Thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to mark the first anniversary of the uprising that led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak.
Anat Hoffman, the progressive Israeli activist who made headlines two summers ago when she was arrested for carrying a Torah at the Western Wall, comes to California next week with a clear message for American Jews: What’s happening in Beit Shemesh is as big a threat to Israel as what’s happening in Tehran.
No doubt Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman will be confronted with questions about Iran as they campaign in the new West San Fernando Valley 30th Congressional District. Iran is likely to come up as they speak at meetings and debates and through the online messages and mailings that will besiege voters in the expensive, high-profile battle between these two candidates with remarkable similarities in their views and even their names.
As I address you today, I am both bereft and optimistic. I am bereft for the obvious reasons one feels the deep, unfathomable sense of loss for what the Holocaust represents: the taking away from this world of 6 million innocent Jews; the destruction of the European communities and cultures they represented; the murder of approximately 3 million other victims persecuted by the Nazis; the political assassination of 3 million Poles; the death of the rich history of Jewish life in Poland; the severing or even amputation of Jewish-Polish relationships that had evolved for generations; and more. I could easily go on.
Jews are known for their intellect, and for legitimate reasons. The number of Jewish recipients of Nobel Prizes, for example, is wildly disproportionate to the Jewish proportion of the world’s population. Jews make up about one-fifth of 1 percent of the world’s population, yet they have received about 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes for chemistry, 41 percent for economics, 26 percent for physics and 27 percent for medicine.
My 97-year-old mother, Herta Greif, died last fall of aortic stenosis that led to congestive heart failure. A Holocaust survivor, she had been a fighter all her life, and with this illness she was no different. When she suffered a massive stroke in July 2005, she lapsed into a coma from which her doctors said she would not recover. But, in a matter of days, she did, at which point her doctors estimated she had, at most, a year to live. Mom hung in there for more than six years, with the only lingering signs of the stroke being having to use a walker and occasional bouts of memory loss.
Hershel Walfish, a leading Orthodox cantor and survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, died Jan. 24 at 89, following a lengthy illness.
How can you defend Israel without being accused of being a tribal loyalist? You know, the type who thinks Israel is unfairly maligned by most of the world, so they’re always pushing “the other side of the story,” which includes — surprise, surprise — a lot of positive items about the Jewish state.
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