Another kind of Brooklyn

1. why they should not be as the rest of the American citizens?

2. at least there are more chances to speak openly about the abuses and the perpetrators. but, again, it is not an excuse for the current situation.

The end of the cinema as we all know

Coppola's predictions.

The fate of the books

and the explanation of what Google's project on digitalization is all about, from the part of Sergey Brin's co-founder of the company.

Tel Aviv's art stage

The NYT's article is one year old, but it is still the same active and interesting stage. It's all about artists - good and bad - with ideas - good and bad. The rest is media buzzing.

In Bovary country

the reality of the world of words.

Citizen patrols in Italy

- the National Guard, under investigation for using symbols and dress code similar with those from the Mussolini regime.

Another "guard" movement, the Hungarian one, marched in the Roma areas in Budapest and elsewhere.

Year? End 2009.

Not only the Americans are dreaming

The short story of Ada Yonath, the winner of a Nobel prize in chemistry, together with another two American scientists. The first Israeli woman to win a Nobel prize, she was born 70 years ago, in a very poor family in Jerusalem.

Two literary descriptions of anti-semitism

Israeli-writer born in Czernowitz Aharon Appelfeld is offering a sample of the popular reaction against Jews in Ukraine. A short telling example, at the end of the second Chapter of the novel Caterina, a discussion about the "Jewish difference": "- Why are they (the Jews) like this? - You don't know they killed Jesus? - They did? - Yes". From time to time, there are episodes when, randomly, the Jews are aggressed with no reason on the street, and everything is taking place as part of non-sense diabolic program: they ought to, because it is like a rule of the place. Caterina is getting over the distance between her world and the Jewish world, by working for and with Jewish families. And, at the end of the book and of her journey, when "there are no Jews in the world", she discovers being a living memory of their world and is afraid to do not loose those few memories too. And she is telling her story. In Joseph Roth's Tarabas the violence and hate are reaching the maximum when a painting of Mary is discovered under layers of dye in the house of the Jew with the name Kristianpoller - haven't yet discovered the reason why the author called him with this name. Once discovered the painting, it becomes object of adoration, but in the same time the Jews are considered guilty for hiding the painting - holy now - because, in fact, it is assumed their aim is to hide and destroy everything Christian. And, the same Mary-go-round of permanent aggression is put into practice. Nobody keen to change this, nobody brave enough to oppose it.

Franz Biberkopf

Döblin's book is hard to include in a clear literary classification. It could be a report about the Berlin from that time, a memoir, a feature ready to be published in a newspaper, a script of a movie, but not an usual one: a kind of road movie, where the characters themselves are moving and changing and at the end, dramatically but predictably fall down. The language you read the book is very important: the best suited is the original German version, but even for a native speaker, an argo dictionary is necessary. The questions following you and obsesively appearing during the lecture of the book - at least in my case: it is possible to do it? why to do it and which are the ethical limits, if any?

The art of writing

and the understanding of the book, as a part of the social context and the result of a long term process: a new way to read the writing business, at the University of Iowa Center of the Book.

The reconversion of the space

The 19th century built Santa Fe Railroad Yard, almost abandoned since end of 80s, reinaugurated as a creative place for artists and creative minds, in 2008. A new hot-spot in New Mexico.

Another Face of Coco Chanel

the WWII collaborationism.

Dynamics

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, about his film sketch Dynamics of a Metropolis

My aim was to produce an effect by its own action, its own tempo and rhythm, instead of the still fashionable plots that force cinema to ape literature or theater.

Survival is the Sweetest Revenge

Forward

Rich Cohen

September 9

When I was 10, my father recommended a movie called “Where Eagles Dare,” the story of a few Allied soldiers who go behind enemy lines during World War II and wreak incredible havoc. When I asked if it was any good, my father just gave me a look. “Four guys kill like a thousand Nazis,” he said. “It’s one of the best movies ever made.”
In those years, my father, judging war films, used a Nazi-to-American kill ratio: If a lot of Nazis died, the movie was good; if those Nazis were killed by just a few Americans, the movie was potentially great.
This second criterion had everything to do with the fact that we were Jews, therefore members of a community small in number but gaudy in incident. In this way, the commandos in the Hollywood epic — I’m thinking of “The Dirty Dozen,” among others — were a stand-in for Jews as a whole. A few of us killing a lot of them — it’s a satisfying fantasy.
I’ve thought a lot about this since the release of “Inglourious Basterds,” the revenge fantasy we’ve been working toward for the last half-century. Like all masterpieces, Quentin Tarantino’s movie shows where and why other artistic expressions of this fantasy — some being very good novels and films — have failed: Simply put, they were not crazy enough, nor wild enough, nor did they go far enough.
Movies like Ed Zwick’s “Defiance,” which chronicles the exploits of Jewish partisans in occupied Poland, are crippled by their adherence to the real-life particulars of the Second World War. From the moment such a film starts, you know how the bigger story will end: The ghettos will fill and empty, the box cars will rattle down the track, the chimneys will send up plumes of black smoke. No matter how you subtract the numbers, you always wind up with the same answer: six million.
“Inglourious Basterds” succeeds as fantasy because Tarantino, who does not know better, broke every rule. (The funky spelling in the title is a warning of coming trespass.) The plot unfolds with a pleasant sense of shock — you keep expecting him to swing back and rejoin the historical narrative, but he instead keeps on, past every decency, into the black book itself, where he re-writes the most terrible moments of history, culminating in the ultimate money shot: a big, heavily armed Jew, a mountain Jew, the big Yid of yore, standing over the Führer, raking his face with machine-gun fire.
Off the charts on the Herb Cohen Nazi-to-American kill ratio, the greatest scene ever filmed, the meaning of Hollywood, why Jack Warner quit Youngstown and moved out West, though he never knew this himself.
Like all good fantasies, it works because the real world remains visible — the dream diverges, but not entirely. Simply put, there were Jews not very unlike the Jews in the movie. I wrote about a group of them in my 2000 book “The Avengers,” the story of the poet-partisan Abba Kovner, who, in the last days of the Second World War, trained a unit of Jewish partisans to kill as many Germans as possible. Plan A, which fortunately failed, was to poison the water system of a German city. Plan B was to poison the bread served daily to members of the Nazi SS being held in a prison camp awaiting prosecution for war crimes. Hundreds were hospitalized as a result, though none died.
The Inglourious Basterds are the fantasy; the Avengers were the reality. Here’s what they had in common: Both wanted to kill Nazis, both were unshaven and ragged, both were wholly unbelievable and thus often not believed in.
More interesting are the points of difference, for therein lies the answer to a great mystery: How do you continue on after the world has fallen?
For starters, Kovner did not want to hunt and kill Nazis one by one. The war had made him crazy, and in his crazed, war-ravaged mind, he believed Germans were not entitled to individualized deaths — I see you, you see me, you beg for your life, I shoot you, then you die. He believed Germans should instead be killed at random, en masse, from an emotional remove, as Germans had done to Jews.
What’s more, in its Hollywood incarnations, Jewish revenge is carried out or enabled by a righteous goy. In Tarantino’s case, this is Aldo Raine, the American lieutenant brilliantly played by Brad Pitt. But Kovner believed Jews, led by Jews and leading Jews, must take their own revenge, must carry out the retribution that God Himself, were there a God (Kovner became an atheist in the war), would have carried out. It was a point of revenge — not merely to punish the Germans but to rehabilitate the Hebrews. The Avengers would kill their way back to life, in the process leaving a marker for future generations: This is what happens if you…
“Better to die as free men fighting” — that’s how Kovner put it at the start of the war. By the end, he might as well have said: Better to kill as dead men living.
Following the war, Kovner returned slowly to life, accepting that the world had not ended and history would go on. In these months, he did something so miraculous it’s never been caught on film. He changed. He grew. He did not give up revenge so much as alter it’s meaning. He never publicly spoke of plans A and B. For him, victory would be measured not by the death of Germans but by the existence of Jews. Survival is the best answer to annihilation. As Kovner himself said, “Every Jewish town that thrives in Israel, every child that is raised, every tree that is planted — that is our revenge.”
Or, as Herb Cohen put it, “I’m here, watching a movie. Where the hell are the Nazis?”

Rich Cohen is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. He is the author of several books, including “The Avengers: A Jewish War Story” (Knopf, 2000) and, most recently, “Israel Is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

About Abba Kovner - http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Kovner.html

What you could do from inside a tank?

Shooting a movie. About Lebanon.

WWII, another sides of histories

Roman Haller and his zeide

Fahrenheit 451

turned into a comic-book. New literary trends? Or simply the end of reading, as we knew?

The problems of jazz

I must confess: I never imagined that jazz could ever have a problem or it needs to be "saved". I knew it is about an industry as well, but considered it is completely irrelevant to waste my time with.

But I am not an addict: I can resist without listening jazz for months, maybe, but when I want to, I know which concert, festival or CD to choose.

I don't know how many people are listening the same music - from soft to very complicate and ermetic jazz - but I will always look with curiosity about new pieces, new artists, new ways to use creativity. Oh, and I discovered why I don't worry too much about the danger of a disappearing art - "culture" could fit better the whole idea: the creativity don't have limits and so the art of jazz.

Atheism in US

on the rise.

Religion

as a matter of choice or rejection of a social laziness of thinking. It is all about your own choice. To take off.

Slate's selection

of Woodstock pictures.

Former Hadassah Exec Says She Had an Affair

With Madoff. Who? Madoff, the one with the 150 years sentence because stealing 65 bn. dollars. Among them the former lover - 20 years ago - turned-into-author Sheryl Weinstein. Maybe she found a miraculous solution to recover the lost money...But I fully doubt it will be any curious about the love-life of this Madoff. Really. Not even for black humor, because the idea in itself to write a book about him - Madoff, the playboy, how impressive, it's kitsch.

Why do some people need less sleep?

it is a matter of genetics, it is said. A rare one. Ok then. Everything is under control. Full control of the nature.

The art of naming the world

THIS PROFUSION OF HUMMINGBIRDS is from the book “Kunstformen der Natur,” by Ernst Haeckel, 1900. The names of the birds, like Topaza pella, or crimson topaz (third from top), and Sparganura sappho, or red-tailed comet (with forked tail), seem as lush and elaborate as their coloration.

A lost art?

Life-sentence for ex-Nazi officer

decided today a court in Munich.

US Jewish press and the economic crisis

is more than the issue of survival of an industry, but is producing effects as well on the communities as such.

Faces of the Post-Zionism in Israel

Or trying to explain to outside-of-Israel people that it is a normal post-Zionist life. Or at least, that there are more chances now than it ten years ago, for example.

What is Allenby 40

Allenby 40 is known as the sleaziest dance bar in Israel; but if you ask the owner, an Orthodox Jew named Mendy, he would say it’s not sleazy but liberating. So, what would a Jew who grew-up Chabad know about liberation? A lot, it seems. At Allenby 40, Orthodox men can gulp a beer and three chasers with their kippah on — guilt-free. And if the religious feel that way, you can imagine how the secular Jew gets down at Allenby 40. The decor is minimalist — just some walls painted flesh and a few dangling disco balls, but the DJs.

Time to end discrimination

in a haredi girls' school.

Apparently, the subtelties of discriminations are endless - the compulsory Askenazi accent, for example, the separate entrances and the plaster wall. And why in the last two years nobody had the gorgious idea to oppose such hard to qualify situation?

Creating new international standards for divorce

How Israel is positioning itself regarding women's rights.

Domestic Relations Law in Israel

Gay vs. Orthodoxy in TA

does tolerance have a chance of survival?

Qui s'excuse, s'accuse

The haredi community lamenting about being accused for the TA attack.

Saving Jewish Children, but at What Cost?

Elaine Sciolino and Jason Horowitz

NY Times

January 9, 2005

In October 1946, just a year after the defeat of the Nazis, the Vatican weighed in on one of the most painful episodes of the postwar era: the refusal to allow Jewish children who had been sheltered by Catholics during the war to return to their own families and communities.
A newly disclosed directive on the this subject provides written confirmation of well-known church policy and practices at the time, particularly toward Jewish children who had been baptized, often to save them from perishing at the hands of the Nazis. Its tone is cold and impersonal, and it makes no mention of the horrors of the Holocaust.
Its disclosure has reopened a raw debate on the World War II role of the Catholic Church and of Pope Pius XII, a candidate for sainthood who has been excoriated by his critics as a heartless anti-Semite who maintained a public silence on the Nazi death camps and praised by his supporters as a savior of Jewish lives.
The one-page, typewritten directive, dated Oct. 23, 1946, was discovered in a French church archive outside Paris and made available to The New York Times on the condition that the source would not be disclosed. It is a list of instructions for French authorities on how to deal with demands from Jewish officials who want to reclaim Jewish children.
"Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing," the directive says.
It also contains an order not to allow Jewish children who had been baptized Catholic to go home to their own parents. "If the children have been turned over by their parents, and if the parents reclaim them now, providing that the children have not received baptism, they can be given back," it says.
Even Jewish orphans who had not been baptized Catholic were not to be turned over automatically to Jewish authorities. "For children who no longer have their parents, given the fact that the church has responsibility for them, it is not acceptable for them to be abandoned by the church or entrusted to any persons who have no rights over them, at least until they are in a position to choose themselves," the document says. "This, obviously, is for children who would not have been baptized."
The document, written in French and first disclosed last week by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, is unsigned but says, "It should be noted that this decision taken by the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father."
The publication of the document is likely to embolden those who do not think Pius XII is worthy of becoming a saint. Some prominent Jews and historians have attacked the document for its insensitivity to the Holocaust.
The Rev. Peter Gumpel, a Rome-based Jesuit priest and a leading proponent for the beatification of Pius XII, the first step toward sainthood, said he was convinced that the document did not come from the Vatican. He pointed out that it is not on official Vatican stationery, that it is not signed and that it is written in French, not Italian. "There is something fishy here," he said.
But Étienne Fouilloux, a French historian who is compiling Pope John XXIII's diaries during his years in France, said that the document had been discovered recently in church archives outside of Paris by a serious researcher and that it is genuine. John has been beatified, the last formal step toward sainthood.
At the time, Pope John XXIII was Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, Pope Pius XII'S representative to France. During the war, Monsignor Roncalli was credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution by using diplomatic couriers, papal representatives and nuns to issue and deliver baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas, many of them forged, to Jews. He also helped gain asylum for Jews in neutral countries.
"This document is indicative of a mind-set at the Vatican that dealt with problems in a legal framework without worrying that there were human beings involved," Mr. Fouilloux said. "It shows that the massacre of Jews was not seen by the Holy See as something of importance."
He said he would include the document in the next volume of the diaries.
The document underscores the sanctity with which the Vatican treated the sacrament of baptism at the time - no matter how or why it was administered.
The church's stance that a baptized child is irrevocably Christian was established nearly a century before the Holocaust, when, in 1858, papal guards took Edgardo Mortara, 6, from his family in Bologna when word spread that he had been clandestinely baptized by a Catholic maid. It was relaxed only in the 1960's.
More important, the directive captures the church's failure to grasp the enormous implications of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. "It shows the very bureaucratic and very icy attitude of the Catholic Church in these types of things." said Alberto Melloni, an Italian historian with the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, who is working with Mr. Fouilloux to publish the diaries of Pope John XXIII. He called the tone of the directive "horrifyingly normal."
A second document that was also discovered by the French researcher is a letter in July 1946 to Monsignor Roncalli that noted his pledge to intervene to return Jewish-born children to their community and asked for his help to return 30 Jewish-born children living in a Catholic charity.
"Almost two years after the liberation of France, some Israelite children are still in non-Jewish institutions that refuse to give them back to Jewish charities," said the letter, which was signed by the Grand Rabbi of France and the head of the Jewish Central Consistory. It added, "We are in advance, grateful for your help."
It is not known whether there was a reply.
No reliable figures exist on how many French Jewish children were saved by the church from the Nazis, or affected by its decision to prevent them from rejoining their families and communities after the war. The French Jewish population had limited success in recovering Jewish children who had been adopted by non-Jews.
In the most well-documented case in France, two Jewish boys, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were sent in 1944 by their parents to a Catholic nursery in Grenoble. The parents perished at Auschwitz. Family members tried to get the boys back in 1945, but in part because they had been baptized, it took an additional eight years and a long legal battle to prevail over the church.
"Look, I know that for the church, baptism means the child belongs to the church, you can't undo it," said Amos Luzzatto, the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. "But given the circumstances they could have made a human decision."
Mr. Luzzatto described himself as "speechless" that the Vatican directive on the children does not mention the Holocaust and questioned the worthiness of Pius XII to be made a saint.
"If they beatify him, don't ask us to applaud," he said.
Some corners of the Catholic Church are suspicious that the document, and the ensuing debate that has played out in Italian newspapers, was produced to create obstacles in Pius XII's march toward sainthood.
But Pope John Paul II strongly supports the campaign to make Pius XII a saint, and in February 2003, the Vatican announced the opening of some secret archives to help clear Pius XII's name, although the papers do not deal with his activities as pope.
Elaine Sciolino reported from Paris for this article, and Jason Horowitz from Rome.

The Jew saving Jews

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/20482/

The Organs Donations Issues

I tried to figure out myself a bit what it is the whole issue about the latest scandal about the organs donations.

Here, a couple of links:

Forward - How Kidneys are Bought and Sold on Black Market
one simple conclusion: there are people in desperate need for a transplant. The provisions in Israel are very strict and the offer is seriously limited in comparison with the demand.

See: Halachic Organ Donor Society

Also: the Syrian-Jewish Enclave in NYC
The insider spy
The almost Hollywood screenplay

and the letter of the Sephardic Community Alliance - a possible power conflict between the Sephardims and Askenazi could also offer an explanation ?

Hamodia found an explanation: We are Very Much in Galus

How much is your body worth - or part of it?
the UK disscussion
the ethics context
value or market value?

Recently, in Romania, several Israeli fertily doctors were arrested and are under investigation for egg trafficking. The "ova commerce" discussion is almost ten years old in Israel.

Health Bills Allow Some a Religious Exemption

Maura Reynolds

CQ Politics

August 3

One of the central tenets of the health care legislation under construction on Capitol Hill is a mandate that every American be protected by some kind of medical insurance. There’s one exception to the mandate, though: people opposed to buying health coverage for religious reasons.
The emerging bills in both the House and Senate include language patterned on an existing “religious conscience” exemption to laws requiring workers to pay taxes for Social Security and Medicare. What’s not clear is whether the exemption, originally designed to apply only to the Old Order Amish, might be used by members of other religious groups — or those who just say they are — in order to evade the insurance mandate.
It’s probably not a large group: There are only between 200,000 and 250,000 Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites (with similar beliefs) in the United States, for instance. But data is thin. The IRS and the Social Security Administration say they don’t collate records on who files for the tax exemption or what religious affiliations they claim. Christian Scientists, who believe in spiritual healing rather than traditional medicine, might be able to file for exemptions to the taxes and to the health insurance mandate, but church officials and lobbyists declined several requests to discuss the matter.
According to the Web site of the Church of Christ, Scientist, believers do not object to all medical care or to purchasing health insurance: “Every Christian Scientist makes his or her own financial and health decisions,” the site says, including when and how to seek medical treatment and whether to carry health insurance.
In Massachusetts, where the Christian Science church is headquartered, the mandatory state health program offers a religious conscience exclusion, and about 9,700 people applied for it in 2007, the most recent year with complete data. The state program has penalties for those who apply for the exclusion and wind up visiting the doctor or the hospital anyway — and, two years ago, about 700 people who applied for the religious exemption were denied and fined, according to Robert Bliss of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue.
There is no similar penalty in the proposed language of the federal health care mandate. A senior Democratic aide involved in drafting the Senate bill, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to talk to reporters, said no member of Congress has pushed for penalties because the number of religious objectors are few and there has been little history of others improperly claiming the exclusion, at least for Social Security and Medicare taxes.
The tax exemption dates to 1965, when Congress included it in the revised Social Security Act (which also created Medicare) to settle a decade-long dispute with the Amish, who believe in a deep division between church and state. The Amish don’t object to paying taxes, and they routinely pay their income, property and other levies to federal and state authorities. But when the IRS began applying the Social Security self-employment tax to farm income in the 1950s — and confiscating farm animals to pay the arrears — the Amish resisted.
Amish farmers argued that Social Security was a form of public insurance, and their religious beliefs prevent them from taking part in public or commercial insurance. Instead, the Amish effectively self-insure within their own community: When a church member needs medical care, for instance, the family pays out of pocket and the church takes up a collection or reimburses them from a common fund.
“The Amish do not believe in accepting government help, and they believe profoundly in taking care of their own,’’ says the Rev. William C. Lindholm, a Lutheran minister and chairman of the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, which advocates on behalf of the Amish, who rarely venture into public debate.
What the Amish wanted to do, in effect, was opt out of the Social Security and Medicare systems entirely, and after a public backlash over the livestock confiscations, Congress decided to permit a narrow exemption for religious sects “opposed to acceptance of the benefits of any private or public insurance.”
To get the exemption, taxpayers must provide evidence they are members of a qualifying sect that has been in existence continuously since 1950. As Roberton Williams, a tax expert at the Urban Institute, put it, “People who try to set up their house as a church, well,that doesn’t fly.’

My Question: You could admit an adult is more or less aware of the consequence of its decisions, whatever the basis. The problem is what to do with the children who, because of the religious choices of their parents are unable to be benefit of a healthy treatment?

See also:

WSJ - Opting out

Social networking and brain

harmful or useful?

Numbers

From the last The Economist, a statistic about the Arab death following the Conflicts in the Arab world since 1990

Sources: Algerian Government, British Council, B'T selem, Iraq Body Count, Kuwaiti Government, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Project on Defense Alternatives, Reuters, UN

Conflict in Darfur, since 2003 - 400,000

Algerian Civil War 1991-2002 - 150,000-200,000

Invasion of Iraq (since 2003) - 101,000-109,000

Iraqi Shia rebellion - 60,000-100,000

War for Kuwait (1990 and 1991) - 24,000-31,000

Second Palestinian intifada (2000-05) -5,500

Gaza war (2009) - 1,400

Lebanon war (2006) - 1,200

Every human being have its value and its story and the same right to live. The same right to have its life defended. Why the apparent solidarity in the Middle East when it is about opposing Israel is fading away when it is to help the lives of other Arabs? The same question for the human rights activitst across the world.

The same Economist is quoting Mona Eltahawy, relating to another issue, but still concerning the Arab world: "Israel is the opium of the Arabs".

Still related to the latest evolution in the Middle East: why any kind of solidarity - human therefore, whatever the race, origin and country - is almost absent in the case of Iran? Of course, the situation is not clear, mainly regarding who could take the direct advantage of any change of the current status. But, beyond the geopolitical and pollitical considerations, it is first of all a matter of respect for the human rights.

What is it like to be a bat?

In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published the paper: "What it is like to be a bat?". The answer is, no surprise, we have no idea. We cannot enter the skull of another person, let alone another species, to experience directly the emotions that rats or bats or other humans feel. Our access is limited to the mechanical, external behavior, that may or may not accompany a certain type of emotion.

The Economist's art discoveries

are a series of not well-known but valuable museums and galleries across the world. After the series of The Monocle, discovering small and valuable ideas in big places, it is another sign that, in the area of creativity - including writing - and arts, the unique and less advertised places have a new future.

An interesting exhibition is currently displayed at the Asian Art Museum from San Franscisco, about the culture of samurai.

Vigil for TA attack held in Jerusalem

Jonathan Beck
The Jerusalem Post

August 2

Hundreds of people convened Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem's Kikar Zion to express solidarity with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) after two people were killed and more than a dozen injured on Saturday night.
Some 500 arrived to the square, carrying signs in with slogans including "Live and Let Love," "Why Kill?" and Tourism Ministry posters of Jerusalem on which the phrase "Senseless Hatred destroyed Jerusalem" was written in Hebrew. Some people waved flags with the rainbow colors symbolizing the gay community and others waved black flags.
News of the vigil spread by word of mouth, through phones and SMS messages.
Dina G., a Jerusalem resident who was present at the vigil, told The Jerusalem Post that the vigil was a "beautiful, soulful" event, with no displays of violence and minimal police presence. Apart from the mostly young people who were at the square, some older people arrived, as well as religious Israelis, she said.
Dina told the Post that the vigil was quiet, with people congregating to honor the dead and some holding up signs, but without shouting slogans.
In a similar event in Tel Aviv, MK Dov Khenin, of the Hadash party, said the murder Saturday was "a horrible reminder of the serious threats to the democratic spectrum of liberties. Again we learn that no man is an island and no place is a safe bubble.
"We will not ask for whom the alarm bell tolls today - it tolls for all of us," Khenin added.
Vigils were also held in Beersheba in the South and Carmiel in the North.

More about:

Eye witnesses - Forward - There were nowhere to run

Laws, history and life

The debate between Ernest Nolte - whose 1963 Der Fascismus in seiner Epoche tried to go beyond both the Marxist and the Liberal patterns of interpretation of the WWII events and stir lots of controversy- and Francois Furet is impressive by the polite and extremely carefully worded exchange. It is a common place, indeed, but I really enjoyed the language of the letters exchange between the two, since 1995 in the last years of Furet's life. An island of academic freedom and distinctiveness, trying to solve by the force of the words painful and sometimes non-conventional ideas - as the insistence of Nolte regarding how to react to revisionists, not by laws, but by the force of the argument - but the problem is that a revisionist don't intend to change its perspective but to impose it in a well-known totalitarian way and they are not interested to hear arguments being already convinced of the absolute truth of their assertions.

For Furet, the 20th century totalitarianisms are twins, sharing are very much alike. And, Holocaust, as Furet wrote to Nolte (66) "was unique...in that it targeted for extermination men, women and children because they were born as they were". Nolte identified Fascism as a form of resistance to and reaction against modernity. By thus, "the final solution" was the logical outcome of an ideology, national-socialism, identifying the Jew with the modernity. As later Zeev Sternhell commented, national-socialism was reduced to the ideas of Hitler and the burden of Germany was eased. After the fall of communism, both points of view are disproportionately mixed by the new-nationalist ideologies, with an anti-semitic milestone, outlining among others that the communism was instaurated by Jews.

The destiny of ideas is often strange. Translated from books to reality, imposed to this reality with a meaning of change, read by people without education, culture and without the required wisdom they could be deadly weapons. Reading a religion book could be a revelatory experience: you find the answers, the recommended path to reach freedom, happiness, peace or to enjoy any other positive standards and feelings. Nothing similar to be found when you look about how religions are effectively working.

For me it was always complicate to look after laws of history or patterns likely to repeat at certain periods of time - Spengler's succesion of the epoch similarly with the seasons is, to be polite, at least childish. At the first lecture, a historical event is like an equation with a non-specified number of unknown details. Something you will never or aproximatively know - especially when it is about events who took place centuries ago - is how the main actors, the human ones, thought and felt and why they took some decisions, and not others. And it is why, for me, the explanation offered by Nolte is not satisfactory, even explained and explained again on hundred of pages: it is too simplistic, tailored as an intellectual relief, sequential and self-explanatory. Facts of life require more details and assertiveness.

The Boiling Point

an interesting story about drinking coffee and enforcing differences.

How to fit a city in a story. Or to fail to.

I must recognize I was thinking a bit at least twice before deciding to write about this book. No, it was not very difficult or the book too complex to describe. By far. Christiane Wirtz's Ein Jahr in Tel Aviv/One Year in Tel Aviv, is a memoir of a German Christian woman in her 30s deciding to take a year off in Tel Aviv, learning Hebrew, finally finding an Israeli boyfriends, scattering references to the life on the beach, eagerness to see the Bethleem for Christmas, one mention of JDate, relations between Germany and the state of Israel, coffee(s), not-so-tensed-life-as-we-see-on-tv etc. Often I had the impression that it is about recollecting some disparate memories put in a certain narrative form. And usually, memory is a traitor and if your memories are not discerned through a critical viewpoint you risk to be stereotypical, as your first stop in the rememoration process would be exactly what it is common to various representations.

Maybe it was intended to advertise Tel Aviv, celebrating this year 100th anniversary. Possibly, as in Germany the book was distributed with a small stamp marking this event, but it is hardly difficult to find too much about the city, as a potential tourist or individual interested about this city, in general. People are drinking coffees all over the world, or going to cut their hair or men are flirting with single women.

As usual, there are good and bad stories, good and bad writers. A city means memories, understanding of places, interacting with people, catching the whole landscape. After, selecting what it is interesting, attractive, unique. It is available for any kind of "city" stories, as each have its special history. When it is about books, you should be able to stimulate the imagination, to describe by your words images. Not the strong point of this book.

I rediscovered Tel Aviv, through the Flying Camel, a 1994 movie of Rami Na'aman. With not a very smart and sophisticated story, but simple, even absurde, and with structured visual information about the city, mostly about the Bauhaus buildings. And, of course, not forget about the statue of the flying camel - the symbol of the Tel Aviv of the pre-State of Israel, which a Jewish European-Israeli professor and a Jewish Palestinian sanitation worker, try to restore.

The story of the camel is shortly the following. In 1932, after the first international fair was inaugurated in Tel Aviv, it was annouced the designation of the Northern part of the city as a permanent fairground, the Levant Fair. Before this decision was took, the mayor of Yafo derided his Jewish colleagues who were dreaming about a fair, "encouraging" them that this will be established when the camel will grow wings. As the fair was established, the symbol of the Levant Fair was chosed the Flying Camel.

How can

the Haredim be so confident?

Window on Israel: Ghetto revolt

Ira Sharansky

Jerusalem Post

July 17

There is a ghetto revolt in Jerusalem. It began several weeks ago in protest against the municipality opening a parking garage on the Sabbath that served visitors to the Old City. It escalated in protest against the arrest of a woman from one of the ultra-Orthodox communities on charges of abusing her three-year-old son.

The ghetto is always seething to some degree. Protests can escalate at any time on account of opposition to a store selling non-kosher food; the discovery of bones at a construction site; the demand that a road be closed on the Sabbath; advertising posters showing immodest women; or a demonstration of gay pride. The ghetto is not unified. There are numerous congregations tracing themselves to Central or Eastern Europe, or Morocco. Some have a history of several hundred years, and each clings to its traditional dress, nuances in ritual and doctrine. Experts say that it is possible to identify the various camps according to the hats and stockings worn by the men, and the wigs or scarves that women use to cover their heads. The larger communities have integrated into Israeli politics, and exercise their weight in the city council and Knesset. The Chabad (Lubavitcher) reach out to other Jews like missionaries. They introduce outsiders to ritual, and seek to gain their support or even their affiliation to the community. Several congregations operate schools for individuals who had been secular, transform themselves to newborn Jews, and are extreme in their loyalty to what they see as true Judaism. The congregations offer social and material support to their members, and help in the selection of a mate. Some congregations are steadfast in their isolation, and opposition to the heretic state. Disputes between the congregations are no less prominent than disputes between the ghetto and secular Israelis. Placards denounce an offending rabbi in the harshest of terms, and yeshiva students may be sent to attack the property or the students of his congregation.
When one of the communities finds an issue that excites others, the whole ghetto is likely to respond. None can remain behind on an issue that gains traction as defense of Judaism. The woman charged with abusing her child is an example. She had starved her three-year-old boy to the point where he was severely undernourished and weighed only 15 pounds. She was affiliated with one of the smallest and most extreme of the congregations, but the involvement of the police and municipal social services with a pregnant woman was enough to recruit others. The protest spread when the police arrived with their truncheons and horses to clear the streets. The ultra-Orthodox community in Beit Shemesh has begun its sympathy protest. So far other ghettos have been quiet. From 2003 to 2008 the ultra-Orthodox had one of their own as mayor of Jerusalem. Uri Lupulianski engaged with the establishment by serving in the IDF and working his way up the career ladder of municipal politics. His election could have marked the beginning of ultra-Orthodox dominance. They amount to 30 percent of Jews in Jerusalem, as opposed to 10 percent of the Jews throughout Israel. They obey their rabbis on issues of politics, and turn out in municipal elections at rates that reach three times those of secular Jews. Insofar as almost all Arabs of East Jerusalem boycott the city's elections, the ghetto could own the city. In 2008, however, one of its inner conflicts set a major congregation against the ultra-Orthodox candidate. A secular candidate, Nir Barkat, moved into city hall. It was he who ordered the opening of the parking garages on the Sabbath, after frustrating negotiations with representatives of ultra-Orthodox congregations. Currently, in response to several nights of burning trash dumpsters and stoning police, journalists, cars, and buses, Barkat has ordered a cessation of garbage pickups, and municipal social services in the ghetto. The municipality and the national government provide considerable resources to the ultra-Orthodox. They qualify for significant discounts on local taxes and water charges due to their large families. Ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset work to assure funding for the schools run by each congregation, most of which ignore the demands of the Education Ministry to provide basic instruction in secular subjects along with their emphasis on religious texts. The parties also demand considerable money for housing, most recently over the 1967 borders in Modiin Ilit and Beitar Ilit. These towns have given the ultra-Orthodox a stake in the conflict over the Land of Israel, and add their complication to whatever can be done about defining the boundaries between Israel and Palestine. Almost all ultra-Orthodox men claim their special exemption from military service. They gain little support from the larger community with the claim to be more effective defenders of the nation than the IDF, due to their study of sacred texts. Each of the congregations also relies on fund raising from affiliated communities overseas, mostly in the United States, Britain and Australia. The occasional need to arouse the enthusiasm of donors may account for the commotions in Israel. Defending the faith against heathen Jews is a way of opening the wallets of ultra-Orthodox millionaires and poor people, and other Jews who respond to Yiddishkeit. Currently one of the main arteries in the city is closed to traffic, and the alternative route is choked as a result. The two major bus lines between French Hill and the center of town are doubtful. There is too much commentary in the media. We hear representatives of the ultra-Orthodox and the anti-ultra-Orthodox, as well as the municipality and the police. It resembles what the media provide during a war: too many voices explaining the position of the Arabs, the Jews, the government and the IDF. One can measure the balance in the media by the insistence of extremists from all sides that they are given a bad deal. It is a time to praise the classical music station, Salvation may not be the right term for what may deliver us from this evil. We can expect a cooling of passions as on previous occasions. A local court has ordered the woman accused of child abuse released to house arrest for Friday and the Sabbath. The police oppose the move out of concern for her other children. The police will release the protesters they arrested, and there will be calming voices of rabbis and secular commentators. Until next time. Perhaps when the parking garage opens again for Sabbath visitors to the Old City. It may all be confusing to those who do not understand, or who cannot understand. The ultra-Orthodox are part of us. They have political weight. They do not dictate policy, but neither do secular Jews.

See also:

The Child was Saved. According to some reports, the mother was an example of patients suffering of the Munchausen-by proxy syndrom.

About Toldot Aharon

Jerusalem Post

The founder of this group,

Aharon Roth, who died in 1947, started the tradition, which continues to this day, that every male member of the sect signs a contract obligating him and his family to abide by the strict dictates of Toldot Aharon. Clothing, customs, even how the hassidim spend their spare time, is carefully regulated. Cohesion is as tight as super glue.

From the History of the Yiddish Presss

and of Hasidic fights.

Parking war

The haredims continued their clashes with the police in Jerusalem this Saturday, protesting over the Shabbat opening of the Carta parking.

The graffiti war

in Jerusalem.

How worthy is a life?

Gilad Shalit’s Plight, and Israel’s Dilemma

From the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

"Many of the perpetrators and victims were known to each other; they came from the same place, or had been to the same school, or had lived in the same street".

See also:

The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

Short trip in the religious world

Are human feelings compatibles with the religious world? The question in itself is quite silly, but it is an answer: no. Gitai's Kadosh is a delicate - and well worked demarche from the point of view of the images: long, with outlined contrasts between light and dark marking the various episodes of the movie - incursion into the haredi world of the ultra-orthodox groups from Jerusalem. A world when getting married is just a matter of following the decisions of the parents, without having any sense of the reasons of why two people should stay together, but for having children and getting a certain sense of normality. It is no place for love, for nuances, for understanding. And, even when it is, as in the case of the couple of Meir-Rivka, the social pressure and the authoritarian decision of the parents are prevailing, without any opposition from the part of those directly concerned and seriously affected. The strangest aspect of this dimension is the fact that, many of them are having opinions and making judgements about a life they hardly know. And the ignorance is passed on from a generation to another. With the rare exceptions when people simply leave the group and look for their chances outside, as far as possible.

Alef-Bet Yoga

for kids - 3-8 years.

I am not very much aware how the kids will switch their memory of various movements into the written and reading knowledge of words and ideas...

The Jewish punk

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371100080&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Satmar power brokers

http://forward.com/articles/108008/

Fighting

the loss of words.

See also:
National Aphasia Organization

Dolls

Sometimes, they are situations when you are simply speachless. Not because you don't have nothing to say, but because it is about a non-sense. Last on my list, Rebecca Rubin.

The challenges

The first African-American Reform rabbi was ordained.

Everybody

wants to be a Cohen. Or how names could be popular beyond religions.

What

is the difference?

Images of wars

Micha Bar-Am was born in Berlin in 1930 and moved with his family in Palestine in 1936. During the War of Independence was part of Palmach units. As a photographer, he documented the Six Day War, the conflicts in Lebanon or the Egypt Peace Talks. Since 1968, he joined Magnum Photos.

Living in chains

or how the religious mentality is destroying lives.

The language of significance

by David Grossman.
"So much of what happens to us is dictated to us by people who are totally irrelevant to us that we would not let them into our home ever to have coffee with them".

Political definitions

of who is a Jew (and who's not).

Mechanical Doll

Dahlia Ravikovitch
translated by Karen Alkalay-Gut

And that night I was a mechanical doll
and I turned right and left, to all sides
and I fell on my face and broke to bits,
and they tried to put me together with skillful hands
And then I went back to being a correct doll
and all my manners were studied and compliant.
But by then I was a different kind of doll
like a wounded twig hanging by a tendril.
And then I went to dance at a ball,
but they left me in the company of cats and dogs
even though all my steps were measured and patterned.
And I had golden hair and I had blue eyes
and I had a dress the color of the flowers in the garden
and I had a straw hat decorated with a cherry.

"The weird world rolls on"

Sleepless in Vermont

Tom LeClair

The NY Times

September 19, 2008

A few years ago, Paul Auster told an interviewer that “I get the best reviews and the worst reviews of any writer I know.” His previous ­novel, “Travels in the Scriptorium,” rewarded his best reviewers and other admirers with a reunion of previous Auster characters in a familiar plot of confused identity. With this new one, “Man in the Dark,” Auster takes revenge on his worst reviewers by making his protagonist/­narrator a 72-year-old literary critic with multiple miseries. His sister may have committed suicide, his wife has recently died, and his daughter and granddaughter are deeply unhappy. He suffers from insomnia and walks with a crutch because his leg has been mangled in one of those accidents Auster likes to inflict on his characters.

As the longtime book editor of The Boston Globe, August Brill wrote more than 1,500 essays, but he now believes all this work to be “ephemera.” The only book project he ever began, a memoir about and for his family, was abandoned. Although he no longer writes, he tells himself ­stories in the dark to avoid thinking about the women with whom he lives: a daughter grieving over a broken marriage, and a granddaughter mourning a former boyfriend killed in Iraq. The novel is the narrative of one such sleepless night, a “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” in which Brill invents a character named Owen Brick, a happily married 29-year-old man who wakes up in a parallel contemporary world where the United States is fighting a civil war. This Rip van Brick must cope with separation from his wife, altered conditions — random bombardments, very high inflation, no TV, few cars — and quantum quirks, like running into his teenage “heartthrob.” With this woman’s aid, secessionists from the federal government dictate a mission implausible: Brick must return to the “real” world of 2007 and kill Brill, who has caused the civil war by imagining it.

Brick’s story is interrupted by Brill’s memories, by his awareness of physical discomforts and, near dawn, by his grand­daughter, who also can’t sleep. She lies down next to him and slowly, persistently, forces him to reveal the most painful part of his past, his betrayals of her beloved grandmother. By morning Brill has, through this nocturnal transmission, finished his memoir.

Invigorated, Brill wants “a farmer’s breakfast.” He doesn’t realize the full extent of the punishment Auster has in store for him. Although a lifelong reader, Brill is in the dark as a story­teller: his alternative-world plot is hackneyed in concept and rickety in execution. But if his account of a war between American liberals and conservatives is sketchily imagined, Brill does no better with his personal materials, confabulated anecdotes rendered in a flat, chronicling style. One of his favorite phrases, which closes the book, is taken from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose: “the weird world rolls on.” The sentence summarizes Brill’s banality and lack of originality, which discourage emotional engagement from anyone not a blood relative.

“Man in the Dark” might be mistaken for a clever mockery of literary critics if the slackness of Brill’s narration didn’t also mar Auster’s other recent fiction. Auster is 61, but the focal characters of his last three novels are figurative or literal old men. The narrator of “Oracle Night” walks like a “shuffling geezer” after a near-fatal illness; the narrator of “Brooklyn Follies” has moved to Park Slope to die; and Mr. Blank of “Travels in the Scriptorium” is a geriatric case. Like Brill, these characters ultimately manage a modest revival, but for long stretches their sensibilities are dull, their perceptions dim, their language fatigued. Feeble figures, they provide a low-energy, high-fiber perpetuation of the Auster brand.

“Man in the Dark” is a slightly new and improved “Travels in the Scriptorium,” which it partially rewrites in a semi-realistic vein. Both B-men occupy a context of imaginary political unrest, and both reveal themselves through their fictionalizing. But the buried associations between Brill’s civil war and the family battles of his past keep “Man in the Dark” within a marginally interesting psychological realm, while “Scriptorium” is a self-regarding and airless authorial game. Yet the superiority of the new novel to “Scriptorium” becomes trivial when “Man in the Dark” is compared with a similar short novel by Max Frisch, “Man in the Holocene,” which is also about an elderly, desperate man who spends a night awake. The scientific and cultural expansiveness of Frisch’s novel make “Man in the Dark” seem narrow and perfunctory.

After, say, 10 books, maybe novelists should be retested, like accident-prone senior citizens renewing their driver’s licenses. Veterans of literary wars would anonymously submit a new manuscript to agents. Of “Man in the Dark,” I think they’d say, “third-rate imitation of Paul Auster.” Then the author might decide to rev up a first-rate imitation of his first-rate early work. Or he might write a fourth-rate attack on literary agents.

Tom LeClair’s fifth novel, “Passing Through,” has just been published.

I didn't liked how the Owen Brick story ended. I was as a feeling of hurry to finish fast with this character, because it was something else to be done. And, since Brick's understandable dissapearance my interest for the rest of the book ceased.

Shalom Auslander

Foreskin's Lament.(a NY Times excerpt)

Chicago bus ads part of Indiana atheist campaign

Associated Press, Chicago Tribune
May 23

For the past week, 25 buses from the Chicago Transit Authority have been bearing an unusual advertising slogan. The large ads read "In the Beginning, Man Created God," and they're scheduled to remain on the sides of the buses through June. They're part of an effort by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign, with the help of the American Humanist Association. The board that runs South Bend's city bus system recently agreed to allow ads on that city's buses reading: "You can be good without God." The group had hoped to have the ads installed on 20 South Bend buses before President Barack Obama's appearance at the University of Notre Dame last Sunday, but that move was delayed.

Bloomington, Indiana's city bus service recently rejected similar ads, prompting a lawsuit.

God is not Great

In comparison with Hitchens, I was cured by religion from an early age. I found at least of anthropological interest his wandering from various religions, as self-introducted in God is not Great: (:233) "...having in the course of my life been an Anglican, educated at a Methodist school, converted by marriage to Greek Orthodoxy, recognized as an incarnation by the followers of Sai Baba, and remarried by a rabbi...". But, in fact, those experiences are offering insights of the history and histories of religion. Even, even as an atheist observer, from outside or better said, from above, all the observations and considerations regarding religion could be valid as well.

For me, the essentials of the books are resumed in Chapter Fifteen - Religion as an Original Sin - as follows (:245):

"There are, indeed, several ways in which religion is not just amoral, but positively immoral. And these faults and crimes are not to be found in the behavior of its adherents (which can sometimes be exemplary) but in its original percepts. These include:

- Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous

- The doctrine of blood sacrifice

- The doctrine of atonement

- The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment

- The imposition of impossible tasks and rules"

And, setting a right balance while answering the detractors of atheism (:300):

"Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, 'faith-based'".

Eating disorder dynamics

in the religious communities.

Hats

- the industry, interesting mostly from the anthropological point of view.

Lars von Trier film "Antichrist" shocks Cannes

Mike Collett-White
Reuters

May 17

Danish director Lars von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama "Antichrist" at the Cannes film festival.

The film, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival, which ends on May 24.

Cannes' notoriously picky critics and press often react audibly to films during screenings, but Sunday evening's viewing was unusually demonstrative.

Jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation.

Many viewers in the large Debussy cinema also appeared to take objection to von Trier's decision to dedicate his film to the revered Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Applause from a handful of viewers was drowned out by booing at the end.

Antichrist opens with a heavily stylized, black-and-white, slow-motion portrayal of the child's accidental death set to soaring music by Handel.

Dafoe's character, who is a therapist, tries to help his wife deal with her grief and encourages her to come off heavy medication that sedates her for weeks after the death.

They decide to go to an isolated wooden cabin in an unspecified forest to recover, but the woman Gainsbourg portrays loses control of her senses.

The abuse she submits herself and her husband to drew shocked gasps from the audience.

The reaction suggested that von Trier, who won the top prize in Cannes with "Dancer in the Dark" in 2000, could be in for a rough ride from reviewers and journalists on Monday.

One U.S. critic said he and others found the film "offensive," and questioned why it was included in the main competition of 20 films in Cannes.

In production notes for Antichrist, the 53-year-old director said that the movie was a "kind of therapy" for depression he was suffering from two years ago.

"I can offer no excuse for 'Antichrist' ... other than my absolute belief in the film -- the most important film of my entire career!"

A past

still denied by many, not enough considered in the whole implications, including from the point of view of understanding human nature.

Busy - running+writing

What I Talk about When I Talk about Running is another writing surprise of Murakami. He wrote about Beatles songs, many adventures of imaginations, as well as about the case of Aum sect. The title is a rephrasing of Raymond Carver's book What We Talk When We Talk about Love (the conclusion: my use of the word "love" is different of yours; the senses are different and sometimes it is not much to do about this, once we try to translate our feelings into words).

I both have the experience of running and writing. The first as a daily exercise, plus reading plus infinite wondering of observing the world around (humans including). I cannot establish exactly when it started as I cannot imagine either living without. The running hobby is no more than a hobby, practiced from time to time.

In a way, they are some similarities between the two, but at various levels. Running is about setting yourself physical limits and practicing how to reach it. Writing is a more complicate business, dealing with the capacity of translating into words various - and sometimes chaotic personal and intellectual experiences -, needs practice too, but you never know exactly what your limits are and the standards are rather diluting and diminishing your creativity. (If your stake is to write as Proust, probably your performance will be to be a perfect pastiche of Proust, your perspective on the world being nothing more, nothing less than Proust's; nothing else to ad on this). Writing is about the capacity to share your own translation of the word, as in any artistic demarche. I can live one day, one month, one year without running. Without writing one day, it is hardly to live with.

One of the advantages of a good writer is to have the capacity to tell stories about everything, to share it with the others. When I first saw the book, I was curious how Murakami sees this. That's the business of the writer. I am curious what his next book will be about.

Identity DJ

Wladimir Kaminer is a very successful media product: DJ in the Russendisko, author of various books about enjoying his Jewish-Russian identity in Berlin - to be read Prenzlauer Berg, Schonhauser Allee - and talking, succesfully again, about how it is to be DJ in Russendisko, author of...etc.etc. Everybody his niche and he is not the only one (will be back soon about this). He is having already an audience. But when very simple, "eatable" identity positionings, are becoming the mainstream and the reference point for the community in itself - and many of its members - as for the outside observers, you will lost exactly those whose contribution will help to preserve what it is not a matter of fashion and "coolness".

Israel and Germany

Amos Oz, on the post-war relationships between Israel and Germany, the first years of the state of Israel and a future. (in German)

Partisan or Parasite?

Daniel Kahn and the New Jewish Questions

courtesy of daniel kahn and the painted bird

Voice of Protest: From the Wall to the world.

By Rokhl Kafrissen

May 13, 2009, issue of May 22, 2009.

Forward.com

Earlier this month, the 90th birthday of folk legend Pete Seeger drew 15,000 people to New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The sold-out show demonstrated the legacy, and continuing vitality, of the American protest-song tradition, a tradition that was born in the Great Depression and gave rise to some of the fiercest critiques of modern capitalism and imperialism in any discourse. Daniel Kahn, a Detroit-born singer-songwriter now living in Berlin, is part of that tradition, while at the same time creating a new musical idiom blending American-folk and Yiddish-protest song. Kahn, 30, is a post-modern folkie just as likely to quote from the Industrial Workers of the World songbook as to cite Marxist critic Slavoj Zizek. But his political sympathies and artistic creations are very much reminiscent of those of Seeger and his progeny.

For example, Kahn was back in the United States, performing, and saw President Obama’s March 24 press conference, at which the president was pointedly asked about the problem of growing homelessness and tent cities springing up around the United States. Disturbed by these images reminiscent of the Great Depression, Kahn woke in the middle of the night and set to work writing original English lyrics for an old Yiddish song about the anger of the unemployed, “Arbetloze Marsh” (“The March of the Unemployed”), originally written by Mordecai Gebirtig.

one, two, three, four

join the marching jobless corps

no work in the factory

no more manufacturing

every tool is broke and rusted

every wheel and window busted

through the city streets we go

idle as a CEO

idle as a CEO

one, two, three, four

join the marching jobless corps

we don’t have to pay no rent

sleeping in a camping tent

dumpster diving don’t take money

every bite is shared with twenty

let the yuppies have their wine

bread and water suit us fine

bread and water suit us fine

The next day, The New York Times featured Fresno, Calif.’s, tent cities on the front page.

Since then, Kahn has been performing “Arbetloze Marsh,” in Yiddish and English for eager listeners, many of whom are unemployed or holding on to whatever employment they have. As the crowd at Barbès in Brooklyn’s Park Slope saw at a recent show, for Kahn and his band, The Painted Bird, there’s nothing fuzzy or nostalgic about Yiddish song. Indeed, Yiddish song is the perfect idiom in which Kahn can create his highly political and timely art. The songs that Kahn chooses are political in themselves, but at the same time, the choice of Yiddish, the maligned tongue of the exile, is an act of cultural and political resistance.

Over the past few years, Kahn has gained a following in Europe, and now in the United States, for his uncanny ability to connect history, politics and current events in a variety of languages, including German, English and especially Yiddish. In concert, and with his new album, “Partisans and Parasites,” Kahn establishes himself as a high-art folk troubadour, the rebellious Jewish son of Woody Guthrie and Bertolt Brecht.

Kahn, who started acting professionally at 11 and studied drama in college, decided to move to Berlin in 2005 not because of the city’s vibrant Jewish music scene, but because it was the home of Brecht.

Kahn’s music reflects his love for Brechtian drama. Kahn even created his own genre of music, called “Verfremdungsklezmer,” or alienated klezmer, in an overt nod to Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt, which seeks to highlight the artifice of theater. Verfremdungsklezmer, like its namesake, prods its audience to action through humor and questioning. With The Painted Bird (named after Jerzy Kosin´ski’s grotesque novel of World War II), Kahn often appears onstage in papier-mâché bird masks, alternately playing an accordion, cigar box ukulele, harmonica and electronic bullhorn.

His original songs evoke a Brechtian level of discomfort by problematizing heroes and making the grotesque sympathetic. For example, “Six Million Germans/Nakam” recounts the story of the hero of the Vilnius (known in Yiddish as Vilna) partisans, Abba Kovner, who was among the brave men and women who fought, with few weapons and terrible odds, against the Nazis and their collaborators. Less discussed is Kovner’s decision, with a group of friends, to take revenge on the Germans after the war. Calling themselves Nakam (revenge), they concocted a plan to poison German water supplies and take millions of German victims in retribution. The song, performed as an upbeat klezmer polka, jarringly juxtaposes subject and tone to bring up two of Kahn’s favorite themes, violence and revenge, and forces the listener to question the nature of heroism and justice.

Reworking and re-imagining Yiddish songs, Kahn decries the excesses of modern-day capitalism and sings of contemporary tragedies. Although “Arbetloze Marsh” was written too recently to make it onto the CD, another song on “Partisans and Parasites” voices a similarly fiery populist outrage. “Khurbn Katrina/The Destruction of New Orleans” is perhaps the most compelling moment on the CD. It is based on the 1912 Yiddish song “Dos Lid fun Titanik,” written about the sinking of the Titanic. The inspiration for “Khurbn Katrina” was, of course, Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s disastrous failure to respond to the suffering of the people of New Orleans.

To Kahn, New Orleans is of more than just theoretical interest. He spent a year there after college as a labor organizer working with nurses. And New Orleans is where he was first introduced to contemporary Jewish music. The destruction of New Orleans is personal for Kahn, and he directs his anger at an administration that seemed to do little to prevent the devastation of one of America’s oldest cities. “Khurbn Katrina/The Destruction of New Orleans” is in two parts; the first verses were written collaboratively in Yiddish, and the second, written solely by Kahn, is completely in English. The song begins mournfully, staying close to the Yiddish original, and then transforms into a raucous, New Orleans funeral march in English, with Kahn not so much singing as crying out in mourning:

two lovers they are peacefully lying

in a peace not a soul could disturb

they cried out ‘my dear God we are dying’

but the President seems not to have heard

just imagine, good people, the ruin

how terrible is the wrath of the Lord

with the water from the lake down to Bourbon

from Canal to the Lower 9th Ward

oh my Lord…

Kahn has been touring Europe nonstop with a brilliant band of pan-European collaborators, Jewish and non-Jewish, such as Russian singer/journalist/academic Psoy Korolenko and Moscow-based blues guitar hero Vanya Zhuk. “Nakam/Six Million Germans” is one of Kahn’s most popular songs and already has been translated into German by a German fan of the song. In Europe, where history is never too far away, Jews and non-Jews are hungry to talk about the complicated legacy left by the slaughter of World War II.

The contemporary Jewish drive to recover a broken past doesn’t exist in isolation, but is accompanied by a larger European desire to heal other cultures also devastated by the losses of World War II, including, but not limited to, the loss of Jewish culture. For Kahn, using old Jewish songs and musical traditions makes sense, not because of their peculiar qualities, indeed, but because of their universality. As Kahn told me a few months ago: “Every people’s story is unique. I’m not sure that it is the unique qualities to the Jewish experience that give it its meaning… it might be the qualities that Jews share with other people: oppression, poverty, isolation, otherness.…” With “Partisans and Parasites,” Kahn and his collaborators force us to question the unique, and the universal, for ourselves and for our neighbors, and for our shared future.

Rokhl Kafrissen is working on a book called “The Myth of the Yiddish Atlantis” and writes for Jewish Currents magazine.

How Avedon Blurred His Own Image

Cathy Horyn
NY Times
May 14

ON a morning in April 1967, Twiggy, the doe-eyed British modeling sensation, sat on a stool before Richard Avedon in his studio on East 58th Street. She had on a plain black dress and black fishnets, and it was her first session with the fashion photographer. She was 17.

As Avedon stood behind a Rolleiflex camera mounted on a tripod, the Kinks blared from a phonograph nearby. Since he began photographing beautiful women in the mid-1940s — first for Harper’s Bazaar, then Vogue — Avedon made it a practice to ask his models what music and food they preferred. This more than contributed to the relaxed atmosphere of the studio. “They all wanted to please him,” said Polly Mellen, the Vogue editor on that shoot.

Bending over the Rolleiflex, Avedon said, “All right, now, very straight,” and Twiggy sat up straight and turned her gaze to the camera.

Despite the hullabaloo she caused, which the writer Thomas Whiteside described in a profile that year in The New Yorker, Twiggy’s career was actually brief. It is Avedon’s pictures that make us think of her as the definitive ’60s child.

His gift was not merely for the alive moment — the model, her chin up, leaping cleanly over a puddle. Rather, it was for knowing which of the myriad of gestures produced the truest sense of the moment. Whiteside found Avedon’s process utterly unique, explaining he “exercised meticulous control over his model, almost as though he were working from a blueprint.”

That blueprint is, broadly, the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, from May 15 to Sept. 6.

From his earliest, sun-splashed pictures in 1944 to portraits in 2000 that convey his fashion fatigue, the I.C.P. exhibition is the largest survey of Avedon’s fashion work since the Metropolitan Museum show in 1978.

In both appearance and personality, Avedon cut the ideal figure of a fashion photographer, and five years after his death, at age 81, he remains that. His photographic style has been widely imitated, not least by Steven Meisel. Generations of models have sprung across mid-tone seamless backdrops, or sat pensively in cafes, or pretended to be in love or quite alone — all because of Avedon. And yet if his images retain their special power, if the experiences and emotions they present seem lived and not merely imitated, it may be because he is the more complete photographer.

A twice-married man, whose energy and trim, compact looks seemed to embody the word “flair,” Avedon often harbored doubts about his next project, yet recovered quickly. His great passion, outside of picture-making and his family, was the theater. A friend, the writer Adam Gopnik, reckoned that Avedon saw Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show 35 times in the space of a summer. “He lived for performance,” Mr. Gopnik said.

It’s probable that as a teenager in New York in the early ’40s — Avedon dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School and enlisted in the merchant marine, where he learned basic photography — he saw not so much the fashion in the streets as the cosmopolitan gestures that animated it. Movement entered his pictures for Harper’s Bazaar soon after he arrived there. Storytelling followed, especially once he began shooting the Paris collections and invented street scenes for models like Dovima and Dorian Leigh, or his first wife, Doe Avedon.

Already on the masthead at Bazaar was Martin Munkacsi, the Hungarian-born photographer whose action shots impressed Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. In later years, when he discussed his beginnings, Avedon often made Munkacsi out to be a more distant figure than he was, according to the exhibition’s curators, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti.

Then again, Avedon always maintained that in every picture he was photographing himself. When Ms. Squiers asked the photographer Lillian Bassman, who spent summers with Avedon and their families on Fire Island, why he had his models running — or laughing — she replied: “Did you ever meet Dick? He was always jumping around.”

Outdoor shots and innovative photography were part of the terrain at Bazaar in the ’40s and ’50s. The cultural life in New York similarly enriched the work of other photographers, notably Irving Penn, who was at Vogue and who would be Avedon’s friend and rival for the next 40 years. So what made Avedon different?

HE was keenly aware that beauty had an element of tragedy — it faded, for one thing, or it came at a terrible loss of self. Growing up, Avedon heard his mother say to his sister Louise, who would eventually die, at 42, in a mental institution, “You’re so beautiful you don’t have to open your mouth.” This notion that beauty can be intoxicating but, equally, impoverishing to the soul, Ms. Squiers said, tinged Avedon’s early pictures with a feeling of compassion.

And it may never have completely left him. A photograph he made in 1998 of a robotic-looking model wearing a mouth plug seemed to circle back to his sister. Such pictures, made when he was a staff photographer at The New Yorker, suggested Avedon’s long view of fashion, but also a distinct side of his personality. “There was a real sadness about him,” said Norma Stevens, who joined his studio in 1976 and today runs the Richard Avedon Foundation. “He loved working, and he would be up for that. But it was like a performance. After that there would be a drop.”

Drawn to theatrical performers, Avedon took numerous portraits when he was at Bazaar, and, like Penn, derived a lot of artistic satisfaction from them. Yet into the ’60s, influenced by the Civil Rights movement and the poets of the counterculture, the portraits acquired a hardness that made critics question Avedon’s right to be more than a fashion photographer. An eviscerating review in 1964 by Robert Brustein of “Nothing Personal,” the book Avedon did with James Baldwin, left him unable to do serious projects for the next five years.

The crisis also affected his fashion work. “You can see he’s been knocked off his game in a lot of those pictures,” Ms. Squiers said. In 1965, Avedon left Bazaar and followed his close ally, Diana Vreeland, to Vogue. As at Bazaar, Vreeland gave him free rein and, more important, said Mr. Aletti, the curator, protected him from the interference of Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman.

Surprisingly, Avedon’s pictures in the ’60s of models like Twiggy and Penelope Tree were seen by some critics as anti-fashion. Avedon — the ’50s golden boy, the inspiration for Fred Astaire’s suave character in the movie “Funny Face” — was now savaging beauty and elegance. Not only was he fleeing from the confines of fashion magazines, he was also seeking revenge.

COMMENTS of this sort make you wonder how much the critics knew about fashion. If anything, Avedon’s stripped-down aesthetic and motion are representative of the era’s frenetic energy.

Mr. Gopnik, who first met Avedon in 1985 when the photographer was completing his series of portraits called “In the American West,” believes the attacks were motivated by jealousy and envy. People resented the famous, good-looking man who took such delight in his work and, at the same time, kept exploring new areas. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” Mr. Gopnik said.

Avedon’s photography has always amounted to a plea for beauty — to see it mysterious, to see it raw but ultimately to see it whole. To view his portraits in the ’50s and ’60s is to see the flip side of the decades’ stylish obsessions. And whether the faces were beautiful or ravaged, famous or not, the portraits relentlessly informed the fashion images, and vice versa.

Certainly by the ’90s, with notions like Prada’s ugly beauty, the categories of beauty had dissolved. For Avedon, though, the lines had faded long before, if they were ever that clear. Perhaps the famous “Avedon blur” expressed the futility, even the tragedy, of permanent beliefs.

“I certainly think — I know — that the apparent line between his fashion photography and his portraits was false, that he saw it as continuous work,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding that Avedon was amused at how people could look at the empty face of a model and find it more beautiful than the worn face of a coal miner. “It was not an affectation on his part,” he said. The I.C.P. exhibition, picking up where the 1978 Metropolitan show left off and allowing the first complete view of Avedon’s fashion photography, strips away the last shadows on his art.