We know that Chanukah is all about the miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days, right? Well, we have a new miracle driving around our streets. And, just like the little bit of oil that kept on going, these electric/hybrid cars use much less gas than a regular car. Now that is not only a miracle, but also really smart.
Next time you are in the car, count the number of electric/hybrid cars you see on the road – look for a Toyota Prius or a Honda Insight. They pollute less, allowing us all to breathe a little easier.
Get out your Chanukah Cookie cutters!
You will need:
1 cup margarine
2 eggs
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 cup sugar
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Chanukah cookie cutters
Directions:
Mix ingredients until smooth. Wrap in wax paper and chill for an hour. Roll out dough until 1/4- to 1/2-inch thick. Cut with cookie cutters. Place on greased cookie sheet.
Bake at 450F for six to eight minutes or until lightly browned. If you want to decorate with sprinkles, do that before you put them in the oven. If you would like to put frosting on, do that after they have baked and cooled.
Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center – the hospital that is the major recipient of trauma victims after suicide bombings in Tel Aviv – received a huge boost in October when the Jewish Russian community of Los Angeles held a fundraiser for them that raised $350,000. The event, billed as Saving Lives Gala 2004, was held at the Hilton Universal City on Oct. 17 and hosted by the Russian Speaking Community and The American Russian Medical and Dental Association, in association with The Jewish Federation. More than 750 people enjoyed an evening of dinner and dancing, and special appearances from Theodore Bikel, Susana Poretsky and Svetlana Portnyansky. Other honored guests included Anita Hirsch, the former co-chair of the Commission on Soviet Jewry and a leader in the L.A. Jewish Federation, and Barbara Yaroslavsky, former chair of the Jewish Public Affairs Committee.
The funds raised at the event went to building a much-needed pediatric trauma unit at the medical center.
From Sinai to Tel Aviv
Sinai Akiba school has an exchange program with its sister school in Tel Aviv – Omaniyut School. Both schools participate in a reading and discussion of a book on the Holocaust and every fall, students and teachers from Omaniyut make their way to Los Angeles to attend classes and programs at Sinai. Then every spring, students and teachers from Sinai Akiba make their way to Tel Aviv to attend classes and programs at Omaniyut. This October, one of the many highlights of the Omaniyut visit was when the Omaniyut and Sinai Akiba students sang Kabbalat Shabbat on Oct. 22 at the Kohn Chapel in Sinai Temple.
Inspiring Shelters
As the housing crisis in Los Angeles worsens with rising real estate prices, it’s good to know that there are some nonprofits out there that are tackling the problem with every weapon in the shelter arsenal. Beyond Shelter is one such program. It has helped more than 3,000 homeless families with children relocate to affordable permanent housing in residential neighborhoods throughout L.A. County. On Oct. 21, Beyond Shelter held its fourth annual Inspiration Awards at the Directors Guild of America theater. The event honored Mayor James Hahn, National Public Radio and television producers Marian Rees and Anne Hopkins, as well as three outstanding Beyond Shelter graduates who were able to rebuild their lives for themselves and their children.
Serious ‘Spin’
You know you have made it in the rabbinical world when the folks at VH1 are banging down your door for an interview. In October, Rabbi Benzion Kravitz sat down in his office with the hipster Nick Swardson who hosts VH1’s “Spin Cycle,” to talk about kabbalah and its appeal to Hollywood celebrities. “Spin Cycle,” which is scheduled to air in the first quarter of 2005, is a “60 Minutes”-style news magazine that is designed to attract younger viewers.
Together for a Cure
One in 27 Jews of Eastern European descent carry a gene that makes them susceptible to the progressive, degenerative, neurological, fatal genetic disease known as Familial Dysautonomia, or FD. But the Cure FD Foundation, which is based right here in Los Angeles, is constantly raising money to fund FD research efforts. On Oct. 31 the Majestic Crest Theater in Westwood hosted a Halloween/”Wizard of Oz” themed fundraiser for Cure FD. All attendants came dressed as Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, and they watched the original 1939 classic, “The Wizard of Oz.”
The event’s emcee was Robert Bucksbaum, the owner of the classic theater. Bucksbaum organized treasure hunts and games for the children.
The event raised $10,000, which has been sent to Dr. Berish Rubin’s research laboratory at Fordham University in New York. Rubin is working on trying to find a cure for FD and had already made significant discoveries to help the many hundreds of children born with the disease.
For more information, visit www.curefd.org, or call (310) 459-1056.
On a Mission
Los Angeles’ Anti Defamation League (ADL) sent a delegation of nine students, who come from ethnically and religiously diverse high schools, to the National Youth Leadership Mission in Washington, D.C., Oct. 17-20. The students were selected based on their individual commitment to strengthening diversity and stopping hatred. During their trip, they visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and heard speakers like ADL National Director Abraham Foxman and ADL National Chair Barbara Balser.
Rah Rah Ramah!
“We know, all of us, what it is to be an outcast,” said Sinai Temple’s Rabbi David Wolpe to several hundred supporters of Ojai’s Conservative-run Camp Ramah in California, which gleaned $946,000 from the Dec. 2 banquet honoring “Legally Blonde” film producer Marc Platt and his wife, Julie.
The Platts were feted partly for their fundraising for Camp Ramah’s Tikvah sleepover program for Jewish children with mental or emotional disabilities. Ten mentally challenged young people attended the tribute.
Also attending the $250-per-plate affair were philanthropist (and Jewish Journal board member) Ozzie Goren; Larry Greenfield, Southern California Republican Jewish Coalition director (“Camp Ramah … my first true love”); Robert Wexler, University of Judaism president; Rabbi Daniel Greyber, Camp Ramah executive director; Laurie Levenson, Loyola Law School professor, and her husband, Douglas Mirell; and Santa Monica architect Sarit Finkelstein.
Toward the evening’s end, Marc Platt told the audience that providing a sleepover camp experience for emotionally disturbed Jewish kids helps to create, “a place for us and our children to love and respect all human beings.”
The banquet included a film tribute, featuring thanks from Broadway’s “Wicked” stars Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, while actor and fellow “Wicked” vet Joel Grey took to the Ziegler Hall dance floor to sing a bit of “Wilkommen” from his Tony/Oscar-winning turn as the emcee in “Cabaret.” – David Finnigan, Contributing Writer
Planting New Life
Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock is an old shul – it was built in 1929 – which makes it full of heritage and history. But until recently it was short of plant life. On Nov. 21, volunteers from the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) and Temple Beth Israel decided to rectify the situation by planting trees and shrubs around the property, including five 15-gallon trees that came from Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Trees for a Green L.A.
The tree planting ceremony, dubbed A Morning of Planting and Revitalization, was also used to teach the volunteers about the importance of environmental awareness in Judaism.
Participants included Temple Beth Israel members Jerry Schneider and Mark Strunin, and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg.
The tree planting was the first phase of the temple’s extensive landscaping project. – DF
Convinced that 2005 will be a year of great peace opportunities, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is throwing his considerable political weight behind a coalition with the Labor Party.
Sharon sees a Likud-Labor partnership, bolstered by at least one ultra Orthodox party, as the ideal tool for carrying through his disengagement plan and beyond. To that end, Sharon is following a two-stage strategy: first, ensuring that the centrist, secular Shinui Party, which has refused to sit in the government with ultra Orthodox parties, leaves the coalition, and then breaking resistance in Sharon’s own Likud Party to a partnership with Labor.
The first stage of Sharon’s strategy already has gone off nicely. Shinui pulled out of the government last week over a deal between Likud and the ultra Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party, under which the government would allocate about $65 million in next year’s budget for religious institutions and needs.
Sharon may not have planned Shinui’s walkout, but he did nothing to stop it. It was a question of simple arithmetic: Likud and Shinui together had 54 seats in the Knesset, a minority in the 120-member house, but Likud and Labor would have a majority of 62.
Replacing Shinui with Labor will be a bit trickier, though, because of opposition within Likud to an alliance that party hard-liners fear will drag the government leftward. But Sharon was strengthening his hand ahead of a key Likud Central Committee vote this week.
A defeat in the Central Committee almost certainly would lead Sharon to go to new national elections. A victory and a coalition with Labor would enable the prime minister to push forward on peace moves with the Palestinians, Syrians and others.
At a business conference Monday in Tel Aviv, Sharon spoke of “restoring Israel’s regional and international position” and declared that it would be “a terrible mistake” to miss opportunities in 2005, because of petty party political squabbles.
According to aides, Sharon is particularly buoyed by what he sees as a potential strategic partnership with Egypt for promoting regional stability. Given Egypt’s leadership position in the Arab world, Sharon believes the recent sea change in relations between Cairo and Jerusalem could create an atmosphere conducive to accommodation with Israel throughout the region, and that this could come to fruition next year.
Analysts see the new Egyptian attitude toward Israel as especially significant, given the ostensibly more pragmatic Palestinian leadership that has emerged in the wake of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s death and ongoing Syrian efforts to renew a peace dialogue with Israel.
These developments have encouraged some outside players to start thinking in terms of a final Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. In an article in the Washington Post last week, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that the internationally backed “road map” peace plan no longer was relevant.
What is needed, Kissinger wrote, is a more detailed blueprint for a comprehensive peace agreement that the United States and Europe should impose on the parties. The Europeans, who want to hold a Middle East peace conference, seem to be thinking along similar lines. The key probably lies with the Bush administration, which so far remains wedded to the road map’s more incremental approach.
In pursuing a stable coalition with Labor, Sharon hopes to be able to exploit the winds of change on the Arab side and, at the same time, resist international pressure on Israel to make concessions that Sharon believes are too risky. The stronger and more stable his government, Sharon reasons, the better Israel’s chances of making the best of what 2005 has to offer.
Still, Sharon needs his party’s support for an alliance with Labor, and he was playing hardball ahead of the Thursday Central Committee vote. He warned that he would “punish” Cabinet ministers who didn’t do enough to bring out pro-Sharon voters, and warned Knesset members that if he has to go to national elections, there’s no guarantee they would be re-elected.
The strong-arm tactics seemed to be working. Ahead of the vote, all the Likud Cabinet ministers, including Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had lined up behind Sharon, and the group of rebel Knesset members who opposed Sharon over his Gaza withdrawal plan also seemed to be disintegrating. At its height, the rejectionist group numbered around 20 of the Likud’s 40 Knesset members; this week, its was down to fewer than 10.
It all could come down to voter turnout. In last month’s election of Likud officers, more than 90 percent of the Central Committee voted.
Similar figures this time around would seem to assure a Sharon victory. But it will be Chanukah, and in the Prime Minister’s office, the worry is that personal holidays could conflict with what Sharon sees as the national interest.
Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.
The public resurrection of a federal investigation involving Washington’s top pro-Israel lobby has done little to shake Jewish confidence in the group — but some organizations worry about the long road that now appears ahead.
FBI investigators searched the Washington headquarters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Dec. 1, the second search in five months.
At the same time, the agents subpoenaed four top officials to appear before a grand jury in Virginia later this month: Howard Kohr, AIPAC executive director; Richard Fishman, managing director; Renee Rothstein, communications director, and Raphael Danziger, research director.
Sources said that federal investigators have interviewed several former AIPAC employees in recent weeks. An FBI official confirmed the search but had no further comment, and a spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office also would not comment.
A new report also suggests two of the alleged targets in the investigation, Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, an Iran specialist, may have been set up by the FBI. The Jerusalem Post reported Sunday that the FBI directed a Pentagon official to give the two AIPAC staffers intelligence about alleged dangers facing Israeli agents in northern Iraq, which Rosen and Weissman later allegedly shared with Israeli officials in Washington.
AIPAC continues to defend the integrity of the organization.
“Neither AIPAC nor any member of our staff has broken any law, nor has AIPAC or its employees ever received information they believed was secret or classified,” the group said in a statement.
AIPAC’s support on Capitol Hill and among U.S. Jews has been steadfast since the controversy first erupted in August. The latest developments have hardly dented that wall, especially among the grassroots.
Hannah Rosenthal, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the umbrella group for Jewish community relations councils (JCRC), said JCRCs around the country have not received calls about the latest developments, a sharp contrast with August, when JCPA conference calls on the matter drew hundreds of participants.
“It’s kind of amazing how low priority this issue is,” she said. “I think a lot of people think the investigation will show there’s nothing there, and we’ll move on.”
Still, Jewish leaders expressed anxiety at what appeared to be a long haul for AIPAC.
“A lot of people thought, when nobody followed up, that they were going to just let it die,” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said of the FBI investigation. “But you know when people bring charges to a grand jury, chances are this will be the tip of the iceberg.”
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and a former prosecutor, said this “is obviously a very serious matter.”
“It does not necessarily mean there will be indictments or that we know who the targets are, but a grand jury has a great deal of power,” she explained. “They can call witnesses, documents, people who go can’t bring lawyers — it’s usually all very exhausting.”
A former top Justice Department official suggested that going to a grand jury meant the investigation had become adversarial.
Levenson said it was significant that Weissman and Rosen were not among those subpoenaed — targets of a probe almost never appear before a grand jury in the early stages of the investigation.
“Usually the people who are brought in at the initial stages are designated as witnesses, rather than targets,” she said. “You work from the outside in. The targets are the people in the middle of the bull’s-eye.”
When investigators first arrived at AIPAC’s offices in August, seizing computer files and interviewing Rosen and Weissman, many suggested that AIPAC was secondary to an investigation into Larry Franklin, a Pentagon analyst suspected of passing the group classified documents on Iran. However, insiders say the investigation has appeared to be moving away from Franklin and toward Rosen and AIPAC.
Making things even murkier was the Jerusalem Post account, which alleged that Franklin, already under FBI investigation, cooperated with authorities and, at the FBI’s request, detailed for Rosen and Weissman presumed threats to Israelis in northern Iraq. The AIPAC staffers allegedly passed that information on to Israel.
If there was such a setup, sources close to those being investigated said, it was so subtle that its nefariousness apparently went unnoticed by its targets, who were unaware that what they were allegedly doing would be considered illegal.
AIPAC said in its statement: “We continue to cooperate fully with the governmental authorities and believe any court of law or grand jury will conclude that AIPAC employees have always acted legally, properly and appropriately.”
The sources insisted that whatever information Rosen and Weissman allegedly passed on, it did not involve an exchange of documents, classified or otherwise. Even if Weissman and Rosen allegedly passed on information they knew to be classified, it is not clear that it was illegal.
Two former federal prosecutors said that government officials have an obligation not to disclose classified information, but the obligations to civilians who receive that information are not as clear. If an outsider bribes or otherwise induces a government official to give him classified information, he could be guilty of conspiracy, one of the former prosecutors said. But, at least according to the Jerusalem Post account, that was not the case.
Some former AIPAC employees suggested that the group could be under investigation for acting as an agent for Israel. Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, a foreign agent is any individual or group that works under the direction of a foreign government. However, AIPAC has always maintained that it represents American supporters of the Jewish state, not Israel itself.
Some Jewish leaders suggested that AIPAC — with its reputation for erring unstintingly on the side of caution when it comes to lobbying rules — was the least likely group to walk into such a trap.
“They have always been scrupulous about the rules and not stepping over the line,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, executive director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.
Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) suggested the FBI was creating a “moral dilemma” for AIPAC officials, trying to entrap them to tell Israelis about information that could save innocent lives. Wexler wrote to President Bush last week, asking him to investigate media leaks and other lapses in the AIPAC investigation.
He said he hopes the matter will be broached when the Senate holds confirmations for Bush’s choices for secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who now serves as national security adviser, and for attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, who in his new role would oversee the FBI.
“The president is responsible for the particulars of this investigation and the apparent increased action that has transpired,” Wexler said.
Jewish organizational leaders said their biggest concern right now is how the negative media attention paid to AIPAC will reflect the broader perception of American Jews and Israel advocacy. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said the community will stand together, although some Jewish activists may become anxious.
“People get impatient,” Foxman said, noting that the ADL was subject to its own investigation a decade ago by the Justice Department.
“This will impact on the community,” he said. “Some will be less confident in standing together. That’s very normal.”
Others will note the positive signals, he said, including the fact that both Bush and Rice spoke to AIPAC during the two years the FBI investigation has presumably been going on, and that AIPAC officials met Rice at the White House late last month. AIPAC was eager to underscore such successes, saying that membership and fundraising have increased since the case first made headlines in August.
“On Capitol Hill in the last three months alone, several measures that strengthen America’s policies in the Middle East have been passed with overwhelming support,” AIPAC said in a statement. “Israel’s annual foreign aid package has just been approved by Congress, giving Israel some $2.6 billion and extending the duration of Israel’s loan guarantees.”
The group also noted that the Senate recently passed by unanimous vote a bill expanding Homeland Security cooperation between Israel and the United States. The Senate also approved a resolution supporting Israel’s disengagement plan and Bush’s call for democracy as a prerequisite for Middle East peace and the “road map” peace plan. The extension of the loan guarantees was an especially sweet victory, considering the administration cut a portion of the guarantees last year to punish Israel for settlement activity.
Still, the grand jury deliberations will preoccupy key AIPAC staffers at a critical time for Israel, when its government is seeking administration and congressional support for renewed talks with the Palestinians and ahead of a planned, controversial withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
If the grand jury probe leads to indictments and convictions of senior AIPAC staffers, the organization could suffer damage, a top Washington lobby watcher said.
“If it turns out that AIPAC staffers were involved in illegal activities, it will hurt AIPAC’s reputation on the Hill,” said Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “It will present a problem in terms of people having to deal with them.”
What ensues depends on whether those at the center of any emerging scandal acted as rogues or were part of a pattern, Noble said.
“AIPAC is a powerful lobbying group, it does have a certain amount of capital, but that can be used up quickly in a really damaging situation,” Noble said.
Steve Pomerantz, a former FBI investigator who consults for Jewish organizations, said the nature of the subpoenas suggests that FBI investigators know what they’re looking for.
“This is not a fishing expedition,” he said. “It’s clear to me they have some specific information which is leading them in a specific direction.”
Some Jewish organizational officials have raised concerns in the past about David Szady, the senior FBI counterintelligence official overseeing the probe, and whether he targeted Jews inside the agency. A JTA investigation in September linked Szady to at least one case where a former CIA official, who is Jewish, sued the FBI and CIA for religious discrimination.
“He’s bad, very bad,” one senior Jewish organizational executive said in that report.
Pomerantz said he had never seen anything to suggest that Szady is anti-Semitic. In any case, he said, the idea that an individual could hijack the nation’s premier law enforcement agency for a personal agenda was far-fetched.
“The FBI is not suicidal,” he said. “They are not taking on AIPAC lightly or without full knowledge that this is a powerful organization seen positively by this administration.”
None of the 1,500 children at a Jewish day school in Caracas will forget drop-off on the morning of Nov. 29. On that morning last week, 25 government investigators, some of them armed and hooded, intercepted busloads of kids and turned them away.
Pandemonium broke loose as confused parents attempted to leave the school through the narrow driveway. Other panicked parents, whose kids were already inside the school, tried desperately to gain access. A couple of dozen children were locked inside, the preschoolers in one room and the older children in another. Not knowing whether this was the unfolding of a hostage crisis, anguished parents pleaded for the return of their children. Over the next 30 to 60 minutes, the investigators allowed all the children out. They were unharmed.
Once everyone was evacuated, the investigators remained on the premises for three hours. Aside from the incident with the children, the government agents were courteous and respectful. School officials said the search teams took nothing and left the offices and classrooms undisturbed. Upon completing their operation, the detectives declared that the search of the Centro Social, Cultural y Deportivo Hebraica, was “unfruitful.”
The raid, it turns out, took place in connection with the murder of investigating prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, who was assassinated in his car by a remote bomb planted in his cellular phone. Anderson was in charge of several politically sensitive cases, namely the prosecution of key members of the opposition to President Hugo Chávez in the attempted coup of 2002.
The prosecutors had received a tip reporting the transfer of weapons and explosives from Club Magnum, a shooting club, to the Hebraica. Club Magnum was not searched.
Community leaders and international Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee immediately denounced the raid and expressed outrage. In a press release to South American papers, the Simon Wiesenthal Center described the incident as an “anti-Semitic act, more like a pogrom than a judicial proceeding,” and demanded immediate suspension of Venezuela’s incorporation into Mercosur, the South American Trade Association.
Local indignation was just as strong. In a stirring letter to El Nacional, one of Venezuela’s main newspapers, Pinchas Brenner, chief rabbi of Venezuela, denounced the raid describing the method as an “astute economy of intimidation [since] there is not a single Jewish family in Caracas that was not affected. Many of us have children in the school, grandchildren, great-grandchildren — or friends. An attack on the school is the most effective way of jolting the entire Jewish population.”
Even though local papers were abuzz with incensed commentary by Jewish groups, official community statements were careful to omit the accusation, “anti-Semitism.”
Why such an apolitical Jewish cultural and community center would be targeted remains a mystery to the community. Since its establishment in Venezuela, the Jewish community has adopted a stance of “live and let live” and has deliberately kept a low profile in political issues. Daniel Slimak, president of the CAIV (Confederación de Asociaciones Israelitas de Venezuela), an umbrella organization that includes major Jewish organizations, said, “Our institutional communities do not intervene nor have ever intervened in political activities.”
However, the Jewish community’s discretion has proven ineffective in the face of independent, non-government sponsored, opinion pieces disseminated in the media in the days preceding the raid. Comparisons of the style of Anderson’s assassination to Israeli targeted killings abounded. In the most well-known example, Israelis assassinated Hamas bombmaker Yayha Ayyash in 1996 using a booby-trapped cell-phone.
Government channels unwittingly contributed by airing these commentaries as examples of irresponsible reporting. The commentary resulted in a press release by the Israeli Embassy in Caracas, which television stations aired, condemning the murder of Anderson and unequivocally stating it had no connection whatsoever to it.
“This has been one of the most difficult weeks for the Jewish community in Venezuela,” Slimak asserted, “not only because of the children, the fear and the raid, but because everyone is wondering what the real reason behind the raid was.”
Most community leaders agreed that, aside from isolated anti-Semitic incidents, there was no anti-Semitism in Venezuela. Slimak is eager to point out that “neither the president nor any high-ranking member of his administration has ever uttered a single word against the community.”
Furthermore, according to Slimak, in times of increased terror alert, the community has always sought and obtained government protection — such as additional security during High Holidays.
Additionally, “Vice President José Vicente Rangel has always been responsive and a good friend to the community,” he said.
Reports on anti-Semitism, however, present a bleaker picture. In its Anti-Semitism Worldwide Report of 2002/3 on Venezuela, the Stephen Roth Institute of Tel Aviv reports, “a great deal of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda, including classical manifestations of anti-Semitism.”
According to the report, after the unsuccessful coup against Chávez, unfounded theories circulated in the independent media about involvement of the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. Additionally, the report provides examples of anti-Semitic statements issued by important groups such as the left-wing MVR (Movimiento Quinta República) accusing Pedro Carmona, a prominent member of the opposition, during his brief interim presidency, of “having intended to conduct a ‘Sharon operation’ [in order to do] what the Jews are doing in Palestine.”
The Venezuelan-Jewish community in Miami, which keeps close contact with its sister community in Caracas, supports the view that anti-Semitism is at work. An unnamed community leader and activist, concurs with the Wiesenthal Center in that, “the raid sent a strong message to the Jewish community.”
Further, she points out that general opinion among the community here is that “[the raid] planted in the minds of the people that the Jews are destabilizing Venezuela.” Recognizing that the Israeli Embassy in Caracas should not intervene, efforts are being made from Miami to bring the matter before the United Nations.
At home, however, the outlook is more optimistic, at least officially. According to Brenner’s letter, Rangel assured that “the raid was in response to a decision by one of judges on the case, and that the executive would never initiate any such aggression against the Jewish community.”
In the words of the rabbi: “His [Rangel’s] word was comforting, but no sedative because the most sacred institution of the Jewish community has been violated.”
“This is the first stain’ on the government’s record toward us,” Slimak said. “We feel optimistic and we want to believe that what occurred was an isolated incident.”
When Imre Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002, few Americans had read the work of the Hungarian novelist, the first survivor of the concentration camps to be awarded the literary prize. Even in his own country, his works were not well known; his subject, largely the Holocaust, was not popular.
Since the prize, his works are more widely available in Hungary and this season new translations are available in English. To mark the publication of the new American editions, the Nobel laureate made his first visit to New York City since winning the prize, and he spent several days last month doing public presentations, interviews and being celebrated.
An eloquent man of charm, grace and modesty, Kertesz, who speaks English through a translator, seemed nonetheless to enjoy the attention. For members of the Hungarian Jewish community in New York — many of whom had indeed read all of his work — it was homecoming week. Many followed his crosstown schedule, from an evening at the 92nd Street Y to an afternoon at Columbia University to an evening reception at the Hungarian consulate, trying to get a photograph, autograph or just a few minutes of his time. When he spoke, they’d laugh or nod knowingly before the translator got the English lines out.
Interviewing Kertesz through his interpreter, Zoltan Saringer, is triangular, but quickly feels quite natural. Kertesz speaks, and Saringer smoothly jumps in where he infers commas, picking up the emotions of the novelist’s words. This visit is the first time Saringer and Kertesz have met, but it’s as though the interpreter is channeling Kertesz’s words.
In person, Kertesz is cheerful, outgoing and funny, in contrast to the darker persona of his novels — which he insists are works of fiction, not memoir, in spite of parallels with his life.
“A writer can only write out of pure joy,” he said. “The whole joy of creating. It gives one real hope. You really have to overcome suffering in order to establish real contact. It’s quite evident that being able to write is a huge liberty from life.”
Kertesz was born in Budapest in 1929. In his Nobel lecture, he described his family background: “My grandparents still lit the Sabbath candles every Friday night, but they changed their name to a Hungarian one, and it was natural for them to consider Judaism their religion and Hungary their homeland. My maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust; my paternal grandparents’ lives were destroyed by Matyas Rakosi’s Communist rule, when Budapest’s Jewish old age home was relocated to the northern border region of the country. I think this brief family history encapsulates and symbolizes this country’s modern-day travails.”
In 1944, the 15-year-old Kertesz was deported to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, and was liberated by American troops in 1945. (He and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who won the peace prize, do not know each other, but were on the same transports and in the camps at the same time.) He then returned to Budapest, and his first jobs were in journalism, but he was dismissed from his position in 1951, when the newspaper adopted the Communist party line. After that, he began writing and translating German authors into Hungarian.
Kertesz has survived not only Hitler, but also Stalin and the Hungarian Revolution and its aftermath. For 40 years, he had no passport and couldn’t leave Hungary, nor did he have access to the work of many major Western writers.
“It is a kind of a literary miracle that he’s here,” said novelist Thane Rosenbaum, who interviewed Kertesz on stage at the 92nd Street Y (with Saringer translating). “That he appears in America, having won the Novel prize — given the multitude of murderous enterprises that were determined to eradicate him and silence his voice.”
The program at the Y also featured pianist Andras Schiff, who was born in Budapest and began his music studies there. Schiff is the son of Holocaust survivors and a friend of Kertesz; the two embraced on the stage after the pianist’s performance.
Kertesz has an extraordinary facility with words; he explains that he doesn’t so much create characters, but he creates a language for them. At the Hungarian consulate, Andras Koerner, a Hungarian-born architect, author and fan of the Nobel Laureate, commented, “He’s a master of the quotation without the quotation marks. He uses words as in a collage, taking from one reality and placing it in another.”
Although he uses his own memories as raw material in his work, Kertesz explained that “fiction and reality become tangled. By the time a book is ready to go, I have completely different memories. You rid yourself of your memories when you write.”
He said that his Jewish identity is primarily one of solidarity. As a boy before the war, he attended weekly religious classes in school, but after the war he was not interested in religion.
“I considered and expressed myself as a Jew,” he said. “How strange it may sound, but my Jewish identity is based on my experiences of Auschwitz, on my experience of the Holocaust. I am not the only one in Europe like this. The Holocaust has managed to tie an abundance of people to Jewish identity. I think that in essence everyone is a Jew. Everyone who writes. Everyone who makes art is forced to become a Jew. There’s no other choice.”
He thinks of himself as “a writer who completely by chance has the Holocaust as his topic, his source. It doesn’t narrow my perspective — it definitely makes my perspective universal.”
In an article that appeared in Die Zeit after a trip to Israel a few years ago, he was critical of those intellectuals who criticize Israel in its dealings with the Palestinian uprising, noting that they’ve never bought bus tickets from Haifa to Jerusalem. When he read the lines of his prepared text at a conference — lines he has repeated before, suggesting that someone like him, who knows no Hebrew, barely knows the sources of Jewish culture and derives his primary Jewish identity from Auschwitz, should not be called a Jew — he felt somewhat ashamed.
Both his first novel, “Fatelessness” (the previous English translation was “Fateless) and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” (previously “Kaddish for a Child Not Born”) — are newly available in Vintage paperback editions, in new translations. In addition, Knopf is publishing a hardcover edition of another Kertesz novel, “Liquidation.” Never before available in English, it is the story of a novelist who survives Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Hungary’s Communist regime, to kill himself a decade after the fall of communism. The death causes the man’s circle of friends to examine their own history and memories.
All three books are translated by Tim Wilkinson. Kertesz finds Wilkinson’s translations to be excellent. Looking back on his own experience as a literary translator, Kertesz said, “It’s not enough to translate verbatim. You have to be very knowledgeable of the mother tongue into which you are translating. You have to understand the tune and the tone. Those are the most important. Any other mistakes can be corrected. When you have a master pianist playing, he might make one mistake, but it doesn’t invalidate the final effect.”
The Hungarian writer who has also worked as a librettist to support his writing of novels, frequently makes musical references. (As an aside, he notes that he doesn’t see his librettos as having literary value — he would have worked as a lumberjack if he was “strong enough and had the audacity to do it.”) He looks at his novels as pieces of music, and it’s not only the musicality of the sentences that interests him, but the structure.
For Wilkinson, who has been translating from Hungarian to English for more than 30 years, what’s particularly distinctive about Kertesz’s writing is that “although it is an attribute shared with all truly good writers … Kertesz is able to conjure up what he wants to write about with just a few deftly chosen worlds.”
The London-based Wilkinson said that in translating Kertesz, there’s an advantage to having a familiarity with the totality of his writing, as there are many allusions to works by such other writers as Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Camus, “that are not flagged at all but for which clues are to be found. Sorting these out is hard work but ultimately hugely rewarding because it gives a real sense of the tradition of great writing into which Kertesz fits.”
A reader encountering Kertesz for the first time would do well to begin with “Fatelessness,” first published in 1975. He worked on that novel for about 13 years, and then it took several years to find a publisher. The book is a narrative of a young man being sent to and surviving a concentration camp; the voice of the child is unforgettable, reporting with innocence and without judgment on what he sees.
The novel is now being made into a feature film by award-winning Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai (“Sunshine” and other films). Kertesz laughs when he says that 30 years after working for so many years on the book, he spent eight weeks writing the screenplay.
“Kaddish for a Child Not Born,” published in Hungarian in 1990, is the meditation of a man who chooses not to bring a child into a world that could produce Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
When told that a friend of The Jewish Week in Budapest expressed her hope that Kertesz’s books would now be required reading in all Hungarian schools, the Nobel laureate smiles and said that he’d never want to be mandatory: “If anything, I’d want to be discovered as the book students are reading in secret during class, hidden under the table.”
Sandee Brawarsky is the book critic for The Jewish Week.
Last week, President Bush said it plainer than ever before: Palestinian democracy, not just an end to terrorism, is the essential precondition for any new U.S. peace efforts in the region.
With Palestinian elections only a month away, the Bush administration hopes the vote will serve as a launch pad for renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and a face-saving boost to its sagging Middle East democracy initiative. But the U.S. push for Palestinian democracy will be an outright disaster if it proves to be nothing more than the latest excuse for U.S. noninvolvement in Mideast peacemaking.
It is likely to have only limited impact if Bush refuses to invest any real diplomatic capital in imposing the same standards on some of his best and most undemocratic friends, starting with Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Initially, the Bush administration had a straightforward approach to dealing with the Palestinians: end the terrorism and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, and then we can talk about new peace negotiations.
As terrorism diminished — the result of fierce Israeli action, not P.A. efforts — the administration shifted its emphasis to the need for “new leadership” among the Palestinians and an end to endemic corruption. That was the gist of Bush’s June 2002 speech forever casting Yasser Arafat into the diplomatic deep freeze.
But officials here didn’t want too much democracy while Arafat was alive, fearing a new vote would just reaffirm his power. Now that Arafat is dead, the administration has resumed its active talk about Palestinian democratization and made it the new benchmark for improved U.S.-Palestinian relations.
Bush said it plainly last week during a visit to Canada: “As we negotiate the details of peace, we must look to the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy.”
Bush was reportedly much taken with Natan Sharansky’s argument in a recent book that you can’t make peace with nondemocracies. Sharansky was a guest at the White House several weeks ago to expand on that concept.
However, the Bush administration’s focus on democracy is far from universal. The president doesn’t seem to care much that vital allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan are among the least democratic nations on the planet. Nor is he concerned that these countries have responded to the call for more democracy around the world with even more repression.
When the administration says that Saudi Arabia is a necessary element in any peaceful resolution of the region’s woes, it isn’t talking about some mythical democratic Saudi Arabia of the future but the oppressive, authoritarian, extremist-supporting Saudi Arabia of today.
Pakistan is a valued ally in the war against terror and never mind it is ruled by a repressive military dictatorship. It’s leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, came to power the old fashioned way — through a coup d’état.
Over the weekend, there were reports the administration is retreating from even its limited demands for democratization elsewhere in the Middle East. Its selective vision on democracy building undermines the administration’s goals both in the Palestinian territories and around the world.
Empowering those Palestinians who want representative and transparent government should be a goal of U.S. policy, especially in the run-up to the Jan. 9 elections to pick new leadership for the post-Arafat era.
But what, exactly, are the standards the Palestinians must meet to win U.S. approval? Does the election have to be entirely corruption free — a standard Florida would be hard-pressed to meet?
And do the results have to be ones we approve of? If radicals get the nod from voters, will we simply declare the entire enterprise undemocratic and invalid?
The demand for Palestinian democracy will fall flat if it isn’t coupled to energetic new U.S. peace efforts. In the past year, the U.S. demand for an end to Arafat’s rule as a precondition for such efforts made sense, given the late leader’s penchant for terrorism and gross corruption, but it also served as a handy excuse for an administration eager to avoid further entanglement in the region’s woes, especially before the Nov. 2 U.S. elections.
Now, there are abundant hints the push for democracy — laudable in itself — might be serving the same function for an administration that is getting pressed by European and Arab allies to ratchet up its involvement, but which apparently has little stomach for it.
The Mideast double standard also undercuts the broader effort to make democratization the solid foundation of U.S. foreign policy around the world. Why should people in East Asia or Africa believe pious American words about democracy, when it continues to support their oppressive rulers?
Indeed, the U.S. hypocrisy in the pro-democratization thrust cheapens and undermines what should be an important shift in U.S. foreign policy.
Pushing for fair, open Palestinian elections in early January — and pressing Israel to help make that possible — are commendable goals. Setting unreasonable standards of democracy as a way of keeping the U.S. from being forced to engage in high-risk Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy in the region is a formula for disaster in a region that badly needs active U.S. involvement.
Growing up in the Oakland public school system, MC Hyim began freestyling when he was 8 years old. Today, he performs and produces conscious hip-hop, encouraging listeners to do tikkun olam — take the anger and pain from today’s society and transform it into something good: “As important as it is to acknowledge and understand the history of what we might call Babylon,” Hyim said, “it’s important to move beyond it. Though a lot of people are hurting, and we have a lot of anger, everyone needs to take responsibility for themselves — to be aware of how they are how they are negatively affected by our reality, and how to turn that into something positive.”
Hyim finds hip-hop to be a natural vehicle for his own tikkun olam, not only because of the influence of his secular environment, but also because of his Jewish roots: “Judaism is a religion of the Word, of the Book,” he said, “so it makes sense a lot of Jews would get into rap and hip-hop. Our culture is about literacy — about verbal and written and oral communication.”
As a white Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, however, Hyim navigates through tensions regarding his participation in hip-hop culture: “There is always the question whether we are co-opting, recycling, participating in culture vulturism. I think the answer really depends on what your intention is. My intention is to celebrate the positive aspects of communication and a long history of storytelling — both of hip-hop music and Jewish heritage.”
The struggle, Hyim said, is in “how to pay respect to the people who created this art form. I pay respect by being honest — by not talking about things that are not true in my own life, by taking responsibility: When you have a mic and you’re amplified, you have to be aware of how your energy is affecting those ears. What are you offering? What are you supporting? What are you taking away? Hip-hop originally was about a party. You could close the door, have a party, have a DJ say, ‘Everybody clap your hands,’ do call and response. [Hip-hop] was about creating a safe space where everyone was participating. If you’re doing hip-hop provoking violence and separation, maybe you’re telling your own story, but you’re also supporting and validating something that isn’t going to be good for the children.”
Hyim will be performing at the CD release party for “Celebrate Hip-Hop,” during which he will showcase his freestyling talents. “I’ll have the audience call out some words,” he promises, “and I’ll go off on that.”