Elul comes after the dark month of Av and still keeps the shades of the suffering and distress.
A short overview of the events that took place in the month of Elul shows how before the change many dramatic changes could take place.
And only if I try to think about some of the events of the last days, according to the media news, I cannot stop thinking about the difficult beginning that stays before us:
The anti-semitic attack on the college campus in the US. As usual, it is still difficult to see American as a hotbed of hate, but the zahav medina for Jews was only in my imagination. A couple of seconds ago I've read that the Orthodox Rabbi of Berlin was charged for defending circumcisions.
A recent anti-semitic attack in Berlin, a place where the Jews discussed a lot lately about what the meaning of a circumcision ban.
The news of the inevitable eviction of Migron
In between many other news and dangers. The challenges aren't new, the opportunities change always.
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
Thursday, 19 January 2012
The Tur on Germany (1329)
Rabbi Yaakov Baal Haturim (The Tur) was the thirs on of Rosh, born in Cologne, around 1275.
After suffering the Rindfleisch persecutions, he refugiated in Spain.
In 1329, he wrote regarding Germany:
"It is forbidden for a person to even traverse a place of mortal danger, let alone to live in the land of blood...Anyone who succeeds in bringin a person out from there (Germany) is considered as having saved a Jewish soul".
After suffering the Rindfleisch persecutions, he refugiated in Spain.
In 1329, he wrote regarding Germany:
"It is forbidden for a person to even traverse a place of mortal danger, let alone to live in the land of blood...Anyone who succeeds in bringin a person out from there (Germany) is considered as having saved a Jewish soul".
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
A war criminal among us
He lived for 60 years in Germany, no need to change his name or to run in Latin America or in the Middle East. How was it possible? I would be curious to find out more.
Monday, 14 September 2009
Survival is the Sweetest Revenge
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?”
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
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Friday, 31 July 2009
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.
Sunday, 28 June 2009
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:
Monday, 18 May 2009
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)
Friday, 15 May 2009
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)