peepleofthebook

Learn Hebrew Phrases - Best Wishes

2012-01-29T11:36:00.001-08:00

I am Jewish

2012-01-22T11:46:00.001-08:00

I OWN A DELI I'M A JEW

2012-01-20T11:33:00.001-08:00

Stuff Jewish Men Rarely Say

2012-01-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

Jewbilation - "The Sound of Shabbos"

2012-01-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Remembering Adrienne Cooper, mother of the Klezmer/Yiddish revival

2011-12-28T13:42:00.000-08:00

Adrienne Cooper passed away on Sunday evening at the age of 65 after a long fight with cancer. Famous primarily for her extraordinary voice and ability to make Yiddish song clear to all, regardless of whether or not the listener understood the language, Cooper was, in many ways, the mother of the Klezmer/Yiddish revival of the 1980s. Her vision of "revival" was based in her own strong commitment to social justice and lay not in nostalgia for Anatevka but in the idea of Yiddish as a language in which one fights for social justice.

It is fitting that just last year she was honored by Jews for Racial & Economic Justice with its Marshall T. Meyer Risk-Taker Award. And equally fitting that Sunday saw the opening of the 27th Annual KlezKamp, an annual week of Yiddish Culture immersion that she co-founded with Henry Sapoznik.

I have thought of both threads as I reflect on the avant garde art song in which she and her partner, the brilliant pianist Marilyn Lerner, made the Yiddish poetry of Anna Margolin accessible to those of us who are Yiddish-disabled. Just a few years earlier, as the Bush administration pushed for war in Iraq, Adrienne and Marilyn gathered English, Spanish, Yiddish, and Hebrew songs for peace and tried to stop a war that has only now (at least on paper) ended.

Of all her projects, however, the one that was perhaps most exciting was an all-women’s ensemble from the late 1990s. Mikveh was one of the first revival groups that went beyond presenting music and poems that might have been played 100 years ago. Among the groups' carefully chosen repertoire were a raucous celebration of "Bas Mitzvah" and new Yiddish poems written by her daughter, Sarah Mina Gordon, including what was probably the first song grappling with abortion. Watching her glow while singing with Mikveh is how I remember Adrienne most vividly. She re-set wonderful old songs so that one walked out of the concerts not only entertained but energized and ready to fight for change in the world.

In the 15 years that I knew her, I was privileged to see her in many of her roles--from performer to KlezKamp teacher, from singer to administrator and planner—for many of those years, at Workmen's Circle, where she pioneered groundbreaking programs, reinvigorating the organization and exciting a new generation with the possibilities of Yiddish, song, and social justice. I also treasure the times we got to just sit and talk (or more often, stand and talk). In my role at the Jewish Women's Archive, I had the opportunity to work with her on projects beyond music—getting her to write a "We Remember" piece for Yiddish theatre icon Mina Bern; or in our last conversation, just last month, planning ways to gather oral histories for a new Workmen's Circle project.

Last year she released a new recording, Enchanted, which pulled many of the threads of her life together. There were songs from her production, with Jenny Romaine, of "The Memoir of Glikl of Hameln;" songs from the Peace show; and from Esn, a program about that most Jewish of subjects, food. There were old Yiddish poets set to new music, and new Yiddish poets, including her daughter. The centerpiece incorporated the sounds from a wax cylinder, lovingly digitized, that had captured her grandfather, the cantor, singing, while a baby Adrienne Cooper laughed and played in the background.

To listen to the adult Adrienne Cooper sing, accompanied by her grandfather and herself as a child, illuminates the accomplishment of her life—to create bridges to a culture that had been thought lost. She leaves us with a present touched by grace, and having known her, a future that includes hope. But her passing, like the passing of too many other "mothers" this year: Debbie Friedman, Esther Bronner, Paula Hyman, leaves us also diminished.

Adrienne Cooper, Yiddish Singer, Dies at 65
By JOSEPH BERGER

Adrienne Cooper, an American-born singer, teacher and curator of Yiddish music who was a pioneer in the effort to keep the embers of that language smoldering for newer generations, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 65.

The cause was adrenal cancer, said her daughter, Sarah Mina Gordon, who is also a Yiddish singer.

Though the movement Ms. Cooper helped start in the 1970s and ’80s was often described as a Yiddish revival, less sentimental observers acknowledged that a true revival of the spoken language among secular Jews was unlikely, given that people who had learned it in their homes, like Holocaust survivors and children of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants, were dying out. But because of the teaching and organizational work of Ms. Cooper and a handful of others, klezmer has become a popular current of the music mainstream and Yiddish courses are given at scores of colleges.

“She was in a way the mother of the revival,” said her friend Alicia Svigals, a klezmer violinist.

Ms. Cooper, blessed with a lush, expressive mezzo-soprano and a crusader’s fervor, shepherded dozens of young performers into Yiddish music and its bedrock culture.

She taught Yiddish songs — obscure ones she unearthed, not just beloved chestnuts like “Raisins and Almonds” — to students in a Yiddish program given at Columbia University by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and in programs she arranged through her most recent position as a cultural executive at the Workmen’s Circle, the Jewish social welfare organization. Her interpretations were enriched by the context she brought as a onetime history student.

“Her performance has a depth and emotional fire that made it clear she understood where these songs came from,” said Samuel Norich, publisher of The Forward, the Jewish newspaper.

She was one of the two founders of KlezKamp, which since 1985 has convened annually in late December in the Catskills and become an incubator of klezmer musicians like the clarinetist Michael Winograd and a floating academy of Yiddish culture. It draws hundreds of musicians, connoisseurs of Yiddish language and amateur anthropologists eager to delve into the extinguished Jewish cultures of Eastern Europe.

Ms. Cooper, who called the gathering “a flying shtetl” and taught there, was the associate director of YIVO in the early 1980s when she turned a notion brought to her by an archivist of hillbilly music into reality, persuading officials like Mr. Norich, then YIVO’s executive director, to finance it.

News of Ms. Cooper’s death came just as KlezKamp was gathering in Kerhonkson, N.Y. Henry Sapoznik, a Ukrainian cantor’s son and the archivist who was the other founder, said the news “cast a pall, but at the same time people realize that her contributions are really present.”

On the liner notes of her last album, “Enchanted,” Ms. Cooper wrote that she and her friends embraced Yiddish for its “hard-to-describe delights, for the rage it brings to injustice, for its wonderful weight on the tongue, for the arc it forms between poles of Jewish identity — from otherworldly to this worldly, from grit to grace — and for the astonishing ushpizin, unexpected guest spirits, who show up and have what to say.”

Ms. Cooper was an inveterate performer, singing about vagabond peddlers, Yiddish poets, labor leaders, Hasidic masters, even gefilte fish. As an ardent feminist, she often sang about the struggles of women.

She sang and recorded with klezmer performers like Ms. Svigals and bands like Kapelye, the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Brass All-Stars and the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band. She brought music about tenements and ghettos to Carnegie Hall and European concert halls.

She also composed Yiddish music with her partner, the pianist Marilyn Lerner, and the poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, and created several musical works: “The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln”; “Esn: Songs From the Kitchen,” where a feast was cooked onstage; and “Ghetto Tango,” which she wrote with Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene.

Ms. Cooper was born on Sept. 1, 1946, in Oakland, Calif. Unlike Mr. Norich and Mr. Sapoznik, who grew up in the Yiddish-speaking homes of Holocaust refugees, Ms. Cooper was reared in an English-speaking household. But she was surrounded by Jewish music — her mother, Buni, performed in opera and musical theater, her grandfather was a synagogue prayer leader and her grandmother made wax discs of Yiddish folk songs.

She studied vocal music with her mother’s teacher and then in Jerusalem, where at Hebrew University she also completed her undergraduate studies. She received her M.A. in history from the University of Chicago and then in New York studied with Lazar Weiner, a composer of Yiddish songs, and Wolf Younin, a poet and lyricist.

In addition to her daughter and Ms. Lerner, she is survived by her mother and her brothers, Michael and Stephen. Ms. Cooper was divorced from Jonathan Gordon in 1984.

While many looked on the revival efforts as quixotic, Ms. Cooper, her daughter said, “was fearless” and was “not burdened by counting numbers.”

“She was interested in people expressing their Judaism through their language and their culture,” Ms. Gordon said. “She taught people how to do that.”

Second Temple Era Seal Discovered

2011-12-27T02:10:00.001-08:00

The Israel Antiquities Authority unveiled a rare ancient seal that underscores the bond of the Jewish people to Jerusalem. The tiny seal, that likely certified the purity of ritual objects used in the Second Temple, was discovered in an excavation near the Temple Mount.
December 25, 2011

The Israel Antiquities Authority press release:
A first of its kind find, indicative of activity in the Temple, was recently discovered: a tiny item that was probably used as a "voucher" certifying the ritual purity of an object or food in the Temple Mount compound and in the Second Temple
The discovery was presented at a press conference at which the Minister of Culture Limor Livnat and Minister of Education Gideon Sa'ar participated
Layers of soil covering the foundations of the Western Wall, c. 15 meters north of the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount, were excavated beneath Robinson’s Arch in archaeological excavations of the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Jerusalem Archaeological Garden. On top of these layers, dating to the first century CE (the late Second Temple period), was paved the Herodian street which was the main road of Jerusalem at that time. From the very start of the excavations in this area the archaeologists decided that all of the soil removed from there would be meticulously sifted (including wet-sifting and thorough sorting of the material remnants left in the sieve). This scientific measure is being done in cooperation with thousands of pupils in the Tzurim Valley National Park, and is underwritten by the Ir David Association. It was during the sieving process that a tiny object of fired clay, the size of a button (c. 2 centimeter in diameter) was discovered. The item is stamped with an Aramaic inscription consisting of two lines - in the upper line or in Aramaic means pure and below it
Following the preposition in the word is the shortened form (two of the four letters) for the name of the G-d of Israel.
According to the excavation directors on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, archaeologists Eli Shukron of the IAA and Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa:
"The meaning of the inscription is "Pure for G-d".
It seems that the inscribed object was used to mark products or objects that were brought to the Temple, and it was imperative they be ritually pure. This stamped impression is probably the kind referred to in the Mishnah (Tractate Shekalim 5: 1-5) as a (seal). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such an object or anything similar to it was discovered in an archaeological excavation and it constitutes direct archaeological evidence of the activity on the Temple Mount and the workings of the Temple during the Second Temple period".
Tractate Shekalim tells of the administration procedures on the Temple Mount in which our object was used, "Whoever required libations would go to Yohanan who was in charge of the stamps give him [the appropriate amount of] money and would receive a stamp from him in return. He would then go to Ahiyah who was in charge over the libations, give him the stamp and receive the libations from him". There can be no doubt that this is a very exciting find.
The Mishnah also mentions in Tractate Shekalim, "There were four tokens in the Temple and on them were inscribed; calf, ram, kid and sinner [which were issued as a receipt to those who deposited the appropriate funds]. Ben Azzai says: There were five; and they were inscribed in Aramaic." Our object does not belong to this group. It shows that not all of the details concerning the administration procedures of the Temple Mount have come to us by way of the rabbinic literature. Here an artifact from an archaeological excavation supplements our knowledge with a previously unknown detail.
It is in this context and the spirit of Hanukkah that the Jerusalem District Archaeologist, Dr. Yuval Baruch, mentioned, "It is written in the Gemara (Talmud Bavli, Tractate Shabbat Chapter 2: Page 21) that the only cruse of oil that was discovered in the Temple after the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks, "lay with the seal of the High Priest" - that is: the seal indicated that the oil is pure and can be used in the Temple. Remember, this cruse of oil was the basis for the miracle of Hanukkah that managed to keep the menorah lit for eight days".
In addition to this item, other artifacts dating to the Second Temple period were discovered. Some are even earlier and date to the time of the Hasmoneans, such as oil lamps, ceramic cooking pots and a fusiform juglet that may have contained oils and perfume, as well as coins of the Hasmonean kings, such as Alexander Jannaeus and John Hyrcanus.
Photographic credit - Vladimir Naykhin

Happy Channukah!

2011-12-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

This is a Russian Jewish Musical Group

2011-12-21T13:24:00.000-08:00

Vaxil’s vaccine could keep about 90 percent of cancers from coming back.

2011-11-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

Vaxil’s groundbreaking therapeutic vaccine, developed in Israel, could keep about 90 percent of cancers from coming back.

As the world’s population lives longer than ever, if we don’t succumb to heart disease, strokes or accidents, it is more likely that cancer will get us one way or another. Cancer is tough to fight, as the body learns how to outsmart medical approaches that often kill normal cells while targeting the malignant ones.

Hadassah HospitalIn a breakthrough development, the Israeli company Vaxil BioTherapeutics has formulated a therapeutic cancer vaccine, now in clinical trials at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. If all goes well, the vaccine could be available about six years down the road, to administer on a regular basis not only to help treat cancer but in order to keep the disease from recurring.

The vaccine is being tested against a type of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. If the substance works as hoped — and it looks like all arrows are pointing that way — its platform technology VaxHit could be applied to 90 percent of all known cancers, including prostate and breast cancer, solid and non-solid tumors.

“In cancer, the body knows something is not quite right but the immune system doesn’t know how to protect itself against the tumor like it does against an infection or virus. This is because cancer cells are the body’s own cells gone wrong,” says Julian Levy, the company’s CFO. “Coupled with that, a cancer patient has a depressed immune system, caused both by the illness and by the treatment.”

The trick is to activate a compromised immune system to mobilize against the threat.

A vaccine that works like a drug

A traditional vaccine helps the body’s immune system fend off foreign invaders such as bacteria or viruses, and is administered to people who have not yet had the ailment. Therapeutic vaccines, like the one Vaxil has developed, are given to sick people, and work more like a drug.

Vaxil’s lead product, ImMucin, activates the immune system by “training” T-cells –– the immune cells that protect the body by searching out and destroying cells that display a specific molecule (or marker) called MUC1. MUC1 is typically found only on cancer cells and not on healthy cells. The T-cells don’t attack any cells without MUC1, meaning there are no side effects unlike traditional cancer treatments. More than 90% of different cancers have MUC1 on their cells, which indicates the potential for this vaccine.

“It’s a really big thing,” says Levy, a biotechnology entrepreneur who was formerly CEO for Biokine Therapeutics. “If you give chemo, apart from the really nasty side effects, what often happens is that cancer becomes immune [to it]. The tumor likes to mutate and develops an ability to hide from the treatment. Our vaccines are also designed to overcome that problem.”

For cancers in an advanced stage, treatments like chemo or surgery to remove a large tumor will still be needed, but if the cancer can be brought down to scale, the body is then able to deal with it, Levy explains. ImMucin is foreseen as a long-term strategy — a shot every few months, with no side effects — to stop the cancer from reoccurring after initial treatments, by ensuring that the patient’s own immune system keeps it under control.

In parallel, the company is also working on a vaccine that treats tuberculosis, a disease that’s increasing worldwide, including in the developed world, and for which the current vaccine is often ineffective and treatment is problematic.

cancerours cellBased in Ness Ziona, Vaxil was founded in 2006 by Dr. Lior Carmon, a biotechnology entrepreneur with a doctorate in immunology from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. In June, Vaxil signed a memorandum of understanding to merge its activities into Sheldonco, a company traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

The Tikva התקווה

2011-11-08T17:05:00.001-08:00

L’ Shana Tova

2011-10-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

L’ Shana Tova

>
> May your hair, your teeth, your face-lift, your abs, and your stocks not fall .

And may your blood pressure, your triglycerides, your cholesterol, your white blood count and your mortgage interest not rise.

May you get a clean bill of health from your dentist, your cardiologist, your gastroenterologist, your urologist, your proctologist, your podiatrist, your psychiatrist, your plumber, and the IRS.

May you find a way to travel from anywhere to anywhere during rush hour in less than an hour, and when you get there may you find a parking space.

May this Yom Tov, find you seated around the dinner table, together with your beloved family and cherished friends, ushering in the Jewish New Year ahead.

May what you see in the mirror delight you, and what others see in you delight them.

May the telemarketers wait to make their sales calls until you finish dinner, may your checkbook and your budget balance, and may they include generous amounts for charity.

May you remember to say "I love you" at least once a day to your partner, your child, and your parent(s). You can say it to your secretary, your nurse, your butcher, your photographer, your masseuse, your seamstress, your hairdresser or your gym instructor, but not with a "twinkle" in your eye.

May we live as intended, in a world at peace with the awareness of the beauty in every sunset, every flower's unfolding petals, every baby's smile and every wonderful, astonishing, miraculous part of ourselves.

And most importantly, May G-d bless you with every happiness, great health, peace and much love during the next year and all those that follow.

Happy New Year

New year greetings 5771

2011-10-01T18:59:00.000-07:00

Israeli Music - Selected Albums

2011-09-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Israel, New OECD Member

2011-09-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

Chidren's Games

2011-09-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

Festivals 2011 - The Rosh Hashanah Feast

2011-09-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Famous Jews who used to be Gentiles -

2011-09-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Judaism]

Tom Arnold, actor
Polly Bergen, an American Emmy Award-winning actress, singer, and entrepreneur
May Britt, actress
Geraldine Brooks ,a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Australian-American journalist and author
Campbell Brown, an American television news reporter
Drew Bundini Brown, assistant trainer of former heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali
Sarah Brown, actress
Kate Capshaw, actress
Nell Carter, singer and actress
Connie Chung, American journalist who has been an anchor and reporter for several U.S. television news networks
Jim Croce, singer/songwriter
Sammy Davis, Jr., entertainer
Mary Hart, American television personality, long-time host of the entertainment program Entertainment Tonight
Carolyn Jones, actress
Julius Lester, son of a Methodist minister and a children's author
Little Richard , an American singer, important in the transition of rhythm and blues into soul
Anne Meara, American comedienne and actress, wife of Jerry Stiller
Marilyn Monroe, actress
Norma Shearer, actress
Kim Stanley, actress
Elizabeth Taylor, actress
Ivanka Trump, daughter of the Donald
Ike Turner, an American musician, bandleader, talent scout, and record producer
Mare Winningham, actress-singer
Jackie Wilson, another American singer, important in the transition of rhythm and blues into soul

ROYAL WEDDING of Prince William and Kate - Klezmer Style!

2011-08-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

Israel Palestinian Conflict: The Truth About the West Bank

2011-07-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

"EishesChayil" "Ideal Woman" The Groggers

2011-07-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

Lawrence of Judea

2011-07-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

Lawrence of Judea
by Sir Martin Gilbert
The champion of the Arab cause and his little-known romance with Zionism.

T.E. Lawrence - better known in Britain and throughout the Middle East as Lawrence of Arabia - was a lifelong friend of Arab national aspirations. In 1917 and 1918 he participated as a British officer in the Arab revolt against the Turks, a revolt led by Sharif Hussein, later King of the Hedjaz. He was also an adviser to Hussein’s son Feisal, whom he hoped to see on the throne of Syria. For generations of British Arabists, Lawrence was and remains a symbol of British understanding of and support for the Arab cause. Virtually unknown, however, is his understanding of and support for Jewish national aspirations in the same era.

In mid-December 1918, a month after the end of World War I, Lawrence was instrumental in securing an agreement between Emir Feisal and the Zionist leader Dr. Chaim Weizmann. The meeting was held at the Carlton Hotel in London (a building subsequently destroyed in the London Blitz). At this meeting, Lawrence acted as the interpreter. Weizmann assured Feisal that the Zionists in Palestine should be able “to carry out public works of a far-reaching character” and that the country “could be so improved that it would have room for four or five million Jews, without encroaching on the ownership rights of Arab peasantry.”[1]

As Weizmann wrote in his notes on the meeting, Feisal explained that “it was curious there should be friction between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. There was no friction in any other country where Jews lived together with Arabs…. He [Feisal] did not think for a moment that there was any scarcity of land in Palestine. The population would always have enough, especially if the country were developed. Besides, there was plenty of land in his district.”[2]

On January 3, 1919, Feisal and Weizmann met again in London, to sign an “Agreement between the King of the Hedjaz and the Zionists.” Lawrence, who was once again the guiding hand in this agreement, hoped that it would ensure what he, Lawrence, termed “the lines of Arab and Zionist policy converging in the not distant future.”[3]

“We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.”
On March 1, 1919 Lawrence, while in Paris as the senior British representative with the Hedjaz Delegation, drafted and then wrote out in his own hand a letter from Feisal to the American Zionist Felix Frankfurter. In this letter, Feisal declared, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.” Feisal went on to say that Weizmann “has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.” The Jewish movement, Feisal continued, “is national, and not imperialist: our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.” Feisal then added, in strong, optimistic words: “I look forward, and my people with me look forward to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their place in the community of the civilized peoples of the world.”[4]

Related Article: Why Jerusalem Matters

If Lawrence’s support for Jewish national aspirations was not known to his contemporaries, it was perhaps suspected. In early 1920, as Lawrence prepared his wartime experiences of the Arab Revolt for publication, he wrote to the author Rudyard Kipling to ask if he would read the proofs of his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Kipling replied that he would be glad to see the proofs, but that, if it emerged from them that Lawrence was “pro-Yid,” he would send the proofs back to him untouched.[5]

Kipling was distressed at the thought that Lawrence might be pro-Jewish. And indeed, Lawrence’s view of the potential evolution of the Jewish National Home in British Mandate Palestine was far from hostile to Jewish hopes. In an article entitled “The Changing East,” published in the influential Round Table magazine in 1920, Lawrence wrote of “the Jewish experiment” in Palestine that it was “a conscious effort, on the part of the least European people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the ages, and return once more to the Orient from which they came.”[6]

Lawrence noted of the new Jewish immigrants: “The colonists will take back with them to the land which they occupied for some centuries before the Christian era samples of all the knowledge and technique of Europe. They propose to settle down amongst the existing Arabic-speaking population of the country, a people of kindred origin, but far different social condition. They hope to adjust their mode of life to the climate of Palestine, and by the exercise of their skill and capital to make it as highly organized as a European state.”[7]

As Lawrence envisaged it in his Round Table article, this settlement would be done in a way that would be beneficial to the Arabs. “The success of their scheme,” he wrote of the Zionists, “will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power.”[8]

It seemed to Lawrence - as it did to Winston Churchill when he discussed the question of eventual Jewish sovereignty with the Peel Commissioners in 1937, shortly after Lawrence’s death - that it would take a long time before a Jewish majority would come into being. Such a contingency, Lawrence had written in his Round Table article, “will not be for the first or even for the second generation, but it must be borne in mind in any laying out of foundations of empire in Western Asia.” These, to a very large extent, “must stand or fall by the course of the Zionist effort.”[9]

When Churchill became colonial secretary in January 1921, he appointed Lawrence to be his Arab affairs adviser. At the outset of his appointment, Lawrence held talks with Feisal about Britain’s Balfour-Declaration promise of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Reporting on these talks to Churchill in a letter dated January 17, 1921, Lawrence was able to assure the new colonial secretary - responsible for finalizing the terms of the Palestine Mandate - that in return for Arab sovereignty in Baghdad, Amman, and Damascus, Feisal “agreed to abandon all claims of his father to Palestine.”[10]

This was welcome news for Churchill, but there was a problem. Since the French were already installed in Damascus, and were not willing to make way for Feisal or any Arab leader, Churchill proposed giving Feisal, instead of the throne of Syria, the throne of Iraq, and at the same time giving Feisal’s brother Abdullah the throne of Transjordan, that part of Britain’s Palestine Mandate lying to the east of the River Jordan. Installing an Arab ruler in Transjordan would enable Western Palestine - the area from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan, which now comprises both Israel and the West Bank - to become the location of the Jewish National Home under British control, in which, in Churchill’s words, the Jews were to go “of right, and not on sufferance.”[11]

“[Churchill] trusted that under the influence of a just policy,” Arab opposition to Zionism “would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.”
Briefed by Lawrence at the March 17, 1921, Cairo Conference, Churchill explained to the senior officials gathered there that the presence of an Arab ruler under British control east of the Jordan would enable Britain to prevent anti-Zionist agitation from the Arab side of the river. In support of this view, Lawrence himself told the conference, as the secret minutes recorded: “He [Churchill] trusted that in four or five years, under the influence of a just policy,” Arab opposition to Zionism “would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.”[12]

Lawrence went on to explain to the conference that “it would be preferable to use Trans-Jordania as a safety valve, by appointing a ruler on whom we could bring pressure to bear, to check anti-Zionism.” The “ideal” ruler would be “a person who was not too powerful, and who was not an inhabitant of Trans-Jordania, but who relied upon His Majesty’s Government for the retention of his office.”[13] That ruler, Lawrence believed, would best be Emir Abdullah, Feisal’s brother.

The presence of Lawrence of Arabia at the Cairo Conference was of inestimable benefit to Churchill in his desire to help establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Lawrence’s friendship with the Arab leaders, with whom he had fought during the Arab Revolt, and his knowledge of their weaknesses as well as their strengths, was paralleled by his understanding of Zionist aspirations. In November 1918, on the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Lawrence had told a British Jewish newspaper, “Speaking entirely as a non-Jew, I look on the Jews as the natural importers of Western leaven so necessary for countries of the Near East.”[14]

On March 27, 1921, ten days after Lawrence’s suggestions in Cairo, Churchill sent him from Jerusalem to Transjordan to explain to Abdullah that his authority would end at the eastern bank of the River Jordan; that the Jews were to be established in the lands between the Mediterranean and the Jordan (“Western Palestine”); and that he, Abdullah, must curb all anti-Zionist activity and agitation among his followers.

The next day, in Jerusalem, Lawrence, Churchill, and Abdullah were photographed at British Government House: Churchill bundled up against the cold, Lawrence in a dark suit and tie, Abdullah in army uniform with Arab headdress. At their meeting that day, Abdullah agreed to limit the area of his control to Transjordan and to refrain from any action against the Jewish National Home provisions of the Palestine Mandate west of the Jordan.

Lawrence had thus helped ensure that the building up of the Jewish National Home could continue. He already knew that national home’s potential: Twelve years before the Cairo Conference, while traveling through the Galilee around Tiberias, he reflected on the glory days of the region in Roman times, and on the Jewish farm settlements he saw on his travels. Writing home on August 2, 1909, he explained, “Galilee was the most Romanized province of Palestine. Also the country was well peopled, and well watered artificially: There were not twenty miles of thistles behind Capernaum! And on the way round the lake they did not come upon dirty, dilapidated Bedouin tents, with the people calling to them to come in and talk, while miserable curs came snapping at their heels: Palestine was a decent country then, and could so easily be made so again. The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: Their colonies are bright spots in a desert.”[15]

The rest is well known: The “bright spots in a desert” evolved into a thriving state on the basis of the skill and capital Lawrence marveled at decades prior. It is hard to know how he would have responded to the Arab world’s growing intransigence toward the Jewish presence in the British Mandate, let alone to its violent attempts to destroy the Jewish State while still in its birth pangs - the same State that he believed held such promise for the Arabs of the region. T.E. Lawrence died in May 1935 of fatal injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident near his cottage in Dorset, at the age of only forty-seven. The accomplishments of his short life have assured his place in the pantheon of modern Arab history. Perhaps it is now time that modern Jewish history paid him homage as well.

This essay originally appeared in Azure 38, Autumn 2009, and is being published with permission. [link to azure.org.il ]

Notes:

From Chaim Weizmann’s interview with Emir Feisal at the Carlton Hotel, December 11, 1918, archives of the British Foreign Office in the Public Record Office, London, 371/3420.
Text reprinted in David Hunter Miller, My Diaries of the Conference of Paris (New York: Appeal, 1924), vol. 3, pp. 188-189.
T.E. Lawrence Papers, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p. 51.
Letter from Feisal to Frankfurter, March 1, 1919, reprinted in the New York Times on March 5, 1919, the Times (London) on March 6, 1919, and the Jewish Chronicle (London) on March 7, 1919. See Isaiah Friedman, Palestine, a Twice-Promised Land?: The British, Arabs, and Zionism, 1915-1920 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000), p. 228.
Kipling to Lawrence, July 20, 1920, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 5, 1920-1930, ed. Thomas Pinney (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2004), p. 126.
T.E. Lawrence, “The Changing East,” The Round Table, September 1920. Available at http://telawrence.net/telawrencenet/works/articles_essays/1920_changing_east.htm.
Lawrence, “The Changing East.”
Lawrence, “The Changing East.”
Lawrence, “The Changing East.”
Letters from T.E. Lawrence to Churchill’s private secretary, January 17, 1921. Churchill Papers, 17/14.
British White Paper of June 1922, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 46.
Colonial Office Papers 935/1/1, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 51.
Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, 1917-1922 The Stricken World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 553.
Message to the Jewish Guardian, November 28, 1918, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 51.
David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), p. 71.

Stamps Issued: June 2011

2011-07-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

Dray Tekhterlekh - Yiddish song from Cracow

2011-05-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

A melancholic song in yiddish, about a father giving away all hes three daughters in marriage.. Written by the late Mordechai Gebirtig, and the sung by the great Bente Kahan.
All the pictures are from the US holocaust memorial museum!

Translation;
1.
When, with good luck, there arrives the day
When I marry off my youngest daughter,
I will dance and dance
A burden has been taken off my mind-
My eldest daughter is getting married
I have two more maiden daughters waiting for their turn to
be married
You bandsmen, tear at your strings!
Let everyone rejoice with us.
My joy is so great.
Only the good God can understand how great it is,
And so can those who have also given away their daughters
in marriage

2.
When I see my second daughter getting married in her white
wedding dress,
I will drink wine with joy -
What a burden off my shoulder!
You bandsmen - tear at yours strings!
My second daughter is getting married.
Now it is only my youngest one who remains in the house
I wish she would be married soon, too
Play, bandsmen play for our in-laws!
Let all poor folk share our happiness
We are having our child settled down to married life
And this child is a daughter, too

3.
Now the sounds of a third wedding are dying away
And this makes me sad and thoughtful
My youngest daughter is gone
What else is there for me to be living for?
You bandsmen, play for the bride.
All three daughters have now been given away in marriage
All our children have left us
It was hard for us to bring them up,
And without them life is even harder
Go on playing.
Let my tears run down.
Today, the last bed will be deserted

Their room will be empty
And so will their wardrobe
Oh, how desolate the life is now.

Israeli Stamps Issued: April 2011

2011-04-11T18:29:00.000-07:00

Dayenu, Coming Home - The Fountainheads Passover Song

2011-04-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

W. H. Prusoff, Who Developed AIDS Drug, Is Dead at 90

2011-04-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

William H. Prusoff, a pharmacologist at the Yale School of Medicine who, with a colleague, developed an effective component in the first generation of drug cocktails used to treat AIDS, died on Sunday in New Haven. He was 90 and lived in Branford, Conn.

Click to enlarge
William H. Prusoff worked at the Yale School of Medicine.
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George Ruhe for The New York Times

The death was confirmed by his son, Alvin.

Dr. Prusoff spent most of his long career studying molecular derivatives of thymidine, a building block of DNA. His work led him to develop two important antiviral drugs.

In the early 1950s, he synthesized idoxuridine, a successful treatment for infant keratitis. The condition, an inflammation of the cornea caused by the herpes simplex virus, was the leading infectious cause of blindness. Idoxuridine disrupted the virus’s ability to reproduce.

This was an important breakthrough. At the time, it was believed that antiviral agents powerful enough to be effective would be too toxic for human use and that those safe for use would be too weak to counteract a virus.

Idoxuridine overturned medical dogma and, after winning approval by the Food and Drug Administration, became the first clinically used antiviral drug. For this reason, Dr. Prusoff is sometimes called the father of antiviral chemotherapy.

In the mid-1980s, as the AIDS epidemic spread, Dr. Prusoff and a Yale colleague, Tai-shun Lin, began looking at thymidine derivatives that had been developed to treat cancer but discarded when they proved ineffective. One of these was stavudine, also known as d4T, a molecular cousin of the first AIDS drug, AZT. Both had been synthesized in the 1960s by Dr. Jerome P. Horwitz at the Michigan Cancer Foundation, now the Karmanos Cancer Institute, in Detroit.
Dr. Prusoff and Dr. Lin resynthesized the molecule and found in laboratory tests that it short-circuited the viral enzyme in H.I.V., causing it to produce short, incomplete pieces of DNA rather than complete strands.

Yale took out a patent in the doctors’ names and licensed it to Bristol-Myers Squibb for development. In 1992, it became the first drug to be tested under the F.D.A.’s parallel-track policy, which allowed patients with life-threatening illnesses to obtain drugs undergoing clinical trials.

After F.D.A. approval, stavudine was brought to market in pill form in 1994 and sold under the brand name Zerit. It joined three other drugs, known as nucleoside analogs, approved for treating H.I.V.: zidovudine (AZT), didanosine (ddI) and zalcitabine (ddC). Eventually, these were joined by a new generation of drugs known as protease inhibitors.

Because of its potential side effects, notably numbness, burning sensations and loss of fat in the feet, legs or hands, the drug is now used primarily in poor countries, where it is cheap and widely available.

Stavudine earned tens of millions of dollars for Yale each year — more than the total amount for all its other licensed medicines combined. It also made millions for Dr. Prusoff, who became a vocal supporter of a campaign initiated by Doctors Without Borders to persuade Bristol-Meyers to lower the drug’s price in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS was rampant.

In March 2001, the company announced that it was reducing the price of the drug in Africa to 15 cents for a daily dose, from $2.23, and removing barriers to the sale of generic equivalents there.

“We weren’t doing this to make money,” Dr. Prusoff told the Yale School of Medicine Chronicle. “We were interested in developing a compound that would be a benefit to society.”
William Herman Prusoff, known as Bill, was born on June 25, 1920, in Brooklyn. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran a small grocery.

He earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Miami in 1941. Rejected by the Army because of his poor vision, he spent World War II inspecting fuses at a munitions factory in Memphis and, as a health inspector, checking the water supply and the kitchens in Miami Beach hotels where pilots were billeted.

Urged by his parents, he applied to medical school, without success. He later enjoyed recalling that Yale deemed him so unqualified that it refunded his application fee in a gesture of pity.

Instead, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia in 1949 and then taught pharmacology in Cleveland at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve) before joining the pharmacology department at Yale in 1953.

Dr. Prusoff used some of his patent money to create the William H. Prusoff Foundation, which supported numerous programs, including the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. He also endowed lectureships in virology and pharmacology at Yale and several scientific prizes.

In addition to his son, Alvin, of Fairfield, Conn., he is survived by a daughter, Laura, of Ortahisar, Turkey, and three grandchildren.

Baruch Blumberg, Who Discovered and Tackled Hepatitis B, Dies at 85

2011-04-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

By H. ROGER SEGELKEN
Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and medical anthropologist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, showed that it could cause liver cancer and then helped develop a powerful vaccine to fight it, saving millions of lives, died Tuesday in Moffett Field, Calif. He was 85 and lived in Philadelphia.

His family said he died, apparently of a heart attack, shortly after giving a keynote speech at a NASA conference at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, which is in the San Francisco Bay area. Dr. Blumberg had long been associated with a NASA project to hunt for micro-organisms in space.

Dr. Blumberg’s prize-winning virology and epidemiology work began in the 1960s at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and took him and his colleagues on field trips around the world, from Japan to Africa.

The work led to the discovery of the hepatitis B virus in 1967, the first test for hepatitis B in the blood supply and the development in 1969 of the hepatitis B vaccine — the first “cancer vaccine.” Dr. Irving Millman, a colleague at the research center, was its co-creator.

Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries have been compared to those of Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 with D. Carleton Gajdusek for their work on the origins and spread of infectious viral diseases. (Dr. Gajdusek had discovered the cause of the kuru, or “trembling disease,” prevalent in New Guinea.)

Almost 20 years later, after decades of hepatitis B-related studies and a global search for medicinal plants to treat hepatic infections, Dr. Blumberg began what he called his second career. In 1999 he became the founding director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Astrobiology Institute.

The institute’s mission was to oversee research teams in the development of life-detecting devices for planetary rovers and asteroid fly-bys, and to scrutinize life forms in “extreme” environments on Earth, like the ocean bottom and the geothermal cauldrons that produce geysers. He joined several expeditions himself.

To these seemingly disparate endeavors — investigating disease-causing organisms and postulating alien or primordial life forms — Dr. Blumberg contributed a broadened understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon called polymorphism, in which a species can adapt to an environment through changes in appearances and functions.

From his base in Philadelphia, Dr. Blumberg began investigating viruses with a study of yellow jaundice, so named because of the characteristic vivid yellowing of the eyes and skin. As early as 1940, medical researchers had determined that there were two different forms of virus-induced jaundice, one that is transmitted as an intestinal infection, and the other spread mainly by blood transfusions.

Scientific field trips to pinpoint the agent responsible for blood-borne jaundice were conducted by Dr. Blumberg and his colleagues in the Philippines, India, Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia and Africa. Ultimately it was blood serum from an infected Australian aborigine that yielded the so-called Australian antigen, a protein found on the surface of the hepatitis B virus.

After he and Dr. Millman developed the hepatitis vaccine, they struggled to interest a pharmaceutical company to help develop and produce it.

“Vaccines are not an attractive product for pharmaceutical companies in that they are often used once or only a few times and they ordinarily do not generate as much income as a medication for a chronic disease that must be used for many years,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Nobel committee.

Moreover, he said, the medical research community in the early 1970s remained skeptical about the claim that a virus had been identified and a vaccine developed.

Ultimately he and Dr. Millman signed an agreement with Merck & Company, whose vaccine laboratories were near Philadelphia.

Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries are credited with saving millions of patients from ever developing liver cancer. But in his scientific autobiography, “Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus” (Princeton University Press, 2002), he observed ruefully that hepatic disease was still killing 1.5 million people a year worldwide — despite the widespread availability of the vaccines he helped develop — and that 350 million were chronically infected.

Still, he was hopeful. “Life — and death — are full of surprises,” he wrote, “and while it may be tempting fate to be too optimistic, it appears likely that within the next few decades this virus will be effectively controlled.” (There is still no vaccine for the blood-borne hepatitis C, one of the five known hepatitis viruses.)

Dr. Blumberg’s traced his fascination with inherited variations in susceptibility to disease to the volunteer service he did during medical school at an isolated mining town in northern Surinam, where he delivered babies, performed clinical services and undertook the first malaria survey done in that region.

He was particularly interested in the sugar plantation workers who had been imported from several continents.

“Hindus from India, Javanese, Africans (including the Djukas, descendants of rebelled slaves who resided in autonomous kingdoms in the interior), Chinese, and a smattering of Jews descended from 17th century migrants to the country from Brazil, lived side by side,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in his Nobel essay. “Their responses to the many infectious agents in the environment were very different.”

He wrote his first scientific paper based on these studies and would revisit the tropics repeatedly. “Nature operates in bold and dramatic manner in the tropics,” he wrote.

By the late 1990s Dr. Blumberg was immersed in astrobiology, as NASA called the new science. Appointed by the NASA administrator, Dan Goldin, to lead the Astrobiology Institute, Dr. Blumberg and his team were asked to address three profound questions: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? And what is life’s future on Earth and beyond?

As in his disease studies, Dr. Blumberg sought collaborations with specialists in a variety of fields, including physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology and oceanography as well as biology and medicine that would “help us to recognize biospheres that might be different from our own.”

While urging the development of instrumentation for astrobiological space probes, Dr. Blumberg recommended equal efforts in the study of earthly “extremophiles,” the organisms that somehow thrive in extreme temperatures, pressures and chemical conditions.

In fissures in the deep ocean floor, Dr. Blumberg said, are extremophiles that might resemble the earliest life forms on Earth or other planets. He described Earth as “a place of extremes” during the first few hundred million years of its 4.5-billion-year existence, given to radical climate fluctuations, from searing heat to immobilizing cold, amid constant meteorite bombardments and catastrophic volcanic eruptions.

He speculated that life might have started on Earth at geothermal sites, either underground or in the sea. The NASA venture — since diminished by administrative changes and financing cutbacks — was welcomed by those who advocate a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI, and call the science “exobiology.” Dr. Blumberg joined the board of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

But in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, he said he would be “very surprised if we found something in space, that it would look like E.T.”

“If we found something more like a virus or a bacteria,” he said, “that would be astounding enough.”

Baruch Samuel Blumberg (Barry to his friends) was born in New York City on July 28, 1925, the second of three children of Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer, and Ida Blumberg. After attending the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, he went to Far Rockaway High School in Queens (whose graduates also include the Nobel physicists Richard Feynman and Burton Richter).

His undergraduate studies at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., were interrupted by World War II, when he served as a Navy deck officer on landing ships. Returning to Union College, he completed a bachelor’s degree in physics, enrolled in graduate studies of mathematics at Columbia and transferred to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, earning his M.D. there in 1951.

Dr. Blumberg served a clinical fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, went to Oxford University’s Balliol College for a doctorate in biochemistry, and returned to the United States in 1957 to join the National Institutes of Health, where he headed the Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section until 1964.

Most of his research afterward was conducted at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Dr. Blumberg was also on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and its School of Medicine as a professor of medicine, medical genetics and medical anthropology.

Dr. Blumberg married Jean Liebesman, an artist, in 1954. She survives him, as do two daughters, Anne Blumberg of Boston and Jane Blumberg of Oxford, England; two sons, George, of Oxford, and Noah, of Chevy Chase, Md.; and nine grandchildren.

Dr. Blumberg saw his Nobel as more than an act of recognition. He said it helped draw renewed attention to his work with enormously beneficial consequences. After receiving the prize, he said, he was invited to China. “I spoke before several thousand people,” he told The Times in 2002. “I provided them with a copy of the patent, and now I’m told that it helped to change the direction of what they were doing and led to the saving of a lot of lives.”

Saving lives, he said, was the whole point of his career. “Well, it is something I always wanted to do,” he said. “This is what drew me to medicine. There is, in Jewish thought, this idea that if you save a single life, you save the whole world, and that affected me.”

RoseEttaCohen

2011-03-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

Pro Israel Companies

2011-03-07T18:10:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 7, 2011 11:26 AM

In case you have an opportunity to show your support, here is a list of Pro-Israel companies

***' Israel 's' country prefix is '729' on barcodes. You will typically only see it on imported foods and not the products listed below... as many of the companies below are American companies that financially support ' Israel .'***

1. The Chairman and CEO of STARBUCKS, Howard Schultz, is an active Zionist. In 1998 he was honored by the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah with 'The Israel 50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Tribute Award' for his services to the Zionist state in 'playing a key role in promoting close alliance between the United States and Israel '. At a time when other businesses were desperately pulling out of

Israel, Starbucks decided to help Israel 's floundering economy and invest in Israel. It has been revealed that Starbucks still continues to support Israel by sponsoring fund raisers for Israel .

2. THE LIMITED STORES, Express, Lerner New York, VICTORIAS SECRET and BATH & BODY WORKS: The Limited, Inc. was founded by Leslie H. Wexner in 1963 in Columbus, Ohio. Includes: THE LIMITED STORES, Express, Lerner New York , VICTORIAS SECRET and BATH & BODY WORKS, and employs over 115,000 people. Its founder, president and CEO Les Wexner is a Zionist. He is on the board of directors of Emet, the Pro-Israel Media 'War Room' whose function is to ensure that all media in the US stays biased in favor of Israel. In 1984, Les Wexner who is one of the world's 200 wealthiest people created the Wexner Foundation. Its mission statement is 'strengthening Jewish Leadership in North America and Israel.' One of the programs the Foundation runs is the Wexner Israel Fellowship Program which annually brings up to ten Israeli have participated thus far. The Wexner Foundation sponsors 'Birthright Israel ' - a program that pays for young American Jews to take free indoctrination trips to Israel. It is also a long-standing supporter of Hillel - the bastion of Zionism on campus.

3. THE HOME DEPOT: Its founder and co-chairman of the Board is an active Zionist. He created the board of directors of Emet, the Pro-Israel Media 'War Room' whose function is to ensure that all media in the US stays biased in favor of Israel .

4. DISNEY: Walt Disneys Millennium exhibition at the Epcot Centre in Florida depicts Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Of the 8 million dollars it cost to set up the exhibition, Israel contributed 1.8 million and worked with Disney to develop its content.

5. AOL/TIME WARNER: AOL ALLOCATES 30% OF ITS INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO IN ISRAEL . (Can you believe it?!)

The buy up of Israeli company Mirabilis, creators of ICQ (internet chat program), for $287m in 1998 forms part of AOLs investment in Israel .

In 1998, Mr. Ted Leonsis, CEO of AOL studios (a business unit of AOL) received the Jubilee Award by the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is the highest tribute ever awarded by the 'State of Israel in recognition of those individuals and organizations that through their investments and trade relationships have done the most to strengthen the Israeli economy.

6. COCA COLA: From 1966 onward Coca-Cola has been a staunch supporter of Israel. In 1997 the Government of Israel Economic Mission honored Coca-Cola at the Israel Trade Award Dinner for its continued support of Israel for the last 30 years and for refusing to abide by the Arab League boycott of Israel. In contrast Pepsi abided by the Arab League boycott of Israel which ended in May 1991, after 1992 Pepsi is also trading in Israel. In 2001 the Coca-Cola World Headquarters hosted and was the main sponsor of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce Awards Gala. It has been revealed that Coca-Cola Israel sponsors training programs for its workers on subjects including the Israeli-Arab conflict. The course content is created by a company funded by the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government. In July 2002, it has been announced that Coca-Cola is to build a new plant at Kiryat Gat.

7. ESTEE LAUDER: Estee Lauder's chairman, Ronald Lauder, also one time chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, is the current president of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) - Ronald Lauder is an ardent Zionist.

8. SARAH LEE. (Includes Hanes, Playtex, Leggs, Champion). This is also not to be confused with the frozen snacks company. This is in regard to the clothing giant. Sara Lee owns 30% of Israel 's leading textile company Delta Galil. Sara Lee is the world's largest clothing manufacturer, this opens the worlds markets to Israel, with cloths originating in Israel and being sold around the world under one of the many famous Sara Lee brands.

In 1998, Mr. Lucien Nessim of Sara Lee Personal Products received the Jubilee Award by the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is the highest tribute ever awarded by the 'State of Israel ' in recognition of those individuals and organizations, that through their investments and trade relationships, have done the most to strengthen the Israeli economy.

9. FOX TELEVISION, FOX ENTERTAINMENT: The News Corporation Limite is one of the world's largest media companies with total assets as of September 30, 2005 of approximately; US $58 billion and total annual revenues of approximately US $18 billion. News Corporation's diversified global operations include the production and distribution of motion pictures and television programming; television, satellite and cable broadcasting; the publication of newspapers, magazines and books; the production and distribution of promotional and advertising products and services; the development of digital broadcasting. News Corporation is the world's leading publisher of English-language newspapers with operations worldwide. The Company publishes more than 175 different newspapers, printing more than 40 million papers a week.

Murdoch's New Corp. invests heavily in Israel. Murdoch News Corporation was one of three US companies that was lauded for their support of Israel at the America-Israel Friendship League Partners for Democracy Awards dinner (25th June 2001);Murdoch himself co-chaired the dinner. News Corp.'s digital technology company based in Jerusalem, called NDS, has grown from 20 to 600 employees in the past decade.

10. NESTLE: The Swiss company owns 50.1% of Israeli food maker Osem Investments. In Dec. 2000, it announced it will invest millions of dollars to operate the new R&D centre in Israel. In 1998, Mr. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe on behalf of Nestle, received the Jubilee Award by the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is the highest tribute ever awarded by the 'State of Israel ' in recognition of those individuals and organizations, that through their investments and trade relationships, have done the most to strengthen the Israeli economy.

11. OVERSEAS ADVENTURE TRAVEL: Company is based in Massachusetts, is known for their many world tours and relatively cheap group travel. The company donates money to over 50 countries in which it operates in to help fund schools, food aid, etc. and averages between $5,000 and $25,000 per country. However, Israel received a flat $1,000,000 from Overseas Adventure Travel, as it's president is a Zionist.

12. IBM: IBM invests heavily in Israel . IBM senior vice-president and general counsel, Lawrence Ricciardi, who noted that his company employs 1,700 people in Israel, said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, 'This wedge of land and the huge ideals it represents are very important to IBM.' IBM was one of three US companies that was lauded at the America-Israel Friendship League Partners for Democracy Awards dinner ( 25th June 2001 ) hosted by Sharon. In May 2002 the Israel-America Chamber of Commerce awarded IBM the Ambassador's Award' in recognition of its outstanding contribution to the development of the Israeli high-tech industry and to advancing trade between the U.S.and Israel. IBM established operations in 1949 and was the first large American company with a wholly owned subsidiary in Israel, introducing computers to the country.

13. KIMBERLY-CLARK: (Huggies, Kotex, Kleenex) In 1998, Mr. Robert P. Van der Merwe, chairman of Kimberly-Clark Europe received the Jubilee Award by the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is the highest tribute ever awarded by the 'State of Israel ' in recognition of those individuals and organizations, that through their investments and trade relationships, have done the most to strengthen the Israeli economy. Kimberly Clark Corp owns 49.9% interest in Israeli company Hogla (6/96) through America-Israel PaperMills $49.9m.

14. RIVER ISLAND clothing chain, ISROTEL and IBROTEL HOTELS in Spain and Portugal, BRITANNIA PACIFIC PROPERTIES. (This one probably relates least to any of us) - a diversified international investment company, with headquarters in London , England . They said to be one of the largest real estate owners in the Sacramento Metropolitan area. It appears that the British based Lewis Trust Group is one of the companies developing hotels in the Aqaba Region. David Lewis, the Chairman of the company, is a prominent supporter of Israel. Mr Lewis's activities have included the raising of money for the Jewish National Fund. He is also a member of the Israel-Britain Business Council. This organization is dedicated to the development of the Israel by channelling British capital to Judea and Samaria for the benefit of the Israeli settlers.

15. NOKIA: Nokia have started to invest heavily in Israel. Nokia general manager Lars Wolf said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post (4 March 2001): 'We are really focusing on Israel from all perspectives, because we have an internal project called 'Project Israel ' which means we a re looking at Israel from a networks perspective, from the perspective of Nokia Ventures Organization, and also from the perspective of Nokia Research Center.' Nokia Venture Partners, a branch of Nokia Ventures Organization, launched a new $500 million fund in December 2000 and allowed that a 'disproportionate' amount of it would go into Israeli companies. Nokia Research Center is on the lookout for Israeli start-ups with which it can cooperate.

16. TIMBERLAND: (clothing, shoes, boots, jackets, etc.) Timberlands is a $1.1 billion footwear, apparel & accessories company. Its President and CEO Jeffrey Swartz is an active Zionist. In a recent 'solidarity visit' to Israel, where he made it clear he was speaking as the CEO of Timberland, he suggested sending 100 IDF soldiers to the US for a week as ambassadors for Israel. Although Timberland is a publicly traded company, his family holds approximately 47% of the stock and has approximately 81% of the voting power.

17. DESERT EAGLE: Desert Eagles are the only firearms that Israel does not buy from the US or other countries. However, many of the parts of these firearms are imported from other countries and they are assembled in Israel . Regardless, Israel prides them as their own and it is strictly an Israeli company.

18. CATERPILLAR: Caterpillar is a company based in Illinois that manufactures large construction equipment such as bulldozers, tractors, various demolition equipment and has a line of 'tough guy' clothing apparel. Caterpillar happily supplies Israel with all of its current fleet of D9 and D10 bulldozers, some of the largest armoured bulldozers in the world.

"Bar'chu!" (I'm A Jew)

2011-02-20T13:00:00.000-08:00

"It's Your Story" - National Museum of American Jewish History

2011-02-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

Shalom Alecheim in China

2011-02-05T06:21:00.001-08:00

We've got a strong desire

2011-02-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

Only in Israel

2011-01-22T10:36:00.000-08:00

A GREAT BRONX TALE

2011-01-17T06:54:00.001-08:00

The South Bronx, in 1950 was the home of a large and thriving
community, predominantly Jewish. In the 1950s the Bronx offered
synagogues, mikvas, kosher bakeries, and kosher butchers -- all the comforts one would expect
from an observant Orthodox Jewish community.

The baby boom of the postwar years happily resulted in many new young
parents. As a matter of course, the South Bronx had its own baby
equipment store, Sickser's.

Sickser's was located on the corner of Westchester and Fox, and
specialized in "everything for the baby" as its slogan ran.

The inventory began with cribs, baby carriages, playpens, high chairs,
changing tables, and toys. It went way beyond these to everything a
baby could want or need. Mr. Sickser, assisted by his son-in-law Lou
Kirshner, ran a profitable business out of the needs of the rapidly
expanding child population.

The language of the store was primarily Yiddish, but Sickser's was a
place where not only Jewish families but also many non-Jewish ones
could acquire the necessary for their newly arrived bundles of joy.

Business was particularly busy one spring day, so much so that Mr.
Sickser and his son-in-law could not handle the unexpected throng of
customers. Desperate for help, Mr. Sickser ran out of the store and
stopped the first youth he spotted on the street. "Young man," he
panted, "how would you like to make a little extra money? I need some
help in the store. You want to work a little?"

The tall, lanky black boy flashed a toothy smile back. "Yes, sir, I'd
like some work." "Well then, let's get started."

The boy followed his new employer into the store. Mr. Sickser was
immediately impressed with the boy's good manners and demeanor.
As the days went by and he came again and again to lend his help,
Mr.Sickser and Lou both became increasingly impressed with the youth's
diligence,punctuality, and readiness to learn. Eventually Mr. Sickser
made him a regular employee at the store. It was gratifying to find an
employee with an almost soldier-like willingness to perform even the
most menial of tasks, and to perform them well.
From the age of thirteen until his sophomore year in college, this
young man put in from twelve to fifteen hours a week, at 50 to 75 cents
an hour. Mostly, he performed general labor: assembling merchandise,
unloading trucks and preparing items for shipments. He seemed, in his
quiet way, to appreciate not only the steady employment but also the
friendly atmosphere Mr.Sickser's store offered.

Mr. Sickser and Lou learned in time about their helper's Jamaican
origins,and he in turn picked up a good deal of Yiddish.

In time the young man was able to converse fairly well with his
employers,and more importantly, with a number of the Jewish customers
whose English was not fluent. At the age of seventeen, the young man,
while still working part-time at Sickser's, began his first semester
at City College of New York. He fit in just fine with his, for the
most part Jewish classmates, hardly surprising, considering that he
already knew their ways and their language.

But the heavy studying in the engineering and, later, geology courses
he chose proved quite challenging.The young man would later recall
that Sickser's offered the one stable point in his life those days.

In 1993, in his position as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
, two years after he guided the American victory over Iraq in the
Gulf War, General Colin Powell visited the Holy Land . Upon meeting
Israel 's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in Jerusalem , he greeted the
Israeli with the word
"Men kent reden Yiddish" (We can speak Yiddish).

As Shamir, stunned, tried to pull himself together, the current
Secretary Of State continued chatting in his second-favorite language.
Colin Powell never forgot his early days working at Sickser's

I am Israel - Yerushalayim Version

2011-01-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

Adrianne Tolsch -- Stand-Up Comedy

2011-01-13T05:34:00.001-08:00

Mickey Katz - Sixteen Tons of latkes!

2011-01-10T19:38:00.000-08:00

Mikey Katz - Bagel-Lox and the Tree Bears

2011-01-10T19:27:00.000-08:00

THE YIDDISHE ZODIAC

2010-12-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

The Year of:

CHICKEN SOUP
1907, 1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003
You're a healer, nourishing all whom you encounter. We feel better just being in your presence. Mothers want to bring you home to meet their
children - resist this at all costs. Compatible with Bagel and Knish.

EGG CREAM
1908, 1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004
You've got a devious personality, since you're made with neither eggs nor cream. Friends find your pranks refreshing; others think you're too frothy.
Compatible with Blintz, who also has something to hide.

CHOPPED LIVER
1909, 1921, 1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005
People either love you or hate you, making you wonder, "What am I, chopped liver?" But don't get a complex; you're always welcome at the holidays!
Bagel's got your back.

BLINTZ
1910, 1922, 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006
Creamy and dreamy, you're rightfully cautious to travel in pairs. You playit coy, but word is that, with the right topping, you turnover morning, noon
and night. Compatible with Schmear.

LATKE
1911, 1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007
Working class with a grating exterior, you're a real softie on the inside.
Kind of plain naked, but when dressed up you're a real dish. Compatible with Schmear's cousin Sour Cream.

BAGEL
1912, 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008
You're pliable and always bounce back, although you feel something's missing
in your center. If this persists, get some therapy. Compatible with Schmear and Lox...Latke and Knish, not so much.

PICKLE
1913, 1925, 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009
You're the perfect sidekick: friends love your salty wit and snappy banter, but you never overshadow them. That shows genuine seasoning from when you were a cucumber. Marry Pastrami later in life.

SCHMEAR
1914, 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010
You blend well with others but often spread yourself too thin. A smooth operator, you could use some spicing up now and then. Compatible with Bagel
and Lox. Avoid Pastrami - wouldn't be kosher.

PASTRAMI
1915, 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011
Brisket's hipper sibling, always smokin' and ready to party. You spice up life, even if you keep your parents up at night. Compatible with Pickle,
who's always by your side.

BLACK AND WHITE COOKIE
1916, 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000, 2012
Kids love you, but make up your mind! Are you black or white? Cake or cookie? You say you're "New Age," all yin & yang. We call it "bipolar."
Sweetie, you're most compatible with yourself.

KNISH
1917, 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013
Flaky on the surface, you're actually a person of depth and substance.
Consider medical or law school, but don't get too wrapped up in yourself.
Compatible with Pickle. Avoid Lox, who's out of your league.

LOX
1918, 1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014
Thin and rich, you're very high maintenance: all you want to do is bask in the heat, getting some color. Consider retiring to Boca. Compatible with
Bagel and Schmear, although you top them both.

__._,_.___

I own a Deli, I am Jew...

2010-12-18T16:13:00.000-08:00

Mount Holyoke College Klezmer Band

2010-12-13T05:27:00.000-08:00

Israeli Stamps November 2010

2010-12-05T16:09:00.000-08:00

Altz fun mir - All Of Me

2010-11-25T17:49:00.001-08:00

Kevin Myers: Israel is a rogue all right -- maybe even a lovable one

2010-11-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

By Kevin Myers
Thursday November 11 2010

Gabriel's co-sponsor of the motion, Lauren Booth, was clearly caught unawares by his brilliant definition of rogue

My latest hero is a 19-year-old Canadian called Gabriel Latner, and for three reasons. The first is that he presented the most brilliantly audacious defence of Israel since Moses parted the Red Sea. The second is that he told his "ally" in a Cambridge Union debate, Lauren Booth (the dingbat half-sister of Cherie Blair) -- "I am going to nail you to the f***ing wall up there." He duly did. The third is that he is banned from life from the Cambridge Union for swearing in front of a lady. Yes, I know, that's where feminism has got us -- equality whenever it suits; otherwise a reversion to the swooning damsel of yesteryear.

Gabriel, who is also Jewish, was proposing the motion in the CU that Israel is a rogue state. He asked the fundamental question: well, what does rogue actually mean? He referred to the dictionary. 'Aberrant, anomalous, misplaced, occurring (especially in isolation) at an unexpected place or time'. In other words, just like Israel.

His first argument was statistical. There are 195 countries in the world; Christian, Muslim, secular. But Israel is the only country in the world that is Jewish -- therefore, a rogue. That he is a better rhetorician than mathematician came in his next assertion, that the chance of any randomly chosen state being Jewish is 0.0051pc. Not true, Gabriel. Two decimal places out; it is 0.51pc.

His next argument came from its treatment of Darfurian refugees, the survivors of the Sudanese Janjaweed war of genocide, who are scorned throughout the Middle East, and even shot on sight in Egypt (Dear old Egypt). But they are welcomed in Israel, with the Israeli government even sending out its soldiers into the Sinai to rescue what are, in essence, illegal immigrants. Clearly, a rogue again.

Thirdly, the Israeli government engages in an activity that the rest of the world shuns -- it negotiates with terrorists. Yasser Abed Rabbo is one of the lead PLO negotiators in talks with Israel. He was formerly a leader of the PFLP -- "an organisation that engaged in such freedom-promoting activities as killing 22 Israeli high-school students".

Gabriel argued that (amongst other governments) the British government would never negotiate with terrorists -- but he was on weaker ground here. Lauren Booth's semi-brother-in-law, yes Phony Tony, even had terrorists staying with him at his personal residence at Chequers. But his point is that to negotiate with murderers -- as Israel does -- is surely the mark of a rogue.

Fourth, Israel has a better human rights record than any of its neighbours. Quite so. As Gabriel himself said, there has never been a liberal democratic state in the Middle East -- except for Israel.

And of all the countries in the region, Israel is the only one where lesbians, gays and bisexuals enjoy equality. In Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, and Syria, homosexual conduct is punishable by flogging or imprisonment, or both. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, homosexuals are put to death. Yet again, Israel is the rogue, for not killing queers, lezzies and trannies.

And fifthly, Israel is the only democracy in the entire Middle East. Again, clearly a rogue! Gabriel then added a sixth argument -- that Israel wilfully and forcefully disregards international law. Look how in 1981 the Zionists destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear bomb plant. The rogues!

Gabriel's co-sponsor of the motion, Lauren Booth, was clearly caught unawares by his brilliant definition of rogue. This convert to Islam divides her loyalties ecumenically between Shia and Sunni mosques in London, which makes her the Islamic equivalent of a Free Presbyterian-Roman Catholic.

She later complained about Gabriel's private use of the F-word to her (and I don't mean Fatima, the shrine at which she was converted to Islam). Well we know that if a man had complained about someone using the F-word to him, he would have been told to grow up, but poor Lauren is a WOOO -- Whingeing Owner Of Ovaries -- and the President of the Union, a silly boy named James Counsell, ordered Gabriel to apologise. The latter refused, (good man, Gabriel) and has accordingly been banned from the Cambridge Union for life.

James Counsell justified his decision as follows: "His decision to verbally abuse one of our female (my italics) guests using sexual language has done enormous levels of harm to the reputation of our union, as well as crossing all boundaries of basic human decency (and) anybody personally connected to Lauren Booth will now almost certainly avoid us like the plague. This includes, amongst many others, Cherie Booth and Tony Blair."

This sad Counsell creature apparently thinks that being avoided like "the plague" by Cherie and Tony is a bad thing. Grounds for a knighthood, I should have thought; Arise, Sir Gabriel. However, the Cambridge Union clearly has a high regard for words with a silent "ue" (rogue, plague). Maybe with a little enunciative intrigue, Gabriel of the synagogue might better have chosen to give tongue and harangue his vague colleague of the anti-Israeli league, in his best Canadian brogue, and argue: "Fugue, Lauren."

Jew Da Maccabi - Iron Like a Lion

2010-11-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

A Jewish Parable (Author Unknown)

2010-11-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

The Jews settled the moon in 2053, just about five years after the end of the Islamic Wars of the 40's, where the Middle East, and Israel, of course, had been obliterated by nuclear weapons. The two million Jews remaining throughout the rest of the world - less than 100,000 total in all the Islamic countries - banded together and purchased the dark side of the moon, which no other companies or people wished to colonize.

Great transports were arranged via the 62,000 mile space elevator and the Space Shuttle and every Jew on Earth - including anyone who claimed any Jewish heritage whatsoever - left to go to a place where no one could blame them for anything.

The Earth rejoiced - happily rid of all Jews . There were huge parties throughout all of Sweden and the rest of Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and North America. (Now known as the Northern Alliance of Islamic States after the United States was taken over peacefully in the elections of 2040 by a predominantly Muslim Congress and President, who immediately passed amendments making Islam the main religion of the United States and the world.)

After the last Jew entered the elevator (a David Goldstein, 62, formerly of New York), the Earth was officially declared Judenrein by Hans Ibn Hitler, a great, great-grandson of Hitler who had been raised in Brazil and hidden by Nazis until this precious moment.

It was not an easy move for the Jews but, in some ways, it was no different from all their moves of previous eras. Some former Israelis (still alive because they were out of Israel when the bombs dropped) claimed that the moon was easier to deal with because there were no Extremist Muslims. Of course, this precipitated a huge argument with some Jews, who felt not having the Radical Muslims nearby was not enough challenge.

Other Jews argued that taming a wilderness with no atmosphere, plant or animal life and freezing temperatures was enough challenge. And yet other Jews argued that arguing was counterproductive. It came as no surprise to anyone that for the two million Jews, there were eventually one million synagogues (with the other million Jews not joining).

It was also no surprise that within just three years, the Jews had created a controlled environment that allowed for fantastic plant and animal growth and production. The transports, which had been called the Arks, had also carried two of each animal and plant (remember, Noah), and through the ingenuity of the Jews and cloning, there were now many new species which sped up production of food (cows with six udders, chickens with four legs and so forth). The population had rapidly increased and, due to the amazing collection of scientific and medical minds, most diseases and even aging had been reduced to nil.

There was even a ministry of communication with Earth, consisting of the remains of Hollywood producers and moviemakers, who sent back to Earth portraits of life on the moon. Of course, it had been decided when the Jews first got to the moon - based on six-thousand-year history of people being jealous of Jewish accomplishment - that all news coverage of the moon's population would be 'movie-ized' to show only horrible things. The film industry, led by Jordan Spielberg, went to great lengths to fabricate news clips to show Jews barely surviving in the harsh lunar habitat. Artists and engineers laboured to cover over vast environmental successes with illusionary domes showing massive areas of wasteland - just in case anyone from Earth ever sent a spaceship with cameras to see what was going on.

But no-one ever did, and the years passed rapidly; one decade, then another. bar mitzvahs, weddings, brises, all celebrated under the artificial world that the Jews had created - not only had it not been that bad, but by the end of the century, some Jewish authors were calling the moon colony - Eden 2'.

Of course other Jews disagreed. In fact, much time was spent on disagreeing. There were even contests for arguing but, in general, there was peace. Anyone who threatened the peace was forced to officiate at a contest with people arguing about why that person was wrong. The contests would go on for days (sometimes weeks), until the troublemaker begged for forgiveness. (Many penalties on the moon were similar to this, and were extremely effective.)

Back on Earth, life disintegrated without the Jews. There was a return to Middle Ages thought - only the current religion du jour was valid - all others were kept legislated into poverty until a war erupted and the positions changed for a few years.

Another amazing anomaly appeared when there were no longer any Jews on Earth - anti-Semitism actually increased to monumental proportions! Famous orators explained this simply by saying: 'I don't have to have a gun to be afraid of having my brains blown out.' Additionally, without the presence of the Jew, the world developed incredible evil that had no release. (Previous evil had always focused on the Jews. One Rabbi on the moon actually said G-d spoke to him, and said that He, G-d, was about to destroy the Earth because everyone o n the Earth was evil. The Rabbi begged Him to reconsider, and bargained that if there were 1,000 good people left on Earth, G-d should spare the planet.

G-d then told the Rabbi, 'Hey, I went through this before with Abraham and Noah, and I already know the answer because I'm G-d.'

People laughed at the Rabbi, but then, one day, while all the lunar citizens were going about their business, an enormous series of explosions was seen on the Earth. Everyone on the moon stared at the distant fireballs that seemed to engulf the blue planet that was once their home.

Although there had been great anger at being forced to leave the Earth, the true spirit of Judaism was always present on the moon, and no one had wished ill on to their former home. As in the tradition of the Seder (when the wine is spilled because the Egyptians perished, and we do not rejoice fully when even an enemy has died) when the Jews saw what was happening, they began to weep and pray, and watch what was to be the final news broadcast from Earth. The horror of the apocalypse was videotaped by cameras until all electricity was ionised by the new electron bombs. Entire countries were wiped away in the blink of an ion exploding. And then came the final transmission from the nation that had started the entire mess - it was a desperate headline screamed by a hundred dying newscasters. Their rant continued until it was just blackness. What were they saying?

As the Jews watched, some gasped, others cried, and a few even laughed. For the last words of the disappearing civilization was a condemnation. 'The Jews have caused all our problems - they left us here to face the mess they made. If the Jews hadn't taken all the best scientists and engineers, we could have defeated our enemies. Our enemies are the Jews! Kill all the Jews.'

It took a little while, but the electronics experts pieced together what had happened on Earth during its last days. Anti-Semitism, which had grown stronger and stronger since the Jews had left, had reached its pinnacle, and all the countries of the world had decided to launch a massive attack on the moon. The attack had been coordinated by the United Nations and, although all the missiles had been launched properly, there was some sort of glitch in the targeting system, resulting in all the weapons colliding in the upper atmosphere and showering the Earth with a deadly rain of nuclear fire, electronic destruction, and a generally bad day. The mistake triggered the military response of all the nations (who all had nuclear weapons by then - plus a few other horrid toys), and the result was truly an Armageddon.

The Jews on the moon went into a period of deep mourning. The Orthodox rent their clothing and there were mass counseling sessions. And then, about one week after the BIG DAY, as it was now called, a presence was detected heading towards the moon. Had one of the missiles escaped? Were the Jews doomed after all? The leaders checked with the defense experts - no this was not a missile, it was an old-style spacecraft, like the ones used in the early seventies. As it approached, the laser defense was trained on the craft. Debates raged as to whether the craft should be destroyed or allowed to get close enough to communicate with.

A message from the ship came just in time. It said, 'We are the last representatives from Earth - two from each country and we come in peace.' Some Jews rejoiced that there were survivors, others demanded isolation or death of the approaching group.

The Rabbi who had had the vision of earth's destruction told the leaders that G-d wanted them to have a chance, so they were allowed to circle the moon. When told they could have a section of land to themselves to farm and repopulate, the Earthlings were upset. They told the Jews that they should be allowed to live with the Jews and have all the same privileges - because, after all, in Judaism, the stranger is given the same rights and privileges as the citizen.

Upon hearing this, the leaders went to the Rabbi with the visions, and he offered to guide the visitors to their new home. The leaders allowed him to g ive the instructions for landing. Of course, not trusting the Rabbi, the commander of the ship didn't listen to his advice, and instead crashed into a lunar crater.

And so we have the final days of the history of the planet Earth, which have been generously shared with us by the Jewish colony of the 453rd Solar System of the M Galaxy. Although the Earth is currently uninhabitable, the head engineer of the Jewish colony on Mars tells us that Venus will be fully colonized by the year 2120, and with continuous replanting, Earth will once again be ready for Jews returning from other planets in the year 2136.

An interesting side note - inside the wreckage of the rocket with the survivors from Earth was a specially-marked package that had survived which included the following words: 'Once there was a great planet named Earth. And there were many peoples on this planet, and they all existed peacefully with each other, except for the Jews. Wherever there were Jews, there was trouble. Jews brought dirt and death and hatred and strife. They were finally banished from our planet, only to take with them many great inventors and scientists and doctors, leaving Earth with nothing. We have decided to destroy the remnants of the Jews, and since the first attempt failed, we are the last chance for Earth. Whoever shall find this will know the truth - It was all the Jews' fault.'

This panel has been saved and is on display at the Earth Memorial Museum at Rivka Crater, NW, for all travelers who wish to see the remains of a civilization that did not understand the words - 'He who blesses the Jews, is himself blessed. He who curses the Jews, is himself cursed.'

The Jews of San Nicandro

2010-11-10T10:20:00.001-08:00

The story that John A. Davis has to tell in The Jews of San Nicandro (Yale University Press) falls under the category of “truth is stranger than fiction.” Who would believe, outside of a fable or maybe a joke, that in Fascist Italy, a group of several dozen Catholic peasants would spontaneously decide to convert to Judaism; that they would persist in calling themselves Jews even as Italy introduced Nazi-style anti-Semitic laws; that they would make contact with Jewish soldiers from Palestine, serving in the British Army that invaded southern Italy during World War II; and that finally, after two decades of dedication and hardship, they would undergo ritual circumcision and emigrate en masse to the newly created state of Israel? Yet it all really happened, in the town of San Nicandro in the impoverished, isolated Gargano region of southern Italy.
According to Davis, a professor of Italian history at the University of Connecticut, the Jews of San Nicandro represent “the only case of collective conversion to Judaism in Europe in modern times.” Why did it happen just then, at the darkest hour for European Jewry, and in a region where no actual Jews lived? The answer lies in the religious genius or madness of Donato Manduzio, the founder of the San Nicandro group. Born in 1885, Manduzio grew up in the extreme poverty typical of southern Italy at the time, and he never went to school. Of his childhood, little is known except that his father gave him the nickname “Shitface” (“although to judge from an early photograph,” Davis objects, “he seems to have been quite good looking”). His first exposure to the wider world came during World War I, when he was conscripted into an infantry regiment and contracted a disease that left his legs paralyzed.
After he returned to San Nicandro, Manduzio developed a reputation as a faith healer and seer. It is one of several elements in his story that makes him seem more a figure of the Middle Ages than the 20th century—and in fact, Davis writes, the life of poor southern Italians was in many respects still premodern. (It was not until the 1930s that San Nicandro got a railroad line.) Certainly, the way he discovered Judaism has a pre-Reformation flavor. In the late 1920s, Manduzio read the Bible for the first time. Even at this late date, the Catholic Church in Italy discouraged lay people from reading the Bible; it wasn’t until evangelical Protestants started to distribute an Italian-language edition that scripture became accessible. (These Protestants, Davis writes, were often Italians who had spent time in the United States, where they were exposed to Christian sects like the Pentecostals and the Seventh Day Adventists.)
What Manduzio read in the Old Testament amazed him. He became convinced “that Jesus had been a prophet but not the Messiah” and that the fallen state of the world—so full of poverty and suffering—was proof that the Messiah had not yet arrived. When he read that God had established the Sabbath on Saturday, he could not understand why Christians celebrated it on Sunday. Salvation, he now decided, “lay in following the Law of the God of Israel as it had been given to Moses on Sinai. … Those seeking salvation and comfort must therefore learn to observe the Law of the God of Moses, forsaking other gods and idols, and following the path of the righteous.”
This is exactly the kind of conversion experience that led so many Protestants, in the 16th century, to reject established churches and identify their own sects with ancient Israel. Where Manduzio went beyond them was in deciding that he must actually revive the religion of Israel. For the most remarkable thing about his story is that, when he had these revelations in the late 1920s, he actually didn’t know that any Jews existed in the world. As Davis writes, “Manduzio at first believed that the Jews had all perished in the biblical Flood and that he had been called by the Almighty to revive a faith that had long since disappeared from the face of the earth.”
Accordingly, Manduzio, who now used the name Levi, set about converting a small number of his neighbors—initially, 19 adults and 30 children—to his self-invented Judaism. He told them not to eat pork and not to work on Saturday—rules that, in this time and place, he had much difficulty enforcing—and ordered them to give their children Biblical names: Sara, Ester, Myriam, and Gherson, among others. The question of naming, in fact, led to one of the group’s most serious schisms. When Concetta di Leo, Manduzio’s favorite disciple, gave birth to a son, her husband wanted to name the boy Vincenzo, after his own father; but Concetta insisted that he be given the name of a Biblical prophet. (They compromised on Giuseppe, or Joseph.) This episode gives a sense of how totally Manduzio dominated his little sect. Paralyzed and bedridden—in all the time he led the Jews of San Nicandro, he never left his house—Manduzio relied on visions and dreams to communicate with God and laid down the law in a way that his followers increasingly resented.
The San Nicandro group could easily have remained just a cult of personality and ended up dispersing as such cults usually do. But eventually Manduzio learned from a traveling peddler that there were other Jews in Italy, and he began to write to Jewish organizations in major cities, asking for guidance. Those organizations were reluctant to write back, which Davis calls “not difficult to understand. Anyone reading the correspondence would immediately have been aware of the very humble background of the writers and would probably have suspected some sort of prank.”
Even once Angelo Sacerdoti, the chief rabbi of Rome, entered into correspondence with Manduzio, he remained wary. “You and your companions have often expressed your desire to convert to Judaism,” the rabbi wrote, “and I have always made it clear how much this amazes me. I have asked you many times how you came to this conviction, since you have had no previous contact with Jews and know very little about what Judaism is.” Sacerdoti also referred to “spiritual tendencies that had nothing to do with Judaism,” and it is unmistakable how deeply Manduzio’s language and thinking were infused with Christian concepts. His Sabbath service, for instance, involved reading a passage from the Pentateuch and singing the Paternoster, a Catholic prayer in Latin. How could it have been otherwise, since Catholicism was the only religion he ever knew?
But the sannicandresi were persistent, and in time their sincerity began to win over members of the Jewish establishment. At this point, Davis’ story begins to broaden into a larger portrait of the Italian Jewish community—a small and highly assimilated group, whose relations with the Fascist regime were mostly good until the late 1930s. Prominent Jews took an interest in San Nicandro—especially the small but influential community of Italian Zionists, who found the devotion of these self-made Jews an excellent example for Jews at large. One of their major patrons was Raffaele Cantoni, a brave anti-Fascist whose work on behalf of Jewish refugees before and after the war put him in a good position to help the Jews of San Nicandro. Much of the later part of Davis’ story unfolds through Cantoni’s correspondence with his proteges, as he tries to balance cautious support with impatience at their infighting and demands for help.
The war, which might easily have meant the end of the Jews of San Nicandro, actually turned out to be the making of them. Donato Manduzio’s house happened to be located on a highway used by a transport unit of the British Army, which occupied the region after September 1943. That unit, Company 178, was composed of Jews from Palestine, who had enlisted in the British Army in order to fight Germany. (Their commander, Major Wellesley Aron, is one of several fascinating Jewish figures in Davis’ story.) When their trucks, painted with the Star of David, drove through San Nicandro, the local Jews greeted them with their own Star of David flag.
In this way, Davis shows, the sannicandresi came to the attention of the network of Jewish activists—Italian, Palestinian, and British—who organized throughout Italy to shelter Jewish refugees and smuggle them to Palestine. The Jews of San Nicandro were especially inspired by their meeting with Enzo Sereni, an Italian Jew who was a leading Haganah activist. The photo of Sereni in San Nicandro, surrounded by solemn-looking men holding the Zionist flag, was the last taken of him before he parachuted behind German lines on a mission that led to his death.
What these experiences meant for the Jews of San Nicandro was that their home-made Judaism grew into a passionate Zionism. From 1944 on, the community’s goal was to emigrate and build the Jewish state. This was by no means easy, as the patient Cantoni kept reminding them: The British were intent on keeping Jewish immigrants out of Palestine, and the few available permits were meant for Holocaust survivors, not the comparatively well-off Jews of San Nicandro. Yet in November 1949, after a series of clashes that Davis documents—and after the death of Donato Manduzio, who grew increasingly alienated from his flock—the Jews of San Nicandro did make aliyah. Davis writes only sparingly about their experience in Israel, which was apparently as difficult as that of most immigrants to the new country. But perhaps this very hardship was the best proof that they had achieved their extraordinary goal of becoming ordinary Jews.

A Comprehensive Guide to Israel’s Biotech Industry

2010-11-03T05:31:00.000-07:00

The Pillcam

Blockbuster prescription drugs sold worldwide that treat multiple sclerosis, cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases derive from Israeli biotechnology. Israel creates more medical devices per capita than any other country, and its life sciences exports earn more than $3 billion a year.

Israeli research is at the forefront of the emerging fields of stem-cell therapy and genomics, and two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, the first to Profs. Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and the second to Prof. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science number among the many awards bestowed on the country’s biotech scientists.

The pace of innovation, development and growth in Israel’s biotechnology sector is unparalleled. Israel’s biotech industry is the most aggressive in the world, with more startups per capita then any other country. Its 180 biotech companies – each built on a combination of academic excellence, a highly-skilled workforce, cutting-edge technological inventiveness and entrepreneurial daring – are creating therapeutic products, diagnostic tools and revolutionary drug-delivery techniques benefiting people all over the world.

Tailor-made for Israel

Biotechnology, the science which applies breakthroughs in molecular biology and immunochemistry to diagnosis and therapy, was born in the late 1970s. In many ways, it is tailor-made for Israel, being rooted in innovation and perseverance; a highly educated workforce; the lessons of military service; intimate links between researchers and entrepreneurs; and US capital and markets and, particularly, the US 1985 free trade agreement with Israel.

* Innovation and perseverance: A small country with a population of only seven million and few natural resources, Israel’s economy is necessarily one of innovation and perseverance. Demanding conditions – first in agriculture, then in defense and from there throughout its economy – set the stage for dramatic economic growth, as Israel transformed itself from a developing to a developed nation, and from an economy based on agriculture to one based on knowledge.

* A highly educated workforce: With seven world-class universities, Israel is one of the most highly educated countries on the globe. Almost a quarter of its workforce has university degrees, and 12 percent of these have advanced degrees. Among the 750,000 people who immigrated to Israel from the Former Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 were hundreds of highly skilled engineers. They have enhanced Israel’s technological talent-pool, giving the country the world’s highest rate of scientists per capita (one in 200), 39 percent of whom specialize in life sciences.

* The lessons of military service: Mandatory military service in Israel equips its young people with the connections, management skills and action-oriented entrepreneurial mindset critical for technological development.

* Intimate links between researchers and entrepreneurs: Israeli universities were among the first worldwide to develop technology transfer organizations – professional companies tasked with helping Israeli researchers to commercialize their academic research by connecting them with national and multi-national companies.

* US capital and markets and, particularly, its 1985 free trade agreement with Israel: The US as a trading partner helped fuel the high-tech boom of the 1980s and 1990s, which, in turn, created the conditions for Israel’s biotechnology cluster.

Birth of biotech in Israel

Israel whimsically dates the birth of its biotechnology industry to 1936. This was when chemist Chaim Weizmann, later to be the country’s first president, developed a process that produced acetone from the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum. It took almost six more decades, however, until the modern Israeli biotechnology industry was born, on the heels of the high-tech boom.

While Israeli biotechnology embraces the whole biotech sphere – from animal vaccines and diagnostics to plant tissue culture, bioreactors, seeds, diagnostics and biopesticides – its emphasis is firmly on medical agents, diagnostics and cell- and tissue-therapies. Some 60 percent of Israeli biotech focuses on human therapeutics, including drug discovery, cell therapy and genetics. A further 20% of Israeli biotech companies produce diagnostic kits.

Top-selling prescription drugs based on Israeli research

The best-known and most successful medication developed in Israel is Copaxone®, a breakthrough treatment that significantly reduces the severity of clinical episodes in multiple sclerosis patients also making them less frequent. Developed by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and the Weizmann Institute of Science, it is the world’s leading MS therapy, approved in 52 countries, with global sales reaching $2.8 billion in 2009.

Teva’s first proprietary drug, Copaxone®, is today responsible for a third of the company’s profits. Teva is one of the 15 biggest international pharma companies in the world and one of the largest generic drug manufacturers. The company employs more than 35,000 people in 50 countries, and earned almost $14 billion in 2009. It is increasingly expanding into cutting-edge patentable therapies.

Azilect® (rasagiline) is another Teva product. Based on research at the Technion Institute of Technology, it combats Parkinson’s disease, both as initial therapy and, later in the disease, in conjunction with L-dopa. Its 2009 sales reached $175 million.

Exelon® is a medication for Alzheimer’s disease that reduces symptoms, enabling patients to remain independent and ‘themselves’ for longer. Originating in research at the Hebrew University and developed and commercialized by Novartis, its global sales in 2009 were more than $954 million.

Doxil® is a chemotherapy agent used in treating different types of leukemia, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple myeloma and cancers of the bladder, breast, stomach, lung, ovaries and thyroid. Based on research at the Hadassah Medical Center, it was sold to Johnson & Johnson, and recorded global sales of $430 million in 2009.

Regenerative Medicine

Scientific regulation in Israel is informed by Judaism’s emphasis on the saving of life. The country’s relatively liberal approach to stem cell research for therapeutic purposes derives from this tradition, which has positioned Israeli scientists among stem-cell research’s pioneers and kept them at the heart of the regenerative medicine map, helped by a government-sponsored research consortium spanning academia and industry. While no stem-cell medication yet exists anywhere, several are on the way from Israeli companies.

The four-year-old Jerusalem start-up Cellcure Neurosciences is starting clinical trials in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in over-50s in the Western world, which is estimated to affect some 30 million people.

The disease is caused by the dysfunction, degeneration and death of pigment-including retina cells, which lie between the retina’s photoreceptors and the nourishing blood vessels at the back of the eye. Cellcure creates healthy retinal pigment cells from human embryonic stem cells, and injects them into the eye to replace the dying cells.

Jerusalem-based Gamida Cell has developed stem cells from umbilical cord-blood to treat blood cancers, autoimmune diseases, metabolic disorders and the hematological disease neutropenia. Its lead product is StemEx, which was given FDA Fast Track Designation in mid-2010. It is now being tested in international Phase III clinical trials as an alternative to bone marrow transplant in patients with advanced blood cancers, who are unable to find a matched donor.

BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics in Petah Tikva is a leading developer of adult stem cell technology and therapy. It has created a stem cell treatment for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Parkinson’s disease based on autologous bone-marrow-derived adult stem-cells. In a first clinical trial, conducted at the Hadassah Medical Center, ALS patients will be re-implanted with stem cells taken from their own pelvis.

Drugs derived from living cells

Uplyso, a medicine for Gaucher’s disease based on the enzyme taliglucerase alfa, is an example of the ongoing push into biologics – drugs derived from living cells rather than from chemicals. It was developed by Protalix Biotherapeutics, a company that began life in 1994 within Israel’s Meytav Technological Incubator, graduating to become an independent publicly held company with a market capitalization of more than $700 million, trading on both the NYSE Amex Exchange and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

It recently sold the rights to this experimental Gaucher’s medication for $60 million to the New York-based Pfizer, the world’s largest-selling pharmaceutical firm.

Re-engineering existing drugs

D-Pharm, created in 1993 in Ness Ziona, is a biopharmaceutical company that has created a new class of therapeutics to treat devastating brain disorders. Its proprietary technology re-engineers existing drugs, modifying them to work more efficiently and with fewer side effects. A mid-stage trial of its neuroprotective DP-b99 doubled the number of patients who completely recovered from strokes caused by blood clots.

The company hopes to bring it to market by 2013. D-Pharm is also making good progress with a medication for epilepsy, bipolar disorder and migraine prophylaxis.

Computational Biotechnology

Computational biotech, also called bioinformatics, is the specialty of Compugen, a company founded in Tel Aviv in 1993 by three former IDF intelligence officers. Its technologies incorporate methods from mathematics, computer science and physics into biology, organic chemistry and medicine to help scientists gather and process vast amounts of data.

The result is powerful predictive models and discovery engines, which advance understanding of biological phenomena and enable discovery of potential therapeutic products and diagnostic markers. Compugen’s customers include the pharmaceutical concerns Eli Lilly, Merck, SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals, Novartis and Millennium Pharmaceuticals.

Genomics

Genomics uses the RNA system within living cells to control which genes are active and how active they are. Rosetta Genomics, based in Rehovot, is using RNA-based technology to develop a wide range of diagnostic tests for cancers and women’s health indications.

Quark Pharmaceuticals has created a fully-integrated drug development platform to deliver RNA molecules to the eye, ear, kidney, lung, spinal cord and bone marrow, where they can block the action of faulty genes.

Diagnostics

Diagnostics, particularly monoclonal antibody-based test kits, were among Israel’s first commercial biotechnology successes. Aided by Israel’s vast clinical medicine resources, new diagnostic tests are brought rapidly from the lab into the hospital ward and to market. Savyon Diagnostics was an earlier entry in this field in 1983, when Ben-Gurion University researchers developed a serological diagnostic kit to test for the sexually transmitted disease Chlamydia (‘clap’).

They formed the company a year later, and brought their test-kit to market in 1989. Savyon has gone on to develop and market tests for urinary tract infections and for HIV.

Orgenics, founded in 1983, produces 22 patented easy-to-use, stand-alone, ELISA-based ImmunoComb kits that test for Chlamydia, hepatitis A and B, cytomegalovirus, toxoplasmosis, rubella, Helicobacter pylori and AIDS, as well as non-wipe strips for measuring blood glucose levels.

Zer Science-Based Industries specializes in diagnostic tests related to fertility. Its Single-Step pregnancy test requires just drops of urine to give an accurate result within five minutes, even before the first missed menstrual period.

Future blockbusters

One example among many is Glassia, the first and only high purity, liquid, ready-to-use 1-proteinase inhibitor for adults with inherited emphysema resulting from 1-antitrypsin deficiency.

Kamada, the 20-year-old biopharmaceutical concern that invented Glassia, entered an exclusive distribution and manufacturing agreement for its production in mid-2010 with the global health-care company Baxter International.

Biotech and electronics

Among Israel’s strengths is the interdisciplinary nature of its R&D. This underlies the creation and development of out-of-the-box products. One of the best-known and among the most important and successful life sciences developments to come out of Israel in the past decade, is the Pillcam from Given Imaging, a disposable pill-sized camera encased in a capsule and used to diagnose stomach disorders after being swallowed (pictured above).

Easily ingested, the capsule moves naturally and painlessly through the gastrointestinal tract, wirelessly transmitting to a portable recorder as it goes, to provide the physician with high-quality images on a computer workstation.

Financing Israel’s biotech

Israel’s biotechnology track record is strong. Companies that have commercialized their products and been publicly listed do exceptionally well – testifying to their excellent science.

The process of scaling up biotech R&D to early production and beyond, however, is a high-risk undertaking. With only one in 250 compounds making it from preclinical development to market (and taking perhaps seven years and $500 million to do so), the major brake on Israel’s biotechnology cluster is the lack of an asset-intensive infrastructure.

Investment is in especially short supply for the so-called Valley Of Death phase – the gap between very early stage investment (usually academic research funds), and easier-to-obtain investment for the clinical study phase which, although more costly, is correspondingly more certain than early-stage technologies.

Government help

Israel’s government supports a spectrum of programs to help start-ups survive the difficult stages between proof of feasibility and final success. They include R&D grants from the Chief Scientist’s Office (since the early 1990s); the Magnet framework that brings companies and researchers together to develop novel generic technologies, underwriting up to 65% of the budget (since 1994); a National Committee for Biotechnology tasked with developing and promoting biotechnology in Israel (established in 1995); Bioplan 2000, which created dedicated biotech incubators to bridge the gap in funding, infrastructure and managerial talent; naming biotechnology a National Project and creating infrastructure centers which give researchers access to essential equipment and knowhow (2002); and, most currently, a generous Grants Program administered by the Israel Investment Center; an Automatic Tax Benefits program administered by the Tax Authorities, offering foreign investors unique advantages; and finally, deignating biotechnology a Preferred Sector.

Academic research funding

Israel’s biotech research at its universities and medical schools is the foundation of the industry. Dedicated biotechnology departments are rare anywhere, but there are three among Israel’s seven main universities. Biotech research is funded from the annual $140 million research budget at Israel’s universities and is comprised of external competitive research grants (36%); the regular budget of the universities (36%); and industry and government research grants and contracts (28%).

Technology transfer

Israel has 12 technology transfer organizations, seven of them university-based and five in its leading research hospitals. They are highly effective: the Hebrew University’s Yissum, for example, founded in 1964, generates more revenue than its counterparts at MIT, Harvard or NYU in its management and licensing of thousands of patents developed within the institution. More successful still is the Weizmann Institute’s Yeda, which has been named the world’s third most profitable technology transfer organization.

Incubators

Based on Israel’s high-tech experience, incubators have been created to nurture young biotech companies. There are both public and private incubator organizations, but all offer fledgling entrepreneurs skilled and experienced management, suitable R&D facilities, technical, financial, administrative and logistic support, administrative services (secretarial, accounting, legal, acquisition) and business guidance.

The Technological Incubators Program, established in 1991 for high-tech and administered by the Chief Scientist’s Office, includes a number of biotech startups. BiolineRx was set up in 2003 by Teva, Hadassah’s technology transfer company Hadasit and two leading venture capital funds as a clinical-stage, publicly-traded, biopharmaceutical development company. It licenses promising early-stage projects and develops them as far as Phase I clinical trials.

Rad-Biomed Accelerator is another interface between biomedical research and Israel’s biomedical industry. It provides physical infrastructure, seed capital, business development and a wide range of related services to help entrepreneurs establish companies that will join the flourishing Israeli biomedical industry.

International partners

Throughout most of biotech’s history, small companies have been the hotbed of innovation. These small firms, however, generally lack the development capital to fund the costly clinical trials and launch of new therapeutics. Biotech has, therefore, long depended on partnerships with large, profitable pharmaceutical companies.

For Israel, this paradigm means that the fruits of Israeli research go largely to foreign companies – with the large partner selling the final product and capturing the lion’s share of the profits.

The unraveling of interferon’s mechanisms and isolation of the human Interferon-beta gene, for example, which began at the Weizmann Institute, was eventually sold to Swiss pharmaceutical giant Ares-Serono Group in 1979.

Growing numbers of Israeli companies today, however, are searching for funding that will allow them to develop their own intellectual property, rather than sell to the multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Venture capital

Israel’s venture capital (VC) industry, born in the late 1980s, received a major boost in 1993, when the government launched the company Yozma to help finance high-tech and, later, biotech startups.

During the 1990s, local venture capital companies that specifically targeted biomedicine were formed. Medica, Columbine, Innomed of Jerusalem Global Ventures, Denali and Vitalife were among the first.

Pontifax, 7 Health Ventures and Poalim Medical III followed.

With most of these funds now fully invested (or no longer active), local investment in life sciences today comes largely from general VCs, not dedicated to biotech.

Clal Biotechnology Industries (an Israeli investment company but not a VC) has a portfolio of 16 young biotech firms. A number of foreign VC investors have targeted Israel’s life sciences in recent years – among them NGN Capital, Onset Ventures, Schroder Ventures Life Sciences, Three Arch Partners and Ziegler Meditech Orbimed, a US firm that invests in the healthcare sector and has been active in Israel for the past decade, expanded its investment team into Israel in April 2010.

Did you know that...

2010-10-28T08:55:00.001-07:00

What we now call challah was originally a South German bread eaten on Sunday. Adopted for the Sabbath by the Jewish community, its various shapes and designs were in the local tradition of decorative breads

Sam Levenson (1911 - 1980)

2010-10-23T06:49:00.001-07:00

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.

Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.

What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.

It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'

It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it.

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.

If you die in an elevator, be sure to push the Up button.

Oy Vey

2010-10-20T04:42:00.000-07:00

This is an actual sign

Some of The Ten (or So) Commandments of The Prophet Murray.

2010-10-18T12:14:00.001-07:00

From The Book of Murray: The Life, Teachings and Kvetching of the Lost Prophet (2010), (c) David M. Bader, the author of Haikus for Jews.

1. Thou shalt not put anything in writing.
2. Thou shalt get everything in writing.
3. Floss regularly
4. Beware the dermatologist who advertises on billboards.
5. Honor thy father and thy mother, but screen thy calls.
6. Thou shalt not treat the Jewish high holidays as an opportunity to stay home and wait for the cable guy.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery on JDate.
8. Thou shalt not mess up the guest towels in the guest bathroom. Yea, not even if thou art the guest.
9. Thou shalt not Google thy symptoms and then phone thy internist at two a.m. claiming to have a terminal illness.
10. Move not to a town where a penitentiary is the main source of employment.
11. Trust not a cardiologist who chain- smokes.
12. Rebuild not thine own carburetor.
13. Take not more than three suitcases for a weekend trip.
14. Always get more than one estimate.

Terminating the contract

2010-10-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

As you are aware, the contract made between you and Abraham is up for
renewal, and this memorandum is to advise you that after, yea, those many
millenia of consideration, we've decided not to renew.

We should point out immediately that there is nothing in writing and,
contrary to popular beliefs, we have not really benefited too much from this
arrangement.

If you go back to the early years of our arrangement, it definitely started
off on the wrong footing. Not only was Israel and Judea invaded almost every
year, but we went to enormous expense to erect, not one but two, Temples and
they were both destroyed. Of course, you know all this, but we feel it's a
good thing to account for all the reasons we wish to terminate the contract.

After the Hittites, Assyrians, etc., not only were we beaten up almost
daily, but then we were sold off as slaves to Egypt (of all countries), and
really lost a few hundred years of development.

Now we realize that you went to a great deal of trouble to send Moses to
lead us out of Egypt; and those poor Egyptian buggers were smitten with all
those plagues. But, reflecting on those years, we are at a loss to
understand why it took almost 40 years to make a trip that El Al now does in
45 minutes.

Also, while not appearing to be ungrateful, Moses did lead us to the left
instead of to the right at Sinai! To the only place in the middle east
without any oil. And with water that is controlled by Jordan and Syria . Oy,
if only he had stopped to ask directions. OK, so the mineral rights were not
a part of the deal, but then the Romans came and we were really up to our
necks in dreck.

While it's true the Romans did give us water fit to drink, aqueducts, and
baths, it was very disconcerting to walk down one of the vias, look up, and
see one of your friends or family nailed to a three-by-four looking for all
the world like a sign post.

Even one of our princes, Judah ben Hur, got caught up with Roman stuff and
drove like a crazy man around the Coliseum! . It's a funny thing, but many
people swore that Ben Hur had an uncanny resemblance to Moses -- go figure.

Then, of all things, one of our most up-and-coming carpenters (he did great
work, real cheap) declared himself your son (there was nothing said like
this about Abe) and before we knew what was what, a whole new religion
sprang up. To add insult to injury, we were dispersed all over the world two
or three times while this new goy (oops, guy) really caught on. We were
truly sorry to hear that the Romans executed him like so many others, but --
and this will make you laugh -- once again we were blamed. Couldn't someone
else be chosen, maybe just once?

Now here's something we really don't understand. That guy, Jesus Christ,
really came into his own. Millions of people revered and worshiped his name
and scriptures -- and still killed us by the millions. They claimed we drank
the blood of newborn infants, controlled the world banks, operated the
world's media, etc. Are we beginning to make our point here?

So let's fast forward a few hundred years to the Crusades. Whoa Boy! Again,
we were caught in the middle. They, the Lords and Knights, came from all
over Europe to smack the Arabs and open up the holy places, but before we
knew what hit us, they were killing us along with everyone else. Every time
a King or a Pope was down in the opinion polls, they called for a Crusade or
Holy War (today they're called a Jihad), and went on a killing rampage in
our land.

So, you tested us a little here and there, but some bright cleric in Spain
came up with the Inquisition. We all thought it was a new game show, but
once again we and quite a few others were used as firewood for a whole new
street lighting arrangement in major Spanish cities. All right, that ended
after about a hundred years or so -- in the great scheme of things not a
long time.

But every time we settled down in one country or another, they kicked us
out. We wandered around a few hundred years or so, but it never changed.
Finally we settled in a few countries, but they insisted we all live in
ghettos, while the Russians came up with Pogroms.. We all thought they made
a spelling mistake and misspelled "programs," but we were dead wrong (very
dead wrong). Apparently, when there was nothing else to occupy their time,
killing Jews was the in thing to do.

Now comes the really tough noogies. We were doing quite well, thank you, in
a small European country called Germany, when some house painter wrote a
book, said a few things that caught on and became their leader. Oh boy! What
a bad day that was for us -- your Chosen People (by now, you must be getting
the drift of this e-mail?). We really didn't know where you were in the
earth years 1933 to 1945. We know everyone needs a break now and then; even
the Lord God Almighty needs some time off. But, when we needed you most, you
were never around. You are probably aware of this, but if you have
forgotten, over six million of your Chosen People, along with millions
un-chosen others were murdered in cold blood. They even made lampshades out
of our skins! Look, we don't want to dwell on the past, but it gets worse.
Here we are, it's 1948, and millions of us are displaced again, when you
really pull a fast one. We finally get our own land back! Yes, after all
these years, you arrange for us to go back. Then all the Arab countries
immediately declare war on us. We have to tell you that sometimes your sense
of humor eludes us.

So, we win all the wars, and we're now in a new century, but nothing's
changed. We keep getting blown up, hijacked and kidnapped. We have no peace
whatsoever.
Enough is enough. We hope you understand that nothing's forever (except you,
of course), and we respectfully would like to pull out of our verbal
agreement vis-à-vis being your Chosen People. Look, sometimes things work
out, sometimes they don't. Let's be friends over the next few eons and see
what happens.

Meanwhile, how about this idea? We're sure you recall that Abraham had a
whole other family from Ishmael (the ones who got the oil).
How about making them your chosen people for a few thousand years?

Respectfully yours,
The Jews

Israeli Stamps August 2010

2010-09-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

Echoes of a Shofar

2010-09-06T10:28:00.001-07:00

Hebrew Home at RIverdale Chutzpah Mission 2004

2010-08-31T05:38:00.000-07:00

Mountain Jews

2010-08-28T05:39:00.000-07:00

Russia’s great expanse stretches south from the Arctic for many thousands of miles until it comes to a halt at the long spine of the Greater Caucasus Mountains. The republics on the northern side of the Caucasus, including turbulent Dagestan and Chechnya, still belong to Russia. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, on the southern side of the mountains, gained their independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. The high slopes are home to shepherds and the descendants of clans who have long lived there. Lower down, where sleepy towns look up from valleys to the snowy peaks, bigger communities try to scratch out a living.

In one of these towns—Oguz, Azerbaijan, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Baku, the country’s oil-booming capital on the western shore of the Caspian Sea—live up to 80 Mountain Jews among a population of more than 6,000. The history of the Mountain Jews, who live mainly in Azerbaijan and the Russian republic of Dagestan is, according to members of the community, rooted about 2,500 years ago in their exodus from Israel, their gradual passage through Persia (where they picked up the Farsi-based language they still speak), and their eventual settlement in the Caucasus mountains.

Sitting in the dark-stone building that houses Baku’s Mountain Jewish synagogue, Semyon Ikhilov, the Mountain Jews’ national leader, shakes off the idea that his people might be descended from indigenous Caucasian mountain dwellers who converted to Judaism. “We’re real Jews who came out of Israel,” Ikhilov said, explaining that they acquired the moniker “Mountain Jews” because they settled in the peaks. “We were not mountain people.” And according to a recent genetic study [1] led by researchers in Israel and Estonia, Mountain Jews share a common origin in the Levantine region of the Near East with other Diaspora Jewish communities.

While once there were as many as 40,000 Jews in Azerbaijan, today there are between 8,000 and 25,000. The estimate varies widely in part because many of them live in Israel or Russia but still retain Azeri passports. Among those who remain in Oguz, many seem to practice a Judaism guided by the spirit of the religion rather than by the letter of its law. They live in a country where more than 90 percent of the population is Muslim, and the demanding rhythm of working on the Soviet-era kolkhoz, or collective farm, coupled with the atheism of the Soviet Union, may all have, over time, muted the zeal of the Jews of Oguz.

Yet push a bit further and an attachment to Judaism emerges. “Last night we lit the Shabbat candles,” says 30-year-old Gunai Iusupova, sitting in the airy dining room of her wooden-balconied Caucasian house. “We said a brucha and ate salted bread. I served up food prepared fresh for Shabbat.” The garden outside was bright with pale pink and deep red summer roses. “And that’s not just us, that’s all the Jews here in Oguz,” she adds, explaining that although they may not observe all the rules of Shabbat precisely, Friday night dinner is sacrosanct.

Standing in the hot sun outside one of the town’s two synagogues, Temur Natalinov, 54, who maintains both houses of worship, explained that he opens them every Shabbat. The men leave quickly, he said, but the women often linger.

Arranged marriages are not uncommon here, Racim Hananayev, 50, the leader of Oguz’s Jews, told me, even for those who leave the town. Hananayev’s wife, Dilbar, served a breakfast of egg, salty cheese, fresh bread, and thick homemade strawberry preserve. She offered met, a bitter, uniquely Caucasian condiment made from the green cherry plum.

Nowhere is the mix of Azeri and Jewish cultures more fascinating than in Krasnaya Sloboda, which sits across a river from Guba, famous throughout the Caucasus for its woven rugs. Just beyond the two settlements looms an imposing mountain, white and icy even in summer.

The two towns seem similar enough, though Krasnaya Sloboda looks more prosperous, full of houses with freshly painted brickwork, new windows, and new iron and lattice roofs mixed in among a few dilapidated wooden homes.

But the difference is more than surface deep. Krasnaya Sloboda is inhabited almost exclusively by Mountain Jews, between 2,000 and 5,000 of them, according to various estimates. In the mid-18th century the khan of Guba [2], Hussein, established Yevraiskaya Sloboda, literally “Jewish settlement,” as a place for Jews to live safe from attack. His son and successor, Feteli, so the story goes, decreed that if anyone came to attack the town, the Jews should light fires and he would see them from across the river and send help to defend the inhabitants.

The town, which was renamed “Krasnaya,” or “red,” in honor of the Soviet Red Army, has seen its population dwindle from its Communist-era height of 18,000. Some emigrants have gone to Israel, others to Moscow, where many are successful businessmen—hence the prosperous appearance of some buildings here—and where a few have become multi-millionaires, with their reputations becoming legendary back home. According to one Jewish local I spoke with, one of these titans “holds half of Moscow in his hands.”

Those that stay while away the hot days in an outdoor chaikhana, a typical Azeri teahouse, sucking on sugar cubes soaked in tea. Nearby, under the shade of chestnut trees, old men play nard, a traditional board game.

Iunus Davidov, a Jewish 19-year-old, explains that there was no work in the town and that in winter there is hardly a soul to be seen there. “It is hard,” he says. “And in winter it is so cold, it can fall to minus 35 degrees, and sometimes there is no gas or electricity.”

Nonetheless, Krasnaya Sloboda has three schools and two synagogues, with a third being beautifully restored, and in the summer nearly all the émigrés return to spend some time in their hometown, Davidov said.

“There is always a minyan, indeed we always have at least 50 people at prayer time,” says Boris Simanduyev, a community leader. “There has always been a rabbi from Krasnaya Sloboda, and there always will be.” On entering the town’s main synagogue, which is covered wall-to-wall in overlapping oriental rugs, we had removed our shoes, as is the custom here.

Rugs also cover the floor of the cool central room in the Yevdaev family home, where 32-year-old Sara Yevdaeva gathered leaves to stuff with meat to make dolma, food for relatives who were due to arrive from Moscow and Baku for the first anniversary of Sara’s mother-in-law’s death. Sara explains one of the customs of her community. “Whether it is here or in Moscow or elsewhere, Mountain Jews don’t allow their wives to work,” she says.

The hardships of winter make year-round life in the town impossible for Sara to imagine, but Moscow, where she lives for most of the year, has its difficulties too. The rise of extreme nationalism in Russia means Sara, who like many Mountain Jews looks much like any other person from the Caucasus, has experienced the racist abuse frequently leveled at people from Russia’s southern borderlands and beyond. The Mountain Jews all concur that, unlike in Russia, in Azerbaijan they have never experienced any prejudice.

This is all the more surprising, perhaps, in a country where international observers have documented increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and where dissent is often quashed. The current president, Ilham Aliyev, took over from his late father, Heydar, in 2003. Posters of both Aliyevs, in action and thoughtful repose, are everywhere. In 2009 the government amended the constitution to tighten [3] controls on religious groups, making all unregistered religious activity illegal. Those who received their religious education abroad, for example, are banned from leading religious activities.

The Azerbaijan State Committee for Work with Religious Associations, though, argues that the changes in the law on religion strengthen tolerance in the country. The committee’s press office explains that some religious leaders educated abroad had come under the influence of radicals who aimed to destroy Azerbaijan’s “tolerant atmosphere,” and the minister in charge of such matters has previously linked the 2009 moves on religion with combating Islamic fundamentalism—the threat of Wahhabism and of Islamic violence in the North Caucasus spilling over into Azerbaijan.

In late 2009, a Baku court jailed [4] 26 people for an August 2008 attack on a mosque in the capital, in which two people were killed. Those convicted claimed to be members of a radical Islamist group that is believed to have roots in the north Caucasian republic of Dagestan. Also in 2009, two Lebanese men were jailed in Baku for conspiring to attack [5] the Israeli embassy there. In 2007, the Azeri authorities said they had prevented [6] attacks on oil installations and the British and U.S. embassies planned by what they called a “radical Wahhabi group.”

Critics, however, suggest that the authorities are using the threat of fundamentalism to tighten the screws on religious communities and restrict free speech.

Evidently, the government perceives no threat from Azerbaijan’s Jewish communities, nor from Israel, with which it has a developing relationship. Shimon Peres’ 2009 trip to Baku was the most recent and highest-level visit by an Israeli dignitary, a move that angered [7] Iran. Azerbaijan—which is locked in an unresolved territorial conflict [8] with neighboring Armenia—buys arms from Israel, and there is an Israeli embassy in Baku. This relationship is doubtless appreciated by Azerbaijan’s Jews, who are courted by the authorities with official greetings on Rosh Hashanah and Pesach and visits to synagogue openings.

According to Alexander Murinson, an expert on Azerbaijan’s Jews and Azeri-Israeli relations, Azeri respect for the Jews is genuine and deeply rooted—in part stemming from the fact that in Soviet times, Jews, especially Ashkenazim, were well represented among the Azeri intellectual elite. Those Jews who stayed, he said, still have some leverage, with the Mountain Jews wielding power due to the strength of their trading clans.

There is also a more calculated political element to the relationship. In the early days of Azeri independence [9] the authorities deliberately reached out to the Jewish communities, realizing that they could be a magnet for the organized Jewish community in the United States, with its impressive lobbying power, said Murinson. And for a government sometimes accused of intolerance, its relationship with the Jewish minority seems to be put on display, not least by Jewish leaders, two of whom insisted to me that President Aliyev had repeatedly described the Mountain Jews as his brothers. Many foreign dignitaries visiting Azerbaijan find that Krasnaya Sloboda is on their itinerary, as what Murinson called a “showcase.” The state, by email, disagreed: The visits are not for show, a spokesman explained, but to meet its own high standards of tolerance.

In Honor of Elena Kagan

2010-08-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

To say the least, we are surprised!
Three justices are Judaized!
It seems, almost, they’re heaven-sent,
Like prophets from Old Testament!

There’s Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan! Three!
A most impressive trinity!
Each one’s a jurisprudent whiz,
These Jewish-prudent justices!

They’re forthright, geared for any fray,
From them you’ll never hear “oy vey”
Or variations likewise drear,
As in the cry “Oy vey iz mir!”

No doubt behind closed doors they’ll schmooze
(A common attribute of Jews).
Maybe they’ll group to joke and josh
And have a cordial little nosh.

Some festive Friday night, perhaps,
They’ll share a bit of wine or schnapps?
At such events, it would make sense
To practice framing arguments

For purposes of keeping sharp.
(Fit topics might be banks or TARP,
Or maybe even Roe v. Wade,
A case that still incites tirade).

No coffee-klatch or friendly tea
Could guarantee they’d all agree
On any point of legal lore:
Through verbal clash — that’s how Jews score!

(A little halvah for dessert
Is à propos and couldn’t hurt.)
In Yiddish will they sometimes speak?
Or is that language to them Greek?

As landsleit they might fraternize,
A tribal twinkle in their eyes.
They’ll quickly learn, as well befits,
Which one is Litvak, who Galitz.

Ad-Jew-dicators, they will bring
Refined Talmudic reasoning
To tasks of weighing arguments
And issuance of writs, dissents.

The Yiddish kup they will apply
To legalisms clarify.
Their quest for justice won’t be quenched!
These judges are, indeed, well benched!
(By Stanley Siegelman)

DAVE TARRAS - Chusen Kala Mazel Tov

2010-08-23T15:51:00.000-07:00

I am Israel - Yerushalayim Version

2010-08-21T08:41:00.001-07:00

Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York Circa 1940

2010-08-21T08:37:00.001-07:00

The Atkins Schmaltz Diet

2010-08-21T08:33:00.000-07:00

The Atkins Schmaltz Diet:

If you get this and you are not Jewish - I cannot even begin to explain -

T his actually goes back 2 generations - or 3 if you are under 50!

I miss it all and can't help but wonder how did my grandparents have a nonexistent cholesterol.

The Atkins Schmaltz Diet.

Before we start, there are some variations in ingredients because of the various types of Jewish taste.. (Polack, Litvack and Gallicianer).

Just as we Jews have six seasons of the year (winter, spring, summer, fall, the slack season, and the busy season), we all focus on a main ingredient which, unfortunately and undeservedly, has disappeared from our diet. I'm talking, of course, about SCHMALTZ (chicken fat).

SCHMALTZ has, for centuries, been the prime ingredient in almost every Jewish dish, and I feel it's time to revive it to its rightful place in our homes. (I have plans to distribute it in a green glass Gucci bottle with a label clearly saying: "low fat, no cholesterol, Newman's Choice, extra virgin SCHMALTZ." (It can't miss!)

Let's start, of course, with the "forshpeiz" (appetizer). Gehockteh leiber (chopped liver) with SCHMALTZ is always good, but how about something more exotic for your dear ones, like boiled whitefish in yoyech (soup) which sets into a jelly form, or "gefilteh miltz" (stuffed spleen), in which the veins are removed (thank God), and it is fried in (you guessed it) SCHMALTZ, bread crumbs, eggs, onions, salt and pepper..

Love it! How about stewed lingen (lungs) -- very chewy -- or gehenen (brains) -- very slimy. Am I making your mouth water yet?

Then there are (grebenes -- pieces of chicken skin, deep fried in SCHMALTZ, onions and salt until crispy brown (Jewish bacon).

This makes a great appetizer for the next cardiologist's convention.

Another favorite, and I'm sure your children will love it, is pe'tcha (jellied calves' feet). Simply chop up some cows' feet with your hockmesser (handl-chopper), add some meat, onions, lots of garlic, SCHMALTZ again, salt and pepper, cook for five hours and let it sit over night. You might want to serve it with oat bran and bananas for an interesting breakfast (just joking!).

There's also a nice chicken fricassee (stew) using the heart, gorgle (neck), pipick (a great delicacy, given to the favorite child, usually me), a fleegle (wing) or two, some ayelech (little premature eggs) and other various chicken innards, in a broth of SCHMALTZ, water, paprika, etc..

We also have knishes (filled dough) and the eternal question, "Will that be liver, beef or potatoes, or all three?"

Other time-tested favorites are kishkeh, and its poor cousin, helzel (chicken or goose neck). Kishkeh is the gut of the cow, bought by the foot at the Kosher butcher.. It is turned inside out, scalded and scraped. One end is sewn up and a mixture of flour, SCHMALTZ, onions, eggs, salt, pepper, etc., is spooned into the open end and squished down until it is full. The other end is sewn and the whole thing is boiled. Yummy!

My personal all-time favorite is watching my Zaida (grandpa) munch on boiled chicken feet. Try that on the kinderlach (children) tomorrow.

For our next course we always had chicken soup with pieces of yellow-white, rubbery chicken skin floating in a greasy sea of lokshen (noodles), farfel (broken bits of matzah), arbiss (chickpeas), lima beans, pietrishkeh, tzibbeles (onions), mondlech (soup nuts), kneidlach(dumplings), kasha, (groats) kliskelech and marech (marrow bones)

The main course, as I recall, was either boiled chicken, flanken, kackletten (hockfleish--chopped meat), and sometimes rib steaks, which were served either well done, burned or cremated.

Occasionally we had barbecued liver done to a burned and hardened perfection in our own coal furnace.

Since we couldn't have milk with our meat meals, beverages consisted of cheap soda (Kik, Dominion Dry, seltzer in the spritz bottles) or glezel tay (glass of hot tea) served in a yahrtzeit (memorial candle) glass and sucked through a sugar cube held between the incisors.

Desserts were probably the only things not made with SCHMALTZ, so we never had any Momma never learned how to make SCHMALTZ Jell-O.

Well, now you know the secret of how I've grown up to be so tall, sinewy, slim and trim, energetic, extremely clever and modest, and if you want your children to grow up to be like me, you're a gohnsen meshuggah (completely nuts)!

ZEIT MIR GEZUNT. (go in good health).... and order out Chinese.

Lowly Spirit

2010-08-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

A musical interpretation of a poem by Shlomo ibn Gabirol (ca. 1021-ca.1058).

With All My Heart

2010-08-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

devotional poem by Yehuda Halevi (ca. 1075-1141) set to music and sung.

Shlock Rock 2010 Mizmor Ledovid

2010-08-13T19:38:00.001-07:00

Shlock Rock 2010 Shalom Aleichem

2010-08-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

Synagogues around the world

2010-08-11T02:10:00.000-07:00

The man from Vilna

2010-08-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

Kaddish

2010-08-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Time-Travelers From a Golden Age

2010-08-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

Time-Travelers From a Golden Age
'Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners 1905-1953,' a 3-CD set of U.S. recordings, brings the past to vivid life

By NAT HENTOFF

Two intertwining traditions of music—jazz and Jewish—became part of my life in early childhood. Hearing a cantor, or hazan, in passionate dialogue with God on the human condition at an Orthodox synagogue during the High Holidays in 1932 when I was 7 set me on fire. A couple of years later at a Jewish wedding, I was nearly lifted into the dancing by a rollicking klezmer band, especially by its swinging, playful clarinetist.

Molly Picon, a musical star of the Yiddish stage and screen, is one of the performers in this collection.

During a break in the music, the clarinetist, noting my awe as I looked at him, leaned over, winked, and said: "Where do you think Benny Goodman came from?"

But it was Artie Shaw, not Benny, who hurled me into jazz when, at 11, I heard his "Nightmare." Years after, I learned that "Nightmare" was based on a cantorial nigun, or wordless melody, and I understand why Artie, in his retrospective "Self Portrait" (RCA Victor/Bluebird), said: "Certainly, I can't deny the influence of my Russian-Jewish ancestry."

In the early 1950s, because Artie had led me to Duke Ellington, the blues and Count Basie, I became New York editor of Down Beat. My first working visit was to Birdland ("the jazz center of the world," as it advertised itself). But my next was a pilgrimage to the Lower East Side to hear the legendary—at least to Jewish musicians—clarinetist Dave Tarras.

Still part of both worlds, I have many books on the musical and social history of jazz, including discographies. But until now I've owned nothing of substance on the nearly 6,000 Yiddish or Hebrew recordings released in the U.S. between 1898 and 1942, and especially the golden age of Yiddish 78s from 1905 to 1953.

At last, though, from Klezmer clarinetist Sherry Mayrent's collection of Yiddish 78s—as far as I know the largest in the world—there now comes a gloriously wide-ranging compilation from those golden years: "Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners 1905-1953" (JASP Records, available on Amazon.com). There are 67 tracks in this three-CD set, including 42 never before reissued. Because of the extraordinary skills of engineer Christopher King, all of them bring you into the very presence of these carriers of the Yiddish ethos. At home in the Boston ghetto, I had grown up with a few of these, but they didn't sound as if the performers were actually in the room with me. They do now.

As a Jewish kid growing up in then virulently anti-Semitic Boston—a place where Henry Brooks Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, could say without censure that "snarling a weird Yiddish . . . the Jew makes me creep"—I got a kick out of defiantly playing this music at a proud volume.

But as the years went on, these American Jewish recordings from that era became hard to find. Ms. Mayrent amassed her collection—now at 5,000 records and still growing—from collectors in America, Canada, Israel, South America, Russia and other countries with transplanted Jews. In her introduction to the CD set, she describes why they became so rare: "Archives did have rudimentary catalogs, but they restricted access to individuals demonstrating some serious academic purpose, and either did not permit copying the discs or charged extremely high per-side fees."

Until now, I had no idea of the range and the striking individuality of these Yiddish stage singers, actors, cantors, comics and instrumentalists. For one example, in my youth women had to sit in the balcony of Orthodox synagogues, and the notion of a woman cantor was inconceivable to me. Yet several powerful female cantors from back then are included here.

The producer of this set, copies of which I intend to give to my children and grandchildren, is Henry Sapoznik, whom I've known for years as a scholar of klezmer music. He will soon head the new Mayrent Institute of Yiddish Culture to be located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He wrote the notes for each track from his fount of historical and anecdotal knowledge of Yiddish culture and history.

Among the vivid time-travelers of this cast is cantor Berle Chagy, born in Latvia in 1892, who came to America around 1909 to avoid army conscription, as my father had from the Old Country some years later. For Jews, the army was worse than the ghetto. As Mr. Sapoznik notes, "Chagy displays a powerful lyrical tenor and a breathtakingly ethereal falsetto rendered with spectacular and seamless abandon." Hearing him I was back in shul, next to my father.

And from 1915 there is the first klezmer ensemble to record in America, Elenkrig's Yiddishe Orchestra playing the spirited "The Rabbi's Melody" from the Hasidic vocal tradition. I hope Mr. Sapoznik will unearth a set of such joyously melodic Hasidic religious services. Elie Wiesel has called the Hasidic sages "souls of fire," like their music.

Soon after moving to New York in 1953, I went to Second Avenue, where Yiddish theater flourished, to see a musical star of that genre, Molly Picon. Here she is, "petite and pixieish" as Mr. Sapoznik describes her, singing "Katya, laughs at the world and goes her own way."

I'm also glad to be introduced to comic and actor Fyvush Finkel ("Picket Fences," "Boston Public") singing "Ich Bin a Boarder Ba Mein Weib" ("I Board at My Wife's"), which for years was a favorite Jewish song, particularly among some husbands for his recipe for a tranquil marriage. A typical lyric: "What an improvement in our lives. No more problems, never harried. We are happily unmarried. I am a boarder at my wife's."

For zestful Yiddish swing, there is Abe Schwartz. Born in Romania, he came here in 1899, and formed a band with "swooping trombones, staccato banjo," and a powerful front line of fiddler Schwartz and the magical clarinetist I yearned to be, Dave Tarras.

Dark Yiddish memories are memorialized by cantor David Roitman in "The Trumpet Has Sounded," based on a poem attributed to the 11th-century Rabbi Ammon of Mainz. Despite being under continued pressure to convert, this rabbi refused and "was arrested, his hands and feet severed," writes Mr. Sapoznick. Mortally wounded though he was, Rabbi Ammon "asked to be carried to the synagogue after extemporaneously reciting this prayer" that was later set to music.

That reminded me of my mother's story of being a child in the Old Country, which could have been put to music. One day her mother heard the Cossacks were coming and popped her daughter into the oven. Fortunately it was not lit.

In one of the rarest of all Yiddish recordings, Sholom Aleichem speaks a few lines from his "If I Were Rothschild" during a 1915 test recording at a Victor studio. When he stopped, the engineer called out "Is that all you got?" and the recording was never issued. When Aleichem died 10 months later, 500,000 people attended his funeral. On that day in the studio, he said that if he were a Rothschild, "First I'd give my wife a three-ruble note so that when it comes time to shop for Shabbos, she'll have the note in her pocket and won't have to bother me." But he'd also "Buy this house, and give her everything from the cellar to the attic." He wasn't just a boarder.

On "Tartar Dance," the first track of this recovery of Yiddish resilience in music and life, another clarinetist, Naftule Brandwein—"If he didn't exist, he would have had to be invented," says Mr. Sapoznik—exults in being descended from a line of Hasidic rabbis. "Even at the end of his life when he was playing in Catskill hotels," Mr. Sapoznik admiringly and candidly tells us, "a drunken Brandwein was reported to have been "'propped up in a chair and blowing like crazy.'"

In my neighborhood when I was a boy, I often heard: "Schwer being a Yid" ("Hard being a Jew"). Not always.
—Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal.

Hava Nagila as interpreted in Russia

2010-08-06T14:35:00.001-07:00

Jews Don't Camp!

2010-08-04T09:54:00.001-07:00

Here are the lyrics-----
I was packin' my gear after a festival appearance
The show had gone real good.
When a bunch of people with a kind of earthy smell
Said "We're stayin' out in these woods,"
They said, "We'd like you to join us, got plenty of room
We got a nice big tent and there's a big full moon,"
Well I stood upwind and said the only thing that I could...

I had to tell 'em...

Jews Don't Camp,
If it hasn't got a lobby I don't want it for a hobby
It's cold and damp,
Let me give you the news,
Jews Don't Camp.

Well now it's really quite simple, a part of my tradition
Taught to me in my youth
After forty years in the desert the eleventh commandment says
Go to bed under a roof.
I'm pretty certain I could live without real bear hugs,
Ain't keen to be cuisine for half a million bugs
And ten times out of ten I pick bagels over berries and roots.

That's why I gotta say...

Jews Don't Camp,
If it hasn't got a kitchen and it isn't air conditioned, where's the
Exit ramp, get my walkin' shoes, cause
Jews Don't camp.

If I was a Gentile
I would love to fish and hunt and get my water from a stream
But until there's seltzer in the brook
Or maybe a nice egg cream... hey!

Jews Don't Camp
Using leaves instead of Charmin may be fine if you're Mormon, but I'm
Not that stamp, so I gotta refuse, but
Jews Don't Camp ... la la la. oy la la la

If you're sleeping bag is tiltin' you can find me at the Hilton, cause
Jews Don't Camp
If you're tired of the diet come and meet me at the Hyatt, babe
Jews Don't Camp
When you sit down to a seder no one there is wearing waders, no
Jews Don't Camp
I got a giant television, it's a perk of circumcision, 'cause
Jews Don't Camp

Jewish State of Mind

2010-08-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

In case you aint no rapper-----Here be de lyrics-----

LYRICS:

No matta the time of day, no matter the weather,
I'd have it no other way, I'll be Jew fo eva,
No I ain't a Rabbi, but I rock a yarmulke,
And every December that's when I celebrate Hannukah
Hannukah's the bombest, don't wanna create fights,
But instead of celebratin 1, we go 8 nights,
That's the holiday when, I light the menorah,
With my fam', singin as we all dance the horah,
I eat that pastrami, on a roll or rye bread,
You can tell I'm Jewish by the dark hair up on my head,
I drink Manischewitz wine, like it ain't nothin,
But before I take a sip, boray peri hagafen,
And before I walk through front doors I check if,
I see a mezuzah i give it a little kiss,
Yeah I keep it kosher, No it ain't hard to see
Tell by my Seder dish , that I most definitely

Don't eat pork, but I eat that potato knish,
And that gefilte fish, I can't consume pork,
My Mother really wants me to, marry another jew
Who can't consume pork, 'sume pork, 'sume pork

Watch me when I'm bored, I'm madd skilled with a dreidel,
Or see me servin' matzoh ball soup with a ladle,
I had a Bar Mitzvah, that's when I became a man,
Biggest moment of my life was nervous when that day began,
My dad's an accountant, that means he's his own boss,
And he likes his potato latkes dipped in apple sauce,
Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Purim, I have a blast,
But on Yom Kippur, it's the worst, cause i gotta fast,
Rock a Star of Savid, and I feel so alive,
Wear it on the Sabbath on the day that I cannot drive,
When I sit down for dinner, I don't wanna risk it,
So I close my eyes, look to skies, and I pray for brisket,
With a side of Matzoh, I love it but don't know why,
It tastes just like cardboard, and it is totally dry,
But one thing that tastes good, is what we Jews call gelt,
Keep some in my pocket, hope that they don't all melt.

I don't eat pork, but i eat that potato knish,
And that gefilte fish, I can't consume pork,
My Mother really wants me to, marry another jew,
Who can't consume pork, 'sume pork, 'sume pork

Challah.

Paris Yiddish dance flashmob

2010-07-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

We've got a strong desire

2010-07-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

FRANK SINATRA'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE JEWS

2010-07-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

Francis Albert Sinatra (1915-1998) may have been one of America 's most famous Italian Catholics, but he kept the Jewish people and the State of Israel close to his heart, manifesting life-long commitments to fighting anti-Semitism and to activism on behalf of Israel. Sinatra stepped forward in the early 1940's, when big names were needed to rouse America into saving Europe's remaining Jews, and he sang at an "Action for Palestine" rally (1947). He sat on the board of trustees of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ; and he donated over $1 million to Jerusalem's Hebrew University, which honored him by dedicating the Frank Sinatra International Student Center . (The Center made heartbreaking headlines when terrorists bombed it in 2002, killing nine people.) As the result of his support for the Jewish State, his movies and records were banned in some Arab countries.
Sinatra helped Teddy Kollek, later the long-serving mayor of Jerusalem but then a member of the Haganah, by serving as a $1 million money-runner that helped Israel win the war.

The Copacabana Club, which was very much run and controlled by the same Luciano-related New York mafia crowd with whom Sinatra had become enmeshed, happened to be next door to the hotel out of which Haganah members were operating. In his autobiography, Kollek relates how, trying in March 1948 to circumvent an arms boycott imposed by President Harry Truman on the Jewish fighters in Eretz Yisroel, he needed to smuggle about $1 million in cash to an Irish ship captain docked in the Port of New York . The young Kollek spotted Sinatra at the bar and, afraid of being intercepted by federal agents, asked for help. In the early hours of the morning, the singer went out the back door with the money in a paper bag and successfully delivered it to the pier.

The origins of Sinatra's love affair with the Jewish people are not clear but, for years, the Hollywood icon wore a small mezuzah around his neck, a gift from Mrs. Golden, an elderly Jewish neighbor who cared for him during his boyhood in Hoboken, N.J. (years later, he honored her by purchasing a quarter million dollars' worth of Israel bonds). He protected his Jewish friends, once responding to an anti-Semitic remark at a party by simply punching the offender. Time magazine reported that Sinatra walked out on the christening of his own son when the priest refused to allow a Jewish friend to be the godfather. As late as 1979, he raged over the fact that a Palm Springs cemetery official in California declared that he could not arrange the burial of a deceased Jewish friend over the Thanksgiving holiday; Sinatra again -- threatened to punch him in the nose.

Sinatra famously played the role of a Jewish pilot in Cast a Giant Shadow, the 1966 film filmed in Israel and starring friend Kirk Douglas as Mickey Marcus, the Jewish-American colonel who fought and died in Israel's war for independence (Sinatra dive-bombs Egyptian tanks with seltzer bottles!) He donated his salary for the part to the Arab-Israeli Youth Center in Nazareth , and he also made a significant contribution to the making of Genocide, a film about the Holocaust, and helped raise funds for the film. Less known is Sinatra in Israel (1962), a short 45-minute featurette he made in which he sang In the Still of the Night and Without a Song. He also starred in The House I Live In (1945), a ten-minute short film made to oppose anti-Semitism at the end of World War II, which received an Honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe award in 1946.

Still game for change

2010-07-19T06:07:00.000-07:00

A conversation with Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Robert Aumann, who just celebrated his 80th birthday and believes his theories of rationality can explain Israel's ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. He's ready to share the land, he says, but unnecessary concessions reflect weakness
By Sami Peretz

Prof. Robert Aumann is sitting in his office at the Center for the Study of Rationality on the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Every floor of the building is adorned with large posters featuring Aumann's photograph. The text on the posters reveals the reason for the hoopla: Aumann, co-winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics, has just celebrated his 80th birthday.

Five years ago he shared the Nobel with American economist Thomas Schelling, for using game-theory analysis "to explain economic conflicts such as price wars and trade wars, as well as why some communities are more successful than others in managing common-pool resources," and to clarify "the raison d'etre of many institutions, ranging from merchant guilds and organized crime to wage negotiations and international trade agreements," according to the Nobel academy.

Today, in his small, modest and messy room, there is no trace of excitement. His desk is covered with piles of documents. On one wall is a board on which dozens of mathematical formulas have been written with markers. On the opposite wall is Aumann's main source of pride: the "family tree" of 14 Ph.D.-holders whom he supervised directly, as well as all 100 of the doctorate-holders - "the grandchildren and great-grandchildren" - his students have trained.

Prof. Aumann, are you in fact a rationalist?

"Rationality is behavior that advances your goals. Maybe it is a bit egoistic and maybe it isn't. The shahids [martyrs in the name of Islam], or - not to suggest that they are in any way comparable - Maj. Roi Klein, of blessed memory, who threw himself onto a grenade to prevent harm to his soldiers, sacrificed their lives, but they are rational. Everyone has a goal and he wants to advance it. A goal is a goal; you can't categorize it as rational or not. Rationality relates to the question of whether the action you are taking advances the goal or not - that is, whether you are using your head in order to advance your goal."

In the interest of advancing my goal I could lie to you, threaten you or trick you. Is that still rational?

"Rationality is not morality. It is not something nice. It is like intelligence, which isn't especially beautiful. It might be a gift from God, a gift from genes or from the environment or perhaps a gift from yourself, but it is not something especially worthy of praise. The question is what you do with it. You can do ugly things in the interest of achieving the goals. This is something I call 'perpendicular to morality': It is not moral and it is not immoral."

And do you feel you always act out of rationality? Are you always rational with your children and your wife?

"I don't act out of rationality. The fact that it is your field of research doesn't mean you yourself are rational. For example, I don't always like to learn new things. I hate technology. I go crazy when they change the computer program and make improvements, because I have to invest in learning the new program. I can waste a lot of time on things the new program could have solved. I am shortsighted in this respect. Instead of investing half an hour or an hour in learning, I say: 'To hell with it, I'll do it with the old program.' This isn't smart or rational. Rationality and game theory aren't relevant to everything.

"I don't 'calculate' what I do with my wife, my children and my grandchildren. That I do out of love. There is a lovely verse we say twice a day: 'And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy might.' About this verse, from the Va'ethanan portion of Deuteronomy [3-7], Rashi says that it is necessary to serve the Holy One, blessed be He out of love and not out of fear. If you serve out of fear and that's rational and that annoys you - you will leave him. If it is out of love, you will not leave him. The love for my children and my wife and my relatives and Talia my secretary isn't in order to get a reward. And it isn't out of fear."
The next crisis

Prof. Aumann's rationalist approach has led him to a sharp and clear view of the government-sponsored economic rescue plans implemented in the American and European banking systems during the past two years, for auto manufacturers in the United States, and in the current attempts in the eurozone to rescue Greece. His position is unambiguous: States must not rescue banks, auto-makers or Greece. The reason: By rescuing organizations that have failed, we are only inviting the next crisis.

"The rescue plans are causing inflation because they entail printing money, and in that way they are causing the next crisis. Additionally, there could be a domino effect - if one organization rescues another, in the end, the rescuer will also need to be rescued. This causes a moral hazard. These are undesirable incentives that will accelerate the arrival of the next crisis and in the end it will cheapen the currency."

I accept that rationale, but if you don't rescue the banking system, and it collapses, the public of depositors will be badly hurt. So how does one balance the rationale and the practice?

"I don't accept the claim that the banking system would collapse. This is something people say, but it isn't correct."

So what should governments do when they see that the banking system is falling apart? Sit and do nothing?

"I didn't say it isn't necessary to intervene. There are other things that can be done: It's possible to reduce certain taxes; it's possible to build infrastructure; it's possible to encourage the economy in various ways. But if you have assembled a rescue plan, it means in effect that [institutions] can act in an irresponsible way and nothing bad will happen to them. Banks go bankrupt all the time. In the United States there are lots of banks that go bankrupt, and there is deposit insurance that covers up to a certain sum. [But] the governments have rescued the banks, not the savers. They have rescued the auto companies."

Let's take your rational approach to another area. Look at what has happened to Israel in the wake of the Turkish flotilla affair. The state had a goal to which it stuck: to stop the ships from reaching Gaza. The goal was achieved but at a high price, including a significant worsening of Israel's international relations and condemnation from all sides. Is that rational?

"In game theory, there is the paradox of the extortionist. Someone offers Reuven and Shimon NIS 1,000 together, if they can manage to agree on the question of how to split the money between them. Reuven says to Shimon: 'Great, let's split it half and half.' Shimon says: 'No. I am not leaving here with less than NIS 900. You will get 100. Take it or leave it.' Reuven says to him: 'Be rational. What is the difference between us? Why should you get more?' Shimon says: 'Rational or not, do what you want. Either I leave here with 900 or with nothing. You decide.'

"Reuven thinks and says: 'Okay, NIS 100 is money nevertheless. What am I going to do with this irrational mule? I myself am rational and I will take the 100. I need to advance my goal of getting as much money as possible, and my choice is between zero and 100. One hundred is still something.'

"What is the paradox? That the irrational person gets more than the rational person. Each needs to decide whether he wants to insist on what he is asking for, or is prepared to compromise. In order to persuade Shimon not to give in, Reuven first has to convince himself. Without willingness to concede, he will not succeed in persuading [anyone else].

"Twenty years ago, a brigadier general came here, maybe a major general, who didn't identify himself. He wanted to talk to me about the negotiations with Syria. He said to me: 'You know, Prof. Aumann, the Syrians will not give up a single centimeter of land and the reason is that the land is holy for them. Therefore, they will not concede.' Then I told him about the extortionist. I said to him: 'The Syrians have succeeded in convincing you because first they convinced themselves.'
'Nothing sacred'

"What is our problem? That nothing is holy. We don't manage to convince ourselves that anything is sacred. Not Jerusalem, not the right of return, not even Tel Aviv. We will be prepared to negotiate, and in the end even to give up Tel Aviv. We are rational as can be, and that's our problem. You can say of me that I am a crazy religious nut who talks about holiness, but I am not talking about faith and the Holy One, blessed be He.

"In the end we will sanctify life abroad, and maybe they will be prepared to give us that. There isn't anything that we can convince the other side is sacred to us, that we're willing to 'be killed for it, rather than transgress.' If there were something like that, then we wouldn't be in the situation we are in today.

"That is what I have to say about the flotilla. We give in all the time. What led to the flotilla? The expulsion from Gush Katif [the Jewish settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip]. This led to the Second Lebanon War, to three years of bombardment of the south and to Operation Cast Lead - and that led to the flotilla."

So in your view, should the government not have considered any possibility other than stopping the flotilla?

"The decision makers have to relate to additional considerations, but they aren't considering this in the right way. I think it is wrong to prevent those ships from entering Gaza. If you have given Gaza to the Arabs, then why impose a blockade on it? But if we do decide to stop the flotilla, we have to tell the Turks we are cutting off relations with them, that we are recalling our ambassador from Ankara and prohibiting Israeli citizens from visiting Turkey. This isn't a declaration of war, but it is the taking of harsh steps. And there won't be any committee of investigation... and if you send another ship we will not come with paint in our rifles, but rather with 1,000 men and real bullets in the rifles. That's the way we will get respect.

"When did we get a lot of respect? When we bombed the reactor in Iraq, in Operation Entebbe, in the Six-Day War. Gestures don't bring respect, but rather scorn, not just here but everywhere in the world because that's human nature. Anyone who remembers the expulsion from Gush Katif relates to it with a shrug: 'You expelled your own people.' We didn't get points because of the expulsion."

In your way of thinking, is there no room for gestures or a middle ground?

"I am not saying the whole land is ours and that it is impossible to partition it. It is possible somehow to share. But to say that we have no right, that we are the problem? The whole business, after all, didn't start in 1967. In 1948, Kfar Darom [in the Gush Katif bloc] was already in our hands. Why did they have to expel the people?

"If we don't understand that we have a right here and we keep apologizing for the occupation all the time, we will not survive here. If I don't convince myself of the justice of my path, that I deserve and I have a place, I will end up without anything. You can't isolate the incident: The flotilla was caused by the expulsion from Gush Katif and by post-Zionism. If we don't know what we are doing here, let's leave.

"This is game theory: You need a goal and if you are prepared to pay the price, you will not need to pay [in the end]. If you are ready for war, you will not need to fight. If you cry 'peace, peace,' you will end up fighting. What was the greatest failure of World War II? They wanted to wage a war in which they didn't want to kill and didn't want to get killed. In a war people kill and get killed and you have to be prepared for that."

Are the so-called proximity talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas doomed to failure?

"The talks can help if two rational bodies participate in them, not when one is an extortionist. The proximity talks aren't being conducted with the right side. It is necessary to talk with Hamas. Why are they conducting talks with someone who has no power? What is that worth? Abu Mazen is prepared to conduct proximity talks, and therefore we are talking only with him? I am not in favor of proximity talks in general, but if you're having them already, then they should be with someone who has something to say."
In Livni's place

Do your colleagues at the Center for the Study of Rationality think the way you do? Ostensibly, if you are presenting a rational outlook here, then your colleagues should hold the same views.

"Some of my colleagues think the way I do and some don't. People aren't prepared to accept these conclusions because of their political leanings."

And don't you draw your conclusions from your political leanings?

"I at least draw my conclusions from the profession. They don't do that."

Israel used quite a lot of force in Operation Cast Lead and paid a high price, so much so that former foreign minister Tzipi Livni is liable to be arrested if she enters Britain. There is a price to your uncompromising approach.

"I think in her place I would go to Britain and ask to be put in jail. Admittedly, it's easy for me to say so."

What's rational about that?

"It will look like we are willing to fight not only with bullets but also in the courts for our most elementary right."

You said that at home you aren't necessarily rational. I assume that if your son didn't want to clean up his room, you didn't take such a tough line, but rather found more pragmatic methods. Why is it that the state is forbidden to be pragmatic and has to stick to a rational line that is costing us a high price?

"My son isn't going to shoot me if I tell him to tidy his room. It is possible to be pragmatic, but what we are doing is the opposite of pragmatic. After all, it isn't working. People think concessions bring peace closer, but they just bring war. Let us learn from this!

"I want peace, but that's not how you get peace. Do you know who the world champions were when it came to peace? The Romans. I don't like the Romans especially. They burned down the Temple, and in Judaism, they are the embodiment of evil. But they knew how to make peace, and for that they deserve credit. They achieved peace by saying, 'If you want peace, prepare for war.'"

"What brings war is that you signal weakness and concessions and ultimately you aren't ready to leave Tel Aviv, and in the end there will be war and in much worse circumstances. We were guilty in Operation Cast Lead because we showed signs of weakness. We should have reacted at the first mortar shell.

"Prof. Sergiu Hart [of the Hebrew University], a student of mine and one of the greatest economists in the world, suggested setting up an immediate automatic system that wouldn't even be operated by humans. When a shell is fired into Israel, within half an hour a shell would be fired back at the place from which it came. You tell the people there they have half an hour to leave. We sat quietly for two years and didn't do anything. We gave them to understand we would sit quietly for another two years. If gestures could bring peace, I would understand the left. Let's try something else. We've been fighting like this for 90 years now."

Let's get back to economics. You believe executives shouldn't be compensated with options, but only by means of shares so they will be a partner to the risk and the risk of change in the shares' value. Are you opposed to placing other restrictions on executive pay?

"Swinishness doesn't bother me. What I need is for things to be good for me, but if someone else has 1,000 times more [money or other things], good for him. I don't need more material things. That is socialism's big mistake. I heard the governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, at a luncheon at the university for recipients of honorary doctorates, and he said one of Israel's aims is to overcome the social gaps. I think every person should have a good life, but if someone has 1,000 times more of something than another person, what do I care? The utility decreases. Someone who has half a million dollars a year - how much better can it be for him?"

And what about the discoveries of natural gas offshore? Do you have no problem with the idea that the profits will go into a limited number of pockets?

"The argument against giving the franchise for the natural gas to a single company or person is correct. If that were the best way to deal with this asset, then I wouldn't care if Yitzhak Tshuva were the owner of it. [But] what can he do with $100 billion? I know what the state can do with it. I think this has to be corrected.

"However, I also understand the developers' argument that agreements were made. I haven't studied this thoroughly. I can't go into everything. Every day someone gets in touch with me about an injustice somewhere. What do they want from me? I did get a Nobel Prize, but I can't lend my name to everything."

Executive pay is closely connected to the low level of competition in some major sectors of the economy. Do you think symmetry should be created between the consumers' degree of freedom in a certain sector and the degree of freedom in determining executive pay in that sector?

"The market needs to be freed up. The country is small, but it is big enough for the markets to be much freer than they are. One of the questions I was asked after I was awarded the Nobel Prize was why the Israeli economy is a wreck. I said: 'I don't understand much about economics, but my economist friends say the Israeli economy isn't a wreck, but rather is doing very well.' That was close to Netanyahu's resignation as finance minister. When I said I didn't understand much about economics everyone burst out laughing, but the bitter truth is that I don't. I understand economic theory. What I am saying about executive pay is correct when you're talking about a free market.

"I have a suspicion that the Antitrust Law helps to create monopolies more than it helps to prevent them ... There is market failure because the market is not free, and what's needed is to pay a lot more attention making it free.

"It's possible to do this in a number of ways. It's possible to give the Antitrust Law teeth and to enforce it, and it's possible to become part of the world, which will be an open market for investments, and for us to be part of the global market. Limiting executive pay will lead to other distortions because they will play tricks in all kinds of other ways. Pay has to be structured correctly. The most important thing is free competition. In the end, all incentives have to lead to free competition, and not to a free market.

"What does a free market mean? That you can do whatever you want except kill. And that is not right. This is because in order to achieve the good of every individual - of the collective, of all the citizens - it's necessary not only for the individual to be able to do what he wants within accepted limitations, with transparency and honesty. It is also necessary that there be competition."
Rashbam on competition

At this point, Aumann goes over to the bookcase in his office and takes out a volume of the Talmud, Tractate Bava Batra, and reads a commentary of the Rashbam (Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, the grandson of Maimonides ) on prices and competition.

"The Rashbam lived in the 12th century, and he said there is no need to supervise prices, but only measures and weights. Why? Because there will always be someone who will come along and offer a lower price, and therefore there is no need for price controls. Weights and measures [however] need to be supervised. The meaning of this is that regulation has to enforce honesty, fairness and transparency, but not prices."

But isn't this true only in a situation in which there are enough competitors in a competitive industry?

"Definitely. This is on condition that there are several producers and the consumer has an alternative. This is lacking in Israel and it could be that is our mistake. The Rashbam understood this before everyone else, including economist Adam Smith. One of the problems in Israel is that everyone knows everyone else and everyone was together in the army, and this leads to 'unfree' competition. Nowadays fewer people are serving in the army, so maybe this will correct itself. One of the problems with regulation is that its aim is to help the inspectors and not those it is supposed to protect. The relationship between the regulator and the companies under supervision is too friendly. Therefore regulation has to be minimized."

But isn't regulation there to deal with the problem of centralization and low competition?

"I am a theoretician, and I mingle with economists, and it really seems there is too much centralization. More important than centralization, there is too much cartelization. It seems to me we aren't up to the criteria of the United States. There too, not everything is kosher. The government of the United States sued Microsoft on the grounds that it violated antitrust laws, and then it cancelled the suit - and that is a scandal. They flex muscles and that isn't right. It is necessary to aspire to competition, to prohibit cartels - and that doesn't happen here. Among the banks in the United States, you see more variance and differences. Here all of them take the same fees and that isn't right. That's exactly what the Rashbam said - and it isn't being done."

Only Israel - by Yedida Freilich

2010-07-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

The Three Stooges

2010-07-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

Three Jewish boys create a cycle of timeless stupidity.
By Saul Austerlitz

*

Finding endless amusement in the brutal simplicity of no-frills slapstick, the Three Stooges are, depending on who you ask, the premier practitioners of physical comedy of their era, or the epitome of brain-dead foolishness. Whichever side of the argument you fall on, there can be little doubt that their consistency is nothing less than astonishing. The Three Stooges--Moe (Moses Horowitz), Larry (Larry Feinberg), and Curly (Jerome Horowitz), occasionally joined by Shemp (Samuel Horowitz)--were a film and television sensation for more than three decades in the mid-20th century.
The First Stooges

The Horowitz brothers, Moe, Curly, and Shemp, were born to a moderately prosperous Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn. Their mother Jennie was a successful real-estate agent, although she could barely speak English, and their father Solomon was a fabric cutter. Samuel was born in 1895, Moses in 1897, and Jerome, the youngest, was born in 1903. By the time Moe was in his early twenties, he was a regular on stage, appearing with the Marguerite Bryant Players, a theatre troupe in Pennsylvania. Shemp, meanwhile, had steady work in vaudeville.
The Three Stooges
Moe and Shemp shot a number of short sports-themed comedies with Hall of Fame baseball player Honus Wagner in 1919 before encountering old friend Larry Fine (nee Feinberg), who had been scratching out a living in show business as well. Moe, Shemp, and Larry were hired by comedian Ted Healy in the early 1920s, to play his sidekicks. Healy was the comedian, the main act, and Moe, Shemp, and Larry were his stooges--audience plants plucked from the crowd to play along with Healy’s carefully planned routines. Healy offered them each only $100 or $150 a week, though he was raking in nearly $2,000 a week.

Shemp left the Three Stooges, as they came to be called, in the early 1930s, and Moe, the unquestioned lead Stooge, brought in his younger brother Curly as the new third member.
In the Movies

After a triumphant performance in front of a crowd of studio executives, the Stooges signed with MGM in 1933 to produce short films with Healy. The self-consciously classy studio did not fit well with the defiantly lowbrow Three Stooges. After Healy ditched his sidekicks in 1934, believing them to be holding him back from greater successes, the Stooges signed with Columbia, then considered the crassest of the major film studios. There they would rocket to success.

The Stooges’ film routines were mostly slapstick, preferring hitting to discussing, and they used soundtrack as both amplifier and audience guides. Exaggerated sounds--ukuleles, twittering birds, and ringing bells--permitted audiences to laugh at punches, counter-punches, and bonks on the head that might otherwise have seemed excessive.

Not everyone found their comedy palatable. Audiences used to more refined comedy have struggled to understand the appeal of the relentlessly violent Stooges shtick. Even their mother failed to grasp her sons’ routines. Seeing one of their original shorts in a movie theater, she grew so riled up at the beatings Healy was dishing out that she began waving an umbrella at the screen and shouting curses in Yiddish at the evildoer who was clobbering her boys.
three stooges
The Three Stooges rarely made much of their Jewish heritage. All three Horowitz brothers changed their last names to Howard and employed a mostly physical brand of comedy that did little to disclose their roots. If you look closely, though, you can see the violence that energizes their work as an expression of immigrant familial love, doled out in pokes and prods rather than hugs and kisses. As working stiffs forever outsmarting and outhustling a world of fatally incompetent bluebloods, the Stooges’ antics were symbolic of their own triumphant brand of unapologetically blue-collar comedy.
Undercover Brothers

One of the few times the Stooges acknowledged their religious roots onscreen was in perhaps their most memorable film, You Nazty Spy! (1940). Moe is a housepainter hired as the dictator of the fictional country of Moronica. With his greasepaint mustache and occasional lapse into gibberish German, he is a dead ringer, not only for Adolf Hitler, but for Charlie Chaplin’s Hitlerian Adenoid Hynkel, from The Great Dictator, released later that same year.

Nazty is riddled with Jewish humor, as if ethnic and religious pride was the Three Stooges’ prime weapon in their arsenal of anti-Nazi munitions. Greeting their Nazi bosses, the Stooges leap back and salute: “shalom aleichem!” Moe proposes a blitzkrieg, and Curly strenuously agrees: “I just love blintzes. Especially with sour cream.” A slinky temptress named Maddy Herring (get it?) offers her favors, and Curly is relieved when Moe avoids temptation: “You’d have been in some pickle with that Herring.”

You Nazty Spy! Ends with Moe, Larry, and Curly unceremoniously eaten by lions, but the Moronican backdrop was brought back for I’ll Never Heil Again (1941). Heil is a more traditionally loony Stooges short, with Moe shooting shaving cream through the telephone at an impudent Curly, and Curly exhaling fire after sucking on a radiator pipe instead of his tobacco pipe.
An Unending Circle of (Comic) Violence

The Stooges appeared to have reached the end of their run in the late 1940s, when they were unexpectedly saved by the arrival of a new medium. Columbia licensed their shorts to television, which was still hungry for anything to fill airtime. On television, the Stooges appealed to a generation of children unfamiliar with their work. Columbia had unceremoniously dropped the Three Stooges after a series of disappointing films, but quickly brought them back upon discovering their undimmed appeal.

In this later era, illness and death made for numerous cast changes, and the films themselves were often hastily re-edited hodgepodges of older footage. Having begun onscreen in the early 1930s, the Stooges were still making films as late as 1968’s Star Spangled Salesman. The Three Stooges retained their popularity, even when they were of an age more suited to retirement than fisticuffs. (Moe was still taking blows--and giving them out!--at over 70 years of age.) Today, the Three Stooges seem to belong to no era at all. Their stupidity is timeless.

1947 film - in color

2010-07-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

a Bostonian named Fred Monosson, came to Israel beginning in 1947 with the latest model COLOR movie camera.

His son recently discovered reel upon reel of film stored in an attic and was about to throw it away when he happened to mention it to an Israeli film director.

The trove was saved. No other color film of this era is known to exist.

Oklahoma like you never heard it!

2010-07-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

Israeli postage stamps April-June 2010

2010-06-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Israel plows new ground in exotic crops

2010-06-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

A tomato breeder has created a crop worth more than its weight in gold. The seeds for the yellow cherry tomato, a fruit researchers feared might turn off consumers, now sell for $160,000 a pound.

Reporting from Berurim, Israel — —

If Willy Wonka had a farm, it would fit right in here in Israel.

Want a lemon-scented tomato or a chocolate-colored persimmon? How about some miniaturized garlic cloves for the home chef who doesn't have time to chop, or a purple potato that tastes buttery when cooked?

There are no chocolate rivers or edible teacup flowers on Israeli farms, but you will find carrots shaped like potatoes, strawberries shaped like carrots, star-shaped zucchini and "watermelon" tomatoes — dark green on the outside with a juicy red flesh.

There are also specially bred red peppers with three times the usual amount of vitamins, and black chickpeas with extra antioxidants. Not to mention worm-shaped berries and blue bananas.

Though some mock such colorful crops as "frankenfruit," an Israeli tomato breeder, Hazera Genetics, has created a boutique crop worth more than its weight in gold.

The former kibbutz supplier developed a yellow cherry tomato that its own researchers feared might turn off consumers. Instead, the hybrid became a hit in Europe, where the seeds sell for about $160,000 a pound.

Bolstered by Hazera's success, a growing number of Israeli farmers, agricultural companies and government-funded research institutions are jumping into the market for freaky fruits and designer veggies, hoping to stumble upon the next big thing.

"It's fun, it's interesting and it brings in the customers," said Uri Rabinowitz, a Tel Aviv-area farmer who has developed a national following for his strange-looking crops, including elongated strawberries and round carrots. "You can charge twice as much."

Rabinowitz and other Israeli farmers grow exotic fruits and vegetables from imported seeds, including the chocolaty persimmon from Latin America (which makes a tasty ice cream) and the buttery potato from the Netherlands.

Some are trying to create new foods in the lab. A team of Israeli and U.S. scientists created the lemon-scented tomato by splicing genes from lemon basil into tomatoes, producing an aroma and taste of lemons and roses.

Efraim Lewinsohn, who has helped lead the project to develop the lemon tomato at Israel's Volcani Agricultural Research Institute, said the goal was to inject a little spice into tomatoes that had become bland from years of mass production.

"People complain that tomatoes don't taste like they used to," Lewinsohn said. "That's the driving force behind this project: attempting to restore the flavor of the past."
But because of consumer concerns about genetically modified crops, many in Israel are sticking with old-fashioned cross-pollination in which, for example, two tomato varieties — one known for its fast growth and the other for its long shelf life — are pollinated by hand to create tomatoes that grow quickly and last longer.

Israel isn't the only country pushing agricultural boundaries. Japan is producing square watermelons (easier to pack) and kumquat-sized grapes (good for giant raisins). The Netherlands and the United States are also leaders in innovative crops, such as yellow tomatoes and miniature watermelons.

But thanks to its warm climate and advanced research facilities, Israel is becoming a player in the emerging market for agricultural oddities.

"Israelis are a naturally curious people," said Avi Almogi, head of Israel's Exotic Fruit Assn., standing beside a display of fuzzless peaches at his trade group's recent exhibition at Kibbutz Givat Brenner in central Israel. "We take fruits, even things that may not be from here, and we play with them to make them better."

A few years ago, Israeli farmers imported a Chinese orange tree and cross-pollinated it with other breeds to make the fruit more colorful and easier to peel. "Now we are selling the seeds back to China," Almogi said.

Hazera made a splash internationally in the 1990s by breeding a tomato that could be vine-ripened and that stayed red three times longer than ordinary tomatoes. Its seeds were sold around the world.

Since then, the firm has been "diving into tomatoes," said Alon Haberfeld, Hazera's senior tomato product manager. The company pumps about 15% of revenue into research and development, a level he said was comparable to the pharmaceutical industry's.

Drawing on ideas from supermarket owners, farmers and chefs, the company's breeders can devote years to developing a single hybrid. Researchers pollinate the plants by hand and must wait months to see what grows.

Hazera's mini-watermelon was created in response to consumer complaints that standard specimens of the fruit were too big to finish.

Most of the company's research is targeted at specific goals, such as developing a tomato that tastes sweeter or whose vine has a high yield. But sometimes Hazera encourages its breeders to pursue whims.

"We let them go crazy," Haberfeld said. "We tell them to surprise us."
The results aren't always pretty. A snow-white tomato looked "terrible" and was quickly abandoned, Haberfeld said. A teardrop-shaped tomato tasted great but looked unappetizing to consumers.

So when a Hebrew University professor approached Hazera with a golden-hued cherry tomato, made by breeding regular cherry tomatoes with a rare yellow variety, she was greeted with skepticism.

The hybrid, eventually dubbed Summer Sun, had about three times the sugar level of ordinary tomatoes and high acidity, giving it a unique taste.

Researchers thought the flavor held promise. But would consumers bite?

"It takes time to educate people to eat yellow tomatoes," Haberfeld said.

With the rising popularity in the West of cooking shows, healthier eating and gourmet restaurants, Hazera started marketing its products the way other companies sell sports cars and fancy watches.

"It's all about lifestyle," reads a company brochure, depicting attractive young people at the beach, playing tennis, meditating and, of course, munching on tomatoes. "A moment of sensual pleasure. A moment to relax and pamper ourselves."

But in Israel, Hazera tried a different strategy, showing the yellow cherry tomatoes dripping in honey to emphasize their sweet flavor and gold color.

To Israelis, the fruit didn't look ripe. Only one supermarket chain carries them here.

The breakthrough came in Europe, where consumers prefer sweeter produce. Now the yellow tomatoes are showing up on salad plates in France, Britain and Austria, where buyers are willing to pay as much as $11 a pound.

Hazera has sold its yellow cherry tomato seeds to a San Diego-based grower for production this summer.

That motivated Hazera scientists to redouble efforts to develop what they hope will be their next big hybrid hit: the purple tomato.

Matisyahu performs "One Day" on Jay Leno's show

2010-06-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

The DNA of Abraham’s Children

2010-06-17T05:14:00.000-07:00

Analysis of Jewish genomes refutes the Khazar claim.

Jews have historically considered themselves “people of the book” (am hasefer in Hebrew), referring to sacred tomes, but the phrase is turning out to have an equally powerful, if unintended, meaning: scientists are able to read Jewish genomes like a history book. The latest DNA volume weighs in on the controversial, centuries-old (and now revived in a 2008 book) claim that European Jews are all the descendants of Khazars, a Turkic group of the north Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the late eighth and early ninth century. The DNA has spoken: no.

In the wake of studies in the 1990s that supported biblically based notions of a priestly caste descended from Aaron, brother of Moses, an ambitious new project to analyze genomes collected from Jewish volunteers has yielded its first discoveries. In a paper with the kind of catchy title you rarely see in science journals—“Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era”—scientists report that the Jews of the Diaspora share a set of telltale genetic markers, supporting the traditional belief that Jews scattered around the world have a common ancestry. But various Diaspora populations have their own distinct genetic signatures, shedding light on their origins and history. In addition to the age-old question of whether Jews are simply people who share a religion or are a distinct population, the scientific verdict is settling on the latter.

Although the origin of the Jews has been traced, archeologically, to the Middle East in the second millennium B.C.E., what happened next has been more opaque. To sort it out, researchers collected DNA from Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Ashkenazi Jews around New York City; Turkish Sephardic Jews in Seattle; Greek Sephardic Jews in Thessaloniki and Athens; and Italian Jews in Rome as part of the Jewish HapMap Project. (All four grandparents of each participant had to have come from the same community.) As the scientists will report in the next issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the analysis shows that “each of the Jewish populations formed its own distinctive cluster, indicating the shared ancestry and relative genetic isolation of the members of each of those groups.”

Jewish populations, that is, have retained their genetic coherence just as they have retained their cultural and religious traditions, despite migrations from the Middle East into Europe, North Africa, and beyond over the centuries, says geneticist Harry Ostrer of NYU Langone Medical Center, who led the study. Each Diaspora group has distinctive genetic features “representative of each group’s genetic history,” he says, but each also “shares a set of common genetic threads” dating back to their common origin in the Middle East. “Each of the Jewish populations formed its own distinctive cluster, indicating the shared ancestry and relative genetic isolation of the members of each of those groups.”

The various Jewish groups were more related to each other than to non-Jews, as well. Within every Jewish group, individuals shared as much of their genome as two fourth or fifth cousins, with Italian, Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi Jews the most inbred, in the sense that they married within the small, close-knit community. In general, the genetic similarity of any two groups was larger the closer they lived to one another, but there was an exception: Turkish and Italian Jews were most closely related genetically, but are quite separated geographically.

Historical records suggest that Iranian and Iraqi Jews date from communities that formed in Persia and Babylon, respectively, in the fourth to sixth centuries B.C.E., and the DNA confirms that. The genetic signatures of these groups show that they remained relatively isolated—inbred—for some 3,000 years. The DNA also reveals that these Middle Eastern Jews diverged from the ancestors of today’s European Jews about 100 to 150 generations ago, or sometime during the first millennium B.C.E.

That’s when the Jewish communities in Italy, the Balkans, and North Africa originated, from Jews who migrated or were expelled from Palestine and from people who converted to Judaism during Hellenic times. During that period Jews proselytized with an effectiveness that would put today’s Mormons to shame: at the height of the Roman Empire, as the Roman historian Josephus chronicled, mass conversions produced 6 million practicing Jews, or 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire. The conversions brought in DNA that had not been part of the original gene pool in the land of Abraham.

The DNA analysis undermines the claim that most of today’s Jews, particularly the Ashkenazi, are the direct lineal descendants of converted Khazars—which has angered many in the Jewish community as an implicit attack on the Jews’ claim to the land of Israel, since it implies that today’s Jews have no blood ties to the original Jews of the Middle East. Instead, find the scientists, at most there was “limited admixture with local populations, including Khazars and Slavs ... during the 1,000-year (second millennium) history of the European Jews.”

Of the non-Jewish Europeans, northern Italians were most genetically similar to the Jews, followed by the Sardinians and French. The Druze, Bedouins, and Palestinians were closest to the Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian Jews. That is evidence of “a shared genetic history of related Middle Eastern and non-Semitic Mediterranean ancestors who chose different religious and tribal affiliations.” Adds Ostrer, “the study supports the idea of a Jewish people linked by a shared genetic history. Yet the admixture with European people explains why so many European and Syrian Jews have blue eyes and blond hair.”

Southern Europeans were the closest genetic cousins of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Italian Jews, reflecting the large-scale conversion of these Southern European populations to Judaism some 2,000 years ago, when European Jewry was forming. The Sephardic groups share genetic makers with North Africans, probably a result of marriages between Moors and Jews in Spain from 711 to 1492.

Several details of the Ashkenazi genome imply that centuries ago, the population experienced a severe bottleneck, in which the size of a group plummets, followed by a rapid expansion. That jibes with the historical record showing that the Jewish population in Western and Eastern Europe bottomed out at about 50,000 in the Middle Ages and then soared to 500,000 by the 19th century, growing at twice the rate of non-Jews—something called “the demographic miracle.”

Analysis of Jewish genomes has been yielding fascinating findings for more than a decade. A pioneer in this field, Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona, made the first big splash when he discovered that genetics supports the biblical account of a priestly family, the Cohanim, descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses: one specific genetic marker on the Y chromosome (which is passed on from father to son, as membership in the priestly family would be) is found in 98.5 percent of people who self-identify as Cohanim, he and colleagues reported in a 1997 paper in Nature (the PBS science series Nova did a nice segment on that work, summarized here). The Cohanim DNA has been found in both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, evidence that it predates the time when the two groups diverged, about 1,000 years ago. DNA can also be used to infer when particular genetic markers appeared, and suggests that the Cohanim emerged about 106 generations ago, making it fall during what is thought to be the period of the exodus from Egypt, and thus Aaron’s lifetime.

Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK’s science editor and author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves

Hatikva-The National Anthem of Israel

2010-06-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

Jews, Poles & Nazis: The Terrible History

2010-06-08T04:36:00.000-07:00

by Timothy Snyder

Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp
by Christopher R. Browning
Norton, 375 pp., $27.95

The sisters Renia, Rosalie, and Chanka Laks, from a prominent Jewish family in Wierzbnik, Poland. Rosalie Laks—whose testimony appears in Christopher Browning’s Remembering Survival—said that when their father was pushed into a gutter and kicked repeatedly by a German during the early days of the Nazi occupation, ‘This was the first time I understood what the war was all about.’ All the sisters survived the war and are still alive.

The hangings took place on the last day of August 1941, on the town square of Wierzbnik, in what had once been central Poland. Two years had passed since the joint German-Soviet invasion that had destroyed the Polish state; ten weeks before, the Germans had betrayed their ally and invaded the Soviet Union. Wierzbnik, home to Poles and Jews, lay within the General Government, a colony that the Germans had made from parts of their Polish conquests. As Poles left church that Sunday morning, they saw before them a gallows. The German police had selected sixteen or seventeen Poles—men, women, and at least one child. Then they ordered a Jewish execution crew, brought from the ghetto that morning, to carry out the hangings. The Poles were forced to stand on stools; then the Jews placed nooses around their necks and kicked the stools away. The bodies were left to dangle.1

Demonstrative killing of civilians was one of several German methods designed to stifle Polish resistance. The Germans had murdered educated Poles: tens of thousands in late 1939, thousands more in early 1940. Since June 1940, the Germans had been sending suspect Poles to Auschwitz and other camps. Polish society was to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass of passive workers. German policy toward Jews was different, though the nature of the difference was not yet clear. Jewish elites had been preserved; some of them as members of the Judenrat (Jewish council) or as policemen directing the local affairs of Jews in a way that suited Germans.

Although fatality rates in some ghettos were high, Jews in summer 1941 had little idea that they had been gathered into ghettos in preparation for a “Final Solution.” The Germans had first planned to deport the Jews to a reservation in eastern Poland, or to the island of Madagascar, or to Siberian wastelands. As these schemes proved impracticable, the Jews remained in the ghettos. It was in that final week of August 1941 that the German “Final Solution” was taking on its final form: mass murder. Two days before the hangings at Wierzbnik, the Germans had completed their first truly large-scale murder of Jews, shooting some 23,600 people at Kamianets-Podil’s’kyi in occupied Soviet Ukraine.

“I knew I hanged the right people,” one of the Jewish hangmen in Wierzbnik recalled more than fifty years later. He thought that those who were executed belonged to the Polish Home Army, and as such were guilty of murdering Jews. The people in question died, of course, not because Poles were killing Jews, but because Poles were resisting German rule. The hangings at Wierzbnik were a typical German reprisal, aiming to spread terror and deter further opposition. If it were not for the testimonies of the Jews from Wierzbnik, this particular event would have been lost. For most of them, it was a first stark demonstration of German mass murder, if only a small foretaste of what was to come.

In his magnificent and humane microhistory, Christopher Browning has drawn on the “written, transcribed, and/or taped accounts of 292” Jewish survivors, most of them from Wierzbnik, who shared a similar experience of the war. He treats these testimonies as historical sources, believing that according them “a privileged position not subject to the same critical analysis and rules of evidence as other sources will merely discredit and undermine the reputation of Holocaust scholarship itself.”

Here, in recounting how a Jew forced by Germans to kill Poles blamed the Poles for their fate, Browning reaches the problem of Polish–Jewish relations.2 While he is quite aware that this particular testimony must be subjected to scrutiny, his analysis consists mainly in the comparison of multiple Jewish testimonial sources. Addressing the evidence of the Jewish hangman, Browning characterizes the Home Army as a “conservative nationalist underground movement” that did indeed kill Jews, but perhaps not at early as 1941. This description may reflect a consensus among surviving Wierzbnik Jews; it does not fit the historical Home Army.

Interestingly, the “Polish underground” makes several appearances in Browning’s book, usually behaving in ways that are remembered positively: shooting Germans, attacking camps, helping Jews. The Home Army, meanwhile, appears in this negative light, as murderous and anti-Semitic. There is a problem here: the Home Army was the Polish underground. Aiming to restore Polish independence from German rule, it united hundreds of resistance groups. It represented a very wide spetrum of opinion, excluding only the communist left and the extreme nationalist right. And it was not just an underground movement: it was an integral part of the Polish armed forces, under the command of the exile government in London, allied with Great Britain and the United States in the war against Nazi Germany.3

Although the Home Army’s enemy was Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism was indeed a problem in its ranks. On Rosh Hashanah, three weeks after the hangings in Wierzbnik, Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski sent his good wishes from London to the Jewish citizens of Poland via the BBC. Stefan Rowecki, the commander of the Home Army in Warsaw, was irritated; such gestures, he thought, made “the worst possible impression” among Poles. This revealed a basic tension, apparent throughout 1941, between the Polish exile government and its underground army. Anti-Semitism, Rowecki seemed to think, was so pervasive that the Jewish issue should be tabled until war’s end. Many Poles had been inclined to support anti-Semitic parties in the 1930s, and the experience of German and Soviet occupation had not helped.4

Some Poles claimed to resent the Jews who had taken up positions of authority in the Soviet occupation apparatus in eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, after the Soviet invasion of that part of the country. Other Poles were corrupted by having taken over Jewish houses or apartments when Jews were forced into ghettos in 1940 and 1941. Throughout 1941, Poles were debating the political and civic status that Jews should have in Poland after the war. The exile government took the view that postwar Poland would be a democracy without racial discrimination. Within the government, however, nationalists questioned this position.

Polish wartime debates about the “Jewish question” ceased only when Adolf Hitler’s answer became clear. The condition of Polish Jews became a pressing question for the exile government and the Home Army when the Germans began to gas Jews in the final weeks of 1941. In early 1942, Polish leaders believed that news of the shocking German campaign would prompt action from Great Britain and the United States. The Home Army thought that the revelation of the existence of gassing facilities would force the Germans to stop. It transmitted to London the documentation about the death factory at Chełmno that had been gathered by the ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum. This led to BBC broadcasts about the mass extermination of Polish Jews. The Polish government in London, though always presenting Jewish suffering as part of a larger story of Polish martyrdom, gave the mass murder of Jews as a reason for the British and the Americans to carry out retributions against German civilians. In vain: the Germans were not shamed by the publicity, and the Western allies took no meaningful action.5

In 1942, in Operation Reinhard, the Germans deported some 1.3 million Polish Jews from ghettos in the General Government to death factories at Treblinka, Bełz˙ec, and Sobibór. The asso- ciated mass deportations of the Jews of Warsaw, which began on July 22, forced the local Home Army into action. It supplied false documentation to Jewish survivors, supported Z·egota, the Polish government organization that aided Jewish survivors, and assisted Jews within the Warsaw Ghetto who were planning an uprising. Operation Reinhard reached the town of Wierzbnik on October 27. As Browning shows, an unusually high proportion of Wierzbnik Jews, some 1,200 men and four hundred women, were selected for labor. Browning provides a heartrending depiction of the selections that separated those who would work for the Germans from the nearly four thousand who would be gassed at Treblinka.

This scene was repeated thousands of times in occupied Poland, but rarely if ever has it been rendered in such detail from so many perspectives. Some families were forced apart. Others divided themselves, not knowing which group was the better one. Some people left their families behind. Others stayed with their families when they might have saved themselves. Others still contrived to take their families with them into labor duty. Browning gently evokes the kinds of morality that could function in such a situation of extremity. He does not expect his sources to provide an example of ethical behavior: “We must be grateful for the testimonies of those who survived and are willing to speak, but we have no right to expect from them tales of edification and redemption.” But he does draw attention to the loyalties that did function: the bonds among families, lovers, and friends.

The Wierzbnik Jews selected for labor were in an exceptional position. By late October 1942, more than two million Polish Jews were already dead, shot in what had been eastern Poland or gassed at Treblinka, Bełz˙ec, Sobibór, or Chełmno. In 1943 and 1944, as hundreds of thousands more Polish Jews were gassed at Auschwitz or shot in the East, Wierzbnik Jews continued to live and work. They owed their survival to an accident of geography: their homes were very near the Polish arms factory at Starachowice, now taken over by the Germans. Jewish labor at Starachowice was important to the German war effort. The Starachowice camps were not under the direct authority of the SS, but rather run by a private business, operating within a larger holding company. As in the Wierzbnik ghetto, daily authority over Jews in the Starachowice camps was in the hands of a Jewish council and Jewish police force. These institutions, which drew heavily from families that had been prosperous before the war, distributed labor assignments on the basis of connections and bribes. German personnel were few, and the guards were stationed outside the camps.

There was little need to guard the camps: in 1943 in occupied Poland, Starachowice was a place Jews escaped to, not a place they escaped from. When Jews from Majdanek were transferred to Starachowice, they could hardly believe their eyes. The place was filthy and the work was dangerous, but Jews remained alive in large numbers, sometimes even with their children. Some were able to supplement their minimal food rations by selling belongings that they had left for safekeeping with Wierzbnik Poles. Jews at Starachowice bribed camp guards to accompany them to Wierzbnik, where they would carry out these transactions. Then they returned to the camps with the food. To escape from Starachowice would be to court death. Jews found by Germans would be shot. Although thousands of Poles aided Jews despite the death sentence they faced for doing so, it would be an extraordinary gamble to trust any given Pole. In this part of occupied Poland there was no underground army that Jews knew would accept them, and no Jewish armed force that could protect them.

The major Jewish armed rebellion against German rule in the General Government, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943, had aimed not at survival but rather at the choice of the manner of death. It had involved a certain alliance between Poles and Jews, but one that did not endure. The Warsaw branch of the Home Army had given Jews a substantial part of its modest weapons cache. Seven of the first eight armed actions taken by the Home Army in Warsaw were in support of the ghetto. This was symbolic: as everyone knew, the Home Army in Warsaw could not have saved the Jews of the ghetto in April 1943, even had it devoted all of its troops and weapons to this purpose. After the Ghetto Uprising was crushed, Home Army commanders failed to enlist surviving Jewish fighters. Thus even Jews with combat experience found themselves hunted in occupied Poland in 1943. Jews had to fear not only the Germans, but also local units of the Home Army who (on several documented occasions) shot them as bandits or (on a few documented occasions) shot them to steal their belongings.

From the perspective of the Home Army, 1943 was the year of an irresolvable dilemma: the Germans were losing the war, but the Soviets were winning it. In February the Red Army had dealt the Wehrmacht its first major defeat, at Stalingrad. Henceforth, the Home Army had to resist the Germans while preparing for the arrival of the Soviets. German propaganda drove the point home that April, revealing that the Soviets had shot thousands of Polish officers at Katyn. Stalin used the revelation of his own mass murder as a pretext to break diplomatic relations with Poland.6 This was an unmistakable sign of imperial ambition. If Stalin would not recognize the legitimate Polish government during a common war against Nazi Germany, why would he endorse Polish independence after a Soviet victory?

Some Home Army commanders feared that arming Polish Jews would ease the spread of Soviet power. Though this sometimes took the form of an anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as Communist, the concern was not entirely unjustified. The Polish Communist party was part of the Jewish Combat Organization, which the Home Army had supplied with arms. The man who negotiated those arms transfers, Aryeh Wilner, was also negotiating with Communists. The Jewish representative within the Polish government department charged with rescuing Jews, Adolf Berman, was also in touch with the Communists. (His brother Jakub would later preside over the Communist security apparatus that would persecute Home Army veterans—including those who had aided Jews.)7 For the Home Army, the Soviet advance meant the arrival of a dubious ally against the Germans as well as an impending threat to Polish independence. For Jews it meant life. This basic difference in perspectives, a result of the Holocaust, was difficult to overcome.

For Jews at Starachowice, only labor counted. As Browning masterfully reconstructs daily life within the factory camps, he reveals what Jews knew about their fate and the limits of their local perspective. When typhus broke out, for example, the Germans at first simply shot the Jews who were infected. So long as Jewish labor was available for rent from the SS, shooting sick Jews was the economically rational thing to do. As the war continued and the number of living Jews plunged, the Germans treated sick Jews rather than killing them. Jews remembered this as a change in the camp regime; Browning recalls the larger causes.

In late 1943, Heinrich Himmler liquidated most of the camps in the General Government where Jews were used as labor, and had tens of thousands of Jewish workers shot. The directors of Starachowice sacrificed some of the women and children to Himmler, but preserved the men. Because their business was making arms, they could evade the policy of murdering all Jews. Only the Red Army’s successful offensive in June 1944 forced the closure of the factory camps at Starachowice. In July the Jewish laborers at Starachowice were sent to Auschwitz. Mortality rates in one of the railcars was high, but not only because of the transport conditions: some of the stronger prisoners took the opportunity to beat the members of the camp council to death.

The Red Army was disarming Home Army units as it entered eastern Poland. The Home Army’s only hope seemed to be an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw, timed to exploit the Soviet advance but precede the actual arrival of Soviet troops. The aim was to liberate Warsaw from German occupation by Polish efforts, and to install a Polish government before the Red Army arrived. In late July 1944, as the Wierzbnik Jews were sent to Auschwitz, the Red Army approached Warsaw. On August 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. The Home Army fought the Germans there for eight weeks: a longer battle than either the Polish campaign of 1939 or the French campaign of 1940, and with casualties comparable to both. As Dariusz Libionka and Barbara Engelking demonstrate in their pioneering study, Jews took part in the battle, most of them in the Home Army.8 Some of these were people of Jewish origin who regarded or presented themselves as Poles and had been in the Home Army all along. Others were veterans of the Ghetto Uprising. More were survivors who left their places of shelter in Warsaw in order to fight, seeing it as self-evident that they would help Poles fight Germans. As Michał Zylberberg put it, “The Poles had risen to fight against the mortal enemy, and it was our obligation, as victims and as fellow citizens, to help them.” The Warsaw Uprising was a major example of armed Jewish resistance to the Germans during World War II. Indeed, it is quite possible that more people of Jewish origin took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 than in the Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

The Warsaw Uprising, like the Ghetto Uprising before it, was defeated. The Home Army, like the Jews the previous year, fought essentially alone. Stalin forbade Allied air drops when they might have helped. The Germans held the line at the Vistula River, and the Red Army halted. Some of the most brutal German SS and police formations defeated the Polish resistance in Warsaw, killing at least 120,000 Polish civilians.

These people perished not only because German forces were ordered to kill them, but also because Joseph Stalin allowed them to die. The Red Army was indeed halted by the stubborn German defense at the Vistula, but its encampment there for five months must be understood as a political act. It doomed the Poles (and the Jews) who were fighting the Germans in Warsaw. The Germans killed people who, as Stalin knew, would also have resisted the imposition of Communist rule.

The Germans were able to empty not only Starachowice, but also the last ghetto in occupied Poland, in Łódz´. In July 1944, Łódz´ Jews knew that the Red Army was nearby, and thought they could be liberated in a matter of days. Some 67,000 Jews were transported from Łódz´ to Auschwitz while the Warsaw Uprising was taking place. Whereas the Wierzbnik Jews were not subjected to a selection at the ramp at Birkenau, most of the Łódz´ Jews were gassed upon arrival.9

By the time the Red Army finally reached Warsaw in January 1945, the Wierzbnik Jews, Łódz´ Jews, and other Jews were being marched from Auschwitz to labor camps in Germany, where they would remain until the end of the war. This ordeal was deadlier for the Wierzbnik Jews than Starachowice and Auschwitz; hundreds died in a matter of a few months. After the Red Army took Berlin in May, Polish- Jewish survivors found their way to displaced-persons camps in Germany. A few dozen Wierzbnik Jews were able to return to Poland and their hometown, where they were greeted with ugly threats from the Poles who had stolen their houses. In June a few returning Wierzbnik Jews were murdered by Poles. One Jew was beheaded. In Poland as a whole, hundreds of Jews were murdered by Poles in the months after the war was over.

Browning concludes from this horrible finale that the goal of the Polish underground was the end of Jewish life in Poland. He adds that the Polish nation was defined in opposition to an enemy image of the Jew. As Browning acknowledges, it is not at all clear that members of the Home Army committed the murders and robberies in Wierzbnik; the Jews upon whose testimony Browning relies could not have known this. However that may be, it is misleading to discuss Polish political aims only in the light of these events. If Polish patriotism was simply a matter of hating Jews, why did the Home Army fight the Nazis with such determination?

Officially, the Home Army was fighting for constitutional liberal democracy and equal rights for all citizens; what its victory or indeed what democratic elections would have brought to Poland we will never know. After intimidation campaigns and faked elections, Poland became a Soviet satellite governed by a Communist regime. We owe the description of the Home Army as a reactionary nationalist clique to Soviet and Polish Communists, whose forces defeated its stubborn remnants, tortured its best officers, and hanged its last commander after a show trial.

In Stalinist Poland, only Communist resistance to the Germans was recognized as such; everything else was fascism. Communists had no difficulty whatsoever in conflating the people who had fought the Nazis with the Nazis themselves. The Ghetto Uprising was celebrated as Communist (though it was not); the Warsaw Uprising was denounced as fascist (though it was not). Yet we owe the stark separation of the two events to national as well as to Communist politics. The Ghetto Uprising is a founding myth of the State of Israel, and the Warsaw Uprising is a founding myth of today’s post-Communist Poland: this, too, keeps the two events further apart in memory than they were in history.

Though the record of the Home Army toward Jews is ambivalent, the dark legend must be abandoned. Important as Jewish testimonial material is to the history of the Holocaust, the recollections of Jews who spent years in camps cannot serve as the basis for historical reckonings with the Home Army. If its history were to be written from Jewish perspectives, these would have to include those of people such as Chaja and Estera Borenstein, who volunteered as nurses at the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising, or Marian Mendenholc, who died trying to rescue Polish comrades right at its very end. It would have to allow for the experiences of Jews such as Stanisław Aronson. Fighting in the most celebrated unit of the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising, Aronson stormed Umschlagplatz, from which he himself had been deported to Treblinka two years before. Then he and his Polish comrades liberated a concentration camp on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, and freed several hundred Jews.

That said, the pristine legend of an unblemished Home Army, cultivated by Polish veterans and patriots, is also unsustainable. There was distance between soldiers in the field and declarations from London, variation among regions and units, reluctance to see Jews as part of the Polish nation, insensitivity to the particular dangers faced by Jews, and occasional outright murder. Getting the balance right is not just a matter for Jews and Poles. The Home Army was the most significant non-Communist resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe. Those who regard opposition to Hitler as a measure of morality will have to take its history seriously.

‘Vatican to accept that Mt. Sinai is in Negev, not Egypt’

2010-06-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

By STEVE LINDE
30/05/2010
‘I‘m sure Karkom is the real mountain of God,’ Prof. Emmanuel Anati declares. ‘Israel should be proud.’

It has taken him more than a decade, but Italian-Israeli archeologist Prof. Emmanuel Anati now believes his controversial view that the biblical Mount Sinai is in Israel’s Negev desert rather than Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula will soon be adopted by the Vatican.

On Friday, he presented his theory in the form of a new book at a seminar at the Theological Seminary in the northeastern Italian city of Vicenza.

“Actually it’s not a theory, it’s a reality. I’m sure of it, Anati told The Jerusalem Post by telephone from his home in Capo di Ponte. “My archeological discoveries at Har Karkom over many years and my close reading of the Bible leave me with no doubt that it is the real Mount Sinai. I’m now sure that Karkom is the real mountain of God.”

In 2001, Anati published the English edition of a book that was first issued in Italian two years earlier and titled The Riddle of Mount Sinai – Archaeological Discoveries at Har Karkom. In the book, he postulated that Karkom, 25 km. from the Ramon Crater, was probably the peak at which Moses received the Ten Commandments – and not the summit in southern Sinai where Santa Catarina (Saint Catherine’s Monastery) stands.

“I know this is revolutionary,” he conceded. “I’m not only changing the location, but I’m moving Mount Sinai to Israel, and I’m sure it will anger the Egyptians. But Israel should be proud of this. The Negev is empty and should be developed.”

“I’m also changing the date of the Exodus from Egypt to some 1,000 years earlier than previously thought,” he added. “I know this will drive everyone crazy. But I am right. I’m sure of it.”

Anati reasoned that if the account in the Book of Exodus was historically accurate, it must refer to the third millennium BCE – and more precisely to the period between 2200 and 2000 BCE.

Jewish tradition puts the Exodus around the year
1313 BCE. According to Catholic tradition, Helena of Constantinople – the mother of Emperor Constantine credited with finding the relics of Jesus’s cross – determined the location of Mount Sinai and ordered the construction of a chapel at the site (sometimes referred to as the Chapel of Saint Helen) in about 330 CE.

According to Anati, however, an abundance of archeological evidence showed that Mount Karkom had been a holy place for all desert peoples, and not just the Jews, which substantiated his case.

He said more than 1,200 finds at Karkom – including sanctuaries, altars, rock paintings and a large tablet resembling the Ten Commandments – indicated that it had been considered a sacred mountain in the Middle Bronze Age. In addition, he said, the topography of its plateau perfectly reflected that of the biblical Mount Sinai.

Finally, he concluded, the biblical tale clearly
backed up his geographic argument.

“When the Children of Israel left Egypt, they reached the Arava. They couldn’t have been in Santa [Catarina], because it says in the Bible that they reached Nahal Tzin, and moved on to Hebron,” Anati said. “The whole story of receiving the Torah must have taken place in the Negev. The Children of Israel wandered in the north and not the south, in the Negev and not the Sinai.”

He was just as certain that the Holy See would officially sanction his stance, and that millions of Catholic pilgrims could soon be visiting Mount Karkom instead of Mount Sinai.

“Actually, they have already accepted my theory,” he said. “They are already organizing pilgrimages. There is already a plan, and I have meetings scheduled with theologians and others, including the Vatican pilgrimage office. They want to start pilgrimages to Karkom as soon as next year.”

Anati said he was aware that he had his detractors, especially among archeologists in Israel, several of whom were interviewed refuting his claims on a Channel 1 Mabat Sheni documentary aired on Wednesday night.

“I know there are all kinds of people – including professors – who resist my theory, and it’s natural that this occurs,” he said. “I urge them all to read my book and study the evidence before criticizing me.”

Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Israel Finkelstein, a world-renowned expert on the subject, said he could not accept Anati’s hypothesis.

“I do not see any connection between the third millennium BCE finds at Har Karkom and the Exodus story. The latter was put in writing not before the 7th or 6th centuries BCE, and as such depicts realities which are many centuries later than the finds of Har Karkom,” Finkelstein told the Post. “Roaming the desert with the Bible in one hand and the spade in the other is a 19th-century endeavor which has no place in modern scholarship.”

Anati said it had taken the Catholic Church several years to be persuaded by his argument, and recognition had been a slow process.

“About three-and-a-half years ago, I had a telephone call from the Vatican that a priest of high standing wanted to meet with me, and he arrived here with a driver. I live 500 km. from Rome, and he sat with me for a whole day and asked me a lot of questions,” Anati recalled.

“Then he disappeared, and after about a year, a group of theologians from the Catholic Church appeared and wanted to investigate the matter more deeply. Seven theologians sat here for the whole day, and I later met with them four times.

“Six months ago they spent four days with me at Karkom, and as a result of this, the Vatican publisher – Edizioni Messaggero Padova – asked me to write up my findings. I revised and updated my book, and they have now published it in Italian, changing the title to The Rediscovery of Mount Sinai.”

“Twenty years ago, I had a hunch that Har
Karkom was the real Mount Sinai,” Anati said.
“Three years ago I was convinced I was correct. Today I know I’m right.”

There was no official Vatican response to Anati’s claims, nor was there an immediate reaction from the Egyptians.

Anati was born in Florence in 1930 to Jewish
parents, and soon after the establishment of Israel, he moved to Jerusalem and received a bachelor’s degree in archeology from the Hebrew University. He later became a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard and was awarded a doctorate at the Sorbonne.

Fluent in Hebrew, he taught prehistory at Tel Aviv University and conducted extensive research in the Negev.

Upon his return to Italy, he founded the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici in Capo di Ponte in 1964, and he remains its executive director today. It is believed to be the only institute in the world that specializes in prehistoric art.

Anati’s study of rock paintings in Valcamonica
spurred UNESCO to include the alpine valley in its list of World Cultural Heritage sites.

Bennett Cerf

2010-05-25T16:10:00.000-07:00

Bennett Alfred Cerf was born at Manhattan on this day in 1898. He was born
and brought up in New York City in a Jewish family of Alsatian and German
descent. His father, Gustave Cerf, was a lithographer; his mother, Frederika
Wise, was an heiress to a tobacco-distribution fortune.
He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1919 and his Litt.B. from
their School of Journalism the next year. He was only briefly a reporter
before joining the publishing house that owned the Modern Library series.
With partner Donald Klopfer he bought that business in 1927. in addition to
the Modern Library series they decided to publish a few other books "at
random", they later changed the name of the business to Random House. Cerf
was a master of developing relationships with authors, his stable included
William Faulkner, James Michener, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, and Dr Seuss. He
compiled several joke books and was a regular panelist on What's My Line?
from 1951 through 1967.

Quotes:
A pat on the back, though only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the
pants, is miles ahead in results.

Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are
things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has
talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school.

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't
watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a
man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a
woman's name out of a satire, then wrote the piece so that she could still
be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of
incest. Do you still want to be a writer? And if so, why?

Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

All from Bennett Cerf, 1898 - 1971

I am a Jew

2010-05-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

Following their true paths

2010-05-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

By SHEREE R. CURRY
18/05/2010 16:17

Reflections of African American women converts.
Talkbacks (5)

The biblical Ruth, one of only two women in the Bible who have their own book, was a convert to Judaism. She left her family’s heritage to endure the hardships of a convert. She made the decision to follow the laws of Moses and never turn back despite the great difficulties she had to endure. Still, she became an accepted member of the Jewish people and the grandmother of King David. Her role is an important one in Jewish history, and it is not too unlike the stories of other female converts to Judaism, especially those of African American women who discover their Jewish neshama (soul) in their adulthood.

The journey to one’s Jewish soul may have several bumps along the way, but those who choose Judaism for genuine reasons often find that they were on that path long before they themselves had the revelation that, at their core, they were already Jewish. While African American converts often report that they are well-accepted by other members of their adopted religion, there is no doubt that the color of their skin is forever a reminder to Caucasian Jews that their history appears different. However, they found unconditional support from their nucleus family, particularly their mothers. For those, however, who want to think differently of these women, consider their strength and perseverance as they live a Jewish life in a world that still believes Jews are “white,” when in reality, we come in all shades and races.

Ahuvah Gray was 50 before she formally converted to Judaism on April 2, 1997, but her journey began long before the first time she was turned away by a beit din (rabbinical court) in Israel when she sought to formalize the life she had been living for so many years. Her journey began, in some ways, in her childhood as she would visit her grandparents in Mound Bayou, Mississippi where she had come to feel a deep connection to the Book of Psalms. “The Tehillim [psalms] that my grandmother taught me at an early age made a profound impact on my life,” she says.

Gray, once an ordained minister, was raised in a family with a strong spiritual background. A question she and many other Jews of African American descent, including myself, say they encounter a few times a year from inquiring white Jews, is: “How did your family feel about your decision?” It is as if they ask this question expecting to hear that we were banished from our Christian families, written out of wills, never to be heard from again. I think many are shocked by the answer that our mothers encouraged our decisions, were at the root of our faith and spiritual dedication or at the least were quite supportive of our decisions – being encouraging of their children the way that all mothers should be toward their offspring.

Gray, whose birth name is Delores, even credits her mother and her grandmother as the backbone behind her strong religious identity. There were times, she says, that “I could hear my mother’s voice reverberating, ‘Delores, God is going to do something very special in your life.’”

Even when her mom’s own life was failing, Gray’s mother continued to encourage her daughter in her journey to Judaism. “How are your studies progressing?” Gray’s mother asked her on the phone one day as she was studying in Israel at a time when her mother began to feel unwell. “Just the way I expected it to be,” Gray recalls. “My mother was more concerned with my Hebrew studies than her own welfare.”

“Would you like me to come home?,” Gray asked her mother.

“No. Don’t you stop your studying! Stay there and learn,” her mother responded. “I know you love what you’re doing and you sound so happy every time we speak.”

Gray, who at the height of her career owned a Los Angeles-based travel business and led Christian tours to Israel for more than a decade, did not know at the time that her love of Israel, Judaism and the Bible would lead her to choose Judaism – let alone make aliya and move to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. Her revelation came one year on the Shabbat following Tisha Be’av.

“I was praying from my siddur when all of a sudden I became very emotional. I fell down prostrate in the middle of my praying and exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, I think I am a Jew!’”

She says it was as if an earthquake had hit the core of her being. “A moment of truth had touched my deepest feelings. It explained why I had undergone such emotional and religious turmoil in the past years. My neshama, my soul, was seeking the God of the Jewish people. When I finally rose to my feet I was a changed person.”

Prior to that point, Gray had stopped attending services on Sundays, and no longer observed any of the major Christian holidays. “I simply couldn’t connect with the liturgies or the sermons. The last time I attended a Christian service, I was with a friend at her place of worship. I heard the pastor say that the Jewish people had to accept the new messiah.”

Gray, who outlines her story on her Web site, www.ahuvahgray.com, and in a series of books, including her latest, Journey to the Land of My Soul, says it did not sit well with her that one religion would consider another so wrong. “My prayer was that I should be able to resolve the tug-of-war that was being waged inside me: Judaism versus Christianity.”

So to continue her journey to find an answer for herself, Gray began studying in Israel. Her mother’s main concern for her daughter as she led pilgrimages to Israel was that she had traded California’s earthquakes for flying bullets from Palestinian attacks against Israelis. But her mother was encouraging of her daughter’s transition. “We understand, Delores. You have to do God’s will. Are you still praying three times a day and reading your Bible?” She was.

Her dad was also quite supportive. “Just keep studying God’s word. Remember my motto: If you get stuck on a verse and don’t understand, stay with it and don’t go any further until you get an understanding.”

Gray’s mother, Christine Franklin Gray Buckner, was buried on December 23, 1994. Gray gave the eulogy.

Meira Leahy also credits her mother for instilling a strong spiritual faith in her that led her on the path to her own journey to Judaism, which began for her nearly 20 years ago at age 23. Leahy, who lives in a Minneapolis suburb with her husband and five kids, leads a frum and observant life. Although she had her bat mitzva after conversion as a Conservative Jew, she later took steps to also convert to Orthodoxy.

She says, “My grandmother taught me a very important lesson in prayer. She was very supportive of me. She would always tell me to pray the psalms every day. She would say that there is power in King David’s psalm. She is a very religious Christian woman and she came to my bat mitzva before I became Orthodox.”

Her mother is equally supportive. “My mom has always been a really good friend to me. When I decided I was going to become Jewish, I told my mother first. I was really surprised. I said, ‘Mom, I think I am going to become Jewish.’ She said, ‘I am not surprised. I saw this coming a long time ago.’ She said, ‘I only request one thing of you. If you think this is how God wants you to serve this world, don’t let anyone stand in your way, not your family, not the pastor at church. If you are going to do it, do it wholeheartedly.’”

That doesn’t mean that Leahy’s mom didn’t challenge the complexities of her daughter’s observant lifestyle, especially that of kashrut. One day her mom announced she was coming to visit her daughter’s house. “She said she was going to bring any food she wanted to my house because she is my mother. I let her know it was my house, I’m grown and you don’t pay rent here.”

That didn’t sit well with her mother, but her mother appreciated that her daughter stood up for her convictions. Her mom respects her daughter’s choices and has learned what she could about her daughter’s lifestyle so she can better support it.

“My mom knows when candlelighting is, when Yom Tov is; She will not call us on Shabbat. It is nice that my children’s Christian grandmother respects their Jewish identity,” says Leahy.

Leahy, 43, adds that years after her conversion, when she decided to marry her current husband Moshe Leahy, her parents were more concerned whether her husband would be decent to her, make a living, be a good father, the same thing any parent would worry about when their daughter gets married. “It is very positive coming from a ‘black perspective,’ if you want to call it that. Unfortunately it wasn’t like that with his family,” she says.

Leahy finds that white Jews seem to be the ones who have more issues with the color of her skin or that she is a convert than she or her family have. “Back when I was younger and we were first married, people would mistake me for the babysitter or they would assume my kids were adopted and they’d ask, ‘Where did you get them from.’ I’d say, ‘Hashem gave them to me’ or ‘I gave birth to them at the hospital and brought them home.’ I am comfortable in my own skin and comfortable with my own identity. And my kids are, too, because I don’t have any qualms about who I am and how I live my life.”

Courtenay Edelhart, who is biracial – the product of an African American mother and white father with Jewish ancestry – received support from her family as well. Her mother was raised African Methodist Episcopal but left the church to join the New Age movement long before Edelhart was born. Her mom meditates daily, consults psychics and believes in reincarnation. Edelhart’s paternal grandmother was a Christian Scientist and her paternal grandfather was the Jewish son of a rabbi. Her late father had no formal religious affiliation growing up and identified as an atheist, but converted to Judaism as an adult because his first wife insisted on it as a condition of marriage. The marriage only lasted a short time. He met Edelhart’s mother as he was going through a divorce.

“Their parenting philosophy was to let me and my twin sister, Ashley, choose our own spiritual path when we were old enough to decide. They never tried to impose their views on us. My sister never picked anything and is raising her children secular.”

Edelhart, 43, went to the mikve to become a Jew shortly after college, about 20 years ago.

Neither one of Edelhart’s parents, she says, believed much in following convention, or settling comfortably into the station they were born into.

“Both had overcome miserable childhoods. Both were the first members of their families to go to college. Both befriended and loved whomever they pleased in an era when few others ventured out of their cultural comfort zones. Neither of my parents thought anything at all of entering an interracial, interfaith marriage. They very much wanted my sister and me to think critically and independently, too,” she says.

“When I told my atheist, Jewish-in-name-only father I was converting to Judaism, he laughed and said mischievously, ‘What did I do wrong?’ My mother, I think, was just relieved that I hadn’t chosen Christianity. She was raised in the segregated South by a mother who called herself a devout Christian but was, in fact, a cruel, emotionally abusive woman. Christianity was, to my mother, a symbol of a past she very much wanted to leave behind.”

Edelhart, a single mom who adopted two African American children – a boy and a girl, after giving up on finding a husband (“I am too black for Ashkenazi Jews and too Jewish for Christian blacks,” she quipped), says her children, who underwent conversions by age two – will experience Judaism in a way very different from what she found when she converted as a young adult. Both of her children attended Jewish preschools that were racially diverse. The temple they belong to in California outside L.A. has a female rabbi and congregants who are black, Asian and Latino. Her daughter, seven, will attend Jewish camp this summer for the second year in a row. “She was not the only black child there last year and will not be the only black child there this year,” she says. “My son, four, is not yet old enough for camp.”

Edelhart says the only real conflict that has come from her decision to practice Judaism is Christmas. “Although my 72-year-old mother hasn’t attended church since she was a teenager, she’s a big believer in the secular aspects of Christmas. I don’t put up a tree in my home, but I participate in my family’s celebration. We gather each year at my sister’s house. I draw the line at the Santa Claus myth. I am absolutely adamant that my children will not be raised with that lie. My mother still hasn’t forgiven me for it. She thinks I’m robbing my children of the magic of the holiday season. This is something we’ll never see eye to eye on. But other than that, she fully supports my choice and is proud that I am raising my own children to know and love God.”
=========
Sheree R. Curry, an award-winning journalist and editor of BlackandJewish.com, had a formal conversion to Judaism at the age of 18 and is supported by a mother who encouraged her daughters to choose their own religious identity. She lives in a Minneapolis suburb with her two sons. They frequent events at the local Aish Center, walking distance from their home.

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2010-05-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

G-d promised this beautiful, holy place to us-- to Am Yisrael. And not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Koran. So much for their claims to it-- stay in Mecca.

CBS Holocaust

2010-05-10T05:52:00.000-07:00

This story was aired on CBS on "60 MINUTES" ** about a long-secret German archive that houses a treasure trove of information on 17.5 million victims of the Holocaust. The archive, located in the German town of Bad Arolsen , is massive (there are 16 miles of shelving containing 50 million pages of documents) and until recently, was off-limits to the public. But after the German government agreed earlier this year to open the archives, CBS News' Scott Pelley traveled there with three Jewish survivors who were able to see their ownHolocaust records. It's an incredibly moving piece, all the more poignant in the wake of the meeting of Holocaust deniers in Iran and the denial speeches in the UN. We're trying to get word out about the story to people who have a special interest in this subject.
· It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russiapeoples looking the other way! Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be "a myth," it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

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2010-05-06T10:09:00.001-07:00

Sarit Chadad Shma Israel

2010-05-06T06:12:00.000-07:00

Palestine in Song and Dance 1931

2010-04-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

SOMEWHERE

2010-04-25T05:44:00.001-07:00