Statement on Divestment
Recently, there have been two bills put forward for a vote before student organizations within the University of California that call on the University to divest from companies doing business with Israel. Understandably, these bills have received considerable attention from the public and the media.
The overarching question of the University of California divesting from any company is a complex one and any action considered must conform to State and federal laws, as well as to the University’s fiduciary responsibilities as a public entity to protect the security of its pension and endowment funds. In 2005, the Regents stated that a policy of divestment from a foreign government shall be adopted by the University only when the United States government declares that a foreign regime is committing acts of genocide. It was also noted at the time that divestment is a serious decision that should be rarely pursued.
We share The Regents’ belief that divestment needs to be undertaken with caution. We firmly believe that if there is to be any discussion of divestment from a business or country, it must be robust and fair-minded. We must take great care that no one organization or country is held to a different standard than any other. In the current resolutions voted on by the UC student organizations, the State of Israel and companies doing business with Israel have been the sole focus. This isolation of Israel among all countries of the world greatly disturbs us and is of grave concern to members of the Jewish community.
We fully support the Board of Regents in its policy to divest from a foreign government or companies doing business with a foreign government only when the United States government declares that a foreign regime is committing acts of genocide. The U.S. has not made any declaration regarding the State of Israel and, therefore, we will not bring a recommendation before the Board to divest from companies doing business with the State of Israel.
UC Board of Regents and President speak out on divestment Read More »
Not even two weeks ago the Supreme Court said the Mojave cross could stay. Now it’s gone—stolen, in fact:
Versions of the memorial have been vandalized repeatedly in the last 75 years and the motive this time was not immediately known, but the theft was condemned Tuesday by veterans groups that support the cross and by civil libertarians that saw it as a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.
“The American Legion expects whoever is responsible for this vile act to be brought to justice,” said Clarence Hill, the group’s national commander.
Attorney Peter Eliasberg of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which sued on behalf of an opponent of the cross, said the organization rejects any resort to theft or vandalism.
“We believe in the rule of law and we think the proper way to resolve to any controversy about the cross is through the courts,” he said.
The 7-foot-high metal cross vanished from its perch in the Mojave National Preserve late Sunday or early Monday, said National Park Service spokeswoman Linda Slater. Bolts holding it to the rock were cut.
Slater said possible scenarios ranged from people “with an interest in the case” to metal scavengers. The U.S. Justice Department was looking into the case.
Mojave cross is stolen after Supreme Court victory Read More »
For Israel and much of the Jewish community, the next inconvenient truth is the quickening reality of a nuclear Iran.
For Lawrence Bender, the producer who helmed the eye-opening global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” nuclear armament is a pending disaster. Bender and director Lucy Walker will screen their documentary, “Countdown to Zero” at the Cannes Film Festival this week in hopes that the film will catalyze political action. The film explores the current global impulse to go nuclear, the possibility for accident and miscalculation, and features commentary from a bevy of prominent political figures, including Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, and Pervez Musharraf. Even Valerie Plame Wilson, the outed CIA operative, makes a cameo to comment on the rickety climate surrounding—what the film is calling, “the second nuclear age.”
According to the blog The Daily Beast, which ranked the film as one of the most anticipated screenings at Cannes, Bender said he hopes the film will not only raise mainstream awareness but “help create the political will necessary to ensure that the Senate ratifies the New START Treaty without delay or partisan bickering.”
Well, that would be one thing the U.S. and Israel could agree upon.
Check out the haunting trailer:
Lawrence Bender premieres ‘Countdown to Zero’ nuclear doc at Cannes Read More »
Anyone who has chaperoned high school students knows it can add a few gray hairs. I experienced this very phenomenon a number of years ago while serving as the
rabbinic leader on March of the Living, the annual gathering that takes youth to Poland to commemorate Holocaust Memorial week.
It was Shabbat morning in Warsaw, and I was assigned to lead 40 students on a half-hour walk to the only functioning synagogue in the city, the Nozyk Shul.
When we arrived, there were more than 1,000 kids, all dressed alike, inside and outside of the shul. I needed to choose a well-defined spot where all the kids would meet once services ended. I scouted out the area and noticed a large sign in English and Polish on the building next to the shul that read: The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation Kindergarten. Everyone in my group saw the sign, and it was an easy place to remember.
I took my time exiting the shul after the service, certain that it would be simple to find the kids. When I finally came out, I couldn’t believe my eyes: All the other group leaders used the same spot, and more than 1,000 kids stood underneath that sign.
It took a number of searches, counts and recounts until I found all 40 students. Had we brought along our own banner to gather around, it would have made the process easier on the students and myself.
I wasn’t the first person in history to encounter this problem. In our Torah reading, Moses tackles this very issue when he conducts the second census of the Jewish people. The late 20th century Torah sage, Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetzky, wonders why there was a need for this second census when the first was taken only a few months before, as recounted in Parashat Ki Tisa.
Rabbi Kaminetzky suggests that the second census established a new way of viewing the Jewish people. For the first time, each tribe had its own flag: “Each man shall encamp by his banner according to the insignias of their father’s household” (Leviticus 2:2). Up until this moment the tribes did not have separate standards or emblems. The people were one unit.
What purpose, Rabbi Kaminetzky wonders, was served by separating the Jewish people into different groups with distinct emblems, colors and standards? Isn’t the goal of the Jewish people to be “One People”?
Weren’t the flags counter-productive, emphasizing diversity rather than unity? Furthermore, if they were so important, why didn’t we have flags immediately following the Exodus from Egypt?
In a brilliant analysis, Rabbi Kaminetzky says that Judaism promotes unity, but unity should never eliminate creative individuality. The only time unity and individuality can co-exist, however, is when they share the same focus. At this moment in our history the focus was the mishkan, the tabernacle, the first synagogue of our people. Everyone shared that goal and worked to see it thrive with every Jew offering his or her individual talents.
We can now appreciate why, up until now, tribal flags weren’t instituted. Until we had a mishkan identifying our faith and common destiny, the individualism of each tribe was unacceptable. Now, with the mishkan, the shared goal became clear so that individuality could be encouraged.
Rabbi Kaminetzky’s insight is more than simple exegesis; rather, he is offering us a view rarely heard. Unity of the Jewish people can occur only if we share a common destiny and mission. When we can apply varied and different talents to one common goal we, in turn, can enhance that goal.
Elazar Muskin is senior rabbi of Young Israel of Century City (yicc.org), an Orthodox congregation in the Pico-Robertson area.
Parashat Bamidbar (Numbers 1:1-4:20) Read More »
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance (MOT) once again proved that flaunting a cuddly relationship with Hollywood helps boost its cause. This year’s national tribute dinner, honoring director-producer team Ron Howard and Brian Grazer along with three recipients of the organization’s Medal of Valor award, attracted one of the most star-studded crowds in recent years. Some of the industry’s heaviest heavyweights — including DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Disney President/CEO Bob Iger and actor Russell Crowe — gathered in the Beverly Wilshire ballroom for a two-hour homage to MOT’s human rights work.
The annual event, held on May 5, drew leaders from the Walt Disney Co. — Iger and chair Rich Ross — as well as the top brass from NBC Universal, including CEO Jeff Zucker and studio head Ron Meyer, who sat with the honorees in a show of solidarity for the upcoming Grazer-produced “Robin Hood,” starring Crowe, who was there to present Howard and Grazer with their Humanitarian Award.
Also at the table of honor was director Brett Ratner, who has made it something of a tradition to lead HaMotzi.
After tardy emcee Jay Leno failed to thrill with a brief routine on rectally inserted bombs and explosive diarrhea, Katzenberg wisely detected the crowd’s cool reception and announced that Leno had written a check — no word on how much — to the Wiesenthal Center.
“Had you mentioned that before,” Leno said, leaning into the microphone, “I would have gotten bigger laughs.”
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center, transitioned the crowd into the serious part of the evening — the presentation of the Medal of Valor honors — by applauding recipients who “celebrate the principles of human dignity and tolerance and stand firm against the apostles of hatred and bigotry.”
Hier had high praise for each of the three medal recipients (two awarded posthumously): Winston Churchill, the World War II-era British prime minister “who saved Western civilization”; Aristide Pellissier, the late mayor of Les Brunels, a village in Southern France, who provided a mother and her daughter safe haven from the Nazis; and Dr. Ofer Merin, deputy director general of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, who oversaw the Israel Defense Forces field hospital operation in Haiti.
“One thing they all share is courage,” Celia Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter, said of the honorees while accepting the award on her grandfather’s behalf.
Sandys spoke of Churchill’s moral courage to be “a lone voice,” warning Britain of the threat building across the English Channel. Despite opposition from within his own country, “He didn’t give in,” she said. “We felt he was put on this earth for a purpose, that he was walking with destiny.”
Quoting one of Churchill’s own self-reflections on fighting the Nazis, she read, “All my past life was but a preparation for this hour and this trial.”
The dinner, though largely a schmoozefest, wasn’t short on teary moments. Esther Liberman, who was a young girl when Pellissier saved her from the Nazis, stood on the stage as her 13 children and grandchildren rose from their seats to sustained applause.
And Merin, who was applauded for his heroic work in Haiti, received an emotional standing ovation buttressed by palpable Jewish pride in Israel. Merin spoke about the Israeli mission in Haiti and said that, despite their very best efforts, the Israeli medical team was but “a drop in the ocean,” able to treat only a fraction of the 300,000 Haitians injured. This was a sobering realization for many of the physicians, Merin said, who had to learn “the ability to accept what we could do, and what we could not.”
Crowe took the stage next to introduce Howard and Grazer with a speech he had “spent most of the day writing,” according to his post on Twitter.
“What is at the core of the American dream,” Crowe said, “is tolerance and humanity; in [Howard’s and Grazer’s] work, you see tolerance and humanity are very important to them, and when you meet them you realize their kindness as men.”
Although it wasn’t explicit why Grazer and Howard were chosen to receive the evening’s highest honor — especially in light of the work of the evening’s other honorees — they both delivered tender and personal remarks about what the award meant to them.
Howard, who is not Jewish, recalled a time early in his career on the set of “Happy Days” when director Jerry Paris noticed him pacing nervously. Howard told Paris he was indeed feeling jittery.
“Cute,” Howard remembered Paris saying. “WASP-y on the outside, total Jew on the inside!”
Howard said that Paris, who died in 1986, would often say to him, “It’s never too late — we can still bar mitzvah you!”
“Well Jerry, this is not quite the bar mitzvah you dreamed of, but it’s pretty remarkable,” he said to heaps of laughter.
Howard spoke eloquently about the importance of American leadership in promoting cultural diversity and “the human yearning for unity.” The Museum of Tolerance, he said, “is a living reminder that silent witnesses to tyranny and injustice are tacit supporters.”
Before the crowd spilled out of the ballroom and into the valet line, Leno singled out one audience member, Berkeley student body president Will Smelko, who recently risked his own popularity to veto a divest-from-Israel bill that had been passed by the student senate (see story on Page 12).
“Will, you are that next mayor in France,” Leno said.
A woman who identified herself as a Holocaust survivor approached Smelko on the way out and said, “People like you saved my life.”
So why did a 22-year-old non-Jewish student leader go against the grain for the Jewish state?
“It was a very one-sided attack on Israel,” Smelko said of the bill. On the surface, it seemed to make some sense, he said, but a closer look indicated a more spurious agenda. “The bill was being used for the political delegitimizing of the State of Israel. Something told me the way they used the bill was morally wrong.”
Stars Shine at Wiesenthal Center Tribute Read More »
Neil Strauss has a Jewish name: Tuvia, from the word tov, meaning good. It was given to him by a college buddy, Dustin, who became a religious Jewish mouthpiece in “The Game,” Strauss’ best-selling book about his exploits as a pickup-artist-in-training and bible to sexually frustrated men all over the world.
Dustin was proof that average-looking American Jewish men can be first-rate womanizers. With one simple glance, he could get a pretty girl at a bar to make out with him in a dark corner, almost like magic, while Strauss looked on with envy. Physically, Strauss painted himself as the classic Jewish neb (although he didn’t call himself that): short, balding and scrawny, with a nose that has a bump at the ridge.
Dustin has since gone from playboy to yeshiva boy. He went to Jerusalem, traded in one-night-stands for Ma’ariv, changed his name to Avisha and now focuses his energy on a rabbi’s daughter — his wife. Meanwhile, Strauss has gone from dateless dud to revered sage of the PUA (pickup art) community, men — and some women — who share knowledge, rules and terminology on the art of seduction. He followed up “The Game” with his L.A.-based “Stylelife Academy,” selling audio programs and tool kits. Last year, he released the paperback edition of “Rules of the Game,” a how-to book filled with self-help messages, field exercises, tested routines and short stories of seduction.
Story continues after the jump.
With astonishing candor and laugh-out-loud humor, Strauss describes his method for rousing a threesome (the dual-induction massage), his seduction of a smelly 60-year-old woman and of a Muslim seductress. But there’s one subject on which he’s conspicuously silent.
During a telephone interview, the L.A.-based Strauss stammered when asked about his Jewish background and said: “My parents are very secretive.”
In “The Game” he scoffed at the name Tuvia and embraced “Style,” his PUA alter ego. But he says Jewish identity played no real role in his quest for his many sexual partners.
“I’m very much a humanist,” Strauss said. “It wouldn’t matter if I were Jewish or whatever. I just find it shouldn’t be segmented.”
If anything, he says “Emergency,” his book about surviving an America in crisis, is written more from a Jewish mindset. He points out that awkwardness around women is not a particularly Jewish malady.
“Everywhere you go there are quiet, frustrated, lonely, desperate men who don’t know how to interact with women, and those interactions tend to be the same. It’s human nature.”
His secret to success?
“I think it was just having an attitude that if someone else can do it, I can do it. And if I failed, I figured out what was my mistake, what went wrong, think it through in my mind, talk to experts and find out what I should have done, then do it right the next time.”
But women, he says, whether they know it or like it, set the rules of the “game.”
“I don’t think woman are at fault for it,” he said. “They need to do it. That fact is, to some extent, no matter who you are, as a woman there are guys who are hitting on you and coming up to you, whether you realize it or not. You need some kind of tool to differentiate who you should spend your time on.”
While he refuses to talk about his Jewish background, Strauss revealed some Jewish influence on his ethics about life and love in a recent blog about the “meaning of life.” He told his fans how he read the Bible one summer after a teacher put it first on the list of the world’s best works of literature. The book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) made a lasting impression.
“I found the life advice of Ecclesiastes very good and accurate,” he said. “Work. Be happy. Die.”
You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Need Pickup Advice Read More »
Five fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a collection of rare biblical artifacts will be on display May 21 through July 18 at Azusa Pacific University (APU) in Azusa.
The exhibition, “Treasures of the Bible: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Beyond,” is part of APU’s mission “to play a part in history by carefully preserving, while also sharing, these remarkable treasures with the public,” Jon Wallace, president of the Christian evangelical institution, said.
Among the biblical artifacts are a 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablet, a Gutenberg bible leaf, a 17th century Sefer Torah scroll and original King James Bibles dating from 1611 to 1640.
The five Dead Sea Scrolls fragments were purchased by APU last summer and will be available for public viewing for the first time, APU spokeswoman Allison Oster said.
“The fragments from Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Daniel confirm the accuracy of the Scriptures and are therefore as significant to Christians as to Jews,” APU Executive Vice President David Bixby said in a phone interview.
Evangelicals believe in the infallibility of the Bible, and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls “is the single most important archaeological discovery in history,” Bixby said.
The exhibit also emphasizes the Jewish roots of Christianity. “One crucial function of the university is to preserve the heritage of the past and show that many principles learned by past generations transcend eras and cultures and are relevant for us today,” said Timothy Finlay, APU associate professor of Old Testament.
“The tragedy of the present era is that we are in grave danger of forgetting these principles,” he added. “This exhibit reminds us that we have much to learn from the peoples of the past.”
Besides APU, only two other American educational institutions — Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and the University of Chicago — own Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.
There are an estimated 15,000 known fragments, many in private collections.
Visitors are strongly encouraged to purchase admission tickets in advance online at Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments, Biblical Artifacts on View in Azusa Read More »
For a woman who says she has never been much involved in the Jewish community, Ruth Seymour has probably introduced more people to an appreciation of Jewish stories and music than any other Los Angeles media figure.
But not only Yiddish aficionados mourned when Seymour announced last November that she would retire from her post of 32 years as general manager of radio station KCRW-FM (89.9) at the end of February.
Listeners, however, hope that her spirit and sensibility will continue through her successor, Jennifer Ferro, who had served as assistant general manager since 1997.
Ruth Epstein (the first of Seymour’s three surnames) was born in the East Bronx to Russian-Polish immigrants, who transmitted their secular, socialist and Yiddish worldview to their daughter.
She deepened and broadened this ideology and culture at the Sholem Aleichem Folk School and, later, at the City College of New York, where she studied under the great Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich.
When she joined KCRW as a consultant in 1977 under the name Ruth Hirschman (her husband was poet Jack Hirschman, whom she would later divorce; she adopted the name Seymour in 1993 in honor of her paternal great-grandfather, a rabbi), the station was housed in two old classrooms at John Adams Junior High School. Later, it moved to more modern quarters at Santa Monica College.
In slowly transforming KCRW into one of the country’s most innovative public broadcasting outlets, Seymour reached back to her roots to create “Philosophers, Fiddlers and Fools.”
The three-hour program became an instant Chanukah hit, serving a bilingual mix of folk music, Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, old Second Avenue songs and a memorial tribute to Holocaust victims.
“I always broadcast the program on Friday evenings, so I could bid my listeners a gut yontif,” Seymour recalled in an interview.
The Chanukah potpourri was complemented by the program “Jewish Short Stories From the Old World to the New.”
After 28 years as host of “Philosophers,” Seymour abruptly shut down the program but followed it with “Only in America,” a series on American Jewish history.
In parallel, Seymour created a host of general cultural, musical and political programs, which appealed to her predominantly liberal Westside audience and brought to the station such notables as Tom Schnabel and Warren Olney.
Such Seymour legacies as “Which Way L.A.?,” “To the Point,” “Left, Right and Center” and “The Politics of Culture” all have established faithful followers who can be counted on to pitch in during annual fundraising drives.
When big news broke, KCRW showed that it could cover the stories as well as, and usually in more depth than, the commercial stations.
In 1992, when a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused in the beating of African American motorist Rodney King, KCRW covered the ensuing riots around the clock. The radio station showed the same tenacity in reporting the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Center.
Seymour’s announcement of her retirement triggered an avalanche of reminiscences and tributes by listeners and the media, but she took the watershed event in her life quite calmly.
“At 75, I don’t want to go through the rest of my life regretting what else I could have done,” she said. “I am committed to living inside the moment.”
KCRW’s Ruth Seymour Offers Rich Legacy to Jewish Community Read More »
Beate Sirota Gordon has lived the life of a trailblazer, albeit accidentally, she says.
While spending her adolescence in Tokyo, where her pianist father taught at the Imperial Academy of Music, she noticed that Japanese women enjoyed few rights in the 1930s — they had to walk behind their husbands, could not initiate a divorce and had no inheritance or property rights.
After she joined Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff in Japan after World War II to reunite with her parents, Sirota Gordon was given a hand in changing Japan’s attitude toward women by writing progressive codes of women’s and human rights into the Japanese constitution.
Author of the memoir “The Only Woman in the Room,” Sirota Gordon will make her first appearance in Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo on May 16 to discuss her personal experiences and her advocacy for equal rights for Japanese women.
Vienna-born Sirota Gordon first arrived in Japan in 1929 when her father, concert pianist Leo Sirota, was hired as a faculty member at the Imperial Academy of Music. He was happy to take a position that allowed him to stop touring, Sirota Gordon explains, and the family fell in love with Japan.
But observing their Jewish heritage was a challenge, she said.
“There wasn’t even a minyan in Tokyo,” Sirota Gordon said during a recent phone interview from New York. “My mother always had Pesach … and she always gave a dinner. There was no matzah in Tokyo, so we got it from Harbin [in Northeast China], where there were many Russian Jews. It always came a day late though.”
Sirota Gordon studied at the German School in Tokyo for six years but was moved to the American School at age 12 when her parents noticed Nazi anti-Semitism taking root. After graduating high school at 15, Sirota Gordon was sent to the all-girls Mills College in Oakland, where she said the president, Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, was an early feminist and encouraged the students to pursue careers.
Inspired by her musical family, Beate had dreams of a life on stage and pursued them at Mills.
“At first I wanted to be a dancer, but then my mother told me I might never be a first-rate dancer, and being a second-rate dancer meant dancing in small little towns with small little dirty hotels and small little dirty halls to perform in,” she said.
But after Beate took an acting class, the instructor let her down easy.
“The teacher told me I had a lot of good qualities, but she said, ‘You’ll never become a first-class actress.’ She was not as dramatic as my mother,” she said. “Instead, I went into languages and literature.”
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Sirota Gordon was separated from her parents. As one of the few non-Asian Japanese speakers in the United States at the time, she took a summer job with the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. She became so valuable to the agency that officials convinced Mills College President Reinhardt to let her stay on and complete her studies by turning in papers and taking exams independently rather than attending classes.
She finished college six months later but it wasn’t easy.
“From 8 a.m. until 1 p.m., I studied for examinations and prepared my term papers, then had lunch and worked the swing shift from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. I came home at midnight, and at 8 a.m. started all over again,”
Sirota Gordon said. “I never went out at all — not to a dinner, a concert; neither did I take Saturday or Sunday off. It was so exhausting. I looked a few years later at my calendar of the next year or two after I finished and it looked like I went out every night.”
It was through translating broadcasts that she learned her father had been dismissed from the Imperial Academy in 1943, and her parents spent the rest of the war in detention in the city of Karuizawa.
Before the war ended, Time magazine hired Sirota Gordon to work as an editorial researcher at its New York office, where she focused on topics related to Japan. She said many of the women working for the publication at that time had advanced degrees but were employed as researchers and secretaries, not writers, and were paid less than their male counterparts. “They were highly progressive and intelligent women. I was always the youngest, and they took me under their care,” Sirota Gordon said.
At the end of World War II, Sirota Gordon had been separated from her parents for five years and was determined to get back to Japan to find them. When she applied for a tourist visa in Washington, D.C., an official informed her that only civilians attached to the Army could travel to Japan. “He asked what I could offer, and I said I lived in Japan for 10 years and I speak Japanese. He said, ‘Don’t tell me any more. You’re hired; you’ll leave in two weeks,’ ” she said.
Attached to the Political Affairs Division, Sirota Gordon worked on Gen. MacArthur’s staff and became part of the drafting committee responsible for writing a postwar Japanese constitution. She was tasked with incorporating women’s and human rights statutes.
Sirota Gordon says she was inspired by the discrimination against women she observed in Japan and in the United States, particularly the women she worked with at Time magazine.
Although Sirota Gordon’s reasons for returning to Japan were personal, the result has had a long-lasting impact on the country. It is in large part because of Sirota Gordon that Japan ended up with a constitution that strongly protects women’s rights and equality.
Sirota Gordon says that Japan, and the many places where she lived and worked afterward, have had a strong influence on her.
“There are many good things I have been fortunate to receive from many nationalities and peoples,” Sirota Gordon said. “I don’t know which country it comes from anymore; it’s all amalgamated in me. Is it from my Japanese experience? My Russian friends? My Jewish friends? I don’t know anymore.”
As a pivotal figure in the dramatic social transformation of another culture, Sirota Gordon strongly believes our own society could be improved if people spent less time worrying about finding themselves and focused more of it on reaching out to others.
“There isn’t a real community spirit anymore,” Sirota Gordon lamented. “It’s me, myself and my greed, and that’s it. People need to look at what they hope for in the future and actually do something about it.”
Beate Sirota Gordon will speak May 16 at 2 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum, ($27, members; $30, nonmembers — advance reservations and payment required). Her talk will follow an 11 a.m. screening of Tomoko Fujiwara’s award-winning documentary, “Sirota Family & the 20th Century.” For more information, visit http://www.janm.org/events.
Articles Addressing Women and Human Rights in Japan’s Constitution
Article 11:
The people shall not be prevented from enjoying any of the fundamental human rights. These fundamental human rights guaranteed to the people by this Constitution shall be conferred upon the people of this and future generations as eternal and inviolate rights.Article 14:
1) All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.
2) Peers and peerage shall not be recognized.
3) No privilege shall accompany any award of honor, decoration or any distinction, nor shall any such award be valid beyond the lifetime of the individual who now holds or hereafter may receive it.Article 24:
1) Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.
2) With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.Article 44:
The qualifications of members of both Houses and their electors shall be fixed by law. However, there shall be no discrimination because of race, creed, sex, social status, family origin, education, property or income.
Making Her Mark on Women’s Rights … in Japan Read More »