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Jewish Journal

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March 23, 2011

Rob Eshman: When Syria falls

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Rob Eshman /

The writer Leon Wieseltier opened his keynote address at the Daniel Pearl Memorial lecture at UCLA last month with a telling joke.

“For 50 years, nothing ever changed in the Middle East,” he said, “until the minute I sat down to write this speech.”

How true. Monarchs and dictators unleashed their forces on protesters and resigned, oil prices rose and fell, wars were fought and lost. Beyond that, very little changed in the Middle East.

The Six-Day War in 1967 was a game changer, reshaping the map of the region, reshuffling alliances, and awakening fundamentalism, terror and militarism.

But no other time period has matched those six days … until the last six weeks. 

This week, all eyes were on Libya, as a coalition of the willing, led by the United States and with the approval of the Arab League, created a no-fly zone as a way to contain the Insane Clown Posse that runs that nation.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Syria to protest against their country’s leadership. That’s right — in Syria. Libya may have gotten most of the attention, but, in truth, so much more depends on Syria. The stakes are higher, the potential risks and rewards far greater. In the march of democracy through the Arab world, all roads now lead to Damascus.

Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi is a symbol of petro-brutality. The minute his people turned on him, he discovered the international community only really liked him for his oil. Old friends admitted they had really only flipped through his Little Green Book for the pictures.

Syrian President Bashar Assad represents something more, the kind of Middle Eastern dictator pumped up in stature by his iron grip on his people and his envious real estate — a prime location bordering Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel.

So far, Assad has managed to keep the fires of Arab awakening at bay, playing the fears of the nation’s Shiite Alawite minority off those of the Sunni majority, clamping down on nascent protests as they crop up, instituting some last-second reforms, opening and closing the Internet with the touch of a maestro — and using a deadly effective internal police force.

But this week’s protests raise the question of how long the Assad family’s good thing can last.

“Compared to footage of thousands, and sometimes millions, of protesters on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Manama, Sana’a and Tripoli, the numbers in Syria might seem low,” wrote M. Yaser Tabbara a Syrian American civil rights lawyer and activist, on aljazeera.com. “It should be noted, however, that what has taken place in Syria over the past few days is simply unprecedented…. A forty year old red line has been crossed and there is no turning back.”

Who cares?  The Iranians care: They stand to lose a client state and, via Assad, access to their Hezbollah proxies in Southern Lebanon. The Shi’ia Iranians don’t want to see the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni group that Assad has clamped down, gain more power.

The Saudis also care. They want to curb Iranian influence, which has only increased in light of the protests in Bahrain. They don’t want Assad or Hezbollah to try to hold on to power by launching the thousands of missiles Hezbollah has stockpiled in southern Lebanon into northern Israel.

And, of course, the Israelis care. A senior Israeli official speaking in Los Angeles last week warned that the “wild card” in the Syrian uprising is the chance that it will prompt Assad, Hezbollah or some Palestinians toward war with Israel. Starting a war, the official said, would not be difficult.

It’s not what the Israelis want — and there are analysts who make the case that Iran has little incentive for it, either. But, even more so, it’s not what the Syrian people seem to want.

The last time I met with “the Syrian people,” it was alongside Jim Prince, the director of The Democracy Council. He has worked hard over the years to support civil society in the Arab world. Several years ago, Prince invited me to lunch with some Syrian dissidents in Century City. (How many years ago? The top secret location was the office of the now defunct Bear Stearns.)

Prince returned this weekend from another trip to Cairo and Jerusalem. He noted that in the rhetoric of the Syrian protesters, Israel isn’t even mentioned.

“It is nonexistent,” Prince said. “It is not registering on anyone’s agenda.”

The Syrian people are educated and fed up with a regime that is more efficient than Mubarak’s Egypt, but just as corrupt. Syrian youth — which make up 50 percent of the country — simply refuse to accept the circumscribed freedoms their parents and grandparents did.

“The administration in Syria blamed everything on Israelis,” Prince said. “But it’s a sophisticated population; they saw through it. They want the Israeli lifestyle, Israeli standard of living. They don’t want to be second class.”

The protests may not turn out millions all at once, as in Egypt, but Syrians will use Facebook and Twitter — when the regime turns the ISPs on — and boycotts, defections and strikes to make their voices heard. 

“Maybe I’m wrong,” Prince said, “but the point is the protest is not going away.”

For those of us who see the liberation of the Arab world as inevitable, and hope that it is for the good, too, these are the headiest of times. We thought change would come only when oil prices crashed, or when Islam modernized itself. We knew Israel was not even close to being the cause of the stagnation, cruelty and backwardness that marked most Middle Eastern nations — but we wondered when Arabs themselves would recognize that.

The troubles in Syria are another good indication that they have.

“The angst across all spectrums of society is not about economics,” Prince said. “It’s about corruption, human rights, and access to information.”

I asked Prince if that means it really is about democracy.

“Yes,” he answered, “I would say it is pure democracy. They want more. They know what they’re missing. They know the world has passed them by.”

Rob Eshman: When Syria falls Read More »

Ameinu head to lead L.A. seminar

Leave a Comment / California, Community /

Though Labor Zionism, at one time Israel’s dominant political force under David Ben-Gurion and a major voice in the American Jewish community, no longer wields its once-muscular power, it is not dead and is even showing signs of revival and rejuvenation.

So says Kenneth Bob, national president of Ameinu (Hebrew for “our people”), the American successor organization for the Labor Zionist Alliance, who will lead an all-day seminar in Los Angeles on March 27.

Ameinu’s national membership stands at a modest 5,000, but during the past few years, it has seen an infusion of younger men and women among its members and leaders, Bob noted in a phone call from his New Jersey home.

In addition, new chapters have recently been established in St. Louis, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Bob, and through him Ameinu, also wields considerable influence by sitting on the boards of such major organizations as the Jewish Agency for Israel, World Zionist Organization, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, AIPAC and Jewish National Fund.

He is also on the advisory board of J Street, a natural connection for Ameinu, which describes itself as the leading progressive Zionist organization in the United States.

Bob will speak at the Jewish Federation Building on “An American Progressive Activist Views the Effects of Arab Unrest on Israel and the U.S.” and “Progressive Zionism in 2011.”

In his professional life, Bob, 58, is a software and solar energy entrepreneur and previously worked on an Israeli kibbutz for 14 years.

Although it is common for American liberal Zionists to view the current political situation in Israel with considerable concern and pessimism, Bob sees some hopeful signs.

In recent years, such “center-right” stalwarts as former and current prime ministers Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced the once-liberal position of a two-state solution.

“This would have been impossible not so very long ago, Bob said.

Currently, the most urgent domestic problem facing Israel is how to address the integration of its Arab minority into mainstream society, Bob believes.

He is encouraged that veteran conservative leader Moshe Arens has strongly endorsed this view, Bob said.

On the American Jewish scene, Bob also sees some changes. “In general, and in Ameinu specifically, American Jews are now less concerned with ideological differences and more focused on concrete issues and positions, he said.

Early reservations for the March 27 seminar are advised; call (323) 655-2842 or e-mail {encode=”LZinLA@aol.com” title=”LZinLA@aol.com”}. Attendance at the morning and afternoon seminar sessions, including kosher lunch, is $25 for Ameinu and Na’amat members, and $35 for nonmembers.

Ameinu head to lead L.A. seminar Read More »

Can a Palestinian story prompt dialogue for Middle East peace?

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Entertainment, Film /

Julian Schnabel must have known that screening a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the United Nations General Assembly would be scene-stealing. To set the town talking, the event would unite all the trappings — provocative subject matter, prestigious venue, Hollywood glamour.

In fact, the March 14 screening of “Miral” in New York drew a crowd of movie stars, diplomats, artists and intellectuals — Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Vanessa Redgrave,  Ambassadors Jean Kennedy Smith and Qazi Shaukut Fareed, and Dan Rather, among them – raising the profile of an event that openly merged artistic prominence and political power. But when mixed, art and politics — while not exactly strange bedfellows — can stir into a complicated brew. And, sure enough, Schnabel’s screening spawned a flurry of protest from some of the most powerful and prominent voices in the Jewish establishment, who accused the film of being “one-sided” and “anti-Israel.”

The next day, a Los Angeles Times headline declared:  “Screening of ‘Miral’ at the United Nations draws protests from Jewish groups.”

The wave of controversy that ensued called into question whether a high-profile film written by a Palestinian and sympathetic to “the other side” was simply too much for some Jews to handle. That the filmmaker, Julian Schnabel, is Jewish and presenting a perspective counter to the dominant Jewish paradigm was considered a tribal and national betrayal. That the film’s distributor, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is a New York Jew, and a vocal supporter of Israel, was even more unsettling. Haven’t the Jews and their State of Israel had it hard enough?

First to object was David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, who, the night before the screening, sent out an open letter to United Nations General Assembly President Joseph Deiss. “The film has a clear political message which portrays Israel in a highly negative light,” Harris wrote. “Permit me to ask why the President of the General Assembly would wish to associate himself — and the prestige of his office — with such a blatantly one-sided event.”

Next, Simon Wiesenthal Center founder Rabbi Marvin Hier sounded off: “Last night, when the General Assembly Hall was used for the first time to screen a pro-Palestinian film, marked another sad day in the 63-year-old history of the U.N.’s bias against the State of Israel,” he said in a widely released statement. “It’s bad enough that the 55 Moslem countries in the General Assembly have a virtual lock on the political resolutions there. Now the U.N. wants to extend that anti-Israel bias to the cultural and arts world as well.”

That the screening became cause for Jewish opprobrium seems to reflect deeper issues. Was this a protest of the film itself? Neither Harris nor Hier had yet seen it. Was it, rather, a legitimate complaint about bias against Israel at the world’s preeminent political assembly? Or was it, perhaps, a knee-jerk reaction from the old Jewish guard to anything sympathetic to the Palestinian perspective? Whatever the answers, the conversation surrounding “Miral” is raising serious and important questions about the Jewish response to Palestinian narratives — and, perhaps ironically, perhaps not — that’s exactly what the filmmakers want.

Rabbi Irwin Kula, one member of the post-screening panel discussion at the U.N., suggested that “Miral” offers an important opportunity to approach the conflict with new eyes.

“Everybody should go see it,” Kula, president of Clal, The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said in a phone interview a few days later, from his New York office. “If you’re a Jew and anything about Israel and Palestinians touches you in any way, you should see this film.”

For Kula and the filmmakers, the hope is that the film will provide rare insight into the Palestinian point of view and inspire dialogue.

“After 63 years of conventional diplomacy, we are now further from a two-state solution than ever before,” Kula said. “We need new forms of peacemaking. Let’s recover personal, intimate human stories, which have been completely clouded out by the political and power narratives.”

Films like “Miral,” he said, offer alternatives to Jewish understanding of the conflict, humanizing individuals on the other side and offering openings for empathy. “Either we live in a moment of pikuach nefesh [“saving a life”], which makes marginalizing and vilifying those with whom one disagrees permissible, or [the reactions are a] projection of repressed, disassociated, split-off guilt about what is happening in Israel that is simply too painful to bear.”

If the early ire of mainstream Jewish groups is any indication, American Jews may not be ready to empathize with Palestinians. For older generations, the historic and seemingly endless suffering of Jews has given rise to the indelible notion that the world is against us. “We all construct narratives to help us get through life, so for a post-Holocaust generation to construct a narrative in which everyone is seen as a Nazi out to destroy us is not crazy,” Kula said. “What trauma does is close down the capacity to trust the other, and we have a traumatized group of senior leadership in American Jewish life.”

For some, that trauma is especially real at a place like the U.N., where an Arab bloc of 55 Muslim countries is outspokenly anti-Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Council, for example, has passed numerous resolutions condemning Israel, while countries with far worse human-rights track records, such as Sudan, get by relatively unscathed. So while the filmmakers saw the U.N. as a powerful forum for dialogue, Harris and Hier saw the potential for an echo chamber of diatribes. And while making movies is an art, and not meant to be objective or balanced, using the U.N. backdrop implies a certain seal of approval for a narrative that is discomfiting for many Jews.

“The moment I hear the words ‘U.N. General Assembly Hall’ — it stinks, because it’s never been open for Jews,” Hier said during a phone interview. “Where’s the film telling Israel’s story? Did they ever show ‘Exodus’ there?”

Can a Palestinian story prompt dialogue for Middle East peace? Read More »

‘Miral’ filmmaker Schnabel is feeling the love — and the criticism

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Entertainment, Film /

In an early scene in “Miral,” the new film by artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel opening March 25, a Palestinian activist named Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) comes across a ragtag group of about 50 children in Jerusalem’s Old City, many of them crying, trembling, dirty, barefoot, their hair matted and faces traumatized. The oldest is a girl of around 12, who explains that, the night before, the children had barely escaped a fiery rampage that destroyed their homes.  They are alone, hungry and terrified.

It’s April 1948, before the establishment of the State of Israel, and the stunned Husseini, an educated woman from a prominent Jerusalem family, soon learns that the children are survivors of an attack on Deir Yassin by Jewish paramilitary groups. Her response is to found a school and orphanage for children displaced by the fighting, a place that, over the course of the film, grows to accommodate thousands of girls.

The movie goes on to tell the story of several generations of Palestinian women, notably Miral (Freida Pinto of “Slumdog Millionaire”), who, in the late 1970s, arrives at the school after her mother, an alcoholic and victim of childhood sexual abuse, commits suicide. A decade later, the teenage Miral becomes radicalized while teaching in a refugee camp during the First Intifada; in one scene, she is arrested in the middle of the night for associating with activists, then brutally beaten while being interrogated in an Israeli prison.

In another sequence, a female terrorist attempts to place a bomb in an Israeli movie theater, while the rape scene from Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” plays on the screen. The sequence serves as a metaphor not only for the rape of Miral’s mother — which propels the woman’s suicide — but also for the protagonist’s perception of the plight of the Palestinian people, Schnabel, the film’s director, said.

“Miral” is essentially an art film based on an autobiographical novel by Schnabel’s girlfriend, the Palestinian-born, Italian TV journalist Rula Jebreal.  Schnabel, 59, is among the most successful painters in the contemporary art world, and the most prominent artist ever to successfully segue into filmmaking. His “Before Night Falls” (2000) earned actor Javier Bardem an Academy Award nomination, while “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007), received four Oscar nods, including one for Schnabel in the directing category.

In 2007, Schnabel’s art was celebrated in an exhibition at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. “There were 40 paintings that I actually installed without building temporary walls, so you could just see modern paintings among the frescoes in these giant rooms,” he said.

He met Jebreal at the show’s opening, and initially assumed she was Indian — she in fact bears a striking resemblance to the Indian beauty Freida Pinto, who plays the lead in “Miral” — but was surprised to learn she was, in fact, Palestinian and an Israeli citizen.

Jebreal, in a separate interview, recalled their first encounter: “I don’t know if I would say he had a knee-jerk reaction, but his expression changed from smiling to almost a tension, like he had never seen a Palestinian before,” she said. “So I asked, ‘Are you scared or something?’ And he replied, ‘Should I be scared?’ —  that is how we started talking.”

But the artist and writer clicked; and when she subsequently sent him her novel, “Miral,” he was moved and heartbroken by her story. 

Sometime during the transformation of the memoir into the film, Schnabel left his second wife, the Spanish Basque actress and model Olatz López Garmendia, who appears as a physical therapist in “Diving Bell”; he and Jebreal now live together, and it seems that his passion for his film and its underlying issues is tied, at least in part, into his passion for Jebreal.

It is the star power of the backers of “Miral” that make its release an event worth noting. The other major player behind this historical drama is Harvey Weinstein, the brash chairman of the Weinstein Co., an inventor of modern independent cinema who last month triumphed at the Oscars with “The King’s Speech,” which swept the awards and won for best picture. Weinstein, who, like Schnabel, is Jewish, has acknowledged that “Miral” is “pro-Palestinian,” but has vociferously defended the picture from some prominent Jewish leaders who see it as anti-Israel.

In the weeks leading up to “Miral’s” release, some mainstream Jewish groups, such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, condemned the drama as agitprop and, in particular, denounced its U.S. premiere at the United Nations earlier this month. “The film has a clear political message which portrays Israel in a highly negative light,” AJC executive director David Harris wrote in a letter to the U.N. “Permit me to ask why the President of the General Assembly would wish to associate himself … with such a blatantly one-sided event.”

In a telephone interview from New York last week, Schnabel said he understands why some Jews have condemned his movie — some without even having seen the film: “It comes out of fear,” he said. “The fear that the Holocaust occurred, that ‘we have been [decimated], and we don’t want it to happen again’; that ‘these people, the Palestinians, are against us having a State of Israel, and we must fight for that, no matter what happens.’ But I don’t believe that’s true. I believe a Jewish homeland in Israel is superimportant, and a great thing, but we must have empathy; we have to be sensitive. I don’t think it’s a very encouraging way to look at people, as ‘us and them.’ It isn’t us and them. We are all human beings. And what is good for the Palestinians is also good for the Israelis.”

Among complaints leveled against “Miral” is that it presents Israeli soldiers as one-dimensional villains – but Schnabel doesn’t perceive the filmmaker’s job as a political balancing act. “Just as if I were painting a portrait, I’m dealing with what is in the frame that is related to Rula, and to Miral’s point of view,” he said. “It’s not from my omniscient point of view of a 59-year-old Jewish guy who’s got all these different facts where I have to explain who attacked whom in the Six-Day War. It’s Miral’s family history as it was told to her, and as it was lived by her. And that’s the power of the story. I can’t do this inexhaustible summation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are just too many stories.” 

Not all the filmmaker’s critics are Jewish. “Others have attacked me because the film isn’t pro-Palestinian enough,” Schnabel said. “I really can’t believe I’m even talking about this because ‘Miral’ is a movie about a girl and her family,” he added. “If the movie had been set in Afghanistan, we wouldn’t even be on the telephone today.”

Not that Schnabel is without his own opinion. “When I shot the movie and lived and worked in Israel and in Palestine, I was pretty ashamed of certain situations that I witnessed,” he said. “I felt it was like apartheid over there, and that’s very disappointing. There’s democracy for Jewish people in Israel, but I don’t think there’s democracy for Palestinian people. … When I see a kid with peyos and a yarmulke throwing a rock into a Palestinian home and screaming at them, that doesn’t seem to be the Jewish way to me.”

‘Miral’ filmmaker Schnabel is feeling the love — and the criticism Read More »

Netanyahu: Israel will react firmly to recent Palestinian violence [VIDEO]

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that Israel will react firmly, responsibly and wisely to a recent wave of Palestinian violence.

“The government, the Israel Defense Forces, and the Israeli public has an iron will to defend the country and its citizens,” Netanyahu said before boarding a flight to Russia.

“Israel will act firmly, responsibly and wisely to preserve the quiet and security that prevailed here over the past two years,” he assured.

Netanyahu issued his statement just hours after a bomb killed a 59-year-old woman at a crowded bus stop in Jerusalem. Earlier Wednesday, southern Israel was bombarded by Palestinian rockets and mortar fire.

Read more at Haaretz.com.

Netanyahu: Israel will react firmly to recent Palestinian violence [VIDEO] Read More »

Christian love versus the obligation to hate evil

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Hearing about a bomb going off in Jerusalem is entirely different when you have two daughters living there. You scramble for your phone. You search out your kids. Any potential delay in their answering their cells is painful. You finally get through. Thank G-d, they’re alright. But what of those who aren’t? Those maimed and killed who were also someone’s daughters, sons, mothers, and fathers.

The news lately has been sickening. And while the Japanese earthquake is not something we can control, the knifing of three-year-old-children in Israel, bombs against civilians in Jerusalem, live fire against protesters in Bahrain, and the use of helicopter gunships against Arab civilians in Libya is something we can stop.

So why don’t we?

Why does evil continue to flourish so mightily in the year 2011? How is that Gaddafi, who owns the home literally next-door to me in Englewood, New Jersey, could get away with blowing up planes and discos for forty years and only when he starts using RPG’s against demonstrators can be declared by an American president to have ‘lost the legitimacy to rule’? Why has the Mafioso Assad family continued to rule Syria for decades? And how can Palestinian-terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah continue to murder Jewish civilians and pay barely any price with the international community?

Because we have forgotten how to hate evil.

Early Christians like St. Paul embraced the Jewish Bible but rejected what they called the ‘vengeful’ G-d of the Old Testament. In his place they gave us Jesus, a deity who they said was synonymous with love. Hate no longer had any place, including hating evil. So whereas the Hebrew G-d of the Israel says explicitly in the book of Malachi, “I love Jacob but I hate Esau,” where the former is representative of those who struggle for peace and the latter is a symbol for those who live by the sword, Jesus says in the New Testament that one must love even one’s enemies and turn the other check to an attack, seemingly advocating passivity in the face of blind cruelty.

Shortly I will argue that this sanitized version of Jesus – a rebel against Rome who was put to death by the empire for opposing Caesar and Roman rule – is utterly inaccurate. But the effects of the misapprehension are felt till today. In the twentieth century genocide was commonplace. A few of the better-known examples include the Turks slaughter of the Armenians during the First World War, the German holocaust of the Jews, the Khmer Rouge and their killing fields in Cambodia in 1975-78, the Hutus hacking to death the Tutsis in Rwanda in April 1994, the ethnic cleanings of Croats by Bosnian Serbs, and the wholesale slaughter of black Christians in the Sudan by white Muslim Janjaweed militias.

How did the world allow so much suffering? Because we practice love without hate, which means we often lack the motivation to stop monsters from committing their crimes against innocents.

Is anyone surprised that China, whose president was recently given only the second state dinner of the Obama presidency and who is currently brutalizing reigning winner of the Noble peace prize, is also opposing the use of force against Gaddafi in Libya? So why do we accord this government so much respect?

At times it becomes almost comical, as when the Carter Administration actually lobbied to have the Khmer Rouge be recognized in the UN as the legitimate government of Cambodia. Or when Kofi Anan, at the time head of all UN peace-keeping forces worldwide, forbade General Romeo Dallaire of Canada, who commanded the UN peace-keeping force in Kigali, from using force to stop the Rwandan genocide. Anan would later be rewarded for his lack of abhorrence for genocide with becoming UN Secretary-General.

But can love really exist without hate? Can someone claim to love the 1.5 million children who were killed by Hitler without hating the SS who gassed them and dashed their brains against rocks? Can you love the 800,000 Rwandans who were savagely cut up by machetes in Rwanda without hating the Hutus who just a few hours earlier were their friends and neighbors? Can you claim to love peaceful protesters in Tehran while refusing to hate the tyrant Ahmadinejad who mows them down in the streets? And can you love the victims of Pan Am 103 without hating Gaddafi for raining their bodies down over Lockerbie?

And spare me the argument that once you start hating the terrorist it can spill over into hating innocents as well. Firstly, the same argument can be made against love, that once you embrace it you may end up loving the wrong people, like a husband or wife having an affair. Please. We discerning adults are plenty capable of controlling our emotions and directing them to legitimate targets. We hate Hamas for their honor killings of young girls with boyfriends or their murder of gays in Gaza without letting it spill over into hating the guy who stole our parking space.

Indeed, this is what Jesus himself meant. He never said to love G-d’s enemies, but your enemies. G-d’s enemies are the religious police in Saudi Arabia who allow young girls to burn alive in their high schools rather than run from the inferno without a face covering. Your enemy is the guy who got promoted over you at work.

Likewise, by turning the other cheek Jesus never meant that if Osama bin Laden blows up New York we should let him take Los Angeles as well. Rather, he meant that if you hear that someone you consider a friend said something unpleasant about you try and transcend the provocation. Any other understanding would make a mockery of one of the greatest moral teachers of all time.

Jesus hated the Romans for their cruelty and Luke (13:1-2) describes the brutality of the Roman proconsul Pilate, which Jesus uses as an illustration for his students. “Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way?”

Indeed, if we don’t begin to hate and fight evil, more victims will suffer and more innocents will die.

Shmuley Boteach, ‘America’s Rabbi,’ is the author of 25 books, most recently ‘Honoring the Child Spirit’ and ‘Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life.’ He is about to publish a book on the Jewish Jesus and his fight against Rome. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

Christian love versus the obligation to hate evil Read More »

The Circuit: 50 Plus

Leave a Comment / 50 Plus, Circuit /

Skirball music director Yatrika Shah-Rais presents Fred Katz with a birthday cake as John and Jeanne Pisano look on. Photo by Bonnie Perkinson

Jazz composer, cellist and pianist Fred Katz performed during a retrospective of his career at the Skirball Cultural Center on Feb. 20. Honored on the occasion of his 92nd birthday, Katz was joined by his son, flutist Hyman Katz, bassist Richard Simon and saxophonist Dave Koz, as well as the Flying Pisanos, John and Jeanne Pisano.

Robert and Ruth Blank have been married for 63 years. According to the Blanks, their marriage has been a partnership from day one. They met when they were young, survived the Holocaust and reunited again after the war. “We came from Europe together, we learned English together, and we are together forever,” Robert Blank said. Photos courtesy of Belmont Village

Belmont Village Westwood held a reception for a special exhibition, “The Look of Lasting Love,” featuring the work of photographer Thomas Sanders, on Feb. 10. The collection of portraits, all of Belmont Village residents, paid homage to love and commitment as seen through the eyes of 16 couples. Collectively, the couples represented 884 years of marital bliss.

Rachel Perlson, with her dog, Schatzi, celebrated her 102nd birthday on Jan. 13 among family and friends at Belmont Village Hollywood Hills. Fleeing Jewish persecution in Poland, Perlson joined her brother in Israel, where she later met her husband. Decades later, the couple moved to the United States, where they raised their daughter, Nureet.  Photo courtesy of Belmont Village

The Circuit: 50 Plus Read More »

Letters to the Editor: Fogel photos, Prager, Valley Torah

Leave a Comment / Letters to the Editor, Opinion /

Look Again

Rob Eshman is right (“Look,” March 18). We should mourn any child killed during war, either intentionally or unintentionally. But the real question is, who started the violence? The Nazis remained the aggressors even though many German children were killed by the allies in World War II. Look again at the facts. Palestinian leaders have misled their own people, rejecting all offers for peaceful compromise, incessantly fomenting state-sponsored hatred by demonizing Israelis and Jews, even in their children’s schoolbooks and TV shows. Look again.

Israel vacated Gaza in 2005, making it Judenrein as Palestinians demanded, but Palestinian leaders chose to build rockets instead of better futures for their own children. Look at the thousands of rockets that Hamas and its affiliates launched at Israelis, including at children and nursery schools in Sderot and other cities. Israel waited for three years and tolerated thousands of rockets before it responded with military force, longer than any other nation would have waited to protect its people and children from such terrorism. They wanted to avoid war. Look again.

Hamas used human shields and hid its weaponry in Palestinian neighborhoods, schools and mosques. The deaths of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s daughters are indeed tragic. But Hamas and the PA’s anti-Israel incitement and actions fomented the war that caused their deaths. If Dr. Abuelaish directed Palestinian policy, his children might be alive today. But he doesn’t. Look again.

Roz Rothstein
CEO
StandWithUs

Rob Eshman Responds:
Though I don’t think it’s historic or helpful to hold the Israelis 100 percent blameless and equate the Palestinians with Nazis, the point of my editorial was not to divide blame equally between the Israelis and the Palestinians. My point was that these two peoples’ destinies are irrevocably interconnected. Their political leaders need to behave in ways that increase, rather than decrease, the chances of a peaceful marriage. Palestinian barbarity doesn’t justify Israeli shortsightedness.

Death Penalty Disagreement

Dennis Prager is, of course, correct that the Torah sanctions, and even mandates, capital punishment for murderers (“Murderers Should Die,” March 18). And if you believe in the eternal truth of the Torah, that imperative remains as relevant today as 3,700 years ago. However, Mr. Prager’s argument is not as convincing when it comes to possibly putting innocent people to death. To argue that in the greater interest of society, it is OK to put a few innocent people to death, is disingenuous and against the basic values of Judaism. The Talmud teaches us that to save a single life is to save an entire world. How can we then be so cavalier about putting a few innocent people to death for the good of the greater society? I wonder if Mr. Prager would make the same argument if it were his own son who was wrongly sentenced to death.

Behrouz Soroudi
Beverly Hills

I will refrain from calling Dennis Prager a right-wing slimeball, as Marty Kaplan was labeled by someone who disagrees with Kaplan’s views (Letters, March 18), and neither will I dispute that many people deserve to be put to death, including Michael Woodmansee, Timothy McVeigh, Charles Manson, etc. But for Prager to state that the incidence of innocent people being put to death “is so rare (if it has happened at all in the last half century)” is disingenuous and false. What’s rare? And isn’t one [innocent person] one too many? Perhaps Prager has forgotten about the kangaroo trials in the South, or the recent events in Texas, where it was found that more than one person who was executed may have been innocent and where district attorneys and the attorney general are currently contesting DNA testing, including for those on death row. Or, perhaps, he is not aware of the correlation between those put to death and their economic status. Lobby for the death penalty if you will, but don’t overlook the fact that corrupt prosecutors, racist juries and economic disadvantage may still be factors operating in murder trials and subsequent penalties. Dennis, check out Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project.

Tom Fleishman
Valley Glen

Remember the Panthers

I was very happy to read of Valley Torah’s runs for the championship and disappointed they were not successful (“View Park Ends Valley Torah’s State Championship Run,” March 18). I would like to clarify that Valley Torah was not the first Jewish high school to reach the California Interscholastic Federation Division 5 state championship quarterfinal round.

The 1987 YULA Panthers had been victorious in the Liberty League and also reached the quarterfinals. The YULA team was composed of several talented individuals: Steven Glouberman, Jeff Kupietzky, Dan Laks, Lenny Moise, Bret Pevan, Elisha Rothman, Charlie Silberstein, Avi Steinlauf, Ari Wasserman and myself.

Rabbi Benjamin Kessler
Kew Gardens Hills, N.Y.

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The Real “Miral:” Rula Jebreal

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Entertainment, Film /

Palestinian author Rula Jebreal bears an uncanny resemblance to Freida Pinto, the Indian actress who portrays the writer’s alter ego in Julian Schnabel’s new film, “Miral.”  So it was not surprising that the filmmaker initially assumed Jebreal was Indian when they met in 2007 at the opening of an exhibition of Schnabel’s paintings in Rome.

“I said, ‘No, I am actually from Israel,’” Jebreal, 38, said in a telephone interview from Manhattan, where she now lives with Schnabel.  “I don’t know if I would say he had a knee-jerk reaction, but his expression changed from smiling to almost a tension, like he had never seen a Palestinian before. So I asked, “Are you scared or something?’” And he replied, ‘Should I be scared?’—that is how we started talking.”

It was only by chance that Jebreal, a prominent television journalist living in Rome, had attended the opening at all. Her friend, Walter Veltroni, Rome’s mayor, mentioned to her over lunch that she should check out the exhibition – and that Schnabel was the only adult besides Hugh Hefner known for wearing pajamas in public.

“When I saw his paintings that night, they spoke to me,” she recalled.  Some captured images and impressions of Egypt, which gave her the sense that Schnabel regarded her culture with dignity and compassion.  “I felt there is a place in his work that speaks to everyone, and relates to the major issues I care about,” she added.

Soon after the opening, she sent the artist-filmmaker a copy of her autobiographical novel, “Miral,” which recounts her painful childhood and her coming of age during the first Intifada in 1987.  Also attached was a rough English translation of a screenplay adaptation of the book, which was originally published in Italian in 2004.

“Three weeks later, Julian called and said he would like to work on this project together,” Jebreal said.

Some time between that telephone call and the completion of the film, the Jewish artist and the Palestinian author fell in love and began living together in Schnabel’s duplex within Palazzo Chupi, a pink complex he built in Greenwich Village.

When did Jebreal learn that Schnabel was Jewish?

“I don’t pay attention to these things,” she said.  “I am Muslim, my daughter is Catholic, and I never classify people based on color, gender or religion. Honestly I did not care.  I met the human being, I met his work; nothing else mattered.”

Jebreal’s own story is heartbreaking.  Everything in “Miral,” the novel and the film, is true, she said, not only about herself, but also about her family.  Her mother, Nadia, was repeatedly raped by her stepfather as a child, ran away from home as a teenager, supported herself as a belly dancer and served time in jail for slapping an Israeli woman who had affronted her.

Eventually, she married Othman Jebreal, a gentle, almost saintly man who worked as a gardener and later, as a minor imam at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.  He vowed to save her, but Nadia was unable to overcome her brutal childhood and descended into alcoholism and depression, eventually committing suicide by drowning herself in the Mediterranean, leaving behind her daughters, Rula, 5, and Rania, 4.

Because Othman Jebreal was already suffering from cancer, he took his girls to live at Hind Husseini’s Children’s Home in the Old City of Jerusalem, hoping that there they could receive an education and find safe haven when he was gone.

“Hind was very strong, dedicated and affectionate to her ‘daughters,’ who numbered about 3,000,” Jebreal said. “She believed education could give us the opportunity to survive, because she saw what was happening in many villages where girls had no option except to marry at 13 or 14, to become prostitutes or to be manipulated and used by religious fanatics, which she did not want for her girls.”

Even so, the early years were difficult for Jebreal, who felt “alone, abandoned, fearful” and who devoured books about orphans such as “Oliver Twist,” “David Copperfield,” and especially “Jane Eyre.”  She learned to tell stories, at first, to heal her sister, who repeatedly attempted to scale the orphanage’s walls to run home; and then to the other orphans who crowded together in bed at night, seeking the physical affection they missed from their parents. Those experiences, in part, led Jebreal to become a writer.

Another turning point came when Jebreal was sent by Husseini to teach in a makeshift school in a refugee camp on the West Bank when she was 16.  “I was shocked by the kind of oppression that seemed unbearable,” she recalled of the camp.  There, Jebreal met and fell in love with an older man, an activist with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; against the wishes of Hind and of her father, who by then was terminally ill, she also began participating in civil disobedience and numerous demonstrations during the first Intifada.

Late one night, Jebreal was arrested and whipped in an Israeli prison, but was released after 24 hours because she is an Israeli citizen.  The only matter that is fictionalized in the film, she said, involves her boyfriend at the time; he did not engage in car bombings in the settlements or in any other violent activities, as far as she knows.  In fact, when the Oslo Accords went forward in the early 1990s, he publicly endorsed the peace process, to the chagrin of fellow PFLP leaders.

Eventually Jebreal received a scholarship to the University of Bologna and relocated to Italy, where she had an affair with an art student and gave birth to a daughter Miral, named for a wildflower that blooms in extreme conditions.  Her break in broadcasting came when the second Intifada erupted in 2000; since then, Jebreal has become one of Italy’s best-known journalists.  She also became an author, writing “Miral,” she said, as a catharsis of sorts, “but in the third person because I needed to process it emotionally.”  Schnabel, she said, has brought a more relaxed quality to her life, since she finds that “art in general focuses on the positive things.”

Yet she has been dismayed by Jewish groups who protested the screening of “Miral” at the United Nations recently. “The one right that I should have is to be able to tell my story,” she said.  “[But] I’m not sure people are ready for a Palestinian woman to tell her story.  You can judge the film as good or bad; you can dislike it, but to come out against the showing of the film is something I find shocking.”

The film opens on March 25.

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