Letters to the editor: Paper in Your Hands, Protests in America

Paper in Your Hands

Thank you for your excellent piece dedicated to Franklin Foer’s book “World Without Mind” (“In the Shadow of Big Tech,” Aug. 24.)

I am one of the many (I hope) who appreciates the printed word on paper far above the electronic word on screen.

Not only do I wholeheartedly understand the value of private reading, but I also value the non-censorable quality of print. I have had posts on Facebook deleted because they (obviously) did not fit Facebook’s desired view, although they were not offensive or inflammatory in any way. I think one might have been in support of the U.S. backing of Israel, to give an example of the censorship available to editors on the internet.

I love reading the Journal to stay abreast of developments I don’t hear about anywhere else. Thank you.

M.J. Leppert, Thousand Oaks

How ironic that I read the story “In the Shadow of Big Tech” while holding the Jewish Journal in my hands. 

Warren Scheinin, Redondo Beach

Protests in America

I don’t see much if any difference between a raised fist, taking a knee during the national anthem, or blowing the shofar at a Nazi rally (“Not All Protests Created Equal,” Aug. 17).
This is America. People have a right to protest. It doesn’t matter if there is what some view as a singular impact or not.
The problem with the NFL protests isn’t with the players, but with President Donald Trump. He chooses actions and uses words to divide the nation rather than uniting it to confront the problem of police violence against Black people.
I wouldn’t expect anything less from someone who thinks there were fine people on both sides of the march in Charlottesville, Va., and who doesn’t have a single senior Black official in his (literally) White House.

Daniel Fink, Beverly Hills

Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Homeland

The article by Steven Windmueller was truly a clear and impactful analysis of the need for a Jewish homeland (“When Is a Place No Longer ‘Good for the Jews’?” Aug. 24). 

I am a nonagenarian retired aerospace engineer. Only those of my generation and part of the previous one can have the experience and the gut feeling of what the existence of a Jewish homeland means to the Jewish people around the world.

I am the first generation born in this country of parents from Poland. I recall my mother sending packages to the relatives back in the “Fiddler on the Roof” town of her origin. Then came Hitler. One cousin of my mishpachah married and emigrated to Palestine in the mid-’30s. She would be the only survivor of the Holocaust from our family. Currently, their children and succeeding generations amount to some 40 sabras. How many more millions of Jews would exist today if the Holocaust victims had a Jewish country to which to escape?

Joseph Klein, Alhambra

Thank you for your article “When Is a Place No Longer ‘Good for the Jews’?” Sadly, Britain may be facing that “moment of truth” because of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn rejects parts of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, in part because he would run afoul of it. He has called Hamas and Hezbollah “brothers” and “friends,” and complained about media “bias” in favor of Israel’s “right to exist.” He has tried to remove the word “Holocaust” from “Holocaust Remembrance Day”; supported Holocaust deniers; defended a Der Sturmer-style anti-Semitic mural; and equated democratic, multicultural Israel with genocidal Nazi Germany. In 2013, he said that “Zionists” (meaning Jews) don’t understand history or irony and suggested they aren’t real Britons. And in 2014, he attended a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia honoring Palestinian terrorists who planned the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. Tellingly, former KKK leader David Duke is supporting Corbyn on social media.

The three major British-Jewish newspapers recently published a joint front-page editorial warning that Corbyn poses an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country” should he become prime minister.

Stephen A. Silver, San Francisco

No Peace With Murderers

In the search for peace, it’s important to recognize inconvenient facts. On Aug. 9, 2001, a Palestinian bomber entered a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem and murdered 15 people, including children Malka Roth, 15, and her best friend Michal Raziel, 16; Yocheved Shoshan, 10; Tamara Shimashvili, 8; siblings Hemda, Avraham Yitzhak and Ra’aya Schijveschuurder, ages 2, 4 and 14, respectively; and Judy Greenbaum, who was five months pregnant.

Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader at the time, was complicit in massacres of Israeli children. His PLO was behind the 1974 Ma’alot massacre of 22 Israeli children at an elementary school and the 1978 coastal road massacre of 13 Israeli children near Tel Aviv. After the June 1, 2001, Dolphinarium disco suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed 21 Israelis — mostly teenage girls as young as 14 — he sent the bomber’s father a $2,000 reward and a personal letter praising “the heroic martyrdom operation” and calling the bomber “the son of Palestine the model of manhood and sacrifice.”

Arafat’s “moderate” successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is no different. He arranged financing for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, incited numerous deadly terror attacks and named a public square, high schools, summer camps and sports competitions in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, who perpetrated the coastal road massacre.

Brian J. Goldenfeld, Woodland Hills

Gefilte Fish’s Bad Rap 

I’m writing in response to the story “Sparrow Mart Art Installation Has a Kosher Section,” Aug. 24. I have feeling I’m not the only reader to respond that she is wrong about gefilte fish, especially since she’s never tasted it.

Disgusting is not a nice way to describe it — OK, out of the jar, you do need horseradish. What my mother did (after the carp in the bathtub days) is boil a jar of gefilte fish together with carrots and a brown onion with the skin still on.

Voila! The fish is a nice brown color and tastes like homemade. That is how I’ve always made it since then.

Ruth Lercher Bornstein, via email

Book Review Is a Revelation

What a marvelous story reteller Jonathan Kirsch is. His review of Leslie Schwartz’s “The Lost Chapters” brought tears to my eyes while opening them up to the deplorable state of our jail system. Such a pleasure to read his reviews. Thank you.

Warren Scheinin, Redondo Beach

A Different Kindertransport

The work done in England to save children from the Nazis was a very great and valiant effort and is to be remembered, as it is in the Kindertransport story (“Kindertrasport Exhibit Displays ‘Childhood Left at the Station,’ ” Aug. 24).

But, although small, there were also Kindertransports to the United States, one of which saved my life. The story is told in “50 Children” by Steven Pressman (Harper, 2014) and relates a private effort by the Brit Shalom Lodge in Philadelphia to save 50 children from Vienna in 1939. It is quite a story.

Robert Spies, Via email

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