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Jewish Journal

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July 13, 2016

Clinton slams Trump for promoting ‘anti-Semitic image’

Leave a Comment / Election 2016, Jewish Insider /

Addressing the challenges Americans face as a nation, Hillary Clinton on Wednesday suggested that Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric and recent controversial star tweet are further proof that he’s “dangerous” and unfit to serve as president.

During a speech at the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois —the site of Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech— Clinton argued that from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s ban on Muslims to his “promotion of an anti-Semitic image pushed by neo-Nazis,” a Trump presidency would have dangerous repercussions in America and around the globe.

“His campaign is as divisive as any we have seen in our lifetimes,” Clinton said. “It is built on stoking mistrust and pitting American against American. It’s there in everything he says and everything he promises to do as President. And that is why I believe Donald Trump is so dangerous.”

“In times like these, we need a President who can help pull us together, not split us apart,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said.

Last week, Trump came under fire for tweeting an image that was deemed anti-Semitic. A meme tweeted by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s account had a montage of Hillary Clinton with a Star of David inscribed and a pile of money in the background. The tweet was soon deleted and reposted, this time with a circle in the star’s place. Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Ohio last Wednesday, 

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‘March of the Living’ documents kinship between teens, survivors

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Hollywood /

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jessica Sanders went to Brazil to document Carnival and samba music. After unexpected detours to Auschwitz and Israel, however, she ended up making a movie about something much more serious: an event that exemplifies survival and affirmation. 

All told, Sanders’ 76-minute documentary, “March of the Living” — released on video on demand on June 28 — took Sanders to five countries, including Brazil, where it was produced. 

“March of the Living” follows a group of teens and Holocaust survivors who travel to Poland to re-create the death march between Auschwitz and Birkenau as part of the 2008 International March of the Living. Every year on Yom HaShoah, thousands of teens and survivors participate in the march, making the approximately 2-mile journey between the camps on foot before traveling on to Israel. The gathering is an opportunity to remember those who were killed during the Shoah and to educate future generations. Since the inaugural event in 1988, more than 220,000 people from 52 countries have participated. 

Brazilian producer L.G. Tubaldini Jr. approached Sanders with the idea of looking at the Holocaust from an international perspective, and the idea was too intriguing to pass up. The director expects her film, which was shot in four languages, to get people to view the Holocaust from a unique viewpoint.

“This was such an unexpected film for me to make,” said Sanders, a Los Angeles native who attended Harvard-Westlake School. “We have no archival footage. We have a contemporary score from an awesome Brazilian composer. We had one American associate producer, and everybody else was Brazilian. From what I understood, there had never been a contemporary take on the Holocaust story. I thought I could do something different.”

Sanders, whose father is Jewish, interviewed a group of Los Angeles area high school students from Harvard-Westlake, New Community Jewish High School (now deToledo High School) and Milken Community Schools, as well as teens from Brazil and Berlin. “March of the Living” shows these young men and women visiting the death camps alongside several survivors who experienced atrocities in these camps when they were children or teenagers during World War II.

Although the film uses no archival wartime footage, “March of the Living” tracks the marchers into barracks and rooms that display horrific reminders of what the Jews experienced in the camps. Museum rooms display giant mounds of human hair, discarded shoes and the incinerated ashes of murdered people. The teenagers listen, often in tears, as tour guides and survivors recount horrific stories of life in the camp. Many of them note that from the outside, the death camps are green and look almost like they could be college campuses.   

According to Sanders, the students she chose to track were meant to be a diverse group — upper-middle class students from privileged backgrounds in Los Angeles sharing a journey of discovery with working-class, less social media-savvy kids from Brazil and Berlin. 

“I tried to find different kinds of Jewish experiences and put them out there,” Sanders said. “A lot of these kids have now graduated college and are doing human rights work. The march impacted their lives.”  

Among the Los Angeles teens appearing in the film is Dani, who is of Polish descent. She says that she can’t think of her family’s country of ancestry without remembering the Holocaust. 

“I could have probably survived the Holocaust looking like this. I’m almost the perfect Aryan,” the blond, blue-eyed Dani says in the film. “So, ‘Ha!’ in Hitler’s face. There are Jews who look like me.”

Sanders said she went through a period of her childhood when she was obsessed with the Holocaust, particularly with children who had survived the experience. The writer-director added that several of her previous films touched on issues of imprisonment and social justice. Her award-winning 2005 documentary, “After Innocence,” chronicles the plight of men who have been released from prison after new evidence led to their exoneration. She is currently working on a feature film, “Picking Cotton,” that follows up one of the stories from “After Innocence.”

“When I look back, it kind of makes sense that I ended up on this film,” said Sanders, whose short-form 2001 documentary, “Sing!” was nominated for an Oscar.

Sidonia Lax, one of the Los Angeles area survivors featured in “March of the Living,” has participated in 11 Marches of the Living and hopes to do at least one more. A foundation set up in her name helps students who lack the financial resources to attend the march. 

Lax spent three months in an underground bunker in her apartment in Przemysl, Poland, before she was captured and taken to various labor camps. She was later transferred to Auschwitz and ultimately to Elsnig, a Buchenwald sub-camp near Torgau, Germany, where she worked in an ammunition factory. Both of her parents were killed in the war. 

Lax, who recently celebrated her 89th birthday, calls the march an amazing experience for the teens. Passing on the story of her experience, she said, is “my legacy.” 

“It’s the only time they have a chance to see a survivor’s face and listen to a living person,” Lax said. “I tell them that, ‘Yesterday was history, today is a gift for you and tomorrow is a mystery.’ That means now it’s very important that they listen to the stories, remember them, and relate them to the future generations because survivors will not be here much longer.”

‘March of the Living’ documents kinship between teens, survivors Read More »

Auschwitz museum prohibits Pokémon Go play on its grounds

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is not buying into the Pokémon Go craze.

On Tuesday, the Holocaust memorial site tweeted that it will not allow visitors to play the new smartphone game because it is “disrespectful on many levels.”

New York magazine first reported Tuesday that some users of the Nintendo game, which allows players to capture its animated creatures on their phones at outdoor sites and buildings with the help of phone GPS systems, were playing at Auschwitz.

Others soon took to Twitter to report finding Pokémon at the popular memorial in Oswiecim, Poland, but their screenshots of game activity did not match the normal look of the game. The game has not been officially released in Europe.

On Tuesday, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt went on Twitter to call for the museum’s visitors to refrain from playing.

The same day, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., also issued a statement condemning playing the game on its grounds. The Washington Post reported that the museum contains three different “PokéStops” — real-life sites where players can redeem in-game items.

“Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism,” Andrew Hollinger, the museum’s communications director, told the Post. “We are trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game.”

Since its release last week, Pokémon Go has become the most popular mobile game in U.S. history, with over 20 million daily users. The stock of its parent company, Nintendo, rose 23 percent on Monday.

New York magazine reported that playing the game at other sites — such as Ground Zero in New York City, near a North Carolina statue of a Confederate general and at the site of multiple African-American mural memorials in Brooklyn — has also caused controversy.

The game’s developer, Niantic, ran into similar trouble last year when one of its games, Ingress, allowed players to battle for control over real-life locations that happened to include multiple former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

Although it has yet to be officially released in Israel, multiple people — including Israeli President Reuven Rivlin — posted screenshots from the game in the Jewish state.

Auschwitz museum prohibits Pokémon Go play on its grounds Read More »

Jensen Karp survives to write his own ending

Leave a Comment / Culture /

When Jensen Karp was 29 years old, his doctor discovered three white spots in his brain. He was informed that these tumors could not be removed, and to start thinking about the possibility of dying. 

“They told me to get all my things in line, and to prepare my tombstone,” Karp said.  

The first thing he decided was that he needed to tell his story, an unbelievable tale that comes down to this: “When I was 19 years old, I was a rapper and had a million-dollar record deal.” 

The full story, written after Karp’s eventual recovery — the tumors never grew larger and are no longer a health threat — is recounted in his recently released memoir, “Kanye West Owes Me $300: And Other True Stories From a White Rapper Who Almost Made it Big.”

The book, which came out June 7, details Karp’s love of rap music when he was growing up in Woodland Hills. He first performed at a friend’s bar mitzvah when he was 12, and wrote a song called “Killin’ at the Playground.” From there, he performed in rap battles at local parties throughout his teenage years.

Jensen Karp with Kanye West. Photo courtesy of Jensen Karp

On a whim one day, Karp phoned into “Roll Call,” a daily rap battle on Power 106 FM. After going up against another rapper, listeners voted him as the winner. The DJs asked his name, and he said, on the spot, “Hot Karl.” 

Returning to the show again and again, he eventually made 43 appearances. (The previous record held for winning “Roll Call” was 10 times.)

“As Hot Karl, I mostly made jokes in my raps,” he said. “I was a rapper who was always kidding. Though I was serious about the art form, I had punch lines.”

Pretty soon, the industry became aware of Karp, a white, Jewish kid from the suburbs, and Interscope gave him a $1 million record deal. He recorded his debut album, “Your Housekeeper Hates You,” with the label, and proceeded to collaborate and commingle with artists such as Mya, Fabolous, Redman, will.i.am and Kanye West.

West and Karp became friends over the course of a year, going to movies and eating out together. In one chapter, Karp writes about how West was a determined young producer who wasn’t taken seriously. He calls it “a real-life insight into a megastar when he was still living with his mother. There aren’t tons of Kanye stories about ‘I knew this guy when.’ I tell the truth. We were close.” 

Although Karp worked hard on his debut album, eventually, Interscope told him it wasn’t going to release it because of scheduling conflicts. This was at about the time that Eminem — also on the label — was becoming a household name. It turned out that there wasn’t enough room in the game for two white rappers, Karp said.

Karp was devastated. He continued to rap for a while, but his heart wasn’t in it anymore. “It was [painful] at times to write this book,” he said. “It shows everything I went through.”

Eventually, Karp quit rapping. He had majored in writing at USC, and decided to see where that path would take him. When a writing job for “WWE Raw” opened up, he was hired by the pro-wrestling/sports entertainment program, and his comedy writing career blossomed from there.  

Karp, now in his mid-30s, works for TV and awards shows these days, and he’s appeared on the web series “Burning Love” and the VH1 show “Barely Famous.” When he’s not writing, Karp runs Gallery1988, which has two locations on Melrose Avenue and showcases pop culture art. It’s been open since 2003 and features four to five group shows per year. 

He’s not completely done with rap, though. A few years ago, he wrote a halftime song for the his favorite basketball team, the L.A. Clippers, called “Where You At.” He’s been writing one new rap line per day, and will compose raps for comedians — including one he came up with for the MTV Movie Awards titled, “Leo Got F—-d by a Bear” (referring to Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in “The Revenant”). It was performed by hosts Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and ended up going viral in April. 

Although rap will always be a part of Karp, he’s not interested in getting back into it full time. 

“Being 36, there aren’t many words that rhyme with ‘mortgage,’ ” he said. “What do you talk about? I should have children, not a mixtape. Rap is a kids’ game. I’m just happy how I wrote my own ending.”

Jensen Karp survives to write his own ending Read More »

Poem: How to Sail

Leave a Comment / Culture, Poetry /

Scrape the curse off the parchment. Stir the broken letters
into a jar of water. Make a woman drink it: thus said
Elohim. But why: thus said Molly, twelve years old. Now I
was the teacher. We sat there, two black flames in a room
of white fire. We were sailing on a wind that passed
through the open window of a room next to the
marketplace, two thousand years ago

“How to Sail” first appeared in “Divinity School,” published by The American Poetry Review, 2015.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, musician, performer and Torah teacher based in Portland, Ore. Her book “Divinity School” won the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize.

Poem: How to Sail Read More »

Police, people of color and a Jewish dream of justice

Leave a Comment / Culture, Opinion, United States /

Last week, we watched in horror and dismay as violent event after violent event unfolded, each amplifying and recontextualizing the one before it. By Friday morning, July 8, five Dallas police officers were dead, three black men had been killed by the police (including the Dallas shooter), and countless families were broken and traumatized.

On Friday evening I was in the streets marching, chanting our movement’s simplest, yet most elusive assertion, “Black Lives Matter.” As a black person and a Jew, I was asserting the value of my own being — attempting to claim agency over my own body and the bodies of those who look like me in the face of racism and violence.

I usually find these marches and rallies empowering, but on this night I was deflated and sad. As we marched through the rapidly gentrifying streets of New York City, I couldn’t stop watching the faces of those people, especially white people — presumably many of them Jewish — who sat in outdoor cafes sipping wine or coasting by in the backseats of taxis. Some cheered or raised a glass, others gawked mutely; some were obviously annoyed at the minor disruption to their day. I joked darkly to a Jew of color who was marching with me that all of our signs should just say, “If you’re standing there, reading this, then you are part of the problem.”

On Sunday I joined a group of Jewish people of color, organized through Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, or JFREJ, to process and hold space for each other after a week of pain.

Many of those in the room with me have been active in the fight to pass the Right To Know Act , a piece of legislation before the City Council here that would help address the very issues that have brought our nation to this terrifying moment. It would create more trust and mutual respect between communities and the police by requiring officers to identify themselves with a business card when they stop you on the street, thus allowing you to follow up if you believe you were stopped or searched in a discriminatory or illegal manner.

It would also provide a remedy for unconstitutional searches by requiring officers to inform people when they have the right to refuse a search.

As I looked at the demoralized faces in the room, I understood why the week left us all so drained and depressed. For decades people of color have protested against discriminatory and violent policing. And while there have been some meaningful victories over the years, we have yet to win the true accountability that we need to secure our full civil rights and dignity. Ever since the death of Garner in my city — in some ways ever since the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles 25 years ago — we’ve had the proof right in front of us, on our screens. We thought this new phenomenon — ubiquitous cameras providing new evidence of an enduring injustice — would shock the nation into action, but it hasn’t. We have organized and marched and rallied, thinking it would move the nation to value our lives and reform its policing. But it hasn’t.

All across America, local community groups are working to pass bills and make policy reforms such as the Right To Know Act. Each effort tries to address some small piece of the problem of racism and police violence — to chip off some tiny piece of the iceberg and make some progress. Our movement is growing, but not fast enough. Unless the Jewish community and everyone who is now watching from the sidelines gets involved, we will be sharing these tragic videos for years to come. Now is the moment to say “never again — not one more.” Now is the moment for white Jews to join us in the streets, to call your legislators, to donate your time and money. To invest in a future where we never have to enter Shabbat with the echoes of gunshots in our ears.

The only way we can ensure a future in which black lives matter and the police are trusted and respected by all is if white Jews, and all Americans, actively participate in the campaigns for racial justice and police accountability being waged all across the country by local organizations, especially those led by people of color. We can win, but only by creating movements too powerful to be ignored. In this struggle there is no neutral ground — if the Jewish community isn’t part of the solution, then it is part of the problem.

Like those people watching us march past them, most Americans don’t see this as their problem to solve. As Jews, we know what it means to fight for our survival while those around us do nothing. And as a Jew of color, I am tired of feeling abandoned by my friends and my larger Jewish community when they sit on the sidelines rather than fighting for my safety and full humanity.

Though  these weeks have been painful, I am still filled with hope for change and certainty that we will win. All I have to do is look at the community I am lucky enough to work with — the powerful, brilliant Jews of all races who are struggling for racial justice every day. They remind me of the most potent parts of our tradition: those that call us to strive for justice even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. We won’t give up — we will pass bills like the Right to Know Act. With Jews at my side, I will be out in streets fighting for justice. Will you be there with me?

Police, people of color and a Jewish dream of justice Read More »

The reformation of a Reform Jew

Leave a Comment / Culture, Opinion, United States /

In an open letter to Donald Trump, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, derided the Trump campaign for questioning the wisdom of a two-state solution, arguing that “a two-state solution is our best hope for securing a Jewish and democratic future for the State of Israel.”

Fortunately, outside of the URJ and the European Union, the rush of the previous decade to a hastily jury-rigged two-state solution has all but fully imploded. Most notably, the nations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait have quietly moved their once prominent “Palestinian agenda” off to the side. They have done so not because of any newly found love for Israel or for the Jewish people. Rather, since the Arab Spring began in 2010, these nations have witnessed not liberation and regeneration of a long oppressed Arab citizenry, but rather a barbaric displacement of these victims under the banner of radical Islam. The reality that more Muslims have been massacred under the dictates of radical Islam than by any other race, religion, or creed, coupled with the fear of a nuclear Iranian hegemony, has jolted these once ardent foes of Israel into a discreetly coalesced cooperative. In the last 12 months, all of these nations have been meeting with Israel, unrelated to the Palestinian issue.

For Israel’s part, its withdrawal from Gaza led not to a budding Palestinian fresh start but rather a totalitarian terrorist state.  “Gazastan” now directly threatens the stability of Egypt and serves as a regional export depot for terror attack materials. Earmarked for infrastructure to improve the quality of life for average Palestinians, billions of dollars worth of humanitarian aid has instead ended up in Palestinian leaders’ private Swiss bank accounts.

As a result of incitement by PA president Mahmoud Abbas and the indoctrination of Palestinians from early childhood, the vast majority of Palestinians support murdering Jewish men, women and children – en masse via suicide bomber, or individually, whether on the street or asleep in their bed.  The irony is that compared to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Israel takes better care of the Palestinians than either of them.

 As for that Jewish-Israel versus democratic-Israel thing, the burgeoning Jewish population of Judea and Samaria is living proof that the “demographic time bomb” is nothing but a myth.

So with almost everybody else agreeing that a Palestinian state would benefit absolutely no one (least of all, the Palestinians themselves because they could have had a state several times over by now if that’s really what they wanted), what is it that Rabbi Jacobs and his band of Reform movement cheerleaders fail to comprehend?  All of the above, apparently.

As a Reform Jew who has devoted a great deal of time and financial resources to the goal of enhancing Jewish continuity, I now affirm these truths: Diaspora Jews need Israel (whether they realize it or not); Israel’s Arab neighbors need Israel (whether they admit it or not); enhancing Jewish continuity means ensuring Israel’s survival from strength to strength—and that means never relinquishing Judea, Samaria, or any part of Israel’s eternal and undivided capital, Jerusalem.   I am reformed!

Andrew Lappin is a Chicago-based redeveloper and contributor to the Haym Salomon Center, a news and public policy group. Lappin serves on the board of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews and The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

The reformation of a Reform Jew Read More »

Hebrew word of the week: PatsHan = Hacker

Leave a Comment / Culture /

The advent of the computer has contributed many new words to modern languages, or new meanings to old words. In Hebrew: maHshev “computer”; dafdefan “browser” (from daf “page,” difdef “turn pages, flip through”); metakhnet “programmer”; do’al  (or do’ar eleqTroni) for “email;” qovets “(computer) file”; ogdan “folder.”

In addition to these useful terms, the computer has also “fathered” some criminal or semi-criminal professions, such as hackers. Hebrew tries to distinguish between the patsHan “hacker, an enthusiastic computer user or programmer (who just hacks for fun)” (from p-ts-H “to crack, decode; burst,”* and partsan “hacker, one who uses unauthorized access to data” (from p-r-ts “to break in; porets “burglar”).**

*Compare: maftseaH egozim “nutcracker”; patsaH be-shir “burst into song.”

**Other languages, such as Spanish, use the English word hacker; so do many Israelis: haqer; plural haqerim.

Yona Sabar is a professor of Hebrew and Aramaic in the department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA.

Hebrew word of the week: PatsHan = Hacker Read More »

Donald Trump sues former adviser for allegedly sharing dirt with media

Leave a Comment / Election 2016 /

Donald Trump has filed a $10 million lawsuit against a former campaign adviser, Sam Nunberg.

The presumptive presidential Republican nominee is alleging that Nunberg, who was fired last August for racially offensive Facebook posts, may have violated his confidentiality agreement in statements to the media, an unnamed source confirmed to Mic on Wednesday.

The Trump campaign has yet to comment on the lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court or its allegations, but court documents obtained by The Associated Press indicated a connection with a May 2015 New York Post story in which an insider reveals details of an affair between campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

 

According to reports, the Trump campaign had sought to litigate in private, but the court documents were revealed when Nunberg, 34, a lawyer, filed for a stay in the arbitration on Monday.

Nunberg, who is Jewish, was fired twice by the Trump campaign — once for his Facebook posts and previously for urging Trump’s involvement in a unflattering BuzzFeed profile in 2014. Following his second firing, Nunberg threw his support behind Trump’s rival for the Republican nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

The Daily Beast reported in 2015 that “the threat of legal action has not stopped Nunberg from speaking his mind about Trump,” and that Trump sent the former aide a cease and desist notice.

Nunberg “is a highly self-destructive individual who makes routine calls begging for his job back,” Trump said at the time. “This is the interview of a desperate person who is trying to hang on and stay relevant.”

Nunberg was fired last summer when his long history of incendiary Facebook posts came to light. In one post he called the Rev. Al Sharpton’s daughter a “N*****!”

Nunberg maintains that he did not write the racist Facebook posts.

He attended Touro College’s Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center and later worked as director of the Legal Project at the Middle East Forum, a Washington think tank directed by conservative scholar Daniel Pipes.

Donald Trump sues former adviser for allegedly sharing dirt with media Read More »

Possible Clinton VP choice, an ex-NATO chief, slammed Iran deal and has close Israel ties

Leave a Comment / Election 2016 /

A former NATO commander being considered as a running mate for Hillary Clinton has called for a formal U.S.-Israel defense treaty and was sharply critical of the Iran nuclear deal.

James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral, is being vetted by Clinton’s campaign to join the former secretary of state as she accepts the Democratic Party nomination later this month, The New York Times reportedTuesday.

In his 2009-13 term as NATO commander and as U.S. European commander, Stavridis met frequently with Israelis and forged close ties with the Israeli security establishment. During that time he received a top award from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a conservative pro-Israel group.

Stavridis retired in 2013 and became a dean at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and has slammed the Iran sanctions-relief-for-nuclear-rollback deal. In 2015, writing in Foreign Policy, he called for a defense treaty with Israel, citing what he said were the weaknesses in the Iran plan.

“We have to think through the execution of the agreement and what steps we can take to mitigate the ill effects of the plan,” he wrote. “At the top of the list should be seriously considering a formal alliance with Israel.”

Israel has resisted past U.S. overtures for a defense treaty, preferring independence when it comes to making security decisions.

Last summer, at the height of the battle led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to kill the Iran deal in Congress, Stavridis was the keynote speaker at an AIPAC fundraiser in Boston.

Possible Clinton VP choice, an ex-NATO chief, slammed Iran deal and has close Israel ties Read More »