December 16, 2010

Legendary horse trainer Robert “Bobby” Frankel, a long-time Pacific Palisades resident, is among seven athletes and sports figures elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame for 2011.
Frankel, who died a year ago, scored 3,654 first place victories and his nearly $228 million in career earnings made him the second winningest trainer in horse racing history. He was a five-time recipient of the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Trainer.
    Among this year’s seven honorees are five Americans, one Briton and one Russian. They will be inducted into the IJSHOF museum, on the campus of Israel’s Wingate Institute, in July 2013.
In addition to Frankel, the new inductees are:
London-born Samuel Elias, aka “Dutch Sam,” “The Terrible Jew” and “Star of the East,” had to wait almost two centuries after his death in 1816 to make the Hall of Fame.
Standing 5’6” and peaking at 135 pounds, Elias is regarded as the greatest small man in bare-knuckles ring history. He fought in 100 bouts, many lasting 35 to 60 rounds, and lost only one – his last, four years and 15,000 glasses of gin after his supposed retirement.
Judo pioneer Rena Kanokogi, the former Rusty Glickman of Brooklyn, known as the “mother of women’s judo,” almost single-handedly forced the Olympic Committee to recognize women’s judo. She coached the U.S. team in the 1988 Olympic Games.
In 1959, posing as a man, she won the New York State YMCA judo championship, but had to return her medal after officials discovered her true gender.
Sports columnist Leonard Koppett, Moscow-born but New York-bred, is the only journalist elected to both the baseball and basketball halls of fame. In New York, “Koppy” wrote for the Herald Tribune, Post and Times, besides authoring 16 sports books.
Alfred Kuchevsky played a major role as defenseman in the Soviet Union’s domination of international ice hockey in the 1950s. He was named three times to the Soviet Hockey League All-Stars and is believed to live in Moscow.
Fred Lewis, a three- and four-wall handball champion, was named the 1970s “Player of the Decade” by the National Handball Association. He now lives in Arizona.
Billiards champ Michael Sigel, was described as the “greatest living player of the 20th century” by the International Pool Tour. He is the winner of 10 world titles and six U.S. Opens, including the World 8-Ball, 9-Ball, Straight Pool and Open championships. He now lives in Florida.
The International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame was founded in 1979 by Los Angeles television producer and writer Joseph Siegman, who currently chairs the organization’s selection committee.
    Since its beginning, the IJSHOF has inducted 350 sportsmen and sportswomen from 24 countries.

Yenta,

Is there anyway to fall back in love with your husband after 23 yrs of a roller coaster marriage? Would it better to move on and try to build a new life at 50. If I we’re to try and make it work, that’s assuming he still wants to get w me, how would I go about having sex with him again after 4-6 years?

Signed,

Desperate for Directions

Dear DFD,

For you, I consulted two Rebbetzins, ie, the wives of good Rabbis. According to the first wise woman I asked, “I do think with a history of 23 years it is possible to fall back in love, its worth seeking help for this. Alone and single at 50 is not as simple as it sounds and the chance of meeting someone is not huge… I know too many women here who are still single at 60 and 70 etc and really regret it. I would say try every option first.”

As we discussed this dilemma we concurred that marriage counseling is in order. That, and upping the communication between husband and wife. Have you talked about your sex life openly with your husband in six years? Have you directly addressed the issues that are mushrooming between you? Communication builds intimacy; intimacy builds trust; trust builds safety; safety yields the possibility for wild sexual expression. Follow suit.

Later I contacted AskMoses.com, where there are live people with great Jewish knowledge waiting online to help people with their questions. I asked the woman there about your dilemma and she immediately said, “I certainly DO believe people can fall in love again…though it takes work. There are many many good books and counselors who can help a couple rekindle what they believe is lost.” (See below for titles.)

“Would you agree?” she asked me. “Yes,” I answered. Adding my own two cents I went on, “I agree. But there is something sad to me about a woman who is beautiful, alive and intelligent trying to make it work with a man who might not be good for her. I have faith in marriage, and respect its sanctity, but also know that we die one day and only live once. So to invest a lifetime in making a dead relationship alive again could be a gamble.”

Together we decided that you need to remember why you married this man, remember what held you together on that roller coaster for 23 years. Yes, it sounds like you had dips and whirls and nausea and everything that goes with a ride, but it also sounds like there was a proper seat belt keeping you alive, close to someone in the seat next to you, and possibly, a thrill.

Or, you held on for the sake of the kids, or out of fear. Or, you married out of obligation, or ignorance, or need. Do you love him? Do you want it to work? Are you staying only because you fear starting over again? I ADORE the brave women I meet in their 50′s and 60′s who did the hard work of leaving a bad thing and finding themselves all over again. Why? Because leaving the man they were with for 30 years and starting over leaves them at a virtual age 28.

I know that women are strong and can endure things for the sake of holding a family and children together. I also know that women make mistakes in choosing partners. But 23 years is a long time. Six years is too. So before you quit, put your heart into this like a brave warrior and see what it yields. The woman at AskMoses reminded me that the Mishna teaches, “according to the toil is the reward.” “In other words,” she explained, “the effort she invests in her relationship will reward her as they can grow to feel intimate (emotionally and otherwise) once again.”

Places to seek help:

Find a marriage counselor, stat, to see what is keeping you from getting intimate with the man you once loved.

For a Jewish spin on marriage and working with it, check out Can This Marriage Be Saved? a blog hosted by Chabad.org. This week’s feature is on what an empty nest does to a marriage.

I do wonder, do you have kids? One thing that happens as children age, is that couples can no longer deflect their issues into caring for their offspring. Once the kids become adults, the parents are left with each other again. In those years of child-rearing it can be easy to lose touch with one another, burying issues under soccer practices and birthday parties. Now you have to sweep up shop after all that production.

Also check out creepy but brilliant John Gray, author of Women are From Mars, Men are From Venus. His website has a whole arsenal of marriage-saving resources including Online Counseling, the How Do You Rate In The Bedroom Quiz, or the Monthly Romance Planner.

Or, check out the even creepier Surrendered Wife for marriage-saving ideas by Laura Doyle.

And finally… “As for her question on physical intimacy,” wrote the AskMoses.com operator, “I think she can invite him for an evening of long overdue romance and do all the classic things, music, candles etc., to get things rekindled that way.”

Or, try reading Kim Catrall’s book, (although she did write it with her EX-husband) Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm

” title=”www.send-email.org”>www.send-email.org to merissag[at]gmail[dot]com.

Falling Back In Love With Your Husband Read More » AIPAC viewed U.S. gov’t as targeting pro-Israel groups during espionage probe Leave a Comment / United States / Jewish Journal It was a case that transfixed the pro-Israel community: the arrest in August 2005 on espionage charges of two senior officials at the most influential pro-Israel group in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Before the government dropped the case in May 2009 amid questions of whether the officials actually committed a crime by talking to Israeli officials about classified information one of them had received alleging an Iranian plot against Israelis stationed in Iraq, AIPAC fired the two men: foreign policy chief Steve Rosen and Iran analyst Keith Weissman. Now the battle is on to clear their names. Rosen has filed a defamation lawsuit demanding $20 million from his former employer, and new court filings on Tuesday shed light on a key element of the case: Before firing the two senior staffers, AIPAC prepared a robust defense of them that alleged a conspiracy inside U.S. government agencies to target pro-Israel groups. The filings by Rosen’s lawyers aim to undermine AIPAC’s claim that the decision in March 2005 to fire him and Weissman was based on the revelation that the two dealt in classified information. Rather, the documents allege, AIPAC approved of dealing in classified information. The court case is significant because it shows the inner workings of AIPAC, a lobbying group that both enemies and supporters call one of Washington’s most powerful and feared lobbies. The new court filings also show the extent to which some of AIPAC’s highest officials believed the U.S. government was targeting the group because of its pro-Israel stance and activities, not because of suspected criminality. That point comes through especially clear in the draft of a speech that was to have been delivered by AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, Rosen’s boss, just weeks after the FBI raided AIPAC’s offices on Aug. 27, 2004. In the speech, Kohr was to say that the government was targeting AIPAC for “who we are and what we do.” The speech was never delivered. The documents filed this week show that Kohr and AIPAC’s lawyer already were aware in October 2004 that Weissman suspected that the information he had received about the Iranian plot was classified. Kohr and other officials acknowledge that chatter about classified information, while never solicited by AIPAC officials, inevitably bubbles up in the course of lobbying routines. Rosen’s suit alleges that he was defamed when AIPAC spokesman Patrick Dorton told the media in 2008 that he was fired because he and Weissman “did not comport with standards that AIPAC expects of its employees.” The cache of documents filed this week are part of Rosen’s response to a request filed last month by AIPAC lawyers asking a judge to dismiss the case, claiming that Rosen does not have enough evidence to go to trial. In their court filings, Rosen’s lawyers describe two earlier cases in which AIPAC defended and praised Rosen and another employee for receiving apparently classified information and passing it along. “Rosen had received and shared potentially classified information concerning Libyan officials giving money to an American Presidential candidate in 1984,” the lawyers’ brief says. “AlPAC did not disapprove of his actions but in fact issued him a positive performance appraisal that year and every year thereafter.” Rosen told JTA that at the time he tried to leak the Libya story to the media with the approval of his bosses. Reporters never were able to confirm the story with a second source, however, and this week’s court filings mark the first time that the information has been made public. In another case that made headlines in 1984, AIPAC defended an employee who had distributed to congressional offices a classified paper outlining U.S. strategies in trade negotiations in Israel. AIPAC said at the time that the staffer never solicited the paper and had returned it immediately upon learning that it was classified. The document had a relatively low “business confidential” classification, and FBI agents at the time said that it “contains no national defense information and was originally classified to protect the U.S. bargaining position.” Dorton denied that AIPAC ever dealt in classified information. “AIPAC does not seek, use or request anything but legal and appropriate information as part of its work,” he said. “No current employee of AIPAC was involved in knowingly obtaining or distributing classified information.” But in the draft speech Kohr prepared but never delivered to top AIPAC donors on Oct. 18, 2004, AIPAC’s chief is blunt about who he blames for the raid on AIPAC’s offices and for erroneous leaks to media alleging a “spy ring” at the lobby. “We believe that some people may be trying to distort the meaning of the law in order to undermine AIPAC, and indeed the entire pro-Israel movement,” the draft speech says. “They are not only suggesting that two members of our staff broke the law. They are also trying to gather evidence that AIPAC, by virtue of who we are and what we do, is violating the law. “Most of the FBI’s questions have focused on the very nature of how AIPAC works,” Kohr was to have said. “They have focused on AIPAC’s role in affecting U.S. Middle East policy.” Kohr suggests that AIPAC is caught in the internecine wars between Bush administration neoconservatives and their enemies in and out of government. It was not clear whether Kohr and AIPAC planned on making a public counteroffensive accusing U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials of deliberately targeting pro-Israel groups. Officials and lay leaders within AIPAC at the time were privately telling associates that AIPAC was targeted by anti-Israel obsessives inside government agencies. An AIPAC briefing paper prepared around the same time as Kohr’s speech—and also never distributed—also intimates that the prosecutors were seen as singling out pro-Israel groups. “That speech was never given because we were uncomfortable with what the draft said and it’s not relevant,” Dorton told JTA this week. “One of its principal authors was Steve Rosen’s defense counsel,” Abbe Lowell, “and at the end of the day, we just didn’t feel comfortable with its content.” Rosen has alleged that AIPAC fired him and then for years refused to pay his legal fees because it was under pressure at the time from the government—which, he alleges, had threatened to invoke a rule allowing the government to charge corporations that protect employees under indictment. A judge considering a different case subsequently ruled that such threats were unconstitutional and the government has stopped the practice. AIPAC has always denied government pressure played a role in the firing of Rosen and Weissman. The government, in its August 2005 indictment, hinged the charges against the former AIPAC staffers on a section of the 1917 Espionage Act criminalizing the receipt of classified information. The section had been invoked only a handful of times before, and never successfully. The threat to free speech posed by the law has made headlines in recent days in considerations of whether the U.S. government could successfully sue WikiLeaks, which has received and distributed classified diplomatic cables. AIPAC viewed U.S. gov’t as targeting pro-Israel groups during espionage probe Read More » Children’s toys Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / The Annoyed Jew In this holiday season, we must be vigilant against all terrorist encroachments.  Especially when they come wrapped in pretty packages. Children’s toys Read More » The City of Lights at its darkest hour Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Judaism / Jonathan Kirsch Adolf Hitler may have been bloody in tooth and claw, but he was enough of an aesthete to understand that Paris was the center of gravity for European culture. On the only visit he made to the city during World War II, he went sight-seeing like any other tourist, then or now. Still, the open-mindedness that made Paris so appealing to artists, writers and intellectuals from around the world inspired only contempt in the Fuehrer. “Does the spiritual health of the French people matter to you?” he remarked to architect Albert Speer. “Let’s let them degenerate. All the better for us.” The story is told by Alan Riding, author of the best-selling “Distant Neighbors” and former cultural correspondent for the New York Times, in “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris” (Knopf, $28.95), a remarkable cultural history of the City of Lights at its darkest hour.  He paints a vivid portrait of the famous figures who found themselves in Paris when the army of Nazi Germany marched under the Arc de Triomphe, and he asks tough questions about what they did and did not do. “How, I wondered, had artists and intellectuals addressed the city’s worst political moment of the twentieth century?” muses Riding. “Did working under the occupation automatically mean collaboration? Should any writer be sanctioned for the ‘crime’ of an opinion? Do gifted painters, musicians or actors have a duty to provide ethical leadership?” So Riding puts a whole generation of public intellectuals in the dock and holds them accountable for their words and deeds. “During the occupation, we had two choices: collaborate or resist,” said Jean-Paul Sartre many years after the war, but Riding points out that Sartre was engaging in a self-serving oversimplification. “In truth,” writes Riding, “the options – and dilemmas – faced by individual artists were far more varied, as Sartre himself demonstrated.” Some artists and intellectuals managed to escape from Nazi-occupied France. Marc Chagall, for example, was one of the beneficiaries of a remarkable American named Vivian Fry, who courageously pried him out of police custody by warning that the collaborationist government of France “would be gravely embarrassed” by the arrest of “one of the world’s greatest painters.”  Others tried to but failed — Walter Benjamin famously ended his own life with an overdose of morphine after he was refused entry into Spain.  Samuel Beckett actually returned to Paris, “reportedly saying he preferred ‘France at war to Ireland at peace,’ and P. G. Wodehouse, interned as an enemy alien, later agreed to participate in propaganda broadcasts from Berlin. Remarkably, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, both Jewish, chose to stay in Paris and managed to survive the occupation, perhaps because Stein wrote a preface for a collection of speeches by the collaborationist French leader Pétain in which she compared him to George Washington. Riding points out how treacherous it could be for artists who remained behind, whether by choice or by necessity. Maurice Chevalier, for example, agreed to sing for French prisoners of war in a camp near Berlin but declined an invitation to do the same in a German theatre.  The Nazi press ran photographs of his performance without identifying his audience, and, as a result, “he learned he had been sentenced to death by a special tribunal of de Gaulle’s provisional French government in Algiers.”  Fearing both the Gestapo and the French resistance, he went into hiding for the rest of the war. By contrast, we learn that “the dashing young conductor Herbert von Karajan,” whom Riding describes as “a member of the Nazi Party since 1933,” became an “instant celebrity” in Paris when he presented a program of Wagner operas at the Paris Opera during “a trip sponsored by Hitler himself.”  One performance was reserved for Wehrmacht officers, but the other one was open to the public — and it sold out, too. “Madame, what you have done for Isolde,” wrote the French writer Jean Cocteau in a revealing fan letter, “was such a marvel that I lack the courage to remain silent.” Indeed, there are precious few examples of heroic conduct by intellectuals in Riding’s account.  Andrè Malraux, for example, “had come to personify the intellectual engagé in the ’30s, but declined to join the resistance until 1944 and “spent much of the war in a quiet corner of the Côte d’Azur.”  Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir remained “Left Bank celebrities” whose photos appeared in the Nazi-controlled newspapers, and the occupation did not prevent them (as well as Pablo Picasso and Albert Camus, among others) from attending all-night parties where the only risk was a curfew violation. Riding does not overlook the less-famous intellectuals who engaged more courageously in the struggle against Nazi Germany. “Many writers chose to sting with words, some did so with armed resistance, a few gave their lives for their beliefs,” he acknowledges. “When the liberation came, the world of letters had its heroes and martyrs, too.” But he concedes that “cultural resistance had a limited reach,” and he quotes the remark of one French writer who dismissed the efforts of the more timid resisters: “Poets who wrote a quatrain about Hitler for a confidential sheet — called clandestine — under a pseudonym believe sincerely that they have saved France.” “And the Show Went On” is a challenging book in more than one sense.  It’s a work of intellectual history in its purest form, and Riding is as much concerned with ideas and values as with events, deeds and personalities. He refuses to idealize or demonize any of the artists and writers whom he ponders in its pages; rather, he allows us to see a certain fog of war that affects civilians as well as soldiers and casts them in an uncertain light.  Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at The City of Lights at its darkest hour Read More » Search ×