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June 21, 2019
German Students Pass Anti-BDS Resolution
German student groups passed a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on June 16 at the German-Israel student conference, the Jerusalem Post reports.
The resolution stated that the student groups supporting the resolution would not engage in any sort of cooperation with BDS supporters, calling BDS “a particularly aggressive expression of Israeli anti-Semitism, for which there can be no room at German universities.” Among the student groups supporting the resolution included “the Christian Democratic students, Young Socialists student groups, Liberal student groups and Green Party student associations,” per the Post.
Jewish Student Union Executive Board Member Ruben Gerczikow tweeted, “What remains is the call for more Israel solidarity & against all anti-Semitism!”
The American Jewish Committee tweeted, “We are pleased to see such consensus on rejecting this hate-driven movement.”
Great news from Germany: major political parties’ university student groups have all passed resolutions rejecting BDS! We are pleased to see such consensus on rejecting this hate-driven movement.
Excellent work by our friends, @JSUDeutschland!https://t.co/MhzGykqoVc
— American Jewish Committee (@AJCGlobal) June 19, 2019
StandWithUs tweeted thanks to the students involved in the resolution’s passage.
Thank you to all the students in #Germany for rejecting #BDS
— StandWithUs (@StandWithUs) June 18, 2019
The German parliament passed a resolution denouncing the BDS movement in May as anti-Semitic, urging the government not to conduct business with any entities that boycott Israel. On June 3, 240 Jewish and Israeli scholars signed a letter advocating for the German government to reject the resolution. The government has not rendered a decision on the matter.
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Holocaust Survivor Hit, Killed by Car
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is looking for the driver in connection with a fatal hit-and-run that resulted in the death of a man, later identified by his granddaughter as a Holocaust survivor, KTLA reported.
According to the LAPD, a 92-year-old man, who various media have identified as Gennady Bolotsky, was entering a crosswalk at Magnolia Boulevard and Wilkinson Avenue in Valley Village at around 5:35 a.m. on June 17 when an unidentified vehicle approached and collided with him.
“The driver of the vehicle failed to stop and render aid, identify him/herself as required by law,” a June 20 LAPD news release said.
According to the LAPD, the Los Angeles Fire Department transported the “92-year-old, male pedestrian to a local hospital, where he later died due to his injuries.”
The LAPD did not release the name of the pedestrian, who was identified by the Los Angeles Times and KTLA.
Citing an interview with Bolotsky’s granddaughter, Adriana, KTLA reported that Bolotsky “escaped Nazi occupation and fled communist Russia to come to the U.S.”
In a brief surveillance video available on the L.A. Times website, a white pickup truck with a white camper shell is shown hitting the pedestrian in a marked crosswalk, momentarily stopping, then driving on. Another pedestrian shown in the video, walking in a crosswalk parallel to the vehicle, appears to have witnessed the incident but doesn’t render aid.
According to the LAPD website, a reward of up to $50,000 is available to anyone providing information that leads to the offender’s identification, apprehension and conviction.
Anyone with information about this accident is asked to call Valley Traffic Division detectives at (818) 644-8029 or (818) 644-8032.
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Omar Defends AOC’s Concentration Camps Comments
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) defended Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) comparison of migrant detention facilities on the United States-Mexico border to concentration camps on June 21, saying that she didn’t understand the controversy surrounding Ocasio-Cortez’s comments.
When a reporter asked Omar about Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, Omar replied, “There are camps and people are being concentrated. This is very simple. I don’t even know why this is a controversial thing for her to say.”
Omar proceeded to call for the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and to be replaced with a different immigration agency.
“There’s no way we can allow for kids to be caged in this country and children to be separated from their families and people being terrorized in their communities,” Omar said. “We have to make sure that we are calling it out and I am 100 percent with [Ocasio-Cortez].”
Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN) falsely claims that the U.S. government is operating concentration camps and says she does not know why it's controversial to compare CBP detention facilities to concentration campspic.twitter.com/R9Hplv2sX2
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) June 21, 2019
Omar similarly said in a June 20 Public Radio International interview about Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, “If we separate it from death camps, I would say these are camps and people are being concentrated in them. And so that’s the general definition. I think a lot of people are conflating what a death camp looks like or a specific removal of people. These people are coming to the border. We are removing them from the border. We are placing them in camps. Some of them are being removed from communities and being put in what we’re calling detention centers — but are essentially camps.”
Former New York Democrat Assemblyman Dov Hikind tweeted that “it was only a matter of short time before [Omar] would follow @AOC in distorting Holocaust history for political gain!”
For those who know @Ilhan well by now could have bet with precision that it was only a matter of short time before she would follow @AOC in distorting Holocaust history for political gain!
Her only miscalculation at this stage is that AOC has already sucked all the air out of it https://t.co/lMzphgcJ1I
— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) June 21, 2019
Omar has previously been in hot water for promulgating the dual loyalty anti-Semitic trope as well as saying that Israel “hypnotizing the world.”
Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research Senior Historian Dr. Robert Rozett noted in a June 20 Times of Israel piece that Ocasio-Cortez use of the phrase “never again” when comparing the detention facilities to concentration camps “she was referring to Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust, and not the early version of such camps established by Imperial Germany in its Namibia colony at the turn of the 20th century.” Rozett added that concentration camps has become the common term to describe the Nazi camps, including Auschwitz, which were either labor camps, where they were forced to work for the Nazi war effort under brutal conditions that could result in death, or extermination camps.
“Jews who were sent to labor camps, and were not worked to death in them, generally underwent a periodic selection where those deemed too weak to work were sent to extermination camps,” Rozett wrote. “Although it was a tenuous lifeline, labor sometimes constituted one of the few means for Jews to remain alive.”
Rozett added, “The Nazi concentration camps were many things, but they were not detention or internment camps in a classic sense. They were not the same as the internment camps set up for Japanese Americans in World War II (as abysmal as they were for the inmates), and neither were they the same as the Gulag camps under Stalin. The Gulag did not lack for brutality and death, but its ultimate goal, was not to murder inmates but to exploit their labor. The clearest evidence of this is that Gulag inmates who produced more were fed better, a norm totally absent from Nazi camps.”
Additionally, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust joined the Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance, Florida Holocaust Museum, Holocaust Museum Houston, Illinois Holocaust Museum, Michigan Holocaust Memorial Center, and New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in condemning Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks as “inappropriate and offensive” in a June 19 statement.
“The Nazi regime targeted Europe’s Jews for murder. It created a vast forced labor and camp system to exploit Jewish labor before murdering them,” the statement read. “Ocasio-Cortez’s inaccurate reference diminishes the inexpressible horror suffered at the hands of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi regime, and collaborators and wrongly equates current US immigration policy with the systematic murder of six million Jews and the persecution of millions of others.”
Ocasio-Cortez has continued to defend her concentration camps comparison on Twitter.
I’m curious, @HouseGOP: what would you like people to call these Trump-run human cages?
According to you, concentration camp experts + historians are wrong.
So what do you call it? What term makes you feel better about brutality?
“Internment?” “Detention?” “Freedom Center?” https://t.co/DXVJ1uFsT9
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 20, 2019
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1142106638519848960
Omar Defends AOC’s Concentration Camps Comments Read More »
Jewish Pride
Last week, joining thousands of others, my five year old daughter and I took part in Louisville’s annual Pride Parade. While it might lack the reputation of San Francisco, Louisville ranked eleventh (Los Angeles ranked eighth) of the 50 largest U.S. Metro Areas for people who identify as LGBT (Gallup survey 2015). The weather was gorgeous and the turnout (27,000) was the largest ever in the parade’s 32 year history.
When I told her we were going to be in a “rainbow parade,” my daughter insisted on wearing her Harry Potter costume from Purim. Rabbi Roxanne Schneider Shapiro of Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation suggested that I wear a shirt saying “Nobody Should Live in a Closet.” So I did. While unintentional, my daughter had brilliantly picked out a great costume. Who better than Harry Potter to remind us about standing up against obstacles and being your true self and a loyal friend?
Walking the roughly mile and a half through downtown Louisville as my daughter joyously handed out stickers and waved to the crowd, was me. Holding a rainbow flag with Magen David on it, I experienced my own kind of “pride.” I am not a member of the LGBT community and was very cautious of participating in this parade, lest I inadvertently commit a faux paus or engage in cultural appropriation. I am fully aware that this is not about me, but I was there to proudly show my daughter that joy and love takes on many forms. And, I was there as part of the Jewish community to show the LGBT community that we love and support you. Louisville’s own Rabbi David Ariel-Joel, a Jerusalem native, was the first rabbi in Israel to officiate at a same-sex wedding and remains instrumental in the continued success of his congregation’s Pride Shabbat and other activities (including participation in the parade) in June and year-round.
It is not lost on me that LGBT support remains controversial in the Jewish community, as it does in other religions. Someone I knew and recognized in the crowd later told me he was surprised that a religious organization would participate in Pride. Clearly, our presence caught him and others off-guard.
Deuteronomy 16:20 famously says “Justice, justice you shall pursue” and Genesis 1:27 says humans are all created in the Divine image. Both of these texts speak to the urgency of the Jewish community to embrace and love everyone, regardless of sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
Pursuing justice is more than just lip service. As Jews, we must continually ask ourselves what are we doing to pursue justice? How are we working to make the world a better place? What are we doing to show that we believe in the divine spark in everyone? There are so many ways to do so, but I believe participation in Pride is an important one.
Amidst all the negativity in this country right now, the timing could not be more urgent. So last Friday, just before Shabbat, we “prayed with our feet.” My daughter is too young to understand what the “rainbow parade” was all about. Someday, she will. In the meantime, she is excited about doing it again next year. And handing out stickers. She told her friends all about it and is ready for them to join us. Jewish or not. LGBT or not. We can all “take pride” in being who we are and celebrating it.
Lisa Rothstein Goldberg is a Jewish educator and social worker. She lives in Louisville, Ky. with her husband their two young daughters.
Trump Called Off Iran Strikes
President Donald Trump announced in a series of tweets on June 21 that he called off strikes against Iran at the last second because he wanted to avoid collateral damage.
Trump explained in the tweets that the Pentagon was “cocked and loaded” to strike Iran, but he decided to back off when he was told that the strikes would result in 150 dead. Trump added that he was “in no hurry” to take military action against Iran since his administration’s sanctions against Iran are crippling the regime.
President Obama made a desperate and terrible deal with Iran – Gave them 150 Billion Dollars plus I.8 Billion Dollars in CASH! Iran was in big trouble and he bailed them out. Gave them a free path to Nuclear Weapons, and SOON. Instead of saying thank you, Iran yelled…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
….Death to America. I terminated deal, which was not even ratified by Congress, and imposed strong sanctions. They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my Presidency, when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East. Now they are Bust!….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
….On Monday they shot down an unmanned drone flying in International Waters. We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
….proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019
Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd that his generals didn’t immediately have the details on collateral damage from the strikes available when he asked for it.
Per POTUS version of events, the Pentagon was coming to him for a strike clearance without providing a collateral damage assessment upfront. When he asked they didn't even have the information immediately on hand. https://t.co/fAr1LOrqfI
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) June 21, 2019
A Trump administration official told Reuters that the strikes would have targeted Iranian radars and missile batteries, among others. The official also said that the administration urged the Iranians in a message through Oman to come to the negotiating table or else face strikes.
Tensions have been escalating between the United States and Iran, as highlighted by the recent attacks against oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman and Iran shooting down an unmanned U.S. drone on Thursday. A senior Republican source on Capitol Hill told CNN, “Historically we have seen what happens when the US issues red lines and then fails to enforce them. Failing to take action could be far more dangerous in the long run.”
Bloomberg national security columnist Eli Lake noted in a June 20 Op-ed that among the U.S.’s options include authorizing strikes against Iranian commanders throughout the Middle East or against Iran’s naval facilities; the U.S. could also engage in cyberwarfare against Iran as a method of deterrence.
American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin argued that the Iranian regime could be on its last legs given the country’s languishing economy under the sanctions and the regime leaders getting older. The regime is unpopular inside Iran, but Rubin warned that the country’s civilians are “fiercely nationalistic,” which the Trump administration should keep in mind going forward.
“It is essential to maintain the pressure on Iran without playing into the hands of a regime that may want conflict,” Rubin wrote. “Let’s hope President Donald Trump is wise enough to allow his ‘maximum pressure campaign’ to work without giving authorities in Tehran either a diplomatic out or resorting to military force that will backfire in the long-term.”
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Sephora Faces Controversy Over ‘Palestine’ Comment
Sephora, the Paris-based multinational chain of beauty stores found itself in hot water June 2 after a customer asked on Instagram whether they ship to Israel.
Sephora responded, stating, “No we do not ship to Palestine at this time.”
Instagram comments about Sephora’s new products quickly transformed from compliments and heart emojis to criticism and Israeli and Palestinian flag emojis.
Sephora posted a statement on their official Twitter account June 3 saying, “@sephora was asked on Instagram if we ship to Israel, and then asked if we ship to Palestine. Our US-based dotcom does not ship to Israel or Palestine. We responded as such. Our responses were about shipping capabilities only and should not be interpreted as anything else. For more information on international shipping for Sephora US, please visit https://www.sephora.com/beauty/international-shipments.”
The Journal reached out to Sephora via email asking the company for more information on the situation. Sephora responded on June 10 with the same statement that appeared on Twitter. The Journal could not find any reference to Sephora’s statement about a request regarding its shipping policy to Palestine on any of its social media platforms.
Following a claim made on Twitter on April 30 by R&B singer SZA who said she was racially profiled while shopping for Fenty Beauty products at a Sephora store in Calabasas, the company apologized to the singer on Twitter and later decided to close more than 400 stores across the U.S. on June 5 for a diversity and inclusion training for its employees.
Asked about the diversity training in light of the Instagram controversy, Sephora sent a statement via email to the Journal on June 13 that read in part, “Sephora is a client-centric company and creating a welcoming space for all our clients is our top priority. The ‘We Belong to Something Beautiful’ campaign has been in the works for a year, and the plan to close our U.S. stores, distribution centers, call centers and corporate office for a one-hour inclusivity workshop with our 16,000 employees has been in development for over six months, timed with our first campaign chapter debuting on June 6th. This store closure is part of a long journey in our aspiration to create a more inclusive beauty community and workplace, which has included forming employee resource groups, building Social Impact and philanthropic programs, and hosting inclusive mindset training for all supervisors.”
Sephora continued, “While it is true that SZA’s experience occurred prior to the launch of the ‘We Belong to Something Beautiful’ campaign, the campaign was not the result of this Tweet. However, it does reinforce why belonging is now more important than ever.”
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When is it Appropriate to Draw Lessons From the Holocaust?
Recent discussion about the use of the term “concentration camp” to describe conditions facing migrants on the southern border have become mired in politically polarized discussion about what is right and wrong when using language heavily related to the Holocaust.
Whatever the intention of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York has become a part of a long history of Holocaust appropriation.
While the term “concentration camp” predates the Holocaust, it has become shorthand in our society for a comparison to the Holocaust — and her remark was widely interpreted as such.
One of the first appropriations of the Holocaust happened right at the point of liberation. British troops, who had just risked their lives on the front lines, standing in front of the piles of corpses at the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, boldly stated to film cameras that “now I know what I was fighting for.” Those troops, however courageous, were never fighting to liberate Jews from concentration camps. Had that been the objective, things would have unfolded in a very different way. Piles of Jewish corpses — people they had failed to liberate weeks earlier — were some of the first victims of our insatiable need to represent the meaning of the dead to justify our own cultural, political and religious views and actions.
So, when is it appropriate to draw lessons from the Holocaust? We all do it from time to time, because we are still searching for meaning, an explanation, a lesson, from that terrible time in human history. We do need to be reminded that some people created a monstrous genocidal ideology, and others executed their orders, and millions of Jews were murdered, while all but a few were silent. We should struggle with the fact that the Holocaust shook the foundation of Western civilization. Remember, we all thought just how advanced we were, how educated we had become. But now we know that democracies can turn to dictatorships, technology can be used for murder, and Ph.D.s can pen the Final Solution. We learned that Jews can be attacked wherever they are. We learned that civilized nations can turn into killing machines.
The rule of thumb is never to appropriate the Holocaust to explain, compare or contrast contemporary issues
The Holocaust gave us a knowledge about humanity that we cannot undo. For the survivors and their families it is inked to their heritage like tattoos from Auschwitz. For the Jewish world, it is a warning to be vigilant against the evil of anti-Semitism; for everyone else, a need to check our actions. Reminding ourselves before it becomes too late is the right thing to do; taking it out of context is not. So how do we know the difference between the two?
In 2003, Oona King and Jenny Tonge, then members of Great Britain’s Parliament, laid bare their failure to understand the difference when they compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.
Whatever their intent, the premise was wrong. It showed a profound lack of understanding of the Holocaust and of Gaza.
Even the mantra “never again” is mired in appropriation; it was popularized by the American-Israeli militant religious leader Meir Kahane in the early 1970s to justify acts of terror in fighting anti-Semitism.
As soon as we attempt to apply the meaning of the Holocaust to events less extreme, we take the Holocaust out of context. But if the Holocaust is so extreme that it can never be talked about at all in contemporary society, we remove it from the world of real people. If the Holocaust tells us anything, it is that an ordinary society can quickly turn violent if it does not check its values and deeply respect the lives of everyone.
These opposing perspectives can live alongside each other. The Holocaust was an unprecedented and unimaginable example of anti-Semitic human behavior as never seen before. And it happened because of an ordinary set of decisions, made by a group ordinary people, who held extraordinarily evil ideas, and used the apparatus of state to succeed.
The rule of thumb is never to appropriate the Holocaust to explain, compare or contrast contemporary issues, whether we are Jews, Christian or Muslims, Republicans or Democrats. Families on the southern border of the United States, the rights of Palestinians, the existence of the State of Israel don’t need the Holocaust to have legitimacy as pressing issues in their own right. We don’t need to invoke the deaths of Jewish children 75 years ago, who have no voice of their own, to make our voice sound more legitimate. But their memory, should always provoke us to be more humane in every situation.
Stephen D. Smith is Finci-Viterbi executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation.
When is it Appropriate to Draw Lessons From the Holocaust? Read More »
Survivor Invites Ocasio-Cortez to Tour Auschwitz With Him
(JTA) A Poland-born Holocaust survivor from New Jersey invited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to tour Auschwitz following her remarks about concentration camps.
Edward Mosberg, 93, on Friday extended the invitation to the Democratic lawmaker. On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez touched off a heated debate in the media about her use of the term, which is widely associated with Nazi Germany, to describe migrant detention centers in the United States .
“It should be a requirement of all United States Congressmen to visit Auschwitz,” wrote Mosberg, honorary president of the Holocaust commemoration group From the Depths.
It is necessary in Ocasio-Cortez’s case because of her “lack of proper education on the Holocaust,” the foundation’s founder, Jonny Daniels, also wrote in the invitation.
Mosberg, a real estate developer who survived several Nazi camps, wore a kippah bearing President Donald Trump’s portrait to a Holocaust commemoration event earlier this year.
Amid criticism by Jewish groups and others over the analogy she made — including by Yad Vashem, Israel’s state Holocaust museum — Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter doubled down on her use of the term.
Her critics, including historian Deborah Lipstadt, argued the analogy is inaccurate and therefore potentially harmful to efforts to reverse the government’s detainment policies.
Many others defended Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison, including George Takei, an actor who was imprisoned in the United States during World War II because he is of Japanese descent.
“I was inside two of them, in America,” he tweeted. “And yes, we are operating such camps again.”
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