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Jewish Journal

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February 25, 2015

Amnesty Int’l: Israel and Hamas committed war crimes

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Amnesty International accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during last summer’s war in Gaza.

The human rights organization in its 415-page annual report released Wednesday reiterated its claims from December that Israel’s assault on Gaza “was marked by callous indifference and involved war crimes.” The report said that Israel during its military operation last July and August carried out attacks on “inhabited homes, in some cases killing entire families, and on medical facilities and schools.”

However, the report also said that Hamas had committed war crimes by “firing indiscriminate rockets into Israel causing six deaths” and killing at least 23 Palestinian civilians that it accused of collaborating with Israel.

A spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the report biased, The Times of Israel reported, and said that Amnesty International has “completely disregarded the suffering of tens of thousands of Israelis, who for years — especially during Operation Protective Edge — were victims of Hamas rocket terror.”

The full report, which detailed human rights abuses in or by 160 countries — including the United States — criticized the United Nations and called 2014 a “devastating year for those seeking to stand up for human rights and for those caught up in the suffering of war zones.”

Amnesty Int’l: Israel and Hamas committed war crimes Read More »

potpourri

Turn your floral bouquet into homemade potpourri

Leave a Comment / Culture, Home, Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News /

Who doesn’t love receiving a bouquet of fresh flowers, whether it’s for a birthday, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or just because? The sweet smells always brighten your day and add a burst of joyful color to your home. It’s too bad, then, that arrangements typically wilt in about a week. But here’s good news: You can preserve the flowers so they last forever. Just dry them and turn them into potpourri. As someone who once thought that potpourri was just a category on “Jeopardy!” I was surprised how easy it is to make.

Step 1: Dry the flowers


Dry whole rose buds by hanging roses upside down for several weeks. 

I like the idea of preserving some of the flowers in their entirety as well as taking some apart to dry the individual petals. The combination of whole flower buds and flaky petals provides a gorgeous texture to the finished potpourri. It’s easiest to dry larger petals, like those on roses and peonies. For flowers with small petals, like carnations and chrysanthemums, I recommend drying the entire flower bud rather than just the petals.

To dry whole flower buds, hang the flowers by their stems upside down, tying them to a clothesline with string or twist ties. Allow them to air-dry indoors for two to three weeks. When  they’re completely dry, the buds will snap off the stems, and you will be left with beautiful flowers that have the look and feel of vintage paper.


Dry rose petals in a conventional or microwave oven.

Drying petals is much faster. Place the petals in a single layer on a parchment-paper-lined cookie sheet, and heat in an oven at its lowest temperature, about 180 F. Crack open the oven door to allow moisture to escape. After 30 minutes, turn the petals over, and heat for an additional 30 minutes. When oven-baked, the petals turn crispy, and their color actually intensifies. (Oven times vary, so if your petals aren’t completely dried after an hour, keep checking their “doneness” in 10-minute increments.)

If you’re in a hurry and can’t wait an hour for them to dry in the oven, you can also microwave your petals. Place the petals between two paper towels and microwave them at full power for one minute. Remove the petals from the microwave, turn them over, and zap them for another minute. Instant dried petals!

Step 2: Add botanicals and other elements


Dried herbs and botanicals complement the flowers in your potpourri.

Once your flowers are dried, it’s time to add other elements to create the potpourri. What you include in your mixture is completely up to your taste and imagination.

Start by looking in your own backyard for botanicals that are available to you for free. Think leaves, tree bark, pinecones and twigs. Rinse them well to remove dirt and bugs, and dry them in the oven for an hour.

Next, consider adding fragrant herbs like lavender or rosemary. I know when I’m walking my dogs, Fosse and Gershwin, around the neighborhood, I can never go by a rosemary plant without running my fingers through the stalks. I just love how it smells. Best of all, lavender and rosemary retain their shape and fragrance when dried, so they work really well in potpourri.

You can also raid your pantry for aromatic spices. Cinnamon sticks, star anise and cloves lend delightful fragrance notes to your potpourri while adding interesting shapes and textures.

When making potpourri, I also like to add nonbotanical filler elements. Costume jewelry, wooden thread spools, seashells, and even vintage keys help to personalize the potpourri and make it unique. Choosing modern and unexpected fillers (Legos, anyone?) can also help keep the potpourri from becoming too froufrou.

Step 3: Mix it all together

Once you’ve gathered your ingredients, place them in a large bowl and stir everything together with a wooden spoon. The proportion of florals to botanicals is up to you, but I like about three-quarters of my mixture to be flowers. The ingredients you choose probably already have some scent, but if you want to enhance their natural fragrance, select an essential oil that will tie all your elements together. Essential oils — with scents such as lavender, almond, orange and jasmine — are available in most health food stores. Just add several drops of the oil to the mix. Then display your potpourri in dishes and bowls throughout your home.

Making homemade potpourri is a great way to preserve your beautiful flowers, as well as the memories associated with receiving them. So the next time you receive a lovely bouquet, save the petals. Love may not always last forever, but the flowers certainly can.

Jonathan Fong is the author of “Walls That Wow,” ”Flowers That Wow” and “Parties That Wow,” and host of “Style With a Smile” on YouTube. You can see more of his do-it-yourself projects on jonathanfongstyle.com.

Turn your floral bouquet into homemade potpourri Read More »

Auschwitz’s volunteer prisoner

Leave a Comment / Culture /

The long-lost story of Capt. Witold Pilecki and his heroic actions during World War II is finally coming to light. Pilecki, a Polish army officer, volunteered to enter Auschwitz as a prisoner to gather information about life inside the concentration camp. He wrote the first intelligence report on Auschwitz with the hope of shocking the world into action, but, sadly, his efforts did little to sway the U.S. and Britain to liberate the camp, and, until 1989, details of his courageous exploits and fate were suppressed by the Polish communist regime.

To honor his efforts, Hillel at UCLA is hosting a multimedia performance March 1 of Pilecki’s reports. Marek Probosz, a visiting assistant professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, will enact select passages, and photo projections will help bring the story to life.

“When you put all the 007 stories together, Pilecki was still the best 007,” Probosz said, referring to fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond’s code number. “A shining example of heroism that transcends religion, race and time.”

Pilecki’s most comprehensive report on Auschwitz, written in 1945 and kept secret for nearly 50 years, was published in English for the first time in 2012 as “The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery.” 

“It’s one of the most amazing stories to come out of World War II,” said Terry Tegnazian, co-founder of Aquila Polonica, the book’s publisher. “His experience that he’s written down gives the details and a view of what went on in Auschwitz even in the years before it became a death camp for the Jews. In ’40 and ’41, it was primarily a camp for Polish political prisoners and anybody the Germans thought capable of resisting them.”

In September of 1940, Pilecki walked into a German Nazi street roundup in Warsaw to get himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz. The 39-year-old officer had volunteered for a secret mission for the Polish Underground to smuggle out intelligence about the new German concentration camp, and to organize inmate resistance with the goal of helping the Allies liberate the camp from the inside. 

“The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous,” Pilecki wrote. “This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous.”

That is perhaps the understatement of the century. Pilecki documented the brutality of the Nazi officers, who created games out of torturing and killing prisoners in scenes of savage perversion. Hospitals were packed with three bodies per bed and were overrun with typhus-infected lice. Doctors performed sterilization experiments on male and female inmates. Inmates were gassed by the thousands and buried in mass graves.

While we’re generally familiar with the horrors of Auschwitz, it’s the details and characters that drive home the constant terror of life in the camp. The scenes unfold mercilessly in the factory of death, and Pilecki narrates the industrialized slaughter with clear and concise language. 

The document was written as a strictly factual intelligence report rather than a memoir. The author focused on describing the events around him, not their emotional impact. As Pilecki writes in the introduction to his report, “[My friends] have told me: ‘The more you stick to the bare facts without any kind of commentary, the more valuable it all will be.’ Well, here I go … but we were not made out of wood, let alone stone, though it sometimes seemed as if even a stone would have broken out in a sweat.”

His clandestine intelligence reports from the camp, beginning in March 1941, were forwarded via the Polish resistance to the British government in London. They were among the first pieces of eyewitness evidence of what was going on at Auschwitz. But the British authorities thought his tales of Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz (2 million people killed in the first three years, 3 million in the next two years) were grossly exaggerated, and refused to provide air support to help the inmates escape.

In the foreword to “The Auschwitz Volunteer,” Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Poland’s current chief rabbi, wrote, “If heeded, Pilecki’s early warnings might have changed the course of history.”

After nearly three years of starvation, disease and brutality, Pilecki accomplished his mission before escaping in April 1943. After he was assigned to a night shift at a camp bakery outside the fence, he and two comrades overpowered a guard and escaped, taking with them documents stolen from the officers. In 1944, Pilecki fought in the Warsaw Uprising to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany.

In a sad and tragic twist, Pilecki was captured by the postwar Polish communist regime, tortured, given a show trial, executed as a traitor and Western spy in 1948 and erased from Polish history until the collapse of communism in 1989. His final words before his execution were “Long live free Poland.”

Pilecki’s story has become better known in the past decade, in part because of the 2006 Polish film “The Death of Captain Pilecki,” starring Probosz. The film was made in just 10 days on a shoestring budget but has received critical acclaim and numerous awards. The actor-filmmaker has since accompanied screenings of the film and spoken about Pilecki’s life at movie theaters, universities and Holocaust museums worldwide. 

“I’ve travelled with this movie around the world for the last 10 years,” Probosz said. “It never stops. There’s such a need for true heroes, not propaganda, not the fictional Batman or superhero, but the real people who were altruists, who were idealists, who really put their life at stake and were ready to sacrifice their own life, believing that that makes sense, that there’s a mission to it, that in the future someone benefits from that sacrifice.”

Probosz also has a personal connection to the Holocaust. His grandfather, Polish poet laureate Jerzy Probosz, was murdered as a prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1942. He was a self-taught intellectual, playwright, essayist and political activist. “I see through his words how idealistic he was, and what kind of a man of vision he was,” Probosz said. “So even though I never met my grandfather, I feel a very strong, intimate connection with him.”

Growing up with the awareness of his grandfather’s legacy also helped Probosz embody Pilecki on film and stage. Now, as an actor and educator, Probosz tries to pass his subject’s values on to others. “He did better me as a human being,” Probosz said of Pilecki. “I’ll go to my grave with him and his ideals.”

You can hear Marek Probosz read from Witold Pilecki’s reports in “The Auschwitz Volunteer” at Hillel at UCLA, 574 Hilgard Ave. in Los Angeles, March 1 from 4-6 p.m. More information is at Auschwitz’s volunteer prisoner Read More »

A sneak peek inside the Broad museum

Leave a Comment / Culture, Entertainment /

A throng of art-world insiders, media and members of the public swirled around the top-floor gallery of The Broad for a sneak peak at Los Angeles’ newest art museum … before the art was installed. At the center of the storm, the new museum’s benefactor and namesake, Eli Broad, sat calmly perched on a stool, taking in the spectacle.

“It’s a dream come true,” said Broad, 81, whose money comes from real estate, though he is now best known as a philanthropist in arts and education. “I feel very good about the building. It’s taken a little longer than we would’ve liked, but it sure was worth waiting for.”

The $140 million, 120,000-square-foot museum designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro had been scheduled to open in 2014, but a legal dispute with a subcontractor, Seele Inc., hired to create the honeycomb exterior, delayed the opening to Sept. 20 of this year. 

On Feb. 15, the museum opened its doors to more than 3,500 people, allowing them to take the freight elevator up to the vast, column-free third-floor gallery. The 35,000-square-foot space (nearly a full acre) had not yet been divided by partition walls, allowing a clear view of the architecture. The $10 tickets for the day sold out within minutes.

“I came up to the third floor, which is the exhibition floor, and I thought I’d gone into heaven. It was a science fiction movie, or something like that,” former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, a friend of Broad, said.

The event also featured two temporary installations: an “abstract soundscape of downtown Los Angeles” by BJ Nilsen and an “immersive sound and light environment” created by Yann Novak.

The building includes an anvil-shaped inner sanctum and the distinctive exterior or “veil” of the building, a porous structure that allows natural light to flood in.

“It does challenge perception,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad. “It challenges traditional ways of thinking about museum buildings. And that’s what we love about it.”

“You know, we had a challenge, being next door to Walt Disney Concert Hall,” Broad added. “You didn’t want to clash with it, but you didn’t want to be anonymous, either. So I think we’ve got a building that is iconic but doesn’t clash with the concert hall.”

Broad has long been a prime advocate for rethinking and reinvigorating Grand Avenue in downtown. He was the founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), located in a building designed by Arata Isozaki across the street from his new museum, and he led the fundraising campaign to build the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall; he also secured the financing for Grand Park at the Civic Center.

The Broad Art Foundation’s collection and the Broads’ extensive personal art collection include more than 2,000 artworks. The Broad will open with a mostly chronological selection of 250 to 300 pieces, beginning with works from the 1950s by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly and pop art of the 1960s by Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol. Artists represented in depth from the 1980s, the decade when The Broad Art Foundation was established, include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Jeff Koons. The museum’s installation will continue through to works from the present, with pieces by Kara Walker and a monumental, immersive, eight-screen video piece, “The Visitors,” by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, and other recent acquisitions.

The Broad Foundation, which will be headquartered in the new museum, has already made more than 8,000 loans to more than 500 museums, mostly from its previous home in Santa Monica, which was not public. Some of the art is housed at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), designed by architect Renzo Piano and built in 2008, to which Broad lent his collection for a survey exhibition. The LACMA collection includes work by James Turrell, Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, Nam June Paik and others. It’s unclear how much of the LACMA collection will be moved to The Broad.

The Broad will be open to the public free of charge, made possible by a sizeable endowment from Eli and Edythe Broad, but will charge for temporary special exhibitions. While the free admission is sure to attract many visitors who might not otherwise come, some fear it could also hurt attendance at MOCA across the street, which charges $12 for general admission and $7 for students and seniors. Broad, who remains a life trustee of MOCA, downplayed the competitive angle.

“It’s so complementary,” Broad said. “Our work is the last 40 years. MOCA’s work begins at the end of World War II, starting with Mondrian and so on. If people want to see the best artwork from the end of World War II to the present time, I can think of no better place than The Broad and MOCA.”

Philippe Vergne, MOCA’s new director, said the staff of both institutions are working “to really make sure that this entire street is perceived as a campus.” That also includes the Music Center, the Colburn School and the Rafael Moneo-designed Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

“So not only do you have fantastic institutions for music, for opera, for art, but you also have permanently installed on the block an exhibition of architecture with some of the most important architects in the world,” Vergne said. “I don’t see many cities that can actually claim, in terms of cultural commitment and architectural achievement, what’s happening here.”

The Broad’s emergence shows just how much downtown Los Angeles is changing. With every gastropub, chic boutique and organic supermarket that sets down stakes in the neighborhood, the long-held image of a crime-infested urban core continues to fade. It’s a little ironic that Broad, who built his fortune constructing suburban developments, is now breathing life back into downtown.

“I think the population of downtown is going to at least triple,” Broad said. “Between what’s happening on Grand Avenue, what’s happening near L.A. Live, and of course the new Arts District. And I think it’s starting to accelerate, and you’re going to see downtown Los Angeles a very different place. It’s going to be 24/7. It’s not going to be like the old days, when you rolled up the sidewalks at 8 o’clock at night.”

Besides building an extensive collection of postwar and contemporary art, the Broads have also poured their finances into biomedical research with the Broad Institute, which funds stem cell research and genomics. The Broad Foundation is also focused on improving urban public education to make U.S. schools more competitive on the global stage.

“The arts are important to improve the human condition in a very different way, especially during these troubled times, when people worry about terrorism and all the other problems of the world,” Broad said. “So I think art gets people stimulated, makes them feel better, gets them away from the day-to-day issues in their lives and the world.

“Today it’s about the architecture. When it opens to the public on Sept. 20, it’ll be about the art,” Broad added.

Watch the live construction of the Broad museum A sneak peek inside the Broad museum Read More »

‘Downton Abbey’ and the Jews

Leave a Comment / Culture, Television /

Much more than a highbrow soap opera about a family of British aristocrats and their servants, “Downton Abbey” has been deeply rooted in the history and social issues of the early 20th century. Themes of class divides, changing morals and tradition versus progress have provided the backdrop for melodramatic storylines involving secrets, betrayals, liaisons and tragic deaths. In its fifth season, currently airing on PBS’ “Masterpiece,” the series has ventured into the issue of anti-Semitism for the first time with the introduction of an upper-crust Jewish family.

Young Lady Rose (Lily James) meets and falls in love with Ephraim Atticus Aldridge (Matt Barber), whose Jewish family fled pogroms in Russia 60 years before and have risen to the heights of British society. His father, Daniel Aldridge (James Faulkner), holds the title of Lord Sinderby, and the lord’s less-than-progressive attitudes emerge during a get-acquainted family dinner at the abbey. Robert and Cora Crawley (the abbey’s Lord and Lady Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) have no issue with the interfaith relationship, because Cora, after all, has a Jewish father. But Lord Sinderby opposes his son marrying outside the Jewish faith — Rose is a cousin with no Jewish blood — and his future grandchildren having a “little shiksa” for a mother.

“I have always been interested in the anti-Semitism of the British upper classes,” Julian Fellowes, creator, writer and executive producer of the series, said in an interview. Fellowes, 65, is not Jewish, but has witnessed anti-Semitism and had personal experience with it in his youth.

“I did see quite a lot of it,” he said. “My mother had no prejudice about that sort of thing — race or color or religion — she just tried to avoid people she thought boring. But my father had a trace of the slight anti-Semitism of his kind. Paradoxically, he had a lot of Jewish friends.” 

Fellowes revealed that Lord Sinderby’s disapproval of the match “even though Rose is well-born and suitable, because she is not Jewish, is from my own experience. My first real girlfriend in London came from a very prominent Jewish family, and it was my only experience of being seen as a thoroughly undesirable suitor. They very definitely did not want her to marry out of the faith, and so they did everything they could to discourage the match. Actually, I liked them very much, and later, when my ex had married a nice boy they approved of, we became good friends. But, in ‘Downton,’ I always like to show both sides, and I wanted to demonstrate that prejudice can exist in either social group.”

Fellowes went on to explain a bit about the history of British anti-Semitism. “The championship of Edward VII and his queen brought prominent Jews into society from the 1870s on. To some extent, [Benjamin] Disraeli [a 19th-century British prime minister] had broken through before that, but even he had to convert. One mustn’t overstate the speed with which peace and harmony was achieved. People like Sir Ernest Cassel, one of the king’s best friends, were still converting in order to be accepted, but some were brought into society despite remaining true to their faith, more so as the [19th] century drew to its close. I saw it as a young man, although there is no doubt that (World War II) and the aftermath made a lot of people rethink their prejudices, but such things take a long time to die.”

Although interfaith marriages were not common in British society, “There were a few,” Fellowes said. “The most famous was probably the heiress Hannah Rothschild, who married the Earl of Rosebery in 1878. “There were others,” he continued. “Viscountess Battersea was Jewish, and although Maud Cassel’s father had converted, she was still considered Jewish when she married Wilfred Ashley, later Lord Mount Temple. I don’t think it was an easy berth for any of them, any more than it would be for the American heiresses who married into the British upper classes at the turn of the century, as they were all, to a degree, on foreign territory. But the majority of them just got on with it, which I suspect, then or now, is the best way to deal with most of life’s problems.”

In Season 5’s eighth episode, Lady Rose and Atticus encounter a potential roadblock on the way to the altar. Rose’s mother, Lady Flintshire (Phoebe Nicholls), who is estranged from her husband and fearing she’ll “be an outcast,” attempts to break the younger couple up by fabricating a scandal, ultimately thwarted by Lord Flintshire (Peter Egan). They marry in a civil ceremony and return from their Venice honeymoon as the Christmas episode, which is set in December 1924, begins.

Airing March 1, the season finale marks Atticus’ first exposure to Christmas. But the storyline “is more about the resolution of the relationships within the family, rather than dealing with the Jewish/Christian marriage issue,” Fellowes said. 

The anti-Semitism plotline met with approval in Britain when the series aired there last year. “People seemed to get involved with it and, rather movingly, I was thanked by a Jewish peer in the House of Lords because he and his family felt we had put forward a very truthful account of what it is like to be a Jew in British society,” Fellowes said. “There can be no question that the tone of the show is against any kind of anti-Semitism, and so nobody seemed to take offense at a pretty truthful display of it.”

Fellowes stressed that, as a non-Jew, he doesn’t set himself up as an authority. “I like to think that these themes provoke conversation and discussion, just as I hope people examine the way they treat their own employees, or members of their family, or whatever, as a result of the drama. I have witnessed that genteel anti-Semitism for myself, and I think today, when such feelings — and rather less genteel ones — are on the rise, in Europe at any rate, I think it a good idea to pull back the curtain and let people look at it in all its ugliness.”

Although mention is made of a job offer in Boston that will send the newlyweds across the Atlantic, “I think we will see Rose and Atticus again,” said Fellowes, who is gearing up for the sixth and final season of “Downton Abbey.” 

“More than that I could not say.”

The season finale of “Downton Abbey” airs March 1 at 9 p.m. on PBS. 

‘Downton Abbey’ and the Jews Read More »

Poem: Josephs, In a Time of No Peace

Leave a Comment / Culture, Poetry /

A gnarl of streets
and Purim boys — my sons with striped towels
for their many-colored coats — roam them
until a rock, a boom, debris.

Then a rain of flesh on a door in a city

Because my father’s father’s
father stole a goat, the child of that goatless
father’s father’s father throws a rock, a bomb
past a door in a city.

Time’s debris: both rubble and sorrow

Susan Terris’ new book is “Ghost of Yesterday, New and Selected Poems”  (Marsh Hawk Press, 2013). Terris is editor of Spillway magazine and a poetry editor for Pedestal.

Poem: Josephs, In a Time of No Peace Read More »

‘Anonymous Soldiers’ looks at terrorism from another troubling angle

Leave a Comment / Books, Culture /

“Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947” by Bruce Hoffman (Knopf) offers an uncomfortable but crucial message: Terrorism works. And the book is all the more disturbing because the examples Hoffman considers are the Irgun and Lehi (perhaps better known as the “Stern Gang”), which he bluntly describes as “Jewish terrorist organizations.”

“(E)ven if terrorism’s power to dramatically change the course of history along the lines of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been mercifully infrequent,” Hoffman writes, “terrorism’s ability to act as a catalyst for wider conflagration or systemic political change appears historically undeniable.” 

To be sure, Hoffman concedes that the Zionist enterprise depended on far more than physical violence. “The struggle for Jewish statehood employed almost every means possible: diplomacy, negotiation, lobbying, civil disobedience, propaganda, information operations, armed resistance …” But he ends the sentence with the object of his current inquiry: “… and terrorist violence.”  

Working largely in the newly declassified archives of MI5, the British secret service and the Palestine Police Force, Hoffman has been able to view through British eyes such momentous acts of terrorism as the assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944, the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, and the kidnapping and hanging of two British sergeants in 1957.  

Britain created the problem in Palestine for itself, or so Hoffman argues, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” but also noted that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Despite the “benevolent prose and altruistic intent” of the diplomatic letter, history shows that Britain now faced the task of “navigating between two peoples’ historical, cultural, religious, and political claims to the same land.” By 1929, Arab violence against Jews was one of the “facts on the ground” that confronted the Zionist movement in Palestine.

Hoffman usefully points out that Arab violence was not purely spontaneous. A radical imam called al-Qassam — now the name of a rocket used by Hamas — preached a holy war to the Arabs of Palestine: “You must know that nothing will save us but our arms.” In 1936, a gang of his followers stopped and robbed a bus and murdered two of its Jewish passengers. A Jewish reprisal took the lives of two Arabs. As violence erupted yet again around Palestine, the British authorities declared a state of emergency. “The Arab Rebellion,” Hoffman writes, “had now begun.”

The question in the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, was whether Jews ought to answer Arab terrorism with terrorism of their own, an issue that divided the left-wing Labor Zionists from the right-wing Revisionists and resulted in two parallel Jewish defense forces, one called the Haganah and the other called the Haganah-Bet. The Labor Zionists embraced the doctrines of havlaga (self-restraint) and tohar ha-neshek (purity of arms), but the Revisionists insisted that the escalation of Arab violence called for new and more brutal tactics: “By blood and fire Judea fell,” was the slogan of the Irgun, “and by blood and fire Judea shall arise.”

Significantly, the Irgun commenced its operations with the bombing of an Arab cafe as an act of revenge for the killing of five Jewish farmers a couple of days earlier. “The shame of restraint has been removed,” declared David Raziel, the first commander of the Irgun. Indeed, Irgun violence grew steadily bolder and bloodier as the “Irgun launched a succession of shootings, bombings, road minings and various acts of sabotage and vandalism against British and Arab targets alike.” Against self-restraint and purity of arms, a new principle was announced: “A hitting fist must be answered by two hitting fists — a bomb explosion has to be replied with two bomb explosions.” 

As Hoffman shows in gripping detail, the emergence of the Irgun meant that the fighting front had divided into several lines of conflict. The Jewish Agency conducted a counterterrorism campaign of its own against the Irgun (and, later, the spin-off known as Lehi), and a Jewish civil war threatened to break out more than once. The British authorities sought to suppress both the Irgun and Lehi, as well as the Arab guerillas that operated in Palestine, and the Arabs set themselves against both the British and the Jews. “By the fall of 1938, Palestine was coming apart at the seams,” Hoffman writes.

“Anonymous Soldiers” can be seen as a corrective to the understatements and misstatements about the role of the Revisionist movement in the history of Zionism and, especially, the creation and defense of the Jewish state. Hoffman, a scholar who specializes in security studies at Georgetown University, succeeds in giving us an even-handed work of history that is, at the same time, a morally illuminating and challenging work about the role of violence in politics. But he also confronts us with the unsettling truth that sometimes, and especially when the adversary is a democracy that has lost its will to fight, terrorism will succeed.

“That Jewish terrorism played a salient role in helping to create and foster the sense of hopelessness and despair that … influenced the Labour government’s decision to leave Palestine is clear,” Hoffman concludes, although he insists that it was only one of many factors at work in the fateful decision.  

That’s not the end of the debate about terrorism, but “Anonymous Soldiers” is a good starting place, especially when we consider the price of not fighting terrorism. 

‘Anonymous Soldiers’ looks at terrorism from another troubling angle Read More »

At Streit’s 90-year-old Lower East Side factory, ‘the men’ turn out their last matzah batch

Leave a Comment / Culture /

Seated in his Lower East Side office, in front of a large portrait of company patriarch Aron Streit, Alan Adler avoids becoming too nostalgic.

“It’s like I tell my family members: none of you own a car from 1935, why do you think a matzah factory from 1935 is what we should be using today?” says Adler, one of Streit’s Matzos‘ 11 co-owners.

This is the line of thought behind the imminent closing of the Streit’s matzah factory, a longtime Jewish fixture in a city neighborhood that once was home to one of the highest concentration of Jews in the country.

Streit’s, the last family-owned matzah company in the United States, announced in December that it would be permanently closing its 90-year-old factory after this Passover season because of longstanding mechanical problems and subsequent economic concerns. Sometime in April, the company will shift its matzah production either to its other factory across the river in northern New Jersey, where several other products such as macaroons and wafers are made, or to another non-Manhattan location.

At the Streit’s Matzo factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, matzah is broken into pieces and sent to be packaged in the same way it has been for over half a century. (Gabe Friedman/JTA)

The greatly gentrified Lower East Side has seen its real estate values skyrocket in recent decades. Although Streit’s has not yet identified a buyer for its landmark building on Rivington Street, the property was estimated to be worth $25 million in 2008, when the company first considered shuttering the factory.

“We should’ve been out of here five or 10 years ago,” says Adler, 63, who oversees the company’s day-to-day operations along with two cousins. “But we feel committed to the men [who work here] and we feel committed to the neighborhood, so we tried to keep this place afloat as long as we could. We probably could’ve stayed here even longer if I could’ve found somebody to work on the ovens.”

The ovens, identified only by “Springfield, Mass” on their side, date back to the 1930s. They are 75 feet long and are continuously fed a thin sheet of dough that emerges from the convection heat in perfect crisp form. Streit’s does not disclose its official production numbers, but Adler says the factory churns out millions of pounds of matzah each year.

Baked matzah coming out of the oven at Streit’s Matzo factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, date unknown. (Courtesy Streit’s Matzo)

However, Adler also estimates that the ovens are now about 25 percent slower than they used to be and he cannot find a mechanic willing to fix them. The slower pace decreases matzah output and affects the product’s flavor.

But the ovens aren’t the only outdated element of the factory. Except for a few electrical parts added to the machinery over the years, nearly all of the other equipment is more than 70 years old. As a result, employees’ tasks have barely changed in over half a century — from mixing the flour in small batches (in under 18 minutes to satisfy kosher requirements) to separating the matzah sheets into pieces that then travel up to higher floors on a conveyor belt.

“Nothing changes at Streit’s,” says Rabbi Mayer Kirshner, who oversees the factory’s kosher certification.

However, plenty has changed in the matzah business since Adler’s childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, when he liked to spend time picking fresh matzah out of the ovens. Back in the “heyday,” as Adler calls it, of the 1930s through the 1960s, there were four matzah factories in the New York metropolitan area: Horowitz-Margareten and Goodman’s in Queens, Manischewitz in New Jersey and Streit’s in Manhattan. Horowitz-Margareten and Goodman’s were sold to Manischewitz, which was bought by the private equity firm Kohlberg and Company in 1990. (Today it is owned by Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s former investment firm.)Outside the soon-to-be-shuttered Streit’s Matzos factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. (Google Street View)

The Streit’s factory also used to boast a vibrant storefront with lines that spilled outside and around the corner. Today there is still a retail counter, but often it is left unmanned.

“Families have moved on, the Lower East Side has changed, so now we’ve sort of transitioned from a local bakery where people would stop by and pick up their matzah hot out of the oven in 1925 to now where 99.9 percent of our sales are wholesale to distributors who resell,” Adler says.

While his cousins helped at the retail counter, Adler, who joined the company 18 years ago after a law career, says he was always more comfortable working behind the scenes. In the factory’s freight elevator he has clearly ridden in innumerable times, he cracks a rare joke.

“You couldn’t build an elevator like this today,” he says. “It’s passed every safety law from 1925 and not one since.”Mikhail Musheyev cleans a matzah dough mixer at the Streit’s Matzo factory. (Gabe Friedman/JTA)

Adler says the 30 factory employees were shocked by the news in December but are taking it “surprisingly well.” The company has told them that there are many jobs available at the New Jersey facility, but only three employees have taken the company up on the offer.

Many of “the men,” as Adler calls the employees, live in Queens and take public transportation to work, meaning that a potential commute to New Jersey would be difficult. Streit’s is working with the New York Department of Labor to help them find new jobs.

Anthony Zapata, who has worked at Streit’s for 33 years, and who Adler says does everything from packing matzah to putting out fires (“literally, not figuratively”), tells JTA that he is very depressed about the factory’s closing. He says the increased transportation costs of traveling to New Jersey would be too much for him.

Mixing water with flour to make matzah dough at Streit’s Matzo Factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, date unknown. (Courtesy of Streit’s Matzos)

“I’m going to miss this place, and I’m going to miss everyone in it,” Zapata says. “I’ve never had a modern job to know what’s old, and what’s different between modern and old.”

Zapata, 53, says that all the employees are friends and have barbecues together around the city in the warmer months.

“We’ll remain tight,” he says.

Adler does not betray many emotions on the matter, but he offers a bittersweet anecdote on the neighborhood’s evolution. Shortly before the company first thought of selling the property in 2008, a man living in one of the condos adjacent to the factory complained to Adler about the noise and flour dust coming out of the building. Adler responded to his requests by blocking in and sealing several factory walls, and when he saw the man months later, he told him what he thought would be “good news” about the factory’s potential closing.

“He said, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want condos — there won’t be enough parking on this street!’” Adler recalls. “All of a sudden he liked my noise and my flour dust.

“I don’t know what they’ll do with this building now,” he adds, “but people don’t like change.”

At Streit’s 90-year-old Lower East Side factory, ‘the men’ turn out their last matzah batch Read More »

Opening the floodgates of Israel bashing

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Commentary magazine called it “flood libel.” HonestReporting.com described it as “dam busted.” And Camera headlined it “Dam Lies.”

Agence France Presse’s report earlier this week falsely alleging that Israel intentionally opened a large dam in the South in order to unleash floods upon Gaza’s already beleaguered residents has released a torrent of puns. But it also opened the floodgates for Israel bashing (as if they weren’t already opened), with numerous other publications, blogs and other sites repeating the claim as fact. One of those, Al Jazeera, officiallyretracted its story on Wednesday, noting, “In southern Israel, there are no dams of the type which can be opened.”

Gaza does indeed suffer frequent flooding this time of year, and this isn’t the first time the dam rumor has, ahem, surfaced. The Palestinian Maan News Agency made the claim in 2012, as did Middle East Monitor in 2013.

BuzzFeed, one of the first non-Israeli and non-Jewish outlets to report the claim as false, quoted a Palestinian official speaking on condition of anonymity as saying the rumor “could be traced back more than a decade”:

“It is easy to say it is dams, easier than saying that the problem is infrastructure — not having infrastructure, having bad infrastructure, having what little infrastructure Gaza destroyed each time there is war — that is the truth,” said the official, who spoke with Buzzfeed by phone from Gaza. He asked to remain anonymous as his statements did not coincide with those made by Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. “If we could rebuild Gaza, we could build a system that dealt with these horrible floods. But Gaza is in ruins, there is nowhere for the water to go, and each year it will be the same unless someone helps us.”

No word on whether the flooding has damaged any remaining Hamas tunnels into Israel.

Opening the floodgates of Israel bashing Read More »