washington for the past year, since former ambassador Afif Safieh’s term ended.
Born in Jericho to a family deeply involved in Palestinian politics, Areikat became active at an early age and spent two short terms in Israeli prisons as a teenager. The PLO delegation did not provide any details relating to this.
Educated at American universities, Areikat has ties with America that tightened upon returning home, when he joined the international department of the Orient House, the PLO’s headquarters in East Jerusalem. There, Areikat was in charge of relations with English-speaking countries, working under Faisal Husseini, the former head of the PLO office in East Jerusalem, who was known for his pragmatic approach to peacemaking and was at times at odds with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Edward Abington, a former Washington lobbyist for the Palestinian Authority, noted that Areikat has “extensive contacts” on Capitol Hill, in the State Department and National Security Council, and with Washington think tanks and the media. These ties were forged in Areikat’s numerous trips to the United States while representing the Palestinian negotiating team in the Middle East peace process and serving de facto as one of several young English speakers seen as the P.A.’s face in America.
Areikat admits he faces “a daunting task” as the chief Palestinian diplomat in Washington, but he said he senses willingness both in the administration and in Congress to listen to the Palestinian point of view and to discuss ways of solving the conflict. “I don’t believe they will close the door in the face of people like me, who want to advance our mutual interests,” he said.
Obama’s Cairo speech, in which he spoke emphatically about the Palestinian right for statehood, as well as his insistence on an Israeli settlement freeze, has made pro-Palestinian activists believe that change is in the air.
Yet, surprisingly, the sudden success in getting the Palestinian message through has many in the pro-Palestinian advocacy community concerned.
“The Palestinians should not sour U.S.–Israeli relations. That will not help anyone,” said Ghaith Al-Omari, advocacy director for the American Task Force on Palestine, a group now seen as the leading pro-Palestinian voice in Washington. He warned against Arab groups “gloating,” and expressed concern that one-sided pressure could lead to an “adversarial approach.” Al-Omari, a former Palestinian peace negotiator, recently participated in White House discussions in preparation of the Cairo speech.
He stressed that it would be a mistake for the administration and Congress to be seen as anti-Israeli. “It’s one thing for Congress to support a settlement freeze, but it will be a whole different story if the administration will be portrayed as leaning too strong on Israel.”
Areikat agrees. “I don’t like the word ‘pressure,’” he said. “This won’t help with either side.” The senior Palestinian representative cautioned that balance is needed in the administration’s approach to the conflict. “It won’t work if one side gets all its demands at the expense of the other side,” Areikat said.
This view seems at odds with statements by Abbas, who, in a May 29 interview with The Washington Post, said he believes that the Palestinians now need to sit and wait while the Obama administration pressures Israel to freeze settlement activity. Privately, advocates for the P.A. voice aggravation with the interview’s fallout.
Concerns within the pro-Palestinian community over the possibility of counterproductive administration pressure on Israel may stem from a surprising source: a little-known rapprochement process taking place between pro-Palestinian groups and Jewish organizations.
Palestinian activists have made a concerted effort to reach out to American Jews and to seek cooperation in promoting a two-state solution. While most of their outreach has focused on dovish Jewish organizations, Palestinians also have been trying to work with mainstream Jewish groups and with the pro-Israel lobby.
Together with Ziad Asali, president and founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, Al-Omari attended the May 4 gala dinner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an event seen as the annual show of force for pro-Israel advocacy. ATFP also holds regular meetings with AIPAC staff members.
In December 2008, while he was serving on the PLO negotiating team, Areikat led a group of Palestinian officials who met with AIPAC board members in Washington. The AIPAC board members were later hosted by PLO officials in Ramallah.
Areikat believes that a new spirit in the Washington and Palestinian outreach efforts will help sway American public opinion toward more understanding of the Palestinian cause. “Americans are open-minded. They want to see the Palestinians treated justly while Israel remains protected,” he said.
Graeme Bannerman, adjunct scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute and a veteran observer of America’s Middle East policy, remains skeptical. Bannerman, whose former lobbying firm used to represent Palestinian interests in Washington, believes that at the end of the day, Palestinian interests will always come second to those of Israel in the Washington scene.
“Any staffer dealing with foreign policy on the Hill will tell you that 70% of the e-mails he gets are about the Middle East and 90% of them are pro-Israel,” Bannerman said. “So eventually, the discussion will always be on what concerns the Israelis, not the Palestinians.”
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
Sammy Davis Jr.’s Menorah Fails To Sell
By Rebecca Dube
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Celebrity sparkle wasn’t enough to sell Sammy Davis Jr.’s menorah at auction.
The silver menorah that belonged to one of Judaism’s most famous converts went on the auction block June 8, but failed to garner the $10,000 minimum bid sought by the owner, a Judaica collector.
“Oh, Samela,” sighed auctioneer Jonathan Greenstein, who said he had advised the collector to lower his minimum bid. Greenstein said two people were interested in Davis’s menorah, and one was willing to pay $8,500, but the collector “wanted $10,000, and he wasn’t taking anything less. I said all right — what are you going to do?”
Davis converted to Judaism after a serious 1954 car crash that cost him his left eye. He played along with jokes about his conversion, but according to his friends and biographers, his religious sentiment was heartfelt. The menorah that went up for sale was a gift to Davis from the New York Federation and bears an inscription from 1965.
While Davis’s menorah is headed back to its owner’s safe deposit box, another piece of Judaica from a different sort of Jewish celebrity fetched a fine price. A diamond-studded Torah pointer, valued at $12,500 to $18,000, that belonged to Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, an influential leader of the Reform movement, sold for $23,000 at auction to a New York doctor who wished to remain anonymous.
Contact Rebecca Dube at dube@forward.com
By Kenneth Waltzer
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
When President Obama visited Buchenwald, he connected the camp with the larger story of the Nazi destruction of the Jews. Accompanied by Buchenwald survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Obama laid a wreath at the camp memorial, honoring the memories of the 56,000 prisoners who died there.
But there is an additional dimension to the story of Buchenwald. This was highlighted in Obama’s presence by Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald museum. He noted the fact that veteran prisoners in the camp, amidst all the horror, sustained their humanity by protecting and saving hundreds of children in an organized effort. In a place of death, they chose to defend life — and to risk their own lives to protect the most vulnerable among them.
When elements of General George Patton’s U.S. Third Army liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, American soldiers discovered 904 boys among the 21,000 male survivors. Today, these Buchenwald boys are in their 70s and early 80s, and they live around the world, with large concentrations in the United States, Israel, Canada, Australia, France and England. But for many years, despite the spectacle of their discovery at liberation, few people asked who they were or how they were still alive to be liberated.
Until recently, their story had been little known. But that is changing.
We now know that they were mostly Jewish children and youths from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Lithuania, who were brought in 1944 and 1945 to Buchenwald, some with fathers or brothers, but the majority as orphans. Most were teenagers, but a sixth of them were 12 and under. The two youngest boys were each 4 years old. Some had been in German factory labor camps in Poland until mid or late 1944. Some had been in Auschwitz and its satellite camps and were taken to Buchenwald to toil in its sub-camps in 1944. Some had been evacuated from Auschwitz and its satellites in early 1945, arriving in bad shape in open coal cars in the frigid air.
How did they manage to survive? Documentary evidence in the Red Cross International Tracing Service archives as well as scores of memoirs and testimonies by and interviews with these men indicate that their lives were saved by elements of the German communist-led international underground in the camp, together with Polish Jewish prisoners who worked closely with the underground. Key activists in the Czech and Hungarian underground national committees at Buchenwald also played important roles.
Veteran prisoners committed to protecting the youths, drawing on the influence of the German communists and their allies in the internal camp self-administration. They did what they could to keep the boys from being sent to the outer sub-camps, where slave labor was a death sentence. They clustered them in children’s barracks under tight discipline and control to minimize their contact with SS guards. They used their influence to provide access to occasional additional food and to warm clothing. They used tough discipline to keep starving youths from scavenging freely in the camp or stealing food from one another. They distributed Red Cross packages sent to other prisoners to the children.
The veteran activists even created makeshift, clandestine schools in the barracks to control the boys and to lift their minds beyond the realities of everyday camp existence. (Mordechai Strigler, who went on to be the editor of the Yiddish Forverts, was a key teacher in this effort.) Finally, in the last days, when Nazi leaders sought to march first the Jewish prisoners and then all the remaining prisoners onto the roads, the prisoner activists changed the markings on the boys’ uniforms and interceded personally on their behalf. Many activists were with the boys until liberation and after. In several images taken on April 17, six days after the camp’s liberation, these men can be seen shepherding the boys through the camp gate to the recently abandoned SS barracks.
Among the boys was little “Lulek,” Israel Meir Lau, an 8-year-old from Piotrkow, Poland, who was protected in block 8 along with several hundred other youths. He later became chief rabbi of Israel and today chairs Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. And, of course, among the older boys was Eliezer Wiesel, a 16-year-old from Sighet, Romania, who was in block 66 with hundreds of boys being looked after by the adults.
As the Allied armies advanced from the west and the east, those in the camp who acted to protect the boys clung to hope and were determined to do what they could to ensure that the youths would survive. The boys represented hope — symbols of resilience and resistance to Nazi oppression. They represented the future.
Not all the youths made it — some boys who could not be protected perished in the outer camps, and a few hundred were led out by the Nazis in the last days. But, thanks to the determination and bravery of some veteran prisoners, one of the great rescue efforts of the Holocaust occurred inside a concentration camp.
Kenneth Waltzer is a professor of history and director of the Jewish studies program at Michigan State University. He is currently completing a book about the rescue of children at Buchenwald.
Brandeis and the ‘Empathy’ Issue
Opinion
By Melvin I. Urofsky
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
In January 1916, just a few days after Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court, Gus Karger, a journalist and a friend of Wilson’s predecessor, William Howard Taft, told the former president that “many Senators who might base their opposition to him on sound and logical grounds, if he were a Presbyterian, are reluctant to take a stand, lest their opposition be misconstrued.”
Karger, of course, had in mind the fear that opposition to the first Jew named to the high court would be construed as antisemitism. Prejudice against Jews was, at the time, commonplace. Leo Frank was lynched in Georgia the summer before, and Brandeis’s nomination certainly sparked a fair amount of grumbling from antisemites. John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, William F. Fitzgerald, ranted that “the fact that a slimy fellow of this kind… together with his Jewish instinct can [be appointed to the court] should teach an object lesson” to every true American. But with the exception of one minor mention, Brandeis’s religion did not come up during his bitter, four-month-long Senate confirmation hearings.
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Sonia Sotomayor’s Hispanic background, notwithstanding her now famous comment about a “wise Latina woman,” will also not play much of a role in her confirmation, except insofar as it will redound to her benefit. Republicans, who have been marginalized by the last election and by their own failure to articulate a coherent program, do not want to alienate either women or the Hispanic community any more than they have already done.
Nor, it appears, will they be able to get much traction out of Sotomayor’s 17 years’ worth of opinions at both the district and appellate court levels. Preliminary reviews indicate a careful jurist who pays very close attention to the facts of the case, a stance that conservatives can hardly condemn.
Rather, like the Republican opponents to Brandeis nearly a century ago, they will attack her for her alleged non-judicial temperament, and they are already pointing with horror to President Obama’s stated criterion of “empathy,” which they say is a thin mask for liberalism and judicial policy-making from the bench.
Although President Wilson did not use the word “empathy,” he clearly had something very similar in mind when he named Brandeis, one of his close advisors, to the Supreme Court. Over the previous decade, the Boston lawyer had made a reputation for himself as one of the country’s leading progressive reformers.
In the landmark 1908 case of Muller v. Oregon, he had shown how creative legal argumentation could be used to defend progressive legislation — in this case a maximum hours law for working women. This horrified conservatives, who viewed the judiciary as their last line of defense against the masses in the protection of property rights.
Brandeis also had taken on the major insurance companies and exposed how they ripped off workers in so-called “industrial insurance,” and managed to get the Massachusetts legislature to approve a plan to establish low-cost savings-bank life insurance. He fought J.P. Morgan’s effort to monopolize New England transportation, and when the business interests tried to grab important mineral rights in Alaska, it was Brandeis who exposed the Taft administration’s connivance. Beyond that, Brandeis had taken over the leadership of the American Zionist movement in 1914, and through his charismatic leadership and organizational skills turned it into a potent player in American Jewish affairs, much to the chagrin of the conservatives like Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall who headed the American Jewish Committee.
Wilson admired the “people’s attorney” because Brandeis put the interests of the common man and woman ahead of business or property rights. Brandeis spoke about “industrial democracy,” the idea that workers had to share in the decision-making processes, so they would be more productive, earn better pay and could then participate in the larger society.
His opponents saw this concern for the people as evidence of his “hatred” for business and property. “Where others were radical he was rabid,” ranted one newspaper, “where others were extreme he was super-extreme.” Brandeis, of course, was no radical; throughout his life he considered himself conservative but believed that in order to keep the best of our past, reforms were necessary to give workers decent wages, safe jobs and a chance to share in the American dream.
Brandeis did not come from a poor background. Unlike Sotomayor, who grew up in a Bronx housing project, Brandeis’s father was a prosperous grain merchant in Louisville, Ky. After his graduation from Harvard Law School, he himself became a successful attorney.
But starting in the 1890s, Brandeis began devoting an increasing part of his time to public service, and he refused to accept any remuneration for this work. American society had been good to him, and he believed it was his responsibility to do something in return. He became a strong advocate for those who, for one reason or another, had been pushed to the margins of politics and society. He may not have been one of the underdogs, but he had empathy for their problems and their striving, and believed that he had a responsibility to help them — not just for their benefit but for the good of society as well.
Sotomayor clearly shares this outlook, and conservatives who see the courts as bulwarks against popular aspirations will oppose her. And as in the case of Brandeis, they will lose. Whether she will, once on the court, do great things, as he did, will not be known for many years. As citizens, we can only hope.
Melvin I. Urofsky is the author of “Louis D. Brandeis: A Life,” to be published this September by Pantheon.
The Truth Walks Into a Court in Jaffa
Opinion
By Michael Sfard
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
A rare visitor called on Israeli society recently, and we almost didn’t notice. The visit occurred last month during the trial of an Israeli army officer who was charged with beating a Palestinian he was “questioning” in the West Bank village of Qadoum. The officer’s attorneys asked his brigade commander to testify in his defense, and the commander agreed. And as the commander proceeded to defend this officer and his right to beat Palestinians, the more sharp-eyed observers noticed that someone who has long been declared persona non grata by the Israeli military had slipped into the courtroom: the truth.
Colonel Itai Virob, a brigade commander in charge of hundreds of soldiers who spend their service facing a civilian population in the occupied territories, laid out his credo at the very beginning of his testimony. To his credit, he was sharp and clear and did not hide behind convoluted wording: “I think,” he said, “that the need to use violence in this sort of questioning is certainly reasonable.”
The use of violence is reasonable. The shirtsleeve of the truth about our army’s attitude toward the Palestinian population in the occupied territories peeked out from under Virob’s uniform. Under the cover of his colonel’s insignia, the truth managed to cross the separation fence, the seam zone and the Green Line until it landed in the military courthouse in Jaffa.
Then the truth went on and flowed uncontrollably out of Virob’s throat, without the perjuring mediation of the army spokesperson or military attorneys. The army’s practices were revealed layer by layer: Storming into a Palestinian village in jeeps, throwing stun grenades or bursting into houses — in order to “disturb the balance of the neighborhood, village or place” — is justified as a “disruption operation.” Discussing pressure methods, Virob acknowledged that “the vast majority is employed against uninvolved people.”
Virob’s testimony oozed with machismo. It seemed to say: This air-conditioned courtroom is not the place to judge the actions of our soldiers who are risking their lives. Virob could have been cast as Jack Nicholson’s tough American colonel character from the movie “A Few Good Men,” who is sure that pencil-pushing prosecutor Tom Cruise is not going to teach him when using violence is acceptable and when it is not.
“Is slapping the heads of Palestinians allowed or not?” the prosecutor asked, and Virob spilled the occupation’s contaminated truth: “A slap, sometimes a punch to the scruff of the neck or the chest, sometimes a knee jab or strangulation to calm somebody down is reasonable.” Exactly what human rights organizations have been reporting for years, exactly what thousands of physically and psychologically injured Palestinians have been crying out, exactly what defense ministers and chiefs of staff and military lawyers and senior officers have been denying dismissively, all singing the “most moral army in the world” anthem like a mantra.
The ugly, stinking, foul truth — an unwelcome tourist in the State of Israel — was straightforwardly spoken by the highest officer on the ground who is charged with educating his soldiers about what is permissible and impermissible. And the truth is that our soldiers are too often taught to treat Palestinians as sub-humans, with whom they should communicate by “slaps” and “punches” and “knee jabs,” as a species that must be trained by roaring jeeps that “disrupt the balance” of their lives. That is the new teaching of Israel.
In response to his testimony, Virob did receive a reprimand from the higher-ups. Inside his file was placed a “commander’s note.” A soldier who is insolent to his commander is grounded for the weekend. An officer who smokes a joint on leave is removed from his command. Virob claims it is okay to hit Palestinians and throw stun grenades to “disrupt” the life of the village, and he received a “commander’s note.” This reaction can only be understood by young soldiers as a wink.
Colonel Virob gave his 18-year-old soldiers the powers that the Israeli High Court of Justice took away from the General Security Service — to physically abuse innocent Palestinians in order to obtain information. And the sky didn’t fall, and the nation that gave humanity the “Golden Rule” did not ask God’s forgiveness. The Jewish people are still waiting for Tom Cruise’s cross-examination, and until he comes and the policeman stationed in the court is ordered to arrest Virob, what Nicholson said to Cruise applies to us: “You can’t handle the truth.”
Michael Sfard is legal adviser to Yesh Din: Volunteers for Human Rights.
People of the Weekly Newspaper
Opinion
By Andrew Silow-Carroll
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
A former colleague of mine from the Forward once mentioned that his mother, raised in New Jersey, is a lifelong reader of the New Jersey Jewish News, where I am now the editor-in-chief. Not only a reader, but a close one, who even noticed when I changed the little picture that accompanies the column I write. Oh — and she lives in Maryland.
“She moved there recently?” I asked.
“In 1962,” he said.
That’s the story I tell when people ask me about the difference between a local community newspaper and a national paper like the Forward. The Forward tackles global and cultural issues for an audience that skews toward Jewish newsmakers and opinion-shapers. It’s an elite audience, but not one that would necessarily notice, or care, that a columnist changed his picture.
Papers like mine — local in scope and distribution, often founded by the Jewish federations in the communities we serve — thrive on these kinds of community connections even as we foster them. In a world of fraying associations and intra-communal strife, we try to serve as a meeting place, bulletin board and town crier.
Today, however, Jewish community federations around the country are taking a hard look at the papers they either own or heavily subsidize through bulk subscriptions. With fundraising campaigns tanking, some federation boards are finding it hard to justify subventions for what the business pages are telling them is a dying business anyway. When members of the American Jewish Press Association meet in Chicago later this month for their annual convention, they’ll likely be talking about the papers that have been suspended (New Mexico Jewish Link), gutted (Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle) or are in immediate danger. And many will be wondering whether theirs will be next.
To be sure, some will hardly miss us. And I’ll admit that the local Jewish press often fails to tell stories more compelling than who had a baby, who got married and who died (“hatch, match and dispatch,” as it is known in the trade).
But if Jewish weeklies are allowed to fade, American Jewish life will have been diminished.
Jewish communities are as much a state of mind as they are a geographic fact. They are webs of public observance and personal practice, the religious and the secular, machers and the rest of us. Jewish weeklies serve a coalescing function, reminding readers what they share as residents of a community, and as members of a people.
Jewish newspapers tell the kinds of stories that other publications, outlets and news sites can’t or won’t tell. We report on the trends, people and institutions that may not make headlines outside our communities but have enormous significance within the “family.”
A good Jewish newspaper also encourages activism — it can rile people up to demand more of their leaders, do a good deed or defend the things they believe in. It shows them the ways their philanthropy can benefit the less fortunate. That was why federations went into the newspaper business in the first place.
A Jewish newspaper is a friendly, unthreatening and commitment-free way to reach Jews who are reluctant to enter “typical” institutional settings.
Finally, the Jewish press is one of the last settings to represent Jewish community in all its diversity. Within our pages, Orthodox must confront Reform, hawks must deal with doves, upstarts can learn from veterans. It’s a conversation that is happening almost nowhere else.
Is helping to sustain this kind of conversation the business of a Jewish philanthropic fund? Look at it this way: Some in journalism are looking to the nonprofit business model to save the profession. Champions of nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica and local news sites like MinnPost.com say it is a compelling philanthropic interest to sustain the instruments of democracy and community identity. Federations can boast that they got there first.
When I left my previous position as managing editor of the Forward, I brought with me a framed quotation by Irving Howe: “The single greatest journalistic quality of the Forward was the sustained curiosity it brought to the life of its own people.”
It’s a quote that represents the aspirations of anyone in the ethnic press. If Jewish newspapers are allowed to wither, that curiosity will be gone, and American Jewry will have lost a sustained conversation on how we live, pray, eat, argue, suffer, celebrate and help one another become a Jewish community.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor-in-chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News.
In Cairo, a Home Run — and an Error
The Hour
By Leonard Fein
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
When it comes down to it, I am glad, even relieved, not to be president of the United States. That’s not to say there aren’t not some pretty nifty perks that come with the job — no security lines at the airport, no running out of laundry detergent or pita chips, no traffic jams, first-run movies on demand, and also “Hail to the Chief,” plus lots of ruffles and flourishes.
But there’s a high price to pay for all that. Some significant number of people will pretty much despise you no matter what you do, and most others will cut you only so much slack. Sooner rather than later, you have to deliver. And you have to know that every word you utter will be scrutinized, all the more so if you are known for the care you take with words.
Until last week, basketball, President Obama’s favorite sport, was also a fitting metaphor for his rhetoric. He’s an all-purpose forward, sometimes leaping and dunking, sometimes taking and making a mid-distance jump short, sometimes shooting, as they say, from downtown, and a solid defender to boot. Whether he can be Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, let alone Michael Jordan, necessarily remains to be seen — but no question, even this early, that he’s at the very least a verbal prodigy.
Recently, the metaphor shifted to a different sport. There he stood in Cairo, with the whole world watching, and the challenge — essentially of his own making — was to hit a home run. Which is exactly what he seemed to do.
I say “seemed” because there’s a substantial difference between seeing and hearing the Cairo speech as delivered and, later, reading it carefully. The live event was stunning as theater. The venue, the enthusiasm of audience and commentators, the audacity of its candor, its manifest decency — all to the good. An inside-the-park home run, I thought. Little soaring rhetoric, but much, very much, to chew on. Even upon reflection, with the dispiriting realization that there was no one on base at the time and that, as the president himself acknowledged, one speech was not about to change history, this was an address meant to make room for the new beginning it promised.
But to read the speech is to come away with a rather more restrained response. There was something in it for pretty nearly everyone, and that is a handy warning sign. My own reservations are more than a quibble, even if less than a full-blown critique of a speech so honorable in intention, so impressive in scope and so cleansing in substance.
One reservation: For Israelis, as for Jews in general, there was Obama’s “recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” And again, the next day, in Buchenwald, where he said that Israel rose “out of the destruction of the Holocaust.”
The sentiment is familiar; we ourselves have for years now used the “from ashes to rebirth” formula to summarize the relationship between the Holocaust and Israel. We take young Jews from around the world on the “March of the Living,” which starts in Auschwitz and ends in Israel. Foreign dignitaries visiting Israel are routinely introduced to our people’s saga by a solemn visit to Yad Vashem. Want to know where we have come from, in what way Israel is an answer to the sorrows of our past? Come stand silently in the Hall of Remembrance. So we can hardly blame others for adopting the theme we have so regularly put forward.
But the formulation essentially starts the story of Israel in 1933, when Hitler came to power, or in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, or in 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The modern unfolding of the story in fact begins much earlier. It begins with Moses Hess’s “Rome and Jerusalem” in 1862, or with Leon Pinsker’s “Auto-Emancipation” in 1882, or with the beginning of the return to the land in that same year, or with Theodore Herzl’s “The Jewish State” in 1896, or with the First Zionist Congress in Basel a year later or with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and most of all there are the waves of Jews who made their way to Palestine “to build it and be rebuilt by it.”
The history of Israel’s renewal and rebirth is rich, dense — and of course, if one wishes, it is a history that goes back not a century or so but millennia. And when the British left Palestine in 1948 (and India in the same year), they did so for their reasons, not for ours. The Holocaust may have accelerated the emergence of the Jewish state; it was not its source. And — here’s the reason it matters — to suggest, in Cairo no less, that it was its source is to reinforce the Arab complaint that it is they who have had to pay Europe’s IOU to the Jews.
It does President Obama neither service nor favor to regard him as flawless. Admiration and praise, yes; idolization, never. Carefully read, the Cairo speech was, in fact, flawed. Carefully read, it also warrants praise. For whatever its errors of commission and omission, it was wise, humane and timely to say, as the president did, that “if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.” That is not, as some have charged, an instance of moral equivalence; it is an assertion of moral imperative.
Security Guard Killed in Holocaust Museum Shooting
By Eric Fingerhut (JTA)
Published June 10, 2009.
An 88-year-old white supremacist shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday before being shot by two other museum security guards.
Stephen Tyrone Johns, who was on the security staff of the museum for six years, died after being taken to George Washington Hospital in Washington. The shooter, identified as James Wenneker Von Brunn, was taken to the same hospital. Authorities said his injuries were serious. A third man was injured by shattered glass and was treated at the scene.
The attack marks the fourth time in the last month that Jewish sites or people have been targeted for attack in the United States. The man who killed a Jewish Wesleyan University student a month ago was found with a copy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion;” police infiltrated a group of terrorists plotting to bomb a pair of Bronx synagogues, and the shooter at an Arkansas military recruiting center was found to have conducted research on Jewish sites.
Von Brunn entered the museum sometime after 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon with a rifle and opened fire near the metal detectors at the museum’s entrance, according to police and museum officials.
Von Brunn, who reportedly lives in Annapolis, Md., was identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a long-time white supremacist and anti-Semite who is a retired Naval reserve officer and World War II veteran. The ADL said he has a self-published anti-Semitic book titled “Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog” (rough Hebrew for “Kill the Best Gentiles”), as well as many anti-Semitic essays. He also created an anti-Semitic Web site, HolyWesternEmpire.org.
In 1981, von Brunn, then living in New Hampshire, was arrested at the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Board after he tried to use a sawed-off shotgun to take board members hostage. He was convicted of attempted armed kidnapping, second-degree burglary, assault with a dangerous weapon, carrying a pistol without a license and two counts of possession of a prohibited weapon. He was sentenced to four to 11 years in prison in 1983. He ended up serving more than six years.
Police say Von Brunn appeared to have acted alone.
Witnesses told JTA of the chaos and fear when the gunfire erupted.
Moti Shair of Silver Spring, Md., who was at the museum at the time of the shooting with family in town from Israel, said he had stepped outside to take a phone call and was just steps away from the gunfire.
“I could hear some of the bullets,” he said. Shair said he ducked for cover until the shooting was over.
Daniela Castillo, who was part of a large group of Jehovah’s Witnesses from Mexico touring the museum, said she was in the gift shop when the group heard gunfire. Everyone in the shop was told to get on the floor, where they remained for about five minutes until they were led out a back door. “It was a little scary,” said Castillo, 31.
Lindsey Newman, 14, was standing outside the museum’s theater with her family waiting to hear a lecture from a Holocaust survivor when she heard four shots. She andher family were rushed into the theater, where they remained for about an hour.
“I thought we were going to die,” Newman said. With an attack at a museum dedicated to memorializing history’s greatest genocide, she said, “In a way it was history repeating itself in a much smaller way.”
The museum had been scheduled to host an invitation-only premiere of the play “Anne and Emmett” on Wednesday night. Written by Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former defense secretary William Cohen, the production featured a imaginary meeting between Holocaust victim Anne Frank and Emmett Till, an African-American lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman.
The museum said it will be closed Thursday in memory of Johns, the security guard who was killed, and the museum’s flags will be flown at half staff.
CEOs Should Lead
Editorial
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
In his new book on Jewish leadership, Rabbi David Teutsch reminds us that one of the most important aspects of leadership is serving as a role model. “You can say a great deal, but what you do is much more powerful than anything you can say,” he writes. “The synagogue whose president never attends services or adult education classes has a problem because that person is failing to model the values and behaviors he or she is supposed to exemplify.”
Words are of high importance in Jewish culture, but as Teustch notes, deeds are even more so. As Jewish organizations around the country grapple with a perfect storm of plunging endowments, reduced giving, increased need and, for many, Madoff-induced financial distress, there has been plenty of talk about efficiency, hardship and sacrifice. The Forward decided to explore whether those words translated into deeds, and whether leaders of organizations where layoffs had occurred were modeling the values and behaviors we have a right to expect in the Jewish world.
Sadly, the answer in too many cases is no.
Of the 21 organizations we surveyed, only one-third of the top leaders committed to sharing the sacrifice — or, at least, to saying so publicly. Ten of the leaders took no hit at all, while another three didn’t respond to our repeated requests for information. Another two said they had reduced their salaries, but wouldn’t disclose by how much, leaving a disturbing credibility gap in their wake.
Some of the executives whose salaries declined spoke of the ethical dimension of their behavior. Some of the executives whose salaries remained untouched displayed an arrogance stunning for this time, or any time. Howard Rieger, president and CEO of United Jewish Communities, all but dismissed executive pay cuts as “political,” even though his organization has laid off 31 staff members over the last year while his salary and annual expense allowance topped out at more than $700,000. And that was just in 2006-07.
Symbolism is important, no doubt about it, but the power of a pay cut extends further and deeper. Ten percent of some of these top salaries can literally save a rank-and-file job. (The fact that there exists such a profound salary gap in some Jewish organizations is a disturbing issue for another day.)
Moreover, nonprofit organizations that exist to serve the Jewish community ought to exemplify the empathy they ask of us. We are asked to join, to donate, to volunteer, to offer up the hours and miles and sweat and money out of a deep caring for our fellow Jews and fellow human beings. But if the man in the corner office — and it’s nearly always a man — does not hold himself accountable to his workers and clients, then the organization is bankrupt, no matter what the balance sheet says.
This is not the time to withhold support out of anger or disgust; the needs today are too urgent. Instead, it’s the time to demand accountability from Jewish organizations and their governing boards. If jobs are lost and services denied, then members and clients ought to be able to know why.
And while we’re asking, let someone explain why the leadership of the 21 organizations examined by the Forward — and others not included because they did not cut staff — is comprised of nearly all men. The only woman on the list is Morlie Levin, national executive director of Hadassah. And here’s an astonishing fact found in the public record: In 2006-2007, Levin earned $285,847, while her (male) chief operating officer, Larry Blum, made $305,750. Could it be that even at a venerable women’s organization, a man earns more than his female boss? Hadassah declined to explain, noting only that Levin quietly left her position last month and has not yet been replaced. Blum is still there.
Several months ago, the Forward offered to convene a public conversation between Jewish communal leaders and members of the communities they serve. Many readers sent in their questions and concerns to feedback@forward.com. Precious few leaders waved their hands to respond.
The offer stands, and it’s now more important than ever.
Montgomery to Ramallah
Editorial
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
President Obama’s June 4 address in Cairo to the Muslim world has by now been thoroughly parsed, analyzed and critiqued with Talmudic intensity. Stunning and significant, the address also left some listeners wanting more — more about their pain and others’ responsibilities. Some complained about things that were in the speech, and some complained about things that were missing.
Many Jews have expressed a justified concern that Obama linked the founding of Israel entirely to the Holocaust, omitting any reference to decades of Zionist thought and advocacy, never mind the hard work of building the land that has been our spiritual and physical home for millennia. Whether that was an intentional misreading of history, or an unintentional slight, probably depends on one’s view of the president.
In the rush to note what wasn’t in the speech, however, an important point may have been overlooked. For an African-American president to bring up race in the context of a major speech to the Muslim world was brave and risky. Obama did it anyway.
“Palestinians must abandon violence,” he said. “Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”
Violence, he went on to say, “is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”
For years, many have wondered why Palestinians have not adopted the tactics of nonviolence from the American civil rights movement, and here Obama gave public voice to that point, without qualification.
The two struggles are not analogous; the comparison can go too far. But though history never precisely repeats itself, it serves us up lessons and challenges. “Pure nonviolence could tell Israelis that Palestinians are willing to live next to them,” Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg wrote recently. “Sainthood can work. Britain abandoned India; Montgomery’s buses were desegregated.”
Wondering why “there is no Palestinian Gandhi,” Gorenberg imagines an elaborate scene of Palestinian nonviolent protest and Israeli reaction, all leading to possible negotiation. Fantasy, he acknowledges. But now, thanks to the speech in Cairo, someone else has given voice to such imaginings, too.
When Moses Saved the Man of Steel
Wonders of America
COURTESY JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT
Thou Shalt Read Comics: Dell’s squeaky clean Bible stories rehabilitated the form.
By Jenna Weissman Joselit
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
For millennia, people came by their knowledge of Moses, the Ten Commandments, and Adam and Eve by reading the Bible and its commentaries. But since the 1940s, and well into our own day, comic books such as Dell Publishing Company’s 1957 “Moses and the Ten Commandments,” a brightly colored, exclamation-ridden account of the ancient biblical tale, and R. Crumb’s forthcoming “The Book of Genesis” (W.W. Norton), arguably the most important comic book version of the Bible ever, continue to give the original text a run for its money.
At first blush, the association between the Bible and the comic book undoubtedly occasions a raised eyebrow or two. Given the latter’s smirky sensibility and gee-whiz cadences, it is hard to imagine a more inhospitable venue in which to encounter the word of God. All the same, graphic versions of holy writ have long taken hold of the American imagination and show no signs of letting go, underscoring the complex and entangled relationship between popular culture and religion in modern-day America.
Still, many Americans of an earlier generation were quick to voice their displeasure, insisting that the comics trivialized and dishonored the Bible. What’s more, these critical voices were even quicker to attribute a raft of societal problems, from the spread of communism to the eruption of juvenile delinquency, to the comic book’s luridly illustrated pages. As David Hajdu relates in “The Ten-Cent Plague” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), his sprightly account of the nation’s relationship comic books bore the brunt of considerable cultural anxiety about the nation’s moral well-being. The stuff of long, drawn-out public hearings, the wildly popular medium set Congress’s teeth on edge, provoked parents into helpless sputtering and prompted the nation’s clergy, especially its Catholic priests and nuns, to insist that “comics are crimes against our children.”
Of all the institutions that cast a woeful eye on comic books, the American Catholic Church was most zealous in its disapproval, all but anathematizing them as the work of the devil — or his close kin, the Jews. This most vernacular of American print media was “neither Christian nor American,” categorically declared the Catechetical Guild, an authoritative Catholic organization, in 1944, as it condemned the large number of Jews who made a living from publishing and illustrating comic books, among them the inventors of Batman and Superman. Placing these stalwarts of the comic book industry, as well as their products, beyond the pale, the church not only orchestrated boycotts of local newsstand and candy store proprietors who carried comics, but also went much further still by encouraging its young faithful to burn them in spectacular bonfires. Book burnings?! In the good ole’ US of A? And just a few short years after World War II?
While we might find it hard to comprehend, much less condone, the church’s actions, its supporters had no qualms on that score. On the contrary. In the wake of one such event conducted in 1948 by the parochial school students of Binghamton, N.Y.’s St. Patrick’s Academy, The Catholic Sun actually heaped praise on their incendiary efforts, writing that they were “to be congratulated for they have earned the respect and regard of every good American.”
Even as it torched the comic book’s reputation, the Catholic Church devised another strategy to minimize and contain its impact: the publication of its own, internally sanctioned comic book versions of Scripture and church teachings. Grudgingly aware that their animadversions went only so far, church leaders decided to give the competition pause by both sponsoring and endorsing “Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact,” which deployed several of the tamer visual conventions of the comic book to explore a wide array of traditional subjects, from the lives of saints to the importance of Lent and the history of Gregorian chant. Its bold graphics, pithy prose and action-packed sequences sought to energize Catholicism, rendering it active, modern and relevant to a young American audience increasingly fond of superheroes.
Those interested in reading “Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact” would not find it on the corner newsstand. The product was distributed exclusively through the good graces of the parochial school. Dell Comics was another matter entirely. Thanks, no doubt, to its reassuring credo, “Dell Comics are good comics,” and to its pledge to parents that the contents of each and every one of its comic books contained “only clean and wholesome entertainment,” it successfully positioned itself as an alternative to both Catholic-oriented comics and their more unbridled, secular counterparts. “Moses and the Ten Commandments” was a case in point. Capitalizing on the success of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic film, “The Ten Commandments,” the comic strip version added another layer to the steadily growing corpus of Decalogue-related events, monuments and artifacts that swept the nation in the mid-1950s.
Largely faithful to the contours of the age-old story, “Moses and the Ten Commandments” sped up the plot, spiced up the biblical language with lots of “Eeeee’s”, “Aha’s” and “Uh’s,” and depicted the story of the Exodus and the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai as one hell of an adventure yarn. As for Moses, nothing — neither fearsome lions nor cruel pharaohs — could keep him from righting society’s wrongs. A hero well worth emulating, the Moses who emerged from these pages saved the day. Redeeming the comic book in the process, “Moses and the Ten Commandments” and the other religiously themed graphic accounts that have steadily followed in its wake remind us more than half a century later that, in modern America, religion and popular culture are not mortal enemies, but bosom buddies like Batman and Robin.
Israel’s Invisible Neighbors, Filmed
Cannes
MARCEl HARTMAN
Watching Himself, Not Quite At Home: Saleh Bakri plays Suleiman’s young father.
By Karine Cohen-Dicker
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Director Elia Suleiman’s new film, “The Time That Remains,” details Arab Israelis’ shattered dreams — and plays it for laughs.
Suleiman is a Palestinian filmmaker whose personal take on being a foreigner on his own soil often tickles the funny bone while sparking political consciousness.
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“There is sometimes a pleasure to make a film under occupation, because you feel like you are a hero, but you don’t want to sound cliché,” he confessed at the recent Cannes International Film Festival, where the movie premiered.
His 2002 film, “Divine Intervention,” a poignant love story of two Palestinians separated by a checkpoint, won the Cannes Jury Prize. This time, the 48-year-old Nazareth native arrived on the French Riviera with a four-chaptered feature chronicling his family’s daily life following the statehood of Israel. It begins in 1948 and catches up to the director in middle age (where he plays himself). We see Suleiman as a schoolboy rebel, exile and soldier of resistance through his art.
Suleiman crafted “The Time That Remains” mostly from notes and diary entries by his late father and from the letters his mother frequently sent to her family in exile. Moments of levity defy the overall gravity.
Visual gags provoke sighs and giggles. One scene features an Israeli tank trying to remain locked on a Palestinian walking back and forth as he chats nonchalantly on his cell phone. The man is clearly no enemy of the state, and the absurdity of the heavy artillery trying to keep pace with him elicits a knowing chuckle. Throughout “The Time That Remains,” Suleiman keeps a steady eye, wryly observing the bitter and the sweet. When he trains the camera on himself later in the movie, he remains still, his eyes conveying that he is helpless to change the outcome.
Watching Himself, Not Quite At Home: Suleiman plays his own older father.
“The camera doesn’t move, so you have the opportunity as an actor to do whatever you want,” commented Saleh Bakri, who plays Suleiman’s father, Fuad.
Other touches of restraint amplify the tragicomic impact. As with classical drama, the violence takes place off-camera, leaving viewers to their own imaginations. The beautiful music and songs ratchet up the pathos. Bouts of silence punctuate the storytelling. Suleiman says he uses the quiet as moments of truth for the audience to meditate upon. In effect, the intervals allow the viewer to mine tears from the laughter.
“I did a cinematic film with a universal message,” Suleiman said. “We do face challenges in telling a story without giving historical information. History is debatable, and historic events are argumentative.”
The “history” he refers to is, of course, the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. It isn’t exactly an obvious source of comedy, but Suleiman has a knack for immersing viewers in ridiculous moments, determined to let them in on the joke.
He is a coy provocateur who must walk a tightrope in his work and when talking about his work. He steers clear of discussing the political pressure he faces. He says he tires of the attention the Middle East receives, pointing out that artists in some African nations are confronted with far more obstacles.
“People are under occupation in all parts of the world,” he said. “Israel is an old story already. Look around. Lack of freedom, lack of democracy.”
Suleiman had to appreciate the irony of shooting a movie about military tension while fighting erupted in Gaza in January, adding an off-screen chapter to the director’s saga.
“I might face more pressure than a director that doesn’t live in any kind of occupation,” he said, “but you meditate and come back with more tools.”
Shades of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati are often said to shadow the filmmaker’s tragicomic approach. No matter what the references, the result in “The Time That Remains” is powerful and poetic.
Suleiman isn’t beyond adopting the style that many perceive to be an enemy for a little comic relief. He has always claimed admiration for Jewish writers, once speaking of his “conceptually Jewish” humor at the 2002 New York Film Festival. He mentioned in this interview that he is more influenced by Primo Levi, the Italian-Jewish writer who survived Auschwitz, than by any filmmaker.
It also should be noted that the co-producer of “The Time That Remains” and “Divine Intervention,” Avi Kleinberger, is an Israeli Jew, and one of the cast, Menashe Noy, is a well-known Israeli actor who, for the sake of his career, is counting on the probability that the movie will not open in Israeli theaters.
Among Arabs, Suleiman’s films often polarize opinion. After receiving a few negative comments, mostly from Arabic-speaking journalists at a Cannes press conference, he snapped back in English:
“How come that the only people who react violently and check the catalog and want to know where the money comes from, etc., are always the Arabs? Every time something succeeds and it is an Arab person or an Arab film, the first persons to attack it are the Arabs.”
The distribution of his movies reflects commercial limitations on all sides. “Divine Intervention” rode the momentum of its Cannes award to a limited run in the United States and several other countries. As of today, “The Time That Remains” is scheduled to open only in France. It conceivably could play in the West Bank, though there is only one screen left in Ramallah (where the film was mostly shot) and Jenin. None of those engagements could possibly make up for the film’s $6.5 million production cost, which, for the record, was underwritten by backers from France, Italy, Belgium, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Kleinberger told a French newspaper he was hopeful that “The Time That Remains” would screen in Israel. Suleiman has written and directed several full-length features since 1996, none of which has ever made it into an Israeli theater except for film festivals.
The popularity of his movies is perhaps shackled by his highlighting of regular people partaking in such mundane activities as sipping coffee and dealing with everyday problems, instead of extreme characters, such as the disenfranchised friends who become suicide bombers in “Paradise Now” by Hany Abu-Hassad.
Suleiman’s films reflect a quieter resistance. He insisted that he is not making movies about Palestinians per se. The problem is that his works are always labeled along with other “minorities,” he said. While shrinking from a role as a spokesman for Palestinian cinema, he still sees a brighter future for Palestinian films. The more Palestinian exiles, the more films they will create, because they “find themselves in other spaces since they couldn’t in their own country.”
Presenting the lighter side of oppression isn’t for everyone, but he remains confident that he can reach different audiences. “There is always a possibility to change the world,” he said. “Not only for Palestine.”
The film, suggestively, shares its title with a book by Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher who has written about film. However, when asked about his title, Suleiman was vague. It’s linked to the “global situation we are living in,” he said and called “The Time That Remains” a term that represents Absentees — the rootless Arab Israelis to whom he has dedicated his art.
“There is nothing too hopeful in the title,” he said. “It is hopeful by defect.”
For a politically charged filmmaker who strives to generate smiles through the outrage, that is no laughing matter.
Karine Cohen-Dicker is a French journalist who currently lives in New York.
Calling the Faithful To Witness
On Language
By Philologos
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
‘I am a Christian,” President Obama declared in his June 4 address in Cairo, “but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan (sic) at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”
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Although many English speakers know the word “muezzin,” “azan” (the double a in “azaan” represents a long Arabic vowel, which is generally not indicated in English transliteration) is less often come across. (This indeed may have been the reason that it was chosen by the president or his speechwriters, who -— careful to insert several Arabic words into his talk — preferred a word that indicated a familiarity with Islam.) The muezzin calls the faithful to prayer; the azan is the prayer call itself. In classical Arabic, as well as in some regional Arabic speech, the words are pronounced mu’aththan (with the doubled “th,” as in “them,” and the accent on the next-to-last syllable) and athan (accent on the last syllable). The substitution of “z” for “th” is a peculiarity of Egyptian Arabic, whose pronunciation, which English has followed, was appropriate for Obama’s talk, because he was speaking to an Egyptian audience.
It is also the Egyptian pronunciation that most rings a bell with those of us who know Hebrew, because mu’azzan and azan are cognates of the Hebrew word ozen, “ear” which in Egyptian Arabic is uzun). The Hebrew word ma’azin, “listener,” is even more like mu’azzan, the difference being that the mu’azzan gives voice, while the ma’azin — which in modern Israeli Hebrew denotes a member of a lecture or radio audience — lends an ear. Yet it is curious that in the Bible, the verb he’ezin almost always occurs in a solemn religious context, often one invoking the act of witnessing. Thus, for example, Moses, in his poetic farewell address to the people of Israel before his death in the Book of Deuteronomy, begins, “Listen to me [ha’azinu], you heavens, and I will speak.” The free medieval Judeo-Aramaic paraphrase of the Bible known as the Targum Yerushalmi or “Jerusalem translation,” which was undertaken in Palestine in early Islamic times, goes: “When the time came for Moses to leave this world, he said, ‘I call as my witness [ana mas’hid] the heavens and the earth, which will never die in this world.’”
It is interesting, in this regard, that the azan is a call to witness, too. After repeating four times Allahu akbar, “God is the greatest,” the mu’azzan repeats twice, “Ash’hadu [a cognate of the Aramaic mas’hid] an la ilaha illallah,” “I bear witness that there is no other God but Allah,” and twice, “Ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah,” “I bear witness that Mohammad is the messenger of God.” The last two statements, when combined, form the shahada, the Muslim “witnessing” or declaration of faith, which is recited daily by Muslims and is incumbent on the convert embracing Islam. (From here, too, comes the Arabic word shahid, “religious martyr,” much encountered in the media these days.)
Is there then some historical, rather than merely linguistic, connection between Hebrew he’ezin and Arabic mu’azzan and azan? It is not impossible. Islam, in its earliest stages, took a great deal from Judaism, which in later periods borrowed as much if not more from Islam. Conceivably, the Arabic verb azzana, to issue a solemn proclamation, from which both mu’azzan and azan come, was influenced by Hebrew he’ezin. (One also must not rule out an influence on the shahada of the Jewish declaration of faith, the “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”) But it is also possible that the vector ran the other way, and that it was Islam that influenced such things as the Targum Yerushalmi’s translation of Deuteronomy.
In any case, ancient Judaism, as far as we know, did not have anything like the Muslim azan or the Christian ringing of church bells to call the faithful to prayer. The closest thing to it that I know of was the custom in parts of the Jewish world, during the middle-of-the-night penitential prayers said in the month of Elul, to go from house to house waking the worshippers. In Eastern Europe this was generally done by the shamash or synagogue sexton, who went about banging on doors and windows and crying out something like, “Shtey uf, shtey uf, tsu avoydes haboyre,” “Get up, get up, to worship your Creator.”
The azan is far more majestic. Indeed, living as I do in a town in Israel near enough to a neighboring Arab village to hear its muezzins sing out the azzan five times a day over the loudspeakers of its mosques, I can testify that I never really tire of it. Even in the middle of the night — especially in the middle of the night — it is a haunting chant. Never mind that it’s all done today with electronic tapes and timers.
It is still full of the starry night and of the great silences of the desert in which a human voice can carry for miles. I hear it in my sleep and turn over in bed and put off getting up till the morning.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com
A Note on Fathers
Personal Reflections on a ‘Real’ Jewish Dad
By Max Gross
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
There’s an old joke about a boy who comes running home from Hebrew school shouting: “Mommy, Mommy! I just got a part in the school play!”
Kurt Hoffman
“That’s wonderful, dear,” the mother replies. “What’s the role?”
“I’m going to be playing the part of the Jewish father.”
“Don’t worry,” the mother says, “next year you’ll get a speaking part.”
I suppose the joke is mildly amusing because it traffics in the well-trod notion that a Jewish mother is pushy and assertive and a Jewish father is meek and humble. Despite Philip Roth’s demurrals that his mother was nothing like the hysterical Sophie Portnoy in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” nobody bought it. When Roth attempted to upend the image of the Jewish father in “Zuckerman Unbound,” no one bought that, either.
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I can only speak from my own experience, but in my house, Dad was no pushover. In fact, I have never known anybody as brash and assertive as my old man (and that includes my balabuste mother).
This is oftentimes to his detriment. There’s nothing uglier than getting into an argument with my father. He’s a smart guy who’s tough to debate.And he’s stubborn. If he feels he’s right, he refuses to back down. This can lead to days of punishing silence.
But, on this Father’s Day, I would invite my readers to take a second look at paternal aggression. Every once in a while, it’s necessary — and sort of awesome.
One incident in particular occurred about a decade or so ago, when I was home from college for the summer. I accompanied my father to Dean & DeLuca one afternoon to do some shopping, and as he waited on the deli line, he told me to stake out a spot on the checkout line.
My arms were filled with groceries, and I stared off at some of the more shapely shoppers as I waited, thinking of nothing in particular.
“Register opening!” a checkout girl shouted.
I quickly walked over to her register and began stacking my groceries on the counter.
But before I had put them all down, an older, stout man pushed my groceries out of the way and put down his own basket.
“I was here first,” he declared, looking me in the eye, daring me to disagree.
Maybe he had been there first — I honestly don’t remember. It’s possible that he had been waiting for the other register and felt he was within his rights to take the first spot at the newly opened one. But I wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation. I decided not to object.
My adversary wasn’t at all assuaged by my nonresponse.
“You believe this guy?” he said to the checkout girl (who looked as if she really, really didn’t want to get involved). “Tried to cut in line!”
I didn’t say anything.
A moment or two later, my father huddled up next to me with more groceries and began to take out his wallet — unaware of what had happened while he was gone.
As my adversary got his receipt, he looked at me once more and snarled: “Punk!”
My father suddenly froze. He then looked up, and in no more than a moment, his face turned red.
“What did you call him?”
“You heard me.”
I put my hand on his shoulder to tell him that it wasn’t a big deal and that we should just ignore this fellow, but my father was already too far gone to be pacified.
“How dare you!” he said, taking a step toward our adversary. “Don’t you ever call my son a punk! He’s the least punklike person I’ve ever met!”
I still think back on the phrase “least punklike person I’ve ever met” lovingly. It wasn’t just a moment when my father had his emotions up and was defending his son against an outside attacker — he was defending me on aesthetic grounds, as well. He was defending my character. How could anyone view a nice teenage kid like myself as a punk? It was unfathomable for him. And the defense came without even a moment to think about the matter (maybe I was a punk — or had done something punkish). No, it was downright ludicrous to assume that I was a punk.
The guy took a step back, perhaps realizing that suddenly, the situation had become unstable. He muttered something under his breath and left.
“What happened?” my father asked. I related the incident, and my dad, the checkout girl and I all commiserated on what a jerk that guy was.
But as we stepped out of the store, our adversary was waiting — with a friend (who, I admit, was also middle-aged and soft around the middle).
“Look!” our adversary cried. “It’s the punk!”
But my father was not about to take any abuse. He stared at our adversary with cold, unblinking eyes. His body was stiff, ready for a fight. He didn’t say much, but the short sentence uttered was not something I could repeat in a family newspaper, and was spoken with the kind of fervor that would make any normal person in the world quiver.
Our adversary was unprepared for such a display of unalloyed toughness. He and his friend slunk away — having lost this confrontation decisively.
And for a moment, nothing in the whole world was quite as thrilling. I’m sure that if you asked me whom my father was more like, John Wayne or Woody Allen, I would have no problem going with Woody Allen. But at that moment, he was all John Wayne. Whoever said that Jewish fathers didn’t have sturdy spines clearly didn’t know what they were talking about. As a people, the Jews have been toughened up by many years of hardship. And I think Jewish fathers are not all that different. My father was defending himself and his son, without apologies or equivocations. How was that any different from old John Wayne, six-shooter in hand, telling the local riff-raff to stay out of his territory?
Granted, it was against a couple of middle-aged fat men, but still.
Max Gross is a reporter for the New York Post, and the author of “From Schlub to Stud: How To Embrace Your Inner Mensch and Conquer the Big City” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2008).
How We Remember
An Author Examines the Ways Jews Memorialize Holocaust Victims
By Jeri Zeder
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
For the longest time, Hasia R. Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, was troubled by the unexamined but widely held belief that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, American Jews did little, if anything, to memorialize the 6 million Jews murdered in Europe. So she decided to have a look for herself. Based on research that took her seven years to complete, and fills 24 file cabinet drawers, Diner refutes the notion in her new book, “We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962” (NYU Press). The book details how, nationwide, Jews in those years memorialized the victims, documented the catastrophe, mobilized for survivors, sought justice from Germany, and used the Holocaust both to advance a political agenda and to build a Jewish future in America. She spoke with Forward contributor Jeri Zeder about memory, truth and the ethical obligations of historians.
Our History: Hasia Diner discusses her new book.
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Jeri Zeder: How are people receiving your message that the “myth of silence” is just that, a myth?
Hasia Diner: It flies in the face of what they know… they often will say, “But I don’t remember it that way.” I think certain narratives about the past get planted in the public consciousness, and people in essence re-remember their own experiences in light of what seems to be the dominant motif.
J.Z.: As a historical matter, what do you think made scholars and other writers perpetuate the myth and actually believe it?
H.D.: The real answer is, that’s a subject that relates to American Jewish history following the period covered in my book; it requires further scholarship. But from my point of view, the myth of silence began in the late 1960s and was pioneered by young Jews involved in a thoroughgoing critique of American culture generally, and American Jewish culture in particular. Many of them went on to become academics, rabbis and community leaders, and repeated the same message in their public writings. What they said remained part of the historical record and was used as evidence by later historians.
At the same time, the term “Holocaust,” “genocide,” came to be appropriated by other groups. Many American Jews began to think that the “Jewish establishment” had ceded the Holocaust to others. More recently, Norman Finkelstein, in his book “The Holocaust Industry,” says that American Jews couldn’t have cared less about the Holocaust until they wanted to use it to buttress and defend Israel. So, the increasing controversy and divisiveness of the Israel issue also plays a very important role in articulating this argument.
J.Z.: It seems to me that the way you defined the word “memorial” freed you to come up with the thematic categories you used to organize the book.
H.D.: American Jews in the postwar period faced a set of challenges and circumstances that Jews in the 1980s and ’90s didn’t. The idea that they didn’t build memorials, because there is no single iconic hunk of stone in the ground someplace, is to me very narrow. Memorials come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, formats and flavors. For example, the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods worked very actively for the passage of the Genocide Convention. They would say, if this is passed, it will be a fitting memorial to the 6 million. How could one argue with that position? That’s how they saw it.
J.Z.: At the end of the book, you draw a serious moral conclusion: that in failing to acknowledge the historical record of Holocaust remembrance just after the war, and here I’m quoting you, “historians and others produced a flawed history and perpetrated an injustice on the past.” What do you mean?
H.D.: By saying they didn’t do this and they didn’t do that, when in fact they did, is, I think, a failure of historians to take their own professional obligations seriously. And I think that we don’t have the right to do that.
J.Z.: Why should we now, today, care that this is the real history?
H.D.: There are political statements being made today that pivot around this false history. On one extreme, people say American Jews were these shallow, obsequious assimilators in the 1950s, and it was only because of Israel’s heroism in the ’67 war that they were able to come out of the their almost Marrano-like status and be honest and truthful. That places American Jewry, which obviously has a very complicated relationship with Israel, in a subordinate position. In the contemporary world, that’s very unhealthy. On the other extreme, people like Norman Finkelstein say American Jews only started caring about the Holocaust much later, when it served the purposes of building up support for Israel. Well, if that’s not true, then that puts into question statements about how American Jews interact with Israel now. One can criticize contemporary Holocaust commemoration, and one can criticize American Jewish engagement with Israel. But it ought not to be based on false history.
Jeri Zeder is a writer living in the Boston area.
Zombie Nazi’s Film Debut
LIV ASK/EUFORIA FILM
Spoof: College students are stalked by Nazi zombies in a new movie from Norway.
By Alex Suskind
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
If we’ve learned anything about scary movies, it’s that the living dead are not to be taken lightly. What could be worse than a crowd of zombies — foaming at the mouth and oozing with blood — chasing after you in the dark night? Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola has found the answer in his new horror spoof, “Dead Snow.” The film is about a group of friends who are hunted not by your traditional brain-crazed zombies, but rather by Nazi zombies, while stranded in the snow-covered mountains of Northern Norway.
“It was an idea of, how can we make zombies even more evil? Nazi zombies, of course,” Wirkola told The Shmooze. “There has never been in film history, as we can remember, a zombie film in the snow. Something with the blood in the snow and the Nazi uniforms… it gives [the movie] good images.”
The story begins with a group of college students who take an Easter holiday trip to the mountains. They soon learn from a creepy yet knowledgeable elder that the land was once traversed by members of the Third Reich, who stole gold and silver from the local population. As legend has it, the locals did not take too kindly to this. Armed with axes, knives and spades, the townspeople chased and trapped the platoon in the mountains, where the German soldiers froze to death. When the students stumble upon the long-lost stolen gold, the Nazi zombies, who will kill anyone who stands between them and their fortune, climb out of their icy graves to terrorize the helpless young travelers.
“Normal zombies are into just flesh and blood and brains. But these zombies are just killing machines,” Wirkola said.
The film, which opens June 19 in New York City and June 26 in Los Angeles, takes the classic zombie genre to a whole new level.
Rematch: Maccabi Tel Aviv Takes On the N.Y. Knicks
By Nathan Burstein
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
Israel’s best basketball team is taking on the NBA.
MACCABI ELECTRA TEL AVIV
Swish: Omri Casspi, shown here taking a shot, is among the players traveling to the U.S. to play the Knicks and the Clippers.
The stars of Maccabi Tel Aviv will face off against the New York Knicks in a charity exhibition game October 18 at Madison Square Garden. The game, which marks the second time the Israelis have faced off against the Knicks, will be followed two days later by Maccabi’s first ever match-up against the LA Clippers, who will have the home court advantage at the Staples Center. Both games will be played on behalf of Migdal Ohr, a social services and educational organization that runs a youth village for more than 6,000 underprivileged children in northern Israel.
“In this time of crisis for Jewish organizations trying to raise money, Migdal Ohr is in fact doubling down with these two games,” Robert Katz, the organization’s executive vice president, told The Shmooze.
Although the Israeli squad lost to the Knicks during the teams’ previous match-up, in October 2007, the defeat was not without distinction, selling 18,000 tickets and achieving an all-time attendance record for an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden.
Among the Israeli players scheduled to take part in the upcoming games is Omri Casspi, a forward with other plans involving the NBA. The 20-year-old Yavne native hopes to become the first Israeli picked up in the league’s first-round draft on June 25.
However he fares, Casspi will hear both Israel’s national anthem and “The Star-Spangled Banner” before October’s exhibition matches.
Maccabi’s rematch against the Knicks, scheduled for 1 p.m. in New York, will be broadcast live in primetime in Israel.
each Party, Israeli Style, Comes to New York
GETTY IMAGES
Summer Days: A Tel Aviv beach will be constructed in Central Park, in honor of the Israeli city’s centennial.
By Devra Ferst
Published June 10, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
New York is a city that seems to have it all, but for Israeli New Yorkers and Israel fanatics, it is sorely lacking one thing: the Tel Aviv beach. Host to many of Tel Aviv’s concerts, cafes and parties, it is the heartbeat of the city. On June 21, a small piece of Israeli beach life will come to New York for one day.
In honor of Tel Aviv’s centennial celebration, a 1,300-square-foot Tel Aviv shore front will be constructed in New York’s Central Park, at the Naumburg Bandshell at 70th Street, in the center of the park. The beach will be complete with lounge chairs and sun umbrellas, as well as such Israel seaside pastimes as shesh-besh (backgammon) and matkot, the Israeli paddle ball game that makes the ping-ping sound Israeli beachgoers know so well.
Of course, an authentic day on Tel Aviv’s beaches would be incomplete without a concert. Israeli radio personality and disc jockey Hadar Marks, the Israeli reggae group Hatikva 6 and the rock band Flow will perform throughout the day.
Adding to the virtual reality factor of the event, the entire day will be simulcast over the Internet for those who don’t live in the New York area.
Gunman Fires on Security Guards at U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.
By Haaretz
Published June 10, 2009.
A gunman walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on Wednesday and opened fire on security guards, police said.
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Sergeant David Schlosser, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police, said the gunman fired at two security guards who returned fire. One of the guards and the gunman were shot, but the extent of their injuries was not yet known.
The shooting occurred at about 1 P.M. and both the guard and the gunman were rushed to area hospitals, police officer Israel James said.
Fire department spokesman Alan Etter told CNN a third person was hurt after being cut by broken glass.
The gunman, identified by a witness as a white male with a silver gun, was taken into police custody. Various media reports named him as a well-known 89-year-old white supremacist, but police have not yet verified those speculations.
President Barack Obama said immediately following the incident that he was “saddened” by the attack and concerned for the health of the wounded guard.
The museum normally has a heavy security presence with guards positioned both inside and outside. All visitors are required to pass through metal detectors at the entrance, and bags are screened.
The museum, located just off the National Mall near the Washington Monument, is a popular tourist attraction. It draws about 1.7 million visitors each year.
Roads surrounding the museum have been closed.
Stephanie Geraghty, 28, who had been visiting the museum, said the shooter appeared to be a white male carrying a silver gun.
“I heard the first shot, it sounded like something had been dropped from the upper stories down,” she told Reuters. “The next two came really fast - bam bam. At that point everyone took off, chaos, running.”
A woman whose teenaged daughter was visiting the museum at the time of the shooting said that the children heard several gunshots before they were evacuated from the building.
Sandy Perkins says her daughter, Abigail, called her shortly after the shooting and said some of her friends were very shaken, but otherwise were fine.
The teens did not see where the shots were coming from before they were safely evacuated to buses outside the museum.
Last month, 21-year-old Jewish student Johanna Justin-Jinich was shot at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Authorities have called the attack an anti-Semitic incident.
Also last month, four New York men were arrested for allegedly plotting to bomb a Bronx synagogue.
Two Men Shot at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.
By Eric Fingerhut (JTA)
Published June 10, 2009.
Two men, including a security guard, were shot Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
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A man with a shotgun entered the museum shortly before 1 p.m. and opened fire on a security guard near the metal detectors at the facility’s entrance, according to media reports. The security guards returned fire and the gunman was wounded.
Both men have been transported to a local hospital. Their conditions are not yet known. A third man was reportedly injured by shattered glass and treated at the scene.
No information was yet available about the shooter or his motive. The museum has been evacuated.
In European Elections, Tough Times Drive Voters to Far Right
By Dina Kraft (JTA)
Published June 09, 2009.
Gains by anti-Semitic, xenophobic and racist far-right parties in June 4-7 elections for European Parliament were a reminder of how voters across Europe gravitate toward fringe parties and extremists during tough economic times.
As in the United States, Europe is experiencing levels of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression. The financial misery has given rise here to increased nationalism, skewing an election of representatives whose job is mostly to pass Europe-wide regulations on food and safety standards, the environment and internal market competition.
“As far as Jews are concerned, the election results are a warning that in a period of crisis people vote with extremists,” Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary general of the European Jewish Congress, told JTA from Paris. “It doesn’t matter if it is left or right to angry voters, as long as it is extreme.”
For the first time since the 1930s, a neo-fascist group in Britain, the British National Party, received enough votes to enter a legislative body. Of the two representatives the party will send to the EU Parliament in Brussels, one is Nick Griffin, a convicted Holocaust denier accused of chanting “Death to Jews!” at a 1981 political rally in Leeds.
Krisztina Morvai, the newly elected Hungarian parliamentarian from the far-right Jobbik party, blogged earlier this month in response to accusations of xenophobia, “I would be glad if the so-called proud Hungarian Jews would go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised d—s rather than vilifying me.”
Her party won three seats, marking Jobbik’s first entry into EU politics.
In Austria, far-right parties won 18 percent of the vote, a greater percentage than anywhere else in Europe. One of the parties, the Freedom Party, or FPO, campaigned with posters reading “FPO veto for Turkey and Israel in the EU.” With 13 percent of Austrian votes, the party more than doubled its share in the last European Parliament elections, in 2004.
The ascent of the far right amid record-low turnout of 43 percent of 388 million eligible voters was a message to European institutions that worries over immigration and anger over failed domestic policies take precedence over any pan-European agenda, analysts said.
About 30 of the 736 new European Parliament members come from extreme-right parties in countries such as Hungary, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, Romania and Bulgaria – up from 23 in 2004. The strongest showing in the elections was for center-right parties, which took victories across Europe and trounced their Socialist rivals. The centrist conservatives have the largest voting bloc in the Parliament.
But apathy – national voter turnouts in Europe frequently are above 60 percent – and the perception that the vote was for a distant, insignificant legislature may mean that extremists will not do as well in upcoming national elections in individual European countries.
Clara Marina O’Donnell, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform in London, cautioned against interpreting the far-right gains as a major political upheaval.
“We have a growth in certain countries of extreme parties, but they only got a few seats and the growth is very much marginal,” O’Donnell said. “People feel the European Parliament does not count, so they feel more tempted to vote extreme, often electing candidates they would never think of choosing for their national parliaments.”
European institutions in Brussels comprised of country representatives have no unified foreign policy or jurisdiction over crucial national issues, such as immigration, education or health care.
But they occasionally make policy – such as when the European Parliament froze a planned upgrade of EU relations with Israel during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza in January. They also may have a hand in setting European rules on shechita, Jewish ritual slaughter, which is banned in some European countries.
More worrying to Jews and other minorities is that extremist parties who gained ground in the recent European vote show no sign of going away.
The Freedom Party, for instance, is already in the Austrian Parliament, with 34 out of 183 seats, and twice has been a junior partner in coalition governments. The possibility that Jobbik will win seats in Hungary’s Parliament in 2010 elections is no longer remote, given that the party captured nearly 15 percent of the vote in Hungary for EU Parliament.
In the Netherlands, the openly anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Freedom Party – a far-right party that though supportive of Israel has been condemned by European Jewish groups – defeated the mainstream Socialists to finish a close second behind the center-right, with 17 percent of the vote.
“If on the EU level they do not stop this kind of extremism, it will get worse,” Cwajgenbaum said. “There is something wrong with how people are being educated, or not educated, in these countries.”
There are some positive signs, with the far right failing to garner almost any support in Germany, France, the Czech Republic and Poland.
In addition, the new extreme right members of the European Parliament are not expected to have much influence in Brussels because as nationalists, they will have difficulty coming up with a united position – as they demonstrated in their 2004 failure to form a voting bloc.
“Within the European Parliament, there are people who need to be quarantined,” said the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations in Paris, Shimon Samuels, “and there are enough centrists who will make sure that happens.”
Former Liberian Dictator Finds Judaism
By JTA
Published June 09, 2009.
Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor has decided to convert to Judaism, one of his wives told the BBC.
Taylor, who is set to go on trial for war crimes in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, apparently discovered Judaism in prison in the Hague.
“He’s now a Jew. He’s practicing Judaism,” Victoria Taylor told BBC Radio June 2 after a three-week visit with her husband. “When he got to the Hague, he got to know that he really, really wanted to be a Jew, wanted to convert to Judaism.”
Victoria Taylor said her husband “does believe in Christ,” and that “he hasn’t rejected Christianity. He has always been a Christian. He just decided to become a Jew. He wants to follow the two religions.”
Israel Takes Catholic Church Assets in Tax Dispute
By JTA
Published June 08, 2009.
Israel’s Finance Ministry reportedly seized the assets of one or more Catholic Church institutions in Israel over tax issues.
The reports Monday in the Italian media and from a Church news agency did not name the institutions in question, but said the action had been carried out by the Finance Ministry’s chief tax collector, Yehezkel Abrahamoff. Israel is pressing for payment of disputed tax demands.
The Vatican and Israel established full relations in 1994, but negotiations since then have failed to resolve several points, including fiscal status and tax issues regarding Church property in Israel as well as visa restrictions on Arab-Christian priests.
There had been hope that an agreement on these issues was near following Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Israel last month.
In a statement Monday to the Catholic Missionary news agency AsiaNews, Father David Jaeger, the Catholic delegate of the Custody of the Holy Land, called the reported move by Abrahamoff an “extraordinary initiative.”
Jaeger said he hoped that if confirmed, it would “be found to be that of an uninformed individual functionary, and that in the next few hours it will be disowned and overturned by his superiors” in accordance with the treaty obligation to abstain from unilateral actions while negotiations are pending.
Israel Will Not Seize Catholic Church Assets
By JTA
Published June 09, 2009.
Israel will not seize funds of Catholic institutions in the country, as Italian and Catholic media had reported.
A statement Tuesday by the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See said that “the seizure of funds from the Ministry of Education destined for some educational institutions of the Catholic Church in Israel will not be made, and that the situation remains unchanged.”
Reports that Israel would seize assets of some Catholic institutions to pressure the Vatican to pay disputed taxes were published Monday by Catholic and Italian media.
Italian media Tuesday quoted Israeli sources as saying the reports were the result of “a technical error” and a “misunderstanding.”
Carter to Israel, Gaza
By JTA
Published June 08, 2009.
Jimmy Carter will visit Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The former U.S. president was in Lebanon to monitor Sunday’s elections. Media have said that he will continue this week to Syria, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
Some accounts say the tour will be private, while others say he will be promoting peace moves in the wake of last week’s address to the Muslim world by President Obama.
Carter in the past has angered Israel with what is perceived as his pro-Palestinian tilt. He also has brokered communications between Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza by Hamas terrorists, and Shalit’s family. The Jerusalem Post said that Carter would meet with Israeli President Shimon Peres; the two are old friends.
Hezbollah Defeated in Lebanese Vote
By JTA
Published June 08, 2009.
Preliminary election results in Lebanon show that an American-backed alliance has defeated Hezbollah.
The March 14 coalition reportedly has retained a majority in the 128-seat Parliament, according to reports, but Hezbollah will still have a place in the Lebanese government. The United States and Israel consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization.
About 55 percent of registered voters turned out for the election, an unusually large turnout that required some voters to wait up to four hours to cast a ballot.
“Political developments in Lebanon are being followed with great interest by Israel and by all of the states in the region and the international community as well,” said Israel’s Foreign Ministry in a statement. “It is incumbent upon any government that is formed in Beirut to ensure that Lebanon will not be used as a base for violence against the State of Israel and against Israelis. The Government of Lebanon must act to strengthen the country’s stability and security, to stop arms smuggling into its territory, and to implement the relevant Security Council resolutions, first and foremost Resolutions 1559 and 1701.
“Israel considers the Lebanese government responsible for any military or otherwise hostile activity that emanates from its territory,” the statement said.
The United States has said that future aid to Lebanon will be determined based on the new government formed after the elections.
How Jews Harshed the Hilarity
Photo taken by Jessica Miglio, (c)2008 Gravier?Productions, Inc., Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
What? What?!: Larry David is right, everyone else is wrong, get it? Good.
By Benjamin Ivry
Published June 08, 2009, issue of June 19, 2009.
In “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), Sigmund Freud observes that a strict superego — or the conscience that punishes misbehavior — results in a correspondingly aggressive jest. As we all have found, whether at school or in the workplace, the harshest superego suppresses laughs entirely. In practical comedic terms, jokes get meaner and meaner until they stop being funny altogether. As the new Woody Allen film “Whatever Works,” starring Larry David, opens, and the promotional campaign begins for Sacha Baron Cohen’s forthcoming “Bruno,” scheduled for release July 10, these concepts are timelier than ever. Tender soulfulness has never characterized Jewish comedians — think of Don Rickles — but has the harshness developed to the point of drowning out the merriment?
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For decades, Allen, now 73, has presented himself as a dismal icon of despair, and in a recent interview he tells a fawning Argentine journalist that “life is suffering,” whining with characteristic joylessness that his wildly overpraised 2008 film, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” was not intended as a comedy, even if viewers and critics took it as such. For decades, audiences have applauded this culture of complaint. Even Allen’s reported “true love” of jazz clarinet is expressed publicly in desultory sour-toned performances in a Dixieland jazz band cheered on by star-struck punters at concerts worldwide. Self-deprecating humor turns to self-deprecation, and then just general deprecation.
Last year, Allen sued Dov Charney’s clothing company, American Apparel, for using his likeness on billboards without his consent, in a case that was settled May 18. Allen accused American Apparel of engaging in a “despicable effort to intimidate” him by claiming that by marrying Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his ex-wife Mia Farrow, Allen damaged his own potential for endorsements. Of course, no one disputes that Allen did marry his ex-wife’s adopted daughter, but bringing up the matter in the context of this lawsuit ticked off the comedian considerably. Charney, a Montreal-born Jew, has been involved in some controversies of his own, yet Allen revealed a fatal lack of self-awareness in not merely complaining about the unauthorized use of his image, dressed as a Hasidic rabbi in “Annie Hall,” but also calling American Apparel advertisements “sleazy,” “adolescent” and “infantile.” Allen’s own vulnerability to similar criticisms following the Previn scandal seems to have slipped his mind entirely.
But then, Allen is a famous failure in psychoanalysis, which he finally dropped after 30 years of therapy, around the very time he began his relationship with Previn. John Baxter’s “Woody Allen: A Biography” (Da Capo Press, 1999) points out that “like Catholic confession, Allen’s form of analysis let the penitent go free to sin again.” No one doubts Allen’s continued abilities to crank out gags like the classic “I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.” Yet none of the japes seems to have improved his mood.
Indeed, Allen’s films, as critics and even some fans have observed, have increasingly become black holes of futile despair, “sour, dispirited, almost vindictive” as Terrence Rafferty wrote in a still-pertinent review of “Husbands and Wives” (1992). Some of the gags still work, despite the overall dispiriting nature of the films that contain them. Such male stars as John Cusack, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Caine are puppetlike stand-ins, straining to imitate Allen’s own herky-jerky speech, uncontrolled gestures and other personal quirks as they read the lines written by him. The same physical mannerisms that made Allen a successful stand-up comedian make him an awkward, amateurish actor, and most of the actors for whom he writes — with the exception of rare majestic talents like Martin Landau and Jerry Orbach in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” — make the capital error of now trying to mimic him. David, as a misanthropic physicist who makes repeated suicide attempts in “Whatever Works,” scheduled for general release from Sony Pictures Classics on June 19, will doubtless avoid this mimicry, since he carries around his own baggage of eccentricity.
In “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” David, a native of the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn, specializes in finding comedy in the trivialities of life, with a ferocity that puts off critic Lee Siegel in The New Republic, who terms David’s choleric fits “merely the anger of frustrated entitlement. [He] has perfected Seinfeld’s superior, uninviting stare into a cold, cruel sneer.” Even HBO’s “Curb” Web site, amid paeans of praise, offers an occasional dissent: “A bunch of screaming Jews apparently ad-libbing; it is not funny.” When standup comedian Susie Essman shrieks profane insults at David’s character in “Curb,” she and other actors provide the superego, the out-of-control conscience that punishes his misbehavior. David’s comedy derives from situations, such as when he invites a sex offender to a Seder, rather than from Allen’s carefully honed and polished jokes. Yet the output of both Allen and David can be seen as sharing a basic acerbic negativity.
David’s friend and colleague Larry Charles, himself a Brooklyn Jew who produces “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” told The New Yorker that David’s Brooklyn upbringing gave him a “‘Lord of the Flies’ sensibility” in a “very savage environment, in a lot of ways, a very cruel and sadistic environment.” Such cannot be said of Baron Cohen, who grew up in leafy Hampstead Garden Suburb, graduating from Cambridge University complete with a prize-winning thesis on civil rights before filming his comedy hit “Borat” and the upcoming “Bruno.” Both of these movies are directed by Charles.
Sony Pictures Classics
Comedy Ain’t Black and White: Bruno with this year’s must-have fashion accessory.
By focusing on prank interviews with real-life people who are shown to be naive, credulous or otherwise objectionable, Baron Cohen has offended some viewers and amused others. As Borat Sagdiyev, the faux-Kazakh journalist, Baron Cohen sang a pseudo-folksong: “Throw the Jew down the well/So my country can be free/You must grab him by his horns/Then we have a big party.” The song, praised by Slate as “hilarious” and “catchy,” raised concerns from the Anti-Defamation League last September: “One serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.” Certainly, Baron Cohen’s timing was flawed; in 2007, in Kazakhstan’s neighbor Uzbekistan, the noted Jewish-Uzbek stage director Mark Weil, 55, was stabbed to death in what local police termed “an antisemitic attack.” The joke sours when Jews are in effect still being thrown down the well near Borat’s homeland, and elsewhere.
Baron Cohen’s latest movie character, Bruno, a gay Austrian fashionista, has similarly made fun of the Holocaust, Hitler and other related subjects. In an earlier incarnation of HBO’s “Da Ali G Show,” Bruno opined that the singer Ricky Martin should be kept “in the ghetto,” while the actor Burt Reynolds should be “condemned” to a “train to Auschwitz.” In the forthcoming film, Bruno will confront a former Mossad agent, homophobes and Republican politician Ron Paul, among others.
Citing historian Ian Kershaw’s formulation that the “path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference,” Baron Cohen told Rolling Stone magazine in 2006: “I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving antisemite. They just had to be apathetic.” Borat’s antisemitism, Baron Cohen added, “lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice.”
Prodding people into showing their worst sides may be a valid experiment in social psychology. Baron Cohen himself likens it to Stanley Milgram’s series of experiments, but some critics have even compared Baron Cohen’s getting his interview subjects to agree to false or evil statements to research on social pressure by the Gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch (1907–1996). Unlike Allen and David, who themselves embody human failings for laughs, Baron Cohen’s Bruno and Borat, while grotesque caricatures in themselves, chiefly point the finger of ridicule at others. Worse than merely “not very funny,” Baron Cohen’s pranks convey a negative view of humanity — not just of the comedian — as if they are the product of a superego so severe that it stamps out comedy entirely. Freud might have considered that the pleasure principle is outweighed by pain in the comic universe of Sacha Baron Cohen, closer to MTV’s “Jackass” than to the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Benny or other greats of Jewish comedy.
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.
Triple Threat
Entertainer Rain Pryor On Comedy, Cabaret and Her Famous Father
By Ezra Glinter
Despite her successful career as a singer, actor, comedian and author, Rain Pryor is most frequently identified as the daughter of the famously outspoken African-American comedian Richard Pryor and Jewish dancer Shirley Bonus. But Pryor’s parentage and upbringing have given her a wealth of her own material. She has explored that material in her one-woman show, “Fried Chicken and Latkes,” which has traveled throughout the states in recent years; her 2006 memoir, “Jokes My Father Never Taught Me,” (Harper Entertainment), and, most recently in her touring cabaret show, “Pryor Experience.” Pryor lives in Baltimore with her husband Yale, and her daughter, Lotus Marie, and will be appearing at The Stoop Storytelling Festival in Baltimore on July 10. Ezra Glinter, a Winnipeg, Canada-based writer, recently spoke with Pryor about her work, her father’s influence, and the intersections between African-American and Jewish comic traditions.
Ezra Glinter: What did you learn from your father as far as your comedic style goes, and where do you differ?
Rain Pryor: I think it’s just about being truthful in the humor. For me, I talk about my life, and I guess people find that hysterical for some reason. I don’t know why. My life is really dramatic, but other people find it funny.
Tell me about your new show, “Pryor Experience.” Is it a departure or a continuation of “Fried Chicken and Latkes”?
“Pryor Experience” came out of a real love of mine. I love singing jazz and blues music and I started performing cabaret way before I ever did “Fried Chicken and Latkes” — and that’s how “Fried Chicken and Latkes” was born, out of a cabaret act. But [“Pryor Experience”] is not a play. I’m not going through the sequence in my life, growing up Jewish in Beverly Hills. It’s completely different, I don’t throw characters out there; I’m not doing anybody onstage. It’s like if you were going to see Bette Midler or Etta James. The one thing I do talk about is the fact that I am a mom. And it’s bluer, which means that the humor is a little more adult — far more adult.
You are active in a variety of disciplines including writing, acting and singing. Is there a common thread to your work across these different forms?
The common thread would be the fact that they’re all acts of entertainment and they’re different aspects of things that I really love to do. When I was younger, you were trained to be a triple threat, which is much different than nowadays, where you either sing, you act or you dance. It was an old Hollywood mentality, where kids actually grew up to learn how to do all three things.
It’s no secret that some of the most influential comedians have been either black or Jewish. How has the confluence of these two traditions influenced your work and your career?
I think it affects my work in the sense that I draw on both and pull in both kinds of crowds. Some nights I have a predominantly black audience and some nights I have a predominantly Jewish audience — and some nights I have a great mixture of both. For me that’s where it’s fun. You find yourself adaptable; you understand both worlds. I think the work that I do really allows me to bridge the two communities and show a lot of the similarities and to start a dialogue between two, instead of the standoffishness that the two communities at different times and places can have.
How do you think racial identification continues to play a role in popular culture and entertainment?
I don’t know nowadays how important it is. I am who I am; I happen to be black, and I happen to be Jewish. And I practice Buddhism. It’s more important to identify myself, even if it is cliché, as part of the human race. But I think for me to say this is my makeup and this is who I am, that’s extremely important.
In your book, “Jokes My Father Never Taught Me,” you describe the many difficulties of your childhood including your father’s drug use. How did you manage to overcome these difficulties, and what advice would you give to kids in similarly difficult situations who want to pursue a creative career?
I don’t believe that anyone is perfect. I don’t try to be perfect. I think the thing is, for me, I don’t want to be a stereotype. I don’t want to be like other people who are kids of celebrities. … It’s not like I’ve never smoked pot or drank alcohol. I tried it, but it wasn’t who I was or what I was or where I wanted to be. It’s sort of like in life you decide who you are, where you want to go, how you want others to view you and that’s the path you, should walk down.
Obama Visits Buchenwald
By JTA
Published June 05, 2009.
President Barack Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp site, calling it “the ultimate rebuke” to Holocaust deniers.
Obama joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust memoirist who was a Buchenwald inmate, on the tour on Friday, a day after Obama called on the Muslim world to reject Holocaust denial.
“To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened,” Obama said at a news conference at the gates of the camp. Such statements are “ignorant, baseless and hateful.”
For more than an hour, Obama and Merkel walked the grounds of Buchenwald. Out of sight of cameras, they entered the crematorium building where camp victims were turned to ash. They placed white roses, a symbol of German resistance, at several sites.
Obama said he had wanted to visit this particular camp because his great-uncle, Charles Payne, was among the U.S. soldiers in Infantry Division 89 who liberated the Buchenwald sub-camp of Ohrdruf in early April 1945. Ohrdruf was the first camp liberated by American soldiers. The gruesome sights of burned victims haunted his uncle for a long time, Obama said.
“It is understandable that someone who witnessed what had taken place here would be in a state of shock,” he said.
Wiesel, a Nobel Peace laureate whose father died at Buchenwald, said, “Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart.”
After visiting Germany, Obama was scheduled to fly to France and take part in ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy.
In an interview with NBC, Obama expressed frustration with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who questions the story of the Holocaust.
“He should make his own visit,” Obama said in Germany. “I have no patience for people who would deny history. And the history of the Holocaust is not something speculative.”
Should he visit Germany, Ahmadinejad could face arrest as a Holocaust denier.
Waiting Game: What Did Abbas Mean?
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 04, 2009, issue of June 12, 2009.
Washington — While Mahmoud Abbas’s meeting with President Obama was widely described as uneventful, comments the Palestinian leader made in a Washington Post interview before entering the White House have led to a feisty debate within the Jewish community.
In an interview with the Post’s Jackson Diehl, published May 29, the Palestinian president spoke freely, expressing a sense of ease and putting the onus on the Israeli government, which is already under pressure from Obama. “I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements,” he said. “Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality… the people are living a normal life.”
Abbas spoke of being under American pressure for the last two years and called on the United States to apply the same pressure to Israel. Other unnamed Palestinian officials were quoted in the article as saying they expect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to collapse within a couple of years, under the weight of American pressure.
Abbas’s explicit choice of a waiting-game policy and his seeming anticipation of the fall of the elected Israeli government has raised eyebrows among those following Middle East policy. The interview was widely circulated via e-mail and was picked up by the Israeli and Arab press.
In a May 30 editorial, the New York Times decried what it said was Abbas’s “depressive passivity” as expressed in the Post interview. “He needs to do a lot more,” the Times argued. “Unless Mr. Abbas’s government does more to improve the lives of Palestinians it will surely lose again to Hamas in elections scheduled for January.”
For the Orthodox Union, the representative body of Orthodox synagogues that is known for leaning in favor of Israel’s right wing government, Abbas’s comments provided an opportunity to slam dovish Jewish groups, which in recent weeks had praised the Obama administration for pressuring Israel on the settlements issue. Writing in his blog, Nathan Diament, the group’s director of public policy, questioned whether the dovish groups have a double standard when it comes to Palestinians who refuse to take actions for peace.
“Where is the dismay of the ‘pro-peace-process’ Jewish left? Oh. They were quick last week to applaud Secretary of State Hilary Clinton for pressing Israel for a settlement freeze, and calling upon Congressman Eric Cantor to explain why he was more supportive of Israel of late than other members of Congress. But they haven’t said a word about Abbas’s transparent treachery. Does the Jewish left only exist to blame Israel?” Diament asked.
“We seek clarifications from Abbas himself, not from Washington Post columnists,” answered Ori Nir, spokesman of Americans for Peace Now, presumably one of the groups targeted by Diament’s criticism.
He explained that in a private meeting Abbas held in Washington with scholars and activists, the Palestinian president spoke of his willingness to resume talks without pre-conditions, but added he could not do so before the Netanyahu government agrees on the goal of such talks. Abbas also said, according to Nir, that there is no sense in talking as long as Netanyahu refuses to discuss the core issue. “Abbas has a point,” Nir concluded.
J-Street, another group criticized by the OU, also referred to the private meeting with Abbas. “While I can’t vouch for what was said when Diehl interviewed Abbas, I can say that in the meeting with President Abbas that I attended I heard a very different message from him,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group’s executive director.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
In New Book, Ross, Top Envoy To Iran, Is Skeptical of Diplomatic Engagement
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 04, 2009, issue of June 12, 2009.
Washington — Since assuming his post as special adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Iran matters, Ambassador Dennis Ross has stepped back and refrained from discussing in public his suggestions for dealing with Tehran.
However, in a book he co-wrote before assuming his new position, Ross reveals a skeptical approach toward one of the Obama administration’s key foreign policy goals: diplomatic engagement with Iran.
In his role as special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary Clinton, Ross is expected to lead efforts to engage Iran — a move that has marked one of the most visible shifts in United States policy in the new Obama administration. Talks between the United States and Iran are expected to begin soon after results of the June 12 elections in Iran become clear.
In their upcoming book, “Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East,” Ross and his co-author, Middle East scholar David Makovsky, set out to debunk misperceptions of both neo-conservatives and realists. The authors take issue with three ideas that shaped policy toward the region in recent decades: the belief that solving the Palestinian problem is the key to all the Middle East’s problems; the debate over whom America should engage with, and the balance between values and interests in dealing with regional players.
“We talk about engagement without illusions,” said Makovsky, director of the Project on Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the same think tank where Ross worked before joining the Obama administration.
The book reveals Ross to be a savvy diplomat who values negotiations and engagement, but is not averse to using coercion and military involvement. His approach toward Iran, based on “bigger carrots and bigger sticks,” puts a significant emphasis on the sticks after providing an open-eyed, dispassionate analysis of the prospects of diplomatic engagement.
Ross’s idea of engagement with Iran combines tightening sanctions while offering the regime a way out of its nuclear program. At the same time, he urges the Obama administration to make the threat of war loud and clear.
“When we say that we are not taking force off the table, that must be more than a slogan,” write Ross and Makovsky. They also encourage Obama to declare that any Iranian attack against Israel will be seen as an attack against the United States.
The success of diplomatic engagement, according to Ross, is not guaranteed and could be unlikely. Still, he and Makovsky believe that negotiations will serve a purpose even if results are not satisfying. “By not trying, the U.S. and its refusal to talk become the issue,” said Makovsky in a June 1 interview with the Forward. “What we are saying is that if the U.S. chooses engagement, even if it fails, every other option will be more legitimate.”
The attitude of Ross and Makovsky seems closer to that of the Israeli government then to that of the Obama administration. The public stance of the Obama administration is that engagement with Iran has a chance of succeeding. After Obama took office, Israel reluctantly agreed to America’s suggested approach of engagement, seeing it is a necessary step before stronger actions.
Ross and Makovsky try to debunk any link between reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and dealing successfully with the Iranian nuclear threat. The authors conclude that Arab leaders link the two missions in order to proclaim that they are concerned only with the welfare of Palestinians when they are actually more concerned with their own national issues.
Obama, on the other hand, seems to believe there is a connection between the two issues, although not a pre-condition.
According to Ross and Makovsky, the key to successful dealing with Iran is getting the European Union, Russia and Saudi Arabia on board.
The Europeans could be a partner to the United States in talks with Iran, and those talks should not require ending uranium enrichment as a precondition, Ross and Makovsky say.
To achieve success, Ross and Makovsky offer an unorthodox idea: Send in Israelis. “There may be value in enlisting Israel to send a high-level delegation privately to key European capitals,” they suggested.
Ross believes that Europe must be ready to adopt tougher sanctions toward Iran in order to play a positive role in the American-led diplomatic effort. The message Israel could convey to Europe, the authors wrote, is that “if you want to avoid the use of force, we need to see that you are going to raise the costs to Iran.”
Ross has written in earlier articles that he prefers a secret-channel approach for negotiating with Iran, one that would connect to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who is viewed by the West as more moderate than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ross’s approach is not popular with the left. In a scathing critique of the Obama administration’s approach in the May 23 New York Times, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, two former National Security Council members, argue that Obama’s engagement with Iran is doomed to failure, partly because he chose Ross to lead. “Iranian officials are fully aware of Mr. Ross’s views — and are increasingly suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one senior Iranian diplomat said to us, ‘an offer we can’t accept,’ simply to gain international support for coercive action,” they wrote in the article.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com.
Obama Reiterates Call for Two-State Solution in Cairo
By JTA
Published June 04, 2009.
Reiterating his call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, President Obama called on each side to see the conflict through the eyes of the other.
In a wide-ranging address in Cairo on Thursday that touched upon America’s history with Muslims, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, and the need for democracy, religious freedom, and women’s rights in the Arab world, Obama identified the Israeli-Arab conflict as a source of major tension.
The president staked out no new ground on the issue – repeating his call for Israel to freeze settlement construction and the Palestinians, including Hamas, to put and end to violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist – but the speech gave Obama an opportunity to convey the new administration’s positions directly to the world’s Muslim public, to whom the speech was addressed.
The president also called Holocaust denial hateful, rejected conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks and said the Arab-Israeli conflict should not be used to distract Arab people from other problems.
“America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable,” Obama said.
“For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive,” he said. “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.”
Obama also recalled the enslavement, torture and killing of 6 million Jews by the Third Reich and said that denying those facts is “baseless, ignorant, and hateful.”
Mentioning the Arab Peace Initiative, which offers Israel recognition by the entire Arab world in exchange for Israel’s return to its pre-1967 borders and a just settlement of the Palestinian refugee issue, Obama said: “The Arab States must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.”
He said, ” The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel’s legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.”
On the issue of Iran, rather than issuing a unilateral call for ending Iran’s nuclear program, Obama said, “It is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point. This is not simply about America’s interests. It is about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.”
He went on, “I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not. No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons. That is why I strongly reaffirmed America’s commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons.”
‘The Ratings King’ of Israel Accused of Hiring Thugs
By Nathan Burstein
Published June 04, 2009, issue of June 12, 2009.
In a real-life scandal far juicier than his TV shows, an Israeli actor and talk show host admitted June 2 to orchestrating a string of violent attacks on executives within the country’s entertainment industry.
YONI HAMENACHEM
Dudu Topaz
Dudu Topaz, long a staple of Israeli television and movies, made his confession after “breaking down” during an interview with police, Israeli media reported in headlines that eclipsed much of the day’s other news. The confession came two days after the performer’s arrest, and 24 hours after a Tel Aviv judge extended his remand by more than a week, reportedly due to fears that Topaz might flee the country.
A veteran of Israel’s entertainment industry known for controversial slips of the tongue and other antics, Topaz, born David Goldenberg, has floundered professionally in recent years after drawing huge television ratings earlier in his career. Two recent talk shows and a reality series fizzled after just one season, failures the star may have blamed on his alleged victims. He is accused of hiring at least two young men with criminal records to assault the three victims — agent Boaz Ben-Zion and executives at rival television companies Keshet and Reshet, both of which employed Topaz in recent years. The victim of the most recent attack, Reshet official Shira Margalit, is recovering from injuries inflicted by unknown assailants outside her home in mid-May.
In the most recent post on his personal blog, dated April 1, the entertainer thanked fans for their “desire to see me as a host on television again.” Whether that would happen, he added, “doesn’t depend on me, but on television’s decision makers.”