fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

February 2, 2012

Former IDF chief Ya’alon: West can hit all of Iran’s nukes

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Lead Story, News, Worldwide /

The West could carry out a military strike on any of Iran’s nuclear facilities, former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon said.

Ya’alon, the country’s deputy prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, told the 2012 Herzliya Conference Thursday that all of Iran’s nuclear facilities are within striking range.

“Any facility defended by a human being can be penetrated,” he said. “Any facility in Iran can be hit, and I speak from experience as the IDF chief of staff.”

Ya’alon added that “the West has the ability to strike, but as long as Iran isn’t convinced that there’s a determination to follow through with it, they’ll continue with their manipulations.”

The Wall Street Journal last week cited American military officials as saying that they did not have arms strong enough to penetrate all of Iran’s nuclear installations.

Ya’alon did not discount the idea that international sanctions could serve as a deterrent against an Iranian nuclear attack.

Earlier Thursday, Israel’s director of military intelligence, Maj.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, told the conference that Iran has enough enriched uranium to produce four nuclear bombs and that Israel is threatened by some 200,000 missiles at any moment.

Former IDF chief Ya’alon: West can hit all of Iran’s nukes Read More »

About

Leave a Comment / California, Community, Is Featured?, Mobile Sections, News /

Salvador Litvak is a Chilean Jewtino who’s lived in the U.S. since he was five. He graduated from Harvard, NYU Law and UCLA Film. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and writing partner, Nina Davidovich Litvak. Salvador wrote and directed the Passover comedy and cult hit, When Do We Eat? as well as the visually innovative historical drama, Saving Lincoln. Sal shares a bit of Jewish wisdom at “>accidentaltalmudist.org.

About Read More »

Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland on “In Darkness” [VIDEO]

Leave a Comment / News /

Agnieszka Holland was sitting by a window in a Los Angeles hotel recently, bathed by sunlight streaming in through slatted Venetian blinds.

Light and dark are the prominent metaphors in her film, “In Darkness,” based on the true story of a group of Jews who escaped the liquidation of the Lvov ghetto, fled into the sewers and survived in darkness for 14 months. They’re aided by two Polish-Catholic sewer workers who are also casual anti-Semites and petty thieves. 

The well-received drama opened in theaters on Feb. 10, and on Feb. 26 it will compete for the foreign-language film Oscar, alongside nominees such as Israel’s “Footnote,” and Iran’s “A Separation.”

About 80 percent of Holland’s film is shot in darkness, often with the actors’ flashlights providing the only illumination. “Darkness is the metaphor for the Jewish destiny during the Holocaust,” the soft-spoken director said, taking a break from preparing to direct an episode of AMC’s “The Killing.” The sewer worker Leopold Socha, who provides the Jews with food and other necessities, was lit brighter: “You have the impression that the light is coming out of him, that he is the flashlight in the darkness for these people, which the real Socha was. Without him they would not have survived longer than a week or two.”

But the storytelling isn’t melodramatic. It’s blunt and gritty — Holland’s antidote for what she has perceived as the “Hollywoodization” of movies about the Shoah. Images of the Holocaust have become “in some ways more sentimental and moralistic,” she said. “What was very difficult for me to accept is to try to put some meaning into the Holocaust; that in some ways it made sense; that you can make some lesson out of it. … The most terrible thing about this human experience is that it was senseless; that it wasn’t a meaningful death, or something that served us to become wiser or better people. … We have to be very non-compromising in the preservation of this reality.”

The sewers in the film appear freezing and filthy, and Socha, the head sewer worker, is crude rather than angelic. He’s a small-time crook who initially agrees to help the Jews in exchange for money. The Jews, as well, are flawed — some are adulterers, snooty intellectuals or thugs, and sex abounds against the fetid underground walls. “I believe that the audience identifies with real people and not saintly, kitschy images,” Holland said of her protagonists. “My characters have a lot of sex,” she added — just as Jews did in Nazi ghettos in real life. Holland learned this from one of the commanders of the Warsaw uprising: “He said he never had so much sex in his life as during this period,” the director said. “In some ways, it was a reaction to the horrors, and the need to feel alive.”

Holland said she tries to see every film released about the Shoah: Her interest stems in part from the experience of her own Jewish father, whose parents died in the Warsaw ghetto after they refused to flee with him. “For my father, the fact that he left his family behind and they died, was extremely painful, and he never talked about it,” she said. “He committed suicide when I was 13 and he was 41. … It was my mother who is Polish [and non-Jewish] who told me that I am Jewish and that my father was a Jew.”

As a filmmaker, the 63-year-old Holland has delved into the time period with dramas such as “Angry Harvest,” about the ordeal of a Jewish woman during World War II, and her Oscar-nominated “Europa Europa” (1990), the story of a Jewish boy who survives by posing as an Aryan, even joining the Hitler Youth.

Robert Wieckiewicz as sewer worker Leopold Socha in “In Darkness.”Photo by Jasmin Marla Dichant, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

When interviewed about these movies years ago, Holland said she had had enough of making movies on the subject, which was so emotionally harrowing.  “I really didn’t want to go back,” she said.  But then she read the screenplay for “In Darkness,” which tempted her despite her hesitations. At first Holland tried to discourage the producers by imposing tough conditions: She said she would not make the film in English, but in the “real languages of the story”: Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German.  “Finally, they agreed to everything, so I was trapped into doing it, in a way,” Holland said.

Her film depicts the liquidation of the Lvov ghetto with a nonchalant brutality; when a woman runs to hide in her apartment, we see a body fall almost casually from a window in the background.

“It was a really difficult shoot,” Holland said of the claustrophobic sewer set. “Sometimes you can shoot in sewers and they look beautiful; for example, in ‘The Third Man,’ they look like cathedrals … but we knew that it was not beautiful; it was really scary and dark and cold.” 

Holland shot the subterranean scenes both on a set and in real sewers: “It was psychologically difficult because all the actors very deeply went into the characters, into the reality, and they really tried to live in that way.”

Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland on “In Darkness” [VIDEO] Read More »

Jews shift toward GOP, survey claims

Leave a Comment / News, United States /

Jewish support for the Republican Party has grown dramatically since 2008 nationwide, a new analysis of survey data out from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press suggests.

The data found that the shift in the GOP direction has been more significant than among the general public.

The findings could point to trouble for the Democrats in the 2012 presidential election, where both parties are counting on strong showings among Florida’s Jewish voters in particular.

Read more at Forward.com.

Jews shift toward GOP, survey claims Read More »

S**T Gentiles say to Jews…

Leave a Comment / News /

After one of my hissy fits over yet another moronic comment by a non-Jew, I decided it was time to sit down and write out ALL of the idiotic things I’ve heard over the years.  So, strap on your seat-belts, lean back, relax and enjoy:

  • I hope you don’t take this personally, but if I ever need a blood transfusion I won’t be able to accept yours since you have Jewish blood, and I don’t want that.

  • I know you are Jewish and all that, but you still celebrate Jesus’ Birthday, right?  After all, he was Jewish.  Did you know that?

  • Do all Jews have a lot of money?

  • You must know a cheap nail salon being Jewish and all! (nail, hair, you name it).

  • Are you only allowed to date Jewish men?

  • I know you are Jewish and all that, but you still celebrate Easter, right?  After all, it was YOUR people that killed him.

  • Oh I know a lot about Jewish people, the Old Testament really isn’t that different from the Bible.

  • You are Jewish? How cute! My step-Father’s Uncle was Jewish. But then he became a Christian.

  • You are Jewish? Oh well, that’s OK. My neighbor is Jewish, he is a lawyer. His name has something like Stein or Wein or Berg in it. Do you know him?

  • I just love how you people are so good with money!

  • I’m so sorry that you won’t be going to Heaven. But its not too late, you can still be saved if you just accept Jesus Christ as your Savior! (I don’t even know what that means).

  • I know you are Jewish and all that, but do you want to come to Church with me? They won’t get mad that I brought a Jew, I promise. Christians are very accepting people, they don’t judge (yeah right).

  • When I said Jewish people are cheap, I meant it in a good way.  You people are very good with money!

  • Do all Jewish people have to learn to speak Hebrew?

  • Why don’t Jewish people recruit, like the Christians? I’ve never seen a Jew asking a non-Jew to come to Temple with him, why is that? (because we don’t want or need you)

  • Do all Jewish men make great husbands?  You know because they are so good with money, and you never have to worry about it…

  • Your Father must be rich!

  • You must know of great deals for everything!

I would love to hear some of yours, so I can add it to the list.

S**T Gentiles say to Jews… Read More »

Yeshiva University ranks as 4th most popular U.S. college

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, News, United States /

Yeshiva University is the fourth most popular school in the country, according to a recent U.S. News and World Report ranking.

The annual rankings are based on the percentage of students who attend a university out of the total number who are accepted to the school. According to the report, which was released Tuesday, 70 percent of the accepted students enroll at YU.

Harvard, Brigham Young and Stanford universities respectively took the top three spots, with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks placing fifth.

“Most of our students have grown up with certain values and a certain belief system, and we believe that those should not be compromised when they hit college,” said YU President Richard Joel. “Our students are looking to continue growing in their Jewish and secular studies, and they know that we provide the pre-eminent university platform for them to grow Jewishly and intellectually.”

Yeshiva University ranks as 4th most popular U.S. college Read More »

Remembering Love

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Poetry /

I peek down the path you came from, and smile at glorious choices.
And I take a handful of light for my own feet, so I may rise through this
forest and see how there was never meant to be an end to all of this Love.
There is always a field surrounding us, leading to another forest , leading
to another more fragrant field. A shore of sand leading to a wider sea. the
sacred places we have seen. The sacred visions in our dreams. I saw a tree.
That we called our home.

Where we speak quietly and we laugh wholeheartedly and our bodies shudder
with lust. And we touch intentionally and we forget (eventually) we once
thought there were two of us. Always. (this is) The eternal broken down maze.

In the roundabout way we’re chasing each other playing pin the tail on
forever, asleep to songs (sounds) of whatever

Through this garden of delight as night turns to day, day turns dark

Deliberately starting where we stop, ending where we once began.

You’ve given me the gift of permission
To touch you

with my magic tricks.

The spell that wishing is.

Take it as it comes.

Falling away, into the severity that simplicity is.

Our compliance is a moment past control, revealed on the far side of every
breath, too beautifully off the count.

Our dance. (Remembering we’re one. Reveal to me a world to come. where
Love. and the Heart and Talk of Divinity. and Sacred Feminity. is Our
dance.

Cause the sun cups my hair as we walk down the street.
In broad daylight he’s always touching me
And those that see me comment on the way he makes me blush:
Catching me in this wild affair

With what is here for all of us.

You have seen me. Staring into you. Dreaming into an endless song. Written
by the quiet daughter of a magician who has made the world her summer.

I give you the key to bypass my intellect.

Sit.

Within a season to

Unreason with all of it.

Beneath a quiet mind, there is a volcano of heart, a windstorm of limbs, a
universal womb of starships, all ours. And I want to let my skin get used to
the air that follows you, the blessings that cling to your hair. The love
that lingers… there.

And you drink promises from my lips. From spaces so tiny that there is only
room for another world inside. safe from our sight.

The angel to your left likes me, and so does the one to your right. She
likes my taste in jewels and calls me grandmother and friend. They’re
blessing us… they say may all your days be days of awakening

My lover’s call is alone a gang of wolves of

donkeys kicking, governments of fish, and

feeble minds splitting into the pieces they are,

only to find One another again. That is what we have done. Find me, chase
me, jog the memory of love. Bring me to
the worlds we have known, and I will bring you back to earth. The galaxies
we have seen are peaceful. You let all men there decorate you with greenery
and pride and flags with each soul’s emblem of meaning—a compressed memory
of life. Built on subtle hills of understanding we will be. Let us be. May
we always be remembering love.

by Emily Stern

Remembering Love Read More »

Orthodox rabbi proclaims new Boteach book ‘forbidden’

Leave a Comment / Culture, Is Featured?, Mobile Sections, News /

A prominent Orthodox rabbi in Toronto has condemned the latest book by celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and pronounced it is “forbidden” for anyone to buy or read it.

In an open letter published on the Jewish news website The Algemeiner, Rabbi Immanuel Schochet denounced Boteach’s newest book, “Kosher Jesus,” as “heretical.”

The book “poses a tremendous risk to the Jewish community,” wrote Schochet, an emeritus professor of philosophy and religion at Toronto’s Humber College and spiritual leader of the city’s Congregation Beth Joseph.

“I have never read a book, let alone one authored by a purported frum (religious) Jew, that does more to enhance the evangelical missionary message and agenda than the aforementioned book,” Schochet said. “It is forbidden for anyone to buy or read this book, or give its author a platform in any way, shape or form to discuss this topic.”

The volume “must be rejected for being heretical,” he said.

The latest offering from Boteach, who had come under fire from fellow rabbis years ago for offering spiritual advice to the late singer Michael Jackson and for authoring the 1999 book “Kosher Sex,” explores the Jewish roots of Jesus and whether the exploration should lead modern Jews to “rediscover” and celebrate the extent to which the Hebrew Bible shaped his thinking.

In a lengthy response that has been widely disseminated online, Boteach shot back, saying he “must retain the right to defend myself against the appalling and libelous charge of heresy.”

Boteach said his book paints Jesus as “a Torah-observant Jew whose mission it was to restore Jewish observance fully among his Jewish brethren and fight Roman persecution.”

“It’s time these universal Jewish ideas that have so influenced the world be traced back to their original source,” Boteach wrote in defense of his book. “It’s time that the Jewishness of Jesus be rediscovered by Christians.”

As for Schochet’s charge that the book will embolden Christians to convert Jews, Boteach said it “is the ultimate argument against Christian missionaries” [because it offers] significant information to argue convincingly against any Christian attempt to evangelize Jews.”

Orthodox rabbi proclaims new Boteach book ‘forbidden’ Read More »

A Bad Month for Hate in the PA Media [VIDEOS]

Leave a Comment / Blogs, News /

” title=”‘“PA incitement is confidence destroying measure,”” target=”_blank”>‘“PA incitement is confidence destroying measure,”’ Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2012).

Here are the video excerpts posted by Palestinian Media Watch, a group that monitors Arab press for their genocidal remarks against Israel and the Jews.