The Pew Research Center released its ” target=”_blank”>”one in four American Jews are losing their religion”. In a country that appears to be losing its religion, Jews are only behind Hindus and Muslims and are ahead of everyone else in retaining adherents. The numbers speak for themselves:
A German court formally authorized the return of two Nazi-looted artworks from the collection of the late art collector Cornelius Gurlitt.
The paintings, among the most valuable of the more than 1,400 artworks discovered in Gurlitt’s home in Munich and later in a second home in Salzburg, Austria, can be retrieved this week by the heirs of the Jewish owners from whom they were stolen, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday following the decision by the Munich District Court.
The court did not reveal the names of the owners of the artworks — Henri Matisse’s “Woman Sitting in an Armchair” and Max Liebermann’s “Two Riders on the Beach” — or the names of the heirs who will receive them, according to The Associated Press.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Libermann painting was stolen from David Friedmann, a German-Jewish collector who died in the early 1940s, and the Matisse was stolen in a Nazi raid on a bank vault in France belonging to Paul Rosenberg, a Jewish art dealer.
Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, was an art dealer on assignment to the Nazis. When Hildebrand Gurlitt died in 1956, his son inherited the collection, which includes works by Picasso, Durer, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Beckmann and Matisse. The Gurlitt collection, discovered in the course of an investigation for tax evasion, is worth an estimated $1.26 billion.
Last year, Gurlitt signed an agreement with the state of Bavaria and the German federal government in which the provenance of all works would be researched, paving the way for the return of the paintings to the heirs of the rightful owners. The work of the task force searching for possible rightful owners continued after Gurlitt died last May.
Gurlitt left his entire collection to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. The museum accepted the collection and promised to participate in the process by which German authorities would attempt to return any looted works to their rightful owners.
2 Nazi-looted paintings from Gurlitt collection cleared for return to heirs Read More »
Much as the United States may like to, staying out the Middle East just isn’t an option — not if security is a priority.
Last month, Jeff Stein and Jonathan Broder wrote an article at Newsweek. It’s worth reading. Defending President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, the authors reference Roman strategy to suggest that America “may have to learn to live” with Middle Eastern chaos:
“As the Roman historian Tacitus wrote… ‘The Germanic tribes, left alone, would become divided again and cease to be dangerous.’ That might well be the hard lesson America has to learn.”
It’s a tempting argument, after years of war that have killed or wounded tens of thousands of Americans — and cost trillions of dollars. As former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it in 2011, “any future defense secretary who again advises the president to send a large army into Asia or the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”
I share that sentiment.
Still, we must be cautious about caution. The prospect of security without exerting international influence is a mirage. Today, in the absence of U.S. influence, various factions in the Middle East render American interests increasingly vulnerable.
Consider America’s war against Islamic State. Here, President Obama’s strategy is openly focused on restraining the extremist organization rather than defeating it. Recognizing the political roots of its power, Obama believes defeating Islamic State won’t be accomplished without indigenous leadership. Strategist Andrew Bacevich echoes his philosophy:
“These are problems that the people in the region are going to have to figure out how to solve […] at the end of the day, they will have a better chance of solving their own problems than we will have a chance of imposing a solution on them.”
It sounds good. But this assessment has two central flaws.
First, it assumes that the conflicted factions will ever achieve compromise. Second, it limits American power to the derogatory notion of “imposed” solutions.
Unfortunately, Islamic State is not a static, localized threat. Driven by a “total war” ideology, and empowered by extraordinary self-belief, the organization is metastasizing globally, as thousands of Salafi-Jihadists now pledge loyalty to Islamic State. Moreover, embracing brutality as the standard of holy credibility, IS has catalyzed jihadist aggression in general.
And by deliberately relinquishing American influence in the Middle East, Obama has allowed others to fill the vacuum. Notably, Iran.
Undeterred by America, Iran is fueling a Middle Eastern meltdown. Pursuing its own sectarian interest in suppressing Sunni Muslims, Iran is encouraging Sunnis to believe that groups like Islamic State and al Qaeda are necessary guardians.
Consider the chaos in Iraq’s Anbar province. Home to an array of Sunni tribes allied against Islamic State, Anbar offers a place to mobilize regional forces to defeat the fanatics. Yet because Obama fears that arming the tribes will anger Iran, he’s sacrificed a real means of defeating Islamic State.
Thus we see the weakness of the Obama-Bacevich “imposing a solution” narrative. Its over-broad interpretation of “imposing” has displaced meaningful strategic alternatives — for one, America’s possibility to act as a critical interlocutor. By deriding such thoughts as neo-conservative arrogance, Obama is enabling the politicization of sectarianism.
Of course, this isn’t to say that America can revert to old doctrines in the Middle East. Many Republicans, for example, are deeply misguided in their belief that supporting pro-American autocracies underpins U.S. security. On the contrary, U.S. support for authoritarians fuelspopular extremism. Political Islam must be moderated, but Islamists must also have avenues of expression.
Nevertheless, leaving the Middle East alone won’t drain it of chaos. This takes us back to Stein and Broder’s conclusion. The authors rightly point out that Rome preserved its power with strategic caution. But Rome’s caution wasn’t all-defining but instead calibrated to occasional, vigorous interaction. Rome forged or co-opted allies, and deterred foes in the looming shadow of its greater power.
Rightly neglecting imperial ambitions, with a mind to protecting U.S. interests, Obama should do the same.
Why steering clear of the Middle East is a terrible idea Read More »
The Iran deal may not be done, but bids by its opponents to shape it are all but buried.
Skeptics of the nuclear negotiations have all but given up on a congressional role before the June 30 deadline for an agreement between Iran and the major powers.
“I’m not sure there’s anything anyone can do now to ensure a better deal,” Mark Dubowitz, the director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank consulting with Iran skeptics in Congress, said in an interview.
Attempts to limit sanctions relief on Iran, to roll back further its uranium enrichment program, and to link the deal to changes in Iranian relations with Syrian and Yemeni leaders – all goals sought by skeptics – are off the table, at least for now.
Last week, the Senate in a 98-1 vote approved a bill mandating congressional review of any deal.
In order to secure the necessary bipartisan support, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, worked with Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., to strip out what the Obama administration had deemed “poison pills”: provisions that would determine what a deal looked like, for instance requiring Iran to give up its backing for terrorism. Instead, the bill simply gives Congress an up or down vote on the deal. Even if the Congress disapproves, President Barack Obama has veto power.
The U.S. House of Representatives is set to consider the bill as early as Wednesday, and insiders say the measure will likely pass overwhelmingly under a parliamentary maneuver that does not allow amendments.
“Leadership on both sides wants to avoid problems with it at this point,” a senior House staffer told JTA. Obama has said he will sign a bill clean of amendments.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel powerhouse that for two decades has led efforts to isolate Iran, signed off on the formula.
“Our priority is to make sure the bill gets passed with the strongest bipartisan majority as soon as possible so that Congress is guaranteed the opportunity to pass judgment on the final agreement,” an AIPAC source said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still hopes to influence the outcome.
“We view the greatest challenge to the security of the Middle East, of Israel and of the world Iran’s quest for empire coupled with its quest for nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said Tuesday after meeting Ursula von der Leyen, the German defense minister. Germany and the United States, along with Russia, France, Britain and China, are negotiating the deal with Iran.
“We hope that this can be prevented, preferably by diplomatic means,” Netanyahu said. “We think a better deal is required than the one that is proposed in Lausanne [the city in Switzerland where the talks were being held], and I believe that this is important for our common future and our common security.”
How Netanyahu plans to go about shaping a better deal is unclear. He thought his best bet was speaking to Congress, and risked a rupture with the Obama administration when he accepted an invitation to address the body in March without consulting with the White House.
That avenue is now closed, according to opponents of the deal. Congress, under the Corker-Cardin bill about to pass, may disapprove of the deal, but is not likely to garner the two-thirds majority in both chambers to override a presidential veto of its disapproval.
“It won’t be easy for Congress to override a presidential veto of a joint resolution of disapproval on a final Iran agreement,” a senior GOP congressional staffer said. “It’s not even certain the Senate will get cloture for a resolution of disapproval,” the staffer added, referring to the 60 votes needed to end debate.
In the House, 151 Democrats signed a letter to Obama last week supporting diplomacy with Iran. The letter did not directly address the Iran deal, but leading the signatories was Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the minority leader. Leaders rarely sign letters, and her signature was a signal that Pelosi had more than the 149 votes required to avoid a veto override.
Dylan Williams, the vice president of government affairs for J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle east policy group that helped circulate the letter, said Democrats – and probably a handful of Republicans – would not want to kill a deal that comported with the terms governing the talks now underway, including an invasive inspections regime, an enrichment rollback and staggered sanctions relief.
“Sufficient numbers of Democrats will understand it’s a choice between the agreement and a complete breakdown in diplomacy and international sanctions,” Williams said.
Once a deal was in place – as early as next fall, given that Congress has up to 52 days to review a deal after the June 30 deadline – the avenue to register opposition would be the law’s requirement that the president certify to Congress Iranian compliance with the deal every 90 days.
Without existing sanctions in place, it would be difficult for Congress to reverse a bad deal, even should it find Iran is not compliant, Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Dubowitz said, noting the difficulties of corralling businesses and other countries into reimposing sanctions.
“The administration is putting the United States on a trajectory where it will be very difficult for a future president or Congress to fundamentally change the terms of this deal,” Dubowitz said.
“It will be very difficult if not impossible to reconstitute the sanctions regime and then there will be only be two options” should Iran breakout a nuclear weapons capability. “One is to concede an Iranian nuke, two is to use force to forestall that possibility.”
(Melissa Apter of the Washington Jewish Week contributed to this report.)
With House set to approve Iran deal, options to shape outcome remote Read More »
Israel will evacuate four Israeli babies born to surrogate mothers in Nepal following the second major earthquake to hit the Asian nation in three weeks.
A Magen David Adom mission was scheduled to leave for Nepal on Tuesday night, Ynet reported, after one of the fathers called for assistance from Israel earlier in the day following the 7.3 magnitude quake. The father’s twins were born Saturday.
The four babies, all born prematurely, were in neonatal intensive care units at the Grande International Hospital in Kathmandu at the time of the earthquake. One of the fathers, Yoav Elani, said that when the earthquake struck, all of the fathers grabbed their babies, disconnected them from tubes and machines, and ran outside.
The Israeli government is currently working with Nepalese officials on the approval needed to bring the babies to Israel.
The surrogate mothers and hospital staff also were safe, the Tammuz surrogacy agency, which facilitates the pregnancies, told the Hebrew language NRG news website. The babies and their parents will spend the night in a car in the parking lot of the hospital trying to keep the babies warm, according to NRG.
Following the 7.8 magnitude quake on April 25, Israel evacuated 25 Israeli babies born to surrogate mothers in Nepal, as well as some late-term surrogate mothers.
At least 42 people have been reported killed and several buildings destroyed in Tuesday’s earthquake in the hours after it struck. The earlier earthquake has killed more than 8,000 people and injured upwards of 16,000.
The area had faced numerous aftershocks and smaller earthquakes since the April 25 temblor centered near Kathmandu, the capital. Many families had moved back to their homes, however.
Rabbi Chezky Lifshitz, co-director of the Chabad of Nepal with his wife, Chani, said soon after Tuesday’s quake that 133 Israelis have again taken shelter at the Chabad center, according to the Chabad.org website.
“Although everyone we know appears to be safe, we are sad to report that there are many more casualties in Nepal again today,” Lifshitz said. “There is so much more work that now needs to be done.”
On Tuesday morning, the Israel Defense Forces delegation to Nepal returned home. In his welcome to the delegation at Ben Gurion International Airport, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that Israel could send a second delegation in the wake of the new earthquake.
Israel to evacuate more babies born to surrogates in Nepal following new quake Read More »
To get to her assigned kindergarten, Biyan Azam, then 5, would have had to walk alone through a bustling commercial district and cross a busy intersection. This Arab-Israeli city does not provide school buses and would not transfer Biyan to a school nearer to her home here.
That’s when, in the fall of 2013, the women of Nahnu stepped in.
Nahnu (“we” in Arabic), a women’s civic activism group, wrote letters, visited City Hall and ultimately succeeded in getting Biyan — who had been staying home rather than risking the walk — moved to the kindergarten near her house.
The campaign was one of many Nahnu has led against City Hall. What began as a group of a dozen women gathering for coffee to commiserate about their hometown became “an address in Taibeh for public complaints,” said Nahnu co-founder Samira Haj Yahia.
“People aren’t aware of where to go,” Haj Yahia, 51, said of the city’s 40,000 residents. “If there’s an immediate problem, the municipality doesn’t handle it. For every small problem, you need to go to the mayor. That compels us to help.”
This fall, Nahnu hopes to enter the local government it has so heartily battled. It is running as a political party, vying for city council seats and the mayoralty in this fall’s municipal elections.
In heavily Arab cities in Israel, women have traditionally been urged to stay out of the public sphere. Politics have been seen as men’s realm. But that’s changing, albeit slowly, as more Arab-Israeli women are running for public office.
To many Arab-Israeli women, politics “looks like something scary that will take a lot of time, and they’ll pay a high price socially, familially,” said Maisam Jaljuli, who runs an Arab women’s political empowerment seminar for the Abraham Fund, which promotes Jewish-Arab coexistence. “We thought that if women would understand what politics is and see what political life is like, it’ll show them that this demon is not so scary.”
Only two Arab women — The Joint List’s Hanin Zoabi and Aida Touma-Sliman — serve in the 120-seat Knesset among 29 female lawmakers. Of the some 570 Arab-Israelis elected to local governments, only 12 are women — an increase from five before 2013, according to Jaljuli. Her seminar, which has included some Nahnu members, hopes to grow that number by teaching Arab-Israeli women such skills as public speaking, giving press interviews and writing party platforms.
Recent years have seen more Arab-Israeli women graduating from college and going to work. In 2011, 24 percent of Arab women participated in Israel’s labor force, double the 1990 figure, according to the Taub Center for Social Policy. And in 2008, Taub found that 13 percent of Arab women aged 25 to 44 held college degrees, compared to less than 3 percent of their counterparts aged 45 to 64.
“Women do not see their problems addressed in terms of day care, in terms of work,” said Suheir Daoud, a politics professor at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina who is originally from northern Israel. “Women are becoming more confident in their abilities. They’re more educated.”
In Taibeh, which is situated in north-central Israel not far from the West Bank border, politics has long been controlled by what locals call “the families” — two large, male-dominated clans that formed city council slates and ran against each other. But in 2007, Israel’s Interior Ministry ousted the last democratically elected Taibeh mayor and dissolved the city council after the city racked up a $233 million debt and ran a $36 million budget deficit, according to Israeli reports.
Since then, a committee appointed by Israel’s Interior Ministry has run the city. Taibeh’s fiscal affairs are in better shape, but locals still complain about a dearth of construction permits, problems with basic utilities and a shortage of jobs. They also chafe at an unelected government led by a Jewish-Israeli politician from the right-wing Likud Party.
“There were improvements, but we reverted on other things,” said Omar Baransi, 58, a widowed father of three who runs a pizzeria. “We have nowhere to build. I want to build. I don’t have a permit, but I have the land.”
In the past two years, Nahnu has successfully pressured the city to reopen a children’s health clinic and unsuccessfully lobbied against a 7.5 percent local property tax hike. It’s also going to bat for fired city workers.
Haj Yahia, a journalist for the Arab-Israeli A-Shams radio station, has gotten to know the city’s woes through her work. Her co-founder, Dr. Neheia Habib, 49, is a physician and the daughter of a former mayor who taught her politics at home.
Nahnu plans to focus on combating violence, both at home and in the street. In the past, gang fights have been a blight on the city. The movement will also push to open a special education school and expand extracurricular activities for kids.
“From my work, I was exposed to a lot of things I could help and not just publish,” Haj Yahia said. “We won’t be silent now. We came to make a change, to make a social revolution, to make the city healthy.”
Haj Yahia talks about winning the mayoralty, but knows she’ll face pushback given the city’s conservative culture — and she’s not alone. In the nearby Arab-Israeli village of Jaljulia, high-school civics teacher Inssaf Shawahna, 49, hopes to run in the 2017 local elections. But Shawahna, another graduate of the Abraham Fund’s political seminar, says family and friends have deterred her from campaigning due to cultural and religious taboos that discourage women from taking on leadership roles.
“I get a lot of negative feedback, even from those close to me, who say you won’t succeed, it won’t work out, you’ll just embarrass us, your [public] picture is forbidden,” she said, referring to some Muslim legal opinions that forbid displaying women’s photos.
Haj Yahia hasn’t let chauvinism faze her. While she’s glad to advance women’s empowerment, it’s not her focus. She’s running, she says, to address her city’s basic needs.
“Someone said to me, ‘Why do you need this headache?’” Haj Yahia recalled. “I said, ‘If you can solve the problems, run instead of me.'”
In Arab-Israeli city, a women’s party is challenging the status quo Read More »
Who could look at the stars and yawn? Certainly not astronomer “>here; see also, Sagan, Cosmos (Random House 1980) at 4, 196.) It was a wonderful reference.
We may sense that there are a lot of stars in the sky, but with the naked eye it is hard to pinpoint and count them, even or maybe especially on a clear night. Sand is somewhat different. We can take a fistful of it at a beach, survey the area, think about the coast lines of the various continents, and then factor in countless interior beaches. Sagan says that our hand will hold about 10,000 grains of sand. (Cosmos, at 196.) Without help, we may not be able to do the math or know the result of the equation, but we can understand that the beaches hold an enormous number of grains of sand.
What Sagan did not say is that his two subjects, stars and sand, were invoked long ago in the “>Hosea’s prophecy — the dissolution of the Northern Kingdom of Israel due to internal corruption and external military forces — is among the earliest of preserved writings of its kind. After expressing God’s disenchantment with the House of Israel, Hosea consoled with a prediction that the people of Israel and of the Southern Kingdom of Judah would be reunited: “The number of the people of Israel shall be like the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured and counted . . . .“ (See Hos. 2:1-2.)
The Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians around 722 BCE, and a number of northerners did migrate south. But a century plus afterwards, the Kingdom of Judah came under attack by the Babylonians. As he sat in prison contemplating the destruction of Judah, “>second Isaiah chastised now exiled Judahites but also promised them that they will, through the success of God’s servant “>about six million Jews in modern Israel. To them, 6,000,000 would seem to fulfill the ancient promises. Imagine their surprise if they learned that there are almost “>world population of Jews totaling just under 14,000,000.
Perspective is important, however, and those 14,000,000 collectively do not exceed two-tenths of one per-cent of the “>between 0.05 and 2mm in diameter. For purposes of our calculation, a cubic millimeter of sand will serve as the volume of an average grain of sand.
The volume of sand on the world’s coastal beaches is a product of the length, width and depth of those beaches. The length of coasts can be determined reasonably well by modern technology, but not all coasts have beaches. Most estimates of the fraction of beach shore to coast range from about one-fifth to two-fifths. The length but especially the width of a beach varies throughout the day as tides ebb and flow. Naturally, the depth of the beach will then vary as well. One “>Another approach puts the number of grains at 5 billion billion, including those on inland beaches. Either way, the result is more than a few sextillion (a billion billion) grains of sand.
Calculating the number of stars in the sky presents different challenges than counting the grains of sand on the Earth’s seashores. Instead of having a reasonably fixed parameter with which to work, like the number of miles of seashore, the stars are set in a universe which is not only expanding, but “>NASA’s relatively new “>other, newer space observatories, “>galaxy 13.2 billion light years way. We do not know, of course, and cannot know, if that star system has survived. We may be seeing stars that no longer exist. Conversely, stars are being born all the time. The light from some of these young stars may not have had time to reach us yet. If it takes 5 billion more years to get here, we will never see it as our “>us with it.
What we can say is that our Sun is one of over one hundred billion stars in its galaxy, the “>400 billion.
As Hubble and other observatories probe deeper and deeper into space, they see farther and farther back in time. Astronomers now believe that there may be 100 to 500 billion galaxies in the known universe. The “>Andromeda galaxy located only 2.5 “>M13 galaxy found in the constellation Hercules, are rounder and are known as globular clusters. The most massive galaxies, the largest known one of which is the “>Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Andromeda may contain “>a hundred trillion stars. Conversely, dwarf galaxy may hold just one to ten million stars. Consequently, a reasonable range of the “>here.) So Carl Sagan was right.
Now some folks may conclude from all of this that the Hebrew Bible has been proven, once again, to be a faulty guide. The reported promise from God that the number of descendants of the Jewish patriarchs would exceed the number of stars in heaven or grains of sand on the seashore has not come true. Moreover, science through Sagan and others has shown definitively that the promise will never be fulfilled.
The literalists would be literally correct, of course. But, as they often do, they miss the greater messages of biblical literature. First, the recorders of the patriarchal legends and the prophets cited above were not seeking to make a scientific point, or a mathematical statement about demography. They were, rather, expressing their faith in their social and political future. They were asserting, even as Americans echoed a similar assertion over two millennia later, a mixture of confidence and hope in a doctrine of “>open letter which acknowledged: “As scientists, many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe.” Five years later, and just one year before he died, Sagan contended that “science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” Summarizing Sagan’s approach to the sacred, Dartmouth religion professor “>Aaron Zeitlin once wrote:
Praise Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me.
Curse Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me.
Praise Me or curse Me,
And I will know that you love Me.
. . .
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God,
If you sit entrenched in, “I couldn’t care less,” says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn, . . .
Then I created you in vain, says God.
Both Carl Sagan and the authors of the Hebrew Bible would ask the same question: How can you look at the stars and yawn?
Sagan, Stars and Grains of Sand Read More »
Robert Shillman heads a publicly traded American technology company called Cognex Corp with a market value of $4 billion. He also says he is a big supporter of last Sunday's Prophet Mohammad cartoon contest in Texas that was attacked by two gunmen who opened fire before being shot dead by police.
In a telephone interview with Reuters from his home near San Diego, California, Shillman said America's free speech is under threat. He added that violent attacks on such events are making people fearful and prone to self censorship. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet – such as the caricatures displayed at the event – as offensive and against the religion's teachings.
“It was a terrorist attack on the American way of life,” says Shillman, who says he isn't anti-Muslim.
Shillman said he remains a director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, whose Jihad Watch website helped organize the cartoon event in a Dallas suburb with activist Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks what it describes as extremist groups, has called the Freedom Center's founder, the right-wing commentator David Horowitz, “the godfather of the anti-Muslim Movement.” The Freedom Center says it “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values.”
The SPLC also calls Geller's AFDI a hate group because of the way it talks about and depicts Muslims.
Horowitz, in an email, called Shillman “an American hero” who is entirely transparent in his agenda. Horowitz also said the SPLC couldn't produce one statement of his own that was anti-Muslim.
Geller did not return messages seeking comment.
PARIS ATTACK
Sunday's attack had some echoes of the January assault on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that left 12 dead in what was said to be revenge for its cartoons of the prophet.
As founder of Natick, Massachusetts-based Cognex, which makes machine vision products that help automate manufacturing, Shillman says he is more outspoken than a typical U.S. corporate leader. “Most CEOs are hired guns and their future depends on what their boards think of them. I don't give a fuck.”
The Freedom Center, whose P.O. Box address is in Sherman Oaks, California, runs several blogs and websites, including the online FrontPage Magazine and Jihad Watch. Shillman has funded four fellowships for journalists who have have worked on the FrontPage, which is the center's online journal for news and political commentary. He declined to comment when asked if he helped pay for the cartoon contest.
Shillman, who grew up in Boston, says he is an admirer of Geller for her defense of free speech and American democracy. “Blaming Pamela Geller for inciting violence is like blaming a victim of rape for wearing high heels,” he said
Dr. Bob, as he calls himself, has the additional title of chief culture officer at Cognex, whose stock has produced a 373 percent return over the past five years. Shillman calls Cognex's 1,300 employees Cognoids and rewards those who reach certain long-service milestones with trips to any one of the Wonders of the World. On their birthdays, U.S. employees get a cake delivered to their homes.
For years, Shillman – who owns about 5 percent of the company's shares – has foregone millions of dollars in salary, bonus and stock options. Cognex donates the money to charity.
Anthony Sun, lead director on the Cognex board, could not be reached for comment.
FUNDS PRO-ISRAEL GROUPS
Shillman has in the past withdrawn support from organizations whose behavior he disagrees with. In 2002, he pulled funding from WBUR, a National Public Radio station in Boston, for what he perceived as anti-Israel sentiment.
His Shillman Foundation has funded a number of conservative and pro-Israeli groups, including the Zionist Organization of America. The ZOA has targeted both academics it perceives have been teaching anti-Israel doctrine and Palestine student groups accused of intimidating Jewish students on U.S. campuses, including a campaign at Shillman's alma mater, Northeastern University in Boston.
Shillman is an emeritus trustee at the university and has given it substantial amounts of money, including $3 million for a classroom building that was then named after him.
Why a US company’s chairman threw support behind Prophet Mohammad cartoon event Read More »
Following a protest by a Holocaust survivors’ group in Israel, the Dutch government reversed its decision to cut pension payments to a 90-year-old woman because she moved to a West Bank settlement.
The reversal was announced Monday in a letter sent by Caspar Veldkamp, the Netherlands’ ambassador to the Israel, responding to a letter sent earlier in the day by Colette Avital, head of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. Avital protested the Dutch government stripping some entitlements from an unnamed Holocaust survivor, who had received a letter from Dutch officials explaining that the measure was taken because she resides beyond the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
“My government considers her receiving this letter a very unfortunate event, which should have been avoided,” Veldkamp wrote in the letter, which was obtained by JTA. “Since the person involved could not have been aware of the consequences of moving to occupied territories for her entitlement, her pension will not be reduced.”
Dutch citizens residing in Israel are entitled to full old-age pensions from the Netherlands under the countries’ social security agreement. However, the Dutch government does not recognize the agreement as applying to territory beyond the Green Line. The woman in question received a monthly pension payment of approximately $1,000 after moving to Israel in recent months, but the amount was to be cut by 35 percent when the Dutch government found that she was living in the West Bank.
“We find it unacceptable to target a population of elderly people who have suffered enough in your country and beyond its borders in the dark days of World War II,” Avital wrote to Veldkamp.
In addition to the basic pension payments known in Dutch as AOW, the Dutch government also pays special income supplements to Holocaust survivors. The woman’s supplements were not affected by her residence in the West Bank, though those may have been increased to make up for the intended cut in her AOW payments, according to Henoch Wajsberg, former chair of Irgun Olei Holland, the group representing Dutch immigrants living in Israel.
“We have been fighting for years to extend the pension rights to people residing beyond the Green Line because this is essentially a non-political issue that has been politicized,” he said.
Holland reverses decision to cut survivor’s pension over West Bank residence Read More »
Tonight’s Eastern Conference semifinals Game 5 between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Chicago Bulls is pivotal for both teams – the best-of-seven series is tied at two games apiece — but it may be the biggest for Cleveland’s Jewish coach, David Blatt.
Blatt, the American-Israeli former coach of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv team, is taking heat for the way he handled the end of Game 4, which his team stole on an improbable buzzer-beater shot from LeBron James. Blatt had tried to call a timeout with a few seconds left, though the Cavs had no timeouts left (the resulting technical foul shots likely would have won the game for the Bulls if the referees had noticed). Then he drew up a play that had James – one of the best players in the history of the game – inbounding the ball rather than taking the final shot.
“To be honest, the play that was drawn up, I scratched it,” James said after the game. “I just told coach, ‘Just give me the ball. We either going to go into overtime or I’ma win it for us.’ It was that simple.”
This essentially validated what many fans had been thinking the entire season: James, and not his rookie coach, runs the team.
It’s fair to blame Blatt for these late-game mistakes, but the level of criticism he has faced all season is suspicious. Sure he’s an outsider – despite his success in the European league, the NBA is on a higher level, and many questioned Cleveland’s decision to hire him.
However, it is also clear that Blatt has not been recognized for holding his team together throughout a turbulent season that saw James get off to a rocky start in his second stint playing in his hometown and injuries to the team’s two other star players, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving.
Will tonight’s game be the important rebound Blatt needs to cement his standing? Or will the Israeli outsider remain stuck in rookie purgatory?
Game 5 between Cleveland and Chicago airs tonight at 7 p.m. on TNT.
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 and Buddhists and Hindus (34 percent each). Meanwhile, Jews and mainline Protests are the oldest, with 26 percent of adults in each religious group coming in at 65 or older.</p>
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<strong>Muslims are the most male religious group.</strong><br />
65 percent of Muslim adults in the U.S. are male. Jehova’s Witnesses—65 percent female—are the most female religious group in the country.</p>
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