Dona is a 14-year-old boy in Port-au-Prince. When his mother was pregnant with him, she hid in fear from his father. In time, he found her and insisted she have an abortion. She refused. They fought, and she ran.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, “In a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.” I have been mulling that quote over in my mind since I learned of the horrible assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and the cold-blooded murder of the other innocent Arizonans in Tucson. Certainly, the main person guilty is the man who pulled the trigger, and he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But, in Heschel’s formulation, all of us are somewhat responsible for what happened, for allowing our society to sink to such a level that our media spews violent rhetoric from prominent politicians and pundits without consequence; all of us are responsible for allowing the debate about guns and gun control, something that should be so sensible, to devolve into angry, violent reactions and prevent us from making laws that can protect people from the monstrous nature of daily firearm deaths in our country; all of us are responsible for supporting violent films and video games, glorifying violence on the screen that only serves to affect our children and our psyches. If we think it doesn’t have an effect, we are sorely deluding ourselves.
The Forward newspaper has done a service to the American Jewish community by publishing the salaries of major executives of American Jewish organizations. They are essentially Jewish communal civil servants, and, as do all civil servants, they sacrifice a measure of privacy — and what is more private in the United States than the amount of money one earns? — for two very important goals: transparency and accountability.
After the Forward published its list of Jewish executive salaries, a comment from someone identified as Gabe appeared on the newspaper’s Web site:
The Forward’s second annual survey of 74 major Jewish national organizations found that, in the past year, women lost ground in leadership, continued to lag behind men in pay and did not experience the same increases in salary that a majority of the men enjoyed despite these recessionary times.
When The Journal interviewed Gary Winnick for a cover story in the fall of 1999, he was asked what he hoped to achieve in the future.
The cover story, \”The Final Taboo,\” in this issue caused a certain amount of soul searching in our offices this week. Not that we questioned the piece or the reporting itself. Everyone had only praise for Religion Editor Julie Gruenbaum Fax, and the research and writing that went into her story. First rate.\nWe were definitely going to run it. The question was: Should we place it on our cover?
A curious thing happened in the pages of The Jewish Journal the week of Nov. 20. During a period when a host of issues of major importance to the American Jewish community were occuring that commanded front page attention elsewhere, The Journal chose to devote the cover story and an editorial in the Nov. 20 issue to the complaints of a disgruntled documentary director and his co-writer against Moriah Films of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In spite of The Journal\’s claims that it was not \”picking on the Wiesenthal Center,\” one wonders what the editorial staff\’s true motives were in giving an inordinate amount of space to the attempt by these individuals to politicize what was for all intents and purposes a dispute over the best creative approach to a film about Israel\’s first 50 years.
The City of Hope, the esteemed charity, cancer hospital and research center, is under attack. But supporters of the charity, whose roots run deep into the Jewish community, are coming to its defense.
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