This is a letter from Lech Walesa to Marek Edelman dated April 17, 1988. When Poland first offered to recognize Solidarity as the official state union, one of their conditions was that they expel Marek Edelman from its Exec. Committee. Lech Walesa refused and instead wrote this letter to Marek on Passover 1988, the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Letter to Marek Edelman Read More »
Corky Hale, a Jewish jazz musician, who turns out tunes on the piano and harp, celebrated the release of her new CD, “Corky Hale and Friends – I’m Glad There Is You,” during a swingin’ soiree held at Bel Air’s Vibrato on Sept. 21.
Rabbi David Baron, Priscilla Presley and Hale’s husband, Hall of Fame songwriter Mike Stoller (who along with partner Jerry Leiber wrote Elvis Presley hits “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock”) joined musicians from the local jazz scene at the event. During dinner, Hale performed several tracks from her new album.
Swingin’ CD Release Soiree for Corky Hale Read More »
The latest Gallup poll indicates that in September, President Obama’s approval rating held steady at 52 percent. He has dropped from the stratosphere into the rough-and-tumble territory of normal politics. Among Jews, his support level is still a healthy 64 percent. While Jews are still far more pro-Obama than whites in general (who are at 44 percent), Jewish backing of the president has declined from their 78 percent vote for him in November and their 83 percent approval rating in January.
Obama’s decline in Jewish support is much like that among Hispanics and other whites, who have been drifting downward for months. Clearly the long march toward health care reform has taken its toll. It has particularly hurt Obama among older voters, the least enthusiastic of all voter groups about changes to the health care system. Ronald Brownstein wrote recently in the National Journal that Obama has been hurt among older white voters (39 percent approval), whose high turnout is a key in the 2010 midterm elections. According to Gallup, only 32 percent of those 65 or older would advise their member of Congress to vote for the new health care law (whatever it is), the weakest support of all age groups. This is pretty close to the 31 percent support among whites of all ages for the proposed health care legislation.
And Jewish voters tend to be older.
The National Jewish Population Survey found that in 2000-01, the median age for Jews was 42, compared to 35 for the U.S. as a whole. Nineteen percent of Jews were over 65 years of age, compared to 13 percent of all Americans. Most likely, these differences remain a decade later.
Overall, elderly voters were less likely to vote for Obama than younger voters in 2008. Yet older Jews are not so easy to pigeonhole. A pre-election Gallup poll found older Jews seven points more likely to plan to vote for Obama than younger Jews. And yet, the health care debate has thrown fear into the hearts of all elderly voters. Perhaps some of this concern has influenced older Jews.
A key part of the Republican strategy against health care reform is to scare seniors. The “socialism” charge may not be very effective with elderly Jewish voters, many of whom remember the same argument being used against Medicare in 1965. Fear of socialism probably works best with ideologically conservative voters. But telling seniors that they may lose their Medicare benefits, that the government is planning to set up “death panels” to decide who lives or dies or that the administration wants to “pull the plug on grandma” must be potent.
Ironically, the party that has been most hostile to Medicare is gaining ground among Medicare recipients by suggesting that a public option like Medicare would hurt Medicare. But nobody ever said politics is fair or logical. Democrats are going to have to be much more aggressive in countering Republican fear tactics with seniors. It would not hurt to start with Jewish seniors, who are extraordinarily well informed about public affairs.
New programs on the scale of the health-care legislation are always wrenching. Social Security and Medicare brought along new payroll taxes on working Americans that people have to pay long before they enjoy the benefits of the programs. The Democrats must now pass a bill that offers enough long-term benefits to make the short-term dislocations bearable.
Those who are telling the White House that they must pass a bill, any bill, are making a serious mistake. What makes all the legislative trouble worthwhile will be the outcome. And this has two key tests — one personal and the other political. The personal test is whether many people will be better off in their health care than they were without the bill. This will be harder to achieve than it appears, because the health insurers and their well-connected lobbyists want guaranteed new customers without changing much of their current business model. Regulating insurance to prevent the exclusion of people with pre-existing conditions is very popular, but it will be a dud if the regulation is weak and inconsistent. Will coverage for the uninsured really be affordable? A third of Hispanics do not have health insurance — will the bill provide a credible way to get them under the health-care umbrella?
The political test is: Will those who vote against the bill someday have to apologize for it? Or will it be a badge of political honor? When is the last time you heard someone brag about having opposed Medicare? In 2010, seniors are likely to comprise a disproportionate block of those who vote, and the midterm elections will be seen as a first test of the new health-care policy. For Democrats, the key will be to rise above the muddy politics of lawmaking inside the Beltway and the current drag in the polls, and to translate the new health-care plan into language for the rest of us.
Will it make our lives better? Will the dislocations be worth it? Instead of worrying about getting Republican votes, Democrats should be thinking about creating a bill that Republicans will worry about voting against.
This is political history in the making.
Raphael J. Sonenshein is chair of the Division of Politics, Administration and Justice at Cal State Fullerton.
Jewish Voters, Obama and Health Care: Trouble Ahead? Read More »
Ada Yonath became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel when the chemistry prize was awarded Wednesday. The Weizmann professor, who has dedicated her career to studying and mapping the ribosome—the protein factory within cells—shares the prize with two U.S. scientists: Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. The trio were honored for “having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Yonath, a professor of structural biology and the director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute, was born into an impoverished Sephardi family in Jerusalem during British Mandate Palestine. “We were so poor we didn’t even have books,” she told Israeli21c in 2008, after becoming the first Israeli to win a lifetime achievement award from L’Oreal and UNESCO.
“There was nothing in my childhood to suggest that I would reach this point, even though my parents and family have always thought there was a chance of recognition,” Yonath told Israeli public radio, according to AFP.
After the award was announced, Israeli President Shimon Peres, also a Nobel laureate, called to congratulate the Weizmann professor, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who expressed his “enormous pride, along with the entire nation” for her achievement.
From Haaretz:
“The Nobel Prize is a true Olympics of humanity,” said Netanyahu. “It is an enormous achievement.”
Yonath was the first Israeli biologist to work with NASA in sending research material to outer space. She cooperated with NASA on 12 missions. Her research contributed greatly to the development of more effective antibiotics, which can overcome phenomenon of drug resistant pathogens.
Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the prize.
“I’m really, really happy,” Yonath said after being informed of her victory. “I thought it was wonderful when the discovery came. It was a series of discoveries…. We still don’t know every, everything, but we progressed a lot.”
…
This year’s three laureates all generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.
“These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the academy said in its announcement.
“All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome,” the academy said.
Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.
Each prize comes with a 10 million kronor [$1.4 million] purse, a diploma, a gold medal and an invitation to the prize ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. The Peace Prize is handed out in Oslo.
Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov lost the Nobel Prize for physics, despite predictions that he was likely to win. The committee awarded the the physics prize to engineers who developed the mechanism used in digital photography, preferring to award the prize to practical technology that could be used on a daily basis rather than the theoretical physics which Aharonov focused on.
The last Israeli to receive a Nobel Prize was Yisrael Robert Aumann, who was awarded the prize in economics in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis. He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling.
The number of Nobel prizes won by Israelis now stands at nine: three for chemistry (Yonath, 2009; Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, 2004), three for peace (Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, 1994, and Menachem Begin, 1978), two for economics (Aumann, 2005, and Daniel Kahneman, 2002), and literature (Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1966).
Ada Yonath — first Israeli woman to win Nobel Prize Read More »
It’s been a long-time waiting, but the Supreme Court will hear today arguments concerning a cross in the Mojave Desert that was erected as a memorial to World War I veterans. This is a legal battle that’s been going on for the past decade, and I remember delving into it a bit when I was at The Sun.
It’s a familiar conflict: Supporters argue the cross is not a religious symbol, civil liberties advocates claim it infringes on any passer-by’s First Amendment rights. For a while now, it’s been covered up by a wooden box.
As powerful as these pro and con arguments are, the Supreme Court may focus more on a technical question that could resolve not only this case but potentially all others involving religious symbols — and perhaps more than that.
It is the gatekeeping question of standing: Who has standing in court to challenge the placement of a religious symbol on public property? The government maintains that an individual who is offended by a religious symbol has not suffered a real injury that justifies a court challenge.
In addition, the government contends that the congressional transfer of the land to the VFW ends any government endorsement of religion. The ACLU counters that the government still favors the cross, by the terms of the land transfer, which designates the cross as a national memorial and declares that the VFW only keeps the land if it also maintains the cross.
If the government and the VFW win on this point, it could mean that for all practical purposes, a government — whether local, state or federal — can put up whatever religious symbols it wants, and there would be no way to challenge it in court.
“If they want to put a cross on every street corner, they could do that,” says Laycock. “There would be no limits on abuses. Government could promote religion as much as it wanted to. And if taking offense at a display doesn’t give standing, the next step might be to say that taking offense at a religious ceremony or prayer isn’t enough to give standing.”
The rest of that NPR report can be found here. For more background, check out the front-page piece from last week’s Washington Post and tmatt’s discussion of it at GetReligion.
Judgment day is still many months away.
Supreme Court to hear Mojave cross case Read More »
Sharing a tender moment are T.R. Knight and Lara Pulver as Leo and Lucille Frank in the riveting musical “Parade,” playing at the Mark Taper Forum through Nov. 15. The riveting story by Alfred Uhry is based on the actual 1915 lynching in Atlanta of Frank, a New York Jew, for allegedly raping a 13-year old factory girl. The play, with music by Jason Robert Brown, probes the dark undertones of anti-Semitism. mob violence, and historic North-South hostility.
“Parade” stars share tender moment Read More »
Time-outs are important, and I’m not talking about the ones for kids when they have done something wrong (that makes for another blog). I’m talking about time out for Mom.
Do you ever feel like your wheels are spinning and you can’t slow down? Like you are running on empty? If you answered “no” to these two questions, please tell me, what’s your secret? Hallucinogens?
The words “slow” or “slow down” are not in my vocabulary. Between writing, errands, chores and entertaining my son, it seems I’m always doing things half as great as I could…or at least I think so. Taking a break often seems like a waste of time. And of course if I finally take a break, all I find myself doing is thinking about what I should be doing.
For the last few days, I’ve been taking a break. No cleaning, no cooking, no thinking (well trying the latter at least), but not of my own accord. I’ve been under the weather and on antibiotics along with make-me-drowsy, can’t-move medications for some sort of weather changing sinus pressure fun.
So here I am, lying in bed and typing, crawling in my skin, wanting to run around. The drowsiness is wearing off, although not as quickly as I’d like it to. But I’ve learned a lot, and how many times must I relearn this over and over again?
If you don’t find the time for a time-out, it will find you.
Last week, The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam released the only known film footage of the young diarist who perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, igniting a viral response on the Internet.
The 20 second film was reportedly shot on July 22, 1941, to record the wedding of the Franks’ next door neighbors. About nine seconds into the film, Anne Frank is seen leaning from a window in order to glimpse the bride and groom. Her time on screen is brief but powerful: According to the New York Times, the footage has been viewed on a new YouTube channel more than 1.6 million times in only five days.
You might call that a built in audience for an Anne Frank film. But is Hollywood listening?
The internet firestorm comes at an odd time for Hollywood—or rather, the Walt Disney Company, who recently changed their plans regarding a new film version of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
In August 2009, Variety reporter Mike Fleming announced that Disney had acquired the rights to the film and that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet would pen the script. But Mamet, who tends to take on controversial politics in his work, transformed the story into a modern tale of anti-Semitism and the script was deemed “too dark” by the family oriented studio.
Two days after the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, The Wrap published a report illuminating the problem: “The screenplay is not a retelling of the famous Holocaust drama taken from the diaries of Frank, but about a contemporary Jewish girl who goes to Israel and learns about the traumas of suicide bombing.”
In this light, the project does seem an ill fit for Disney, but after the Internet craze that resulted from Frank’s video debut, they might want to reconsider.
Watch the video below:
Will Disney reconsider Anne Frank film? Read More »
Marek Edelman could be said to embody both Poland’s Holocaust history and its modern Jewish revival. The last surviving leader of Warsaw’s ghetto uprising, a man credited with “awakening” Poland’s postwar generation to its proud Jewish legacy, Edelman was a hero to Polish Jews and gentiles.
His death Oct. 2 in Warsaw at the age of 90 brings to a close his generation’s contributions to Poland’s democratic culture even as his influence reverberates throughout the country’s revitalized and growing Jewish community.
Edelman’s role in the Warsaw ghetto uprising elevated him to a place of honor among Jewish and gentile resisters to Nazi predations. A fighter of unusual skill and courage, this 24-year-old commander survived the 1943 uprising to participate in the valiant but doomed 1944 general Warsaw uprising against Nazi occupation.
Only 280,000 of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews survived the Holocaust and returned at the end of the war. By 1970 that number was down to 20,000 or 30,000, as many fled the communist regime. Edelman’s wife and children left Poland during the Cold War anti-Semitism of the late 1960s, but he stayed.
“Warsaw is my city. … Someone has to stay here with all those who died,” said the man who emboldened three postwar generations to rebuild Jewish life in Poland.
By the 1970s, few Poles knew anything about the Warsaw ghetto or its uprising. The communist government had made a point of systematically erasing Poland’s past, leaving the postwar generation with what it called “biale plamy”—history’s blank spots.
Then in 1976, the anti-communist underground published a book-length interview with Edelman. Forty thousand copies sold with remarkable speed and the biale plamy began to fill in. Edelman became Poland’s only famous living Jew, and the postwar generation began to learn about its Jewish history.
“Marek awakened my generation,” Holocaust researcher Anka Grupinska told me in 1990.
In the late ‘70s, together with gentiles interested in Jewish culture, Jewish activists organized secret, underground groups—“flying universities”—that sought to supplant the negative stigma around Jewishness with positive meaning. They studied Jewish history, held Holocaust commemorations and practiced religious observances.
This reclamation of Jewish identity and culture became a meaningful expression of anti-communist resistance, and it imbued the 1980s Solidarity movement with respect for Poland’s Jewish heritage. Indeed, Edelman became an inspiration to the Solidarity labor movement that presaged the fall of communism in Poland.
With communism’s collapse in 1989, the Jewish activists came out of hiding and began to revitalize Jewish communities in a free Poland. Throughout his long life Edelman continued to play an active role in Polish political and Jewish cultural life.
I was fortunate to meet Edelman a handful of times, and like nearly all who knew him, I can attest that he could affect a gruff exterior. He stated his strong opinions bluntly and did not mince words—certainly not when confronting injustice and hypocrisy.
He could be a tough pragmatist, even to the point of seeming heartless. Edelman would tell a story in which he characterized himself as having been “merciless” during the war. As a young messenger for the ghetto hospital, he carried documents that allowed him to rescue a few Jews from trains transporting them to the gas chambers. He consciously saved those he thought most capable of aiding the coming ghetto revolt. Only those who experienced the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, he said, could understand the decisions he and others were forced to make.
Making such tough life-and-death decisions did not preclude, and perhaps heightened, Edelman’s capacity for empathy. He often spoke of the courage exhibited by those Jews who chose to stay with their families, even when staying together meant the strong accompanied the weak to a certain end. What others condemned as shameful meekness Edelman saw as courage that was as great, he said, as that of those who fought the Nazis with homemade weapons.
“These people went quietly and with dignity,” he said. “It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one’s death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting.”
Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek of Warsaw has said of Edelman that it was his decision to stay in Poland that “made him fight so hard for his Jewish and Polish identity. He became a real witness, he gave a real testimony with his life.”
For that decision and that testimony, Poland and its revitalized Jewish community—and in fact Jews everywhere—have much to be grateful.
(Shana Penn is the executive director of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture in San Francisco.)
Remembering Marek Edelman Read More »
A special exhibit displaying memories from Lou Schotland’s life adorned the walls of Agoura Hills Senior Retreat last month when the 87-year-old retiree was honored as the assisted-living facility’s Citizen of the Month. Through photographs and letters, Schotland illustrated a life story that stretches from World War II-era Poland to Youngstown, Ohio.
Miraculously, the Holocaust survivor was able to reunite with his wife, Dorothy, after being separated at Auschwitz and began life anew in the United States. Although Schotland has never visited Israel, he is a passionate Zionist and speaks about his experiences during the Holocaust at schools and universities.
But that’s not all: Schotland is known to stand in as a surrogate rabbi, helping lead Shabbat services each Friday at the Agoura Hills retirement facility.
Survivor Honored in Agoura Hills Read More »