Was Benoît Mandelbrot Jewish?

Yes, Benoît Mandelbrot was a Jew. The Times obituary says he, "was born on Nov. 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936 his family fled the Nazis, first to Paris and then to the south of France..."  Wikipedia says that in France, "He was helped by Rabbi David Feuerwerker, the Rabbi of Brive-la-Gaillarde, to continue his studies." Mandelbrot is the Yiddish word for almond bread, the Jewish biscotti.

The Times says, "Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term 'fractal' to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature." Mandelbrot's discoveries profoundly influenced mathematics and the sciences and numerous disciplines beyond.

Does intermarriage finish Hitler's work? Is there any benefit to eating Kosher? My July 2016 Dear Rabbi Zahavy column in the Jewish Standard

Dear Rabbi Zahavy
Your Talmudic Advice Column

Dear Rabbi Zahavy,

I was at a public Jewish event where a rabbi was speaking about the future of the Jewish people. At one point in his talk he lashed out at Jews who marry non-Jews. He said that they are “finishing Hitler’s work,” which I took to mean they are destroying the Jewish people.

This criticism disturbed my friends and me, especially because I have a child who is intermarried. So do others who were present and heard this rabbi.

I was hurt and offended by this statement. I did not say anything to the rabbi. Should I have spoken up?

Offended in Oradell

Dear Offended,

Yes, as a rule, you may speak up and let people know if you feel offended by what they say. That’s how we maintain a polite and orderly society. Even if the person speaking has a claim to respect and authority because he is a rabbi, that does not give him any right to say inane things that offend others.

My Jewish Standard Dear Rabbi Column for July 2015: Holocaust Conceit

Dear Rabbi,

A member of our community has been saying for years that he is Holocaust survivor. In fact he did live in Hungary during the Holocaust, but by all accounts, he was not subjected to any special duress during that period. It seems like this person is engaging in a form of bragging and seeks a special status, even sympathy. Why would someone do that? And what should I do about it?

Befuddled in Bergenfield

Dear Befuddled,

I’ll answer your question in two parts. First the factual. The suffering for Jews during the war was less severe in Hungary than in other parts of Europe. It is true that Germany did not occupy Hungary until 1944, late in the war. During the war, however, many Hungarian Jews suffered deprivation, starvation, humiliation, and other atrocities. Every Jew in Europe during WWII suffered trauma, whether they were in concentration camps, hidden, or partisans in the forest. Even those who escaped direct attack might have been traumatized by the loss of loved ones.

The Jews in Hungary were decimated at the end of the war. As many as 450,000 or more Jews were deported to concentration camps, and anti-Semitic laws were enacted. So as a matter of fact, a person living in Budapest through the war can call him or herself a survivor of evil Nazi rule, if that’s what he wants to do.

The Holocaust is a sensitive subject. You have to be careful of your wording and tone when you discuss it, so you do not suggest that anyone who went through it is less of a survivor. True, some people fabricate their experiences, but that’s not widespread.

You need to accept that a wide range of factors goes into how people in that circumstance choose to describe themselves and their personal histories. On one end of the spectrum, some survivors will not speak at all, even to their families and friends, about their experiences.

Your acquaintance seems to be on the other side of the spectrum — speaking out too vocally for your taste and claiming too much about his past. American culture is quite averse to open conceit. Even when the facts and a person’s achievements make it tempting for him or her to claim special merit, it’s not a good idea. And if it is done in the wrong way, it may backfire for someone who claims attention for triumphs over adversity.

On the other hand, Jewish culture is thick with recollections of enslavements, persecutions, and sufferings. Theologians have spent great efforts dealing with the cosmic and narrative meanings of our adversities over the generations.

A familiar refrain that we recognize from the Haggadah proclaims that, “In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” And we have faith that God redeems us from our sufferings.

Cultural analysts suggest that the survival of the Jews as a collective is strengthened by the sharing of stories of survival in the face of barbaric enemies.

Yet some historians have decried the religious meme of the persecuted and suffering Jew as an overemphasis on the lachrymose side of history. Tearful accounts of the past, they say, deflect us from the reality that while many tragic events have occurred to us as a people, most of Jewish history is positive, not sad, unhappy, mournful, or sorrowful.

Your attention-seeking acquaintance seems to have chosen to personalize our Jewish meme and make himself into a singular symbol of past suffering. While that does not sit well with you, I suggest that you try to abide his attitude. Given the historical and cultural contexts of this situation, there is little that you can or should do about it.

Remember, stories of the past ought to make us wary of the real enemies that are lurking out there to attack us. But be balanced. Stay focused, and find meaning in your own present-day Judaism. Do not be distracted from it by others who dwell overly much on the horrors of our history.
________________________________

The Dear Rabbi column offers timely advice based on timeless Talmudic wisdom. It aspires to be equally respectful and meaningful to all varieties and denominations of Judaism. You can find it here on the first Friday of the month. Send your questions to DearRabbi@jewishmediagroup.com.

Is the United Nations Kosher?

No, the United Nations is not kosher.

In Hebrew the abbreviation for the UN is OOM and Haaretz has a humorous historical account of the common dismissal and disparagement of the UN in Hebrew/Yiddish "Oom shmoom: Blithe dismissal, Yiddish-style". [Hat tip to Yitz!]

As a person who supports Israel, I take note of these top reasons that I think the UN is not kosher:

• The declaration in the General Assembly in 1975 that Zionism is racism.
• The creation of refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1948-49 to prolong the suffering of the Palestinians and to foster terrorism.
• The appointment of Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi Wehrmacht officer, as Secretary General from 1972 to 1981.

So indeed, Oom Shmoom, not kosher!

Catching up on the News of Jews: Chained Melodies and Celebrities Good and Bad

Chained Melodies:

I support civil rights for Jewish women in all marital and in all ritual issues. I am surprised that the Agunah issue has become mainstream news all of a sudden in the Times and at the Jewish Channel. The Times has this, "Unwilling to Allow His Wife a Divorce, He Marries Another - NY Times" The reporter presents some of the baffling facts about the rabbinic legal jungle:

Mr. Kin, who in recent years moved to Las Vegas, has repeatedly insisted that Ms. Kin agree to binding arbitration from one particular religious court based in Monsey that is controversial and has been widely denounced by rabbinical authorities in the United States and Israel. Several leading rabbis, including the chief rabbinical office of Israel, have said they would not accept a divorce document signed by this particular court. Mr. Kin has said that the head of the beit din, Rabbi Tzvi Dov Abraham of Monsey, granted him dispensation to marry again.

“The rabbinical court system is such an ad hoc system where any man is able to call himself a rabbi and any three rabbis are able to call themselves a court, so that even if it’s not accepted by anyone, he is able to hide behind this,” said Rabbi Jeremy Stern, the executive director of the group that organized the protests against the wedding. “What empowers him to continue is the support of friend and family and community. We need everyone to say clearly we will not tolerate this kind of behavior.”

The notion that rabbis act within a legitimate system of law has always seemed to me to be a grand exaggeration at best. In the realm of rabbinic law, there is no transparent means of publishing decisions or appealing decisions. Facts are hard to come by and rumors rule. Often a rabbinic case works like this: you go to the local rabbi of your choice and he whispers his opinion in your ear. Then you go tell everyone what he said.

Speaking of rumors, I stumbled on this blog (which when asked, a reporter first told me was Kin's former husband's blog and then he changed his mind and said he was not sure that is the case): THE PHONY AGUNAH: LONNA KIN RALBAG IS A PHONY AGUNAH. The post raises issues and makes me think - did Lonna Kin ever actually go to the court to receive her get? One begins to wonder if this case is a clash of two manipulators who no longer wish to live together. Something doesn't smell right. This instance is probably not going to turn out to be the best poster case for the issue of women's rights in Orthodox Judaism, once we hear all the allegations about these two people. Too bad - the cause of women's rights overall is a just one.

Celebrities Good and Bad:

New Yorker had two fantastic profiles: one on actress Scarlett Johansson - Anthony Lane: The Unstoppable Scarlett Johansson- and the other on Paul de Man who was an acclaimed academic until he was exposed as a writer for the Nazis and all-around scoundrel - Louis Menand: Paul de Man's Hidden Past

And the Times brought us news of some wonderful New York Jews, They Kept a Lower East Side Lot Vacant for 47 Years: telling us, "Nearly four decades ago, a new assemblyman named Sheldon Silver and his young protégé escorted Edward I. Koch, then a mayoral candidate, through the Orthodox Jewish enclave on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where the two had both grown up. It was the first day of Rosh Hashana, 1977..." and going on to extol (?) the contributions of William E. Rapfogel to this neighborhood preservation effort. to recall, "Mr. Rapfogel, who led the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, was arrested last year and accused of looting the agency." I got a mailing today from the Met Council asking for a Passover donation. I'm gonna pass. You may want to shower thoroughly after reading that article.

Richard Brody at New Yorker Rips Hannah Arendt

I've always despised Hannah Arendt for the chutzpah of mitigating Eichmann's horrifying evil, "He was a typical functionary" she says, and his evil was "banal".

And I am one of those, "Jews who were infuriated by [her] charges of Jewish complicity in the Holocaust."

Brody has a lucid powerful new post on the matter of Arendt in the New Yorker ("HANNAH ARENDT’S FAILURES OF IMAGINATION") in which among other trenchant observations he says,

... Arendt reveals the ground for her belief that Eichmann was no ideological Nazi but, in fact, was just a blind functionary. Not being an intellectual, he couldn’t have had “ideas” or “terrifically interesting things” to think about Hitler, and, therefore, he couldn’t have “really believed in Nazism.” I’ve long believed that her division of the world into those who “think” and those, like Eichmann, who speak in what she calls “clichés” reflects the snobbery of a proud member of the intellectual class. It’s a strange badge of intellectual honor to ascribe true belief in Nazism solely to intellectuals, and it is yet another sign that the passions and the hatreds on which the movement ran were essentially beyond Arendt’s purview. Second, her charge against the intellectual class—that they invent “completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things” and get “trapped in their own ideas”—is the perfect description of her own heavily theoretical and utterly impersonal view of Eichmann.

Experience God's Favorite Prayers

Times: Is Einstein's Physics of Relativity Jewish?

In George Johnson's review of a new book by Steven Gimbel, the Times considers the issue of the connection between Albert Einstein's science and the Talmud. We're glad to see that the Talmud is given credit for such great scientific advances. Still, we need to reserve judgement on the assertions at least until we read the book.

The book blurb announces that, "There are some senses, Gimbel claims, in which Jews can find a special connection to E = mc2, and this claim leads to the engaging, spirited debate at the heart of this book."

Here is the Talmudic crux of the review:

...“Jewish physics.” With Einstein’s theories now at the bedrock of modern science, the Nazi’s words have been justly forgotten. It seems almost perverse that Steven Gimbel, the chairman of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College, would want to bring back the old epithet and give it another spin. In his original new book, “Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion,” he considers the possibility that the Nazis were on to something. If you can look past the anti-Semitism, he proposes, “maybe relativity is ‘Jewish science’ after all.” What he means is that there might have been elements of Jewish thinking that gave rise to what is now recognized as one of the deepest insights of all time.

...What gives Einstein’s work a Jewish flavor, Gimbel believes, is an approach to the universe that reminds him of the way a Talmudic scholar seeks to understand God’s truth. It comes only in glimpses. “Thou shalt not steal” may seem clear enough. But is it stealing to keep a $100 bill you find on the ground? It depends. Did you see the person who might have dropped it? Was it found on a busy street or in a friend’s backyard? In a hotel lobby with a lost and found? Without the luxury of a God’s-eye view, we must reckon from different vantage points.

“The heart of the Talmudic view is that there is an absolute truth, but this truth is not directly and completely available to us,” Gimbel writes. “It turns out that exactly the same style of thinking occurs in the relativity theory and in some of Einstein’s other research.”

From our blinkered perspective we see qualities called space and time. But in relativity theory, the two can be combined mathematically into something more fundamental: a four-dimensional abstraction called the space-time interval. Time and space vary according to the motion of the observer. But from any vantage point, an object’s space-time interval would be the same — the higher truth that can be approached only from different angles. The same kind of thinking, Gimbel says, also led to Einstein’s thought experiments with the elevator showing that when we feel the pull of gravity from the Earth or the push of acceleration from the takeoff of a jet, we are experiencing the same under­lying phenomenon.

Gimbel isn’t saying that only a Jew could have discovered these things but that being Jewish just might have given Einstein an edge...

And by the way, our dad wrote about relativity in several places in his book, Whence and Wherefore, as for instance this observation:

Consider the excitement generated by Einstein’s theory of relativity in the early years of the twentieth century. Its implications shook the very pillars of scientific determinism. At the outset, there was no way to test its validity. The scientists who accepted its credibility, could do so only as an act of faith. On the other hand, its recognition would indicate a challenge to the undisputed principle of scientific determinism. Courageous scientists, in those early inconclusive days, boldly took that leap of faith, and by doing so, they incautiously placed their scientific reputations on the line. The rest of the tale is now common knowledge. Einstein was vindicated and proved correct. A revolution ensued in the world of physics and related sciences. The behavior of the light of stars acted in accordance with the remarkable conclusions of an ingenious intellect, and those who indulged in the early leap of faith were rewarded by the ultimate triumph of their convictions.

44 New Talmudic Books for Kindle | The Amazing 36 Volume Kindle Talmud in English | God's Favorite Prayers

Is Quentin Tarantino Jewish?

Quentin Tarantino's film, Inglorious Basterds, is a fantasy story - a comic book brought to the screen - about a a group of Jewish guerrilla U.S. soldiers in occupied France during World War II who seek revenge on the Nazis.

Reviews were generally positive -- one thoughtful discussion worth peeking at by Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, "Is Tarantino good for the Jews?"

Pundits were asking whether the subtitle of the movie should be, G. I. Jews, or Dirty Minyan?

And so, with such a theme, it is natural for us to ask, Is Quentin Tarantino Jewish?

No, he is not a Jew. Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Connie Zastoupil (née McHugh) of Irish and Cherokee Native American ancestry, and Tony Tarantino, part Italian from Queens, New York.

His new movie this year (2012) will be Django Unchained.

Note well also, Tarantino is also not a Bible scholar. In one of my favorite scenes, his character in Pulp Fiction played by Samuel L. Jackson recites this biblical sounding verse that actually is a fake,

The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the iniquity of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger, those who poison and destroy my brothers; and they shall know that I am the Lord when I shall lay my vengeance upon thee.

Research has shown that Tarantino actually borrowed the pseudo-verse from a 1970s Japanese action film called Karate Kiba.
//repost//

Is the Volkswagen Jewish?

In the Book Review section at WSJ, the article, "The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz" in Thinking Small explains that yes certain aspects Volkswagen has Jewish connections through the Jewish engineer Ganz, and no in other views, it does not.

So, is Volkswagen Jewish, turns out to be quite a complicated question.

Video with subtitles: Icky Misogynist Bullying Orthodox Jews Spit on an Orthodox School Girl

This icky stuff makes no sense at all to us. Black hat Haredi men spit on an Orthodox girl. In the interviews, the Haredi men claim that only they know how to respect women.

This proves: Up is down, and down is up. Say the opposite of what you do, and expect that people will believe you. Unfortunately, based on our knowledge of the American experience of racism, this hateful activity will continue until people are maimed or killed and troops are brought in to restore and enforce civil rights.

"God's Favorite Prayers"- egalitarian in its worldview

Dowd in the Times: Mormons Baptized Anne Frank

Maureen Dowd expounds on Mormon beliefs in her Times column.

She has strong points that correctly characterize Mormon beliefs and practices as odd.

One of the oddest is the posthumous baptism of peoples of other faiths. Citing Christopher Hitchens, Dowd explains,

Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”

Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.

It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.

Mormons desisted in 1995 after Michel, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “discovered that his own mother, father, grandmother and best childhood friend, all from Mannheim, Germany, had been posthumously baptized.”

Michel told the news agency that “I was hurt that my parents, who were killed as Jews in Auschwitz, were being listed as members of the Mormon faith.”

Is Argentina's Political Candidate Sergio Bergman Jewish?

Yes, Argentinian Rabbi Sergio Bergman is a Jew. He was chosen by Buenos Aires' mayor, Mauricio Macri, to lead his PRO party’s list for the municipal legislature.

In Buenos Aires, a mayor facing a Jewish challenger taps a rabbi to lead his party’s list
By Diego Melamed

BUENOS AIRES (JTA) -- Rabbi Sergio Bergman, already one of Buenos Aires’ most prominent spiritual leaders, has become one of the Argentine capital’s most highly visible political candidates.

Bergman was tapped by the city’s incumbent mayor, Mauricio Macri, to lead his PRO party’s list for the municipal legislature. As the top candidate on the center-right party's slate, the rabbi is virtually assured of securing a spot in the city legislature in the July 10 municipal elections.

Meanwhile, Macri’s main challenger for the mayoralty is Jewish. Daniel Filmus, a former Argentine education minister, will be facing off against Macri for the city’s top job for a second time. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, picked Filmus to run as the candidate of her center-left Victory Front...more...

Efraim Zuroff on the Demjanjuk Verdict in Germany

Efraim Zuroff writes in the Forward ("Hunting Demjanjuk: The End of a Decades-Long Case and What It Means") about the significance of the Demjanjuk verdict in Germany.

He speculates about the impact as follows:

Demjanjuk’s conviction marks the first time that a German court has found a suspected Holocaust perpetrator guilty without any evidence of a specific crime committed by the defendant, other than service in a death camp. As a Holocaust historian, I can easily justify such a decision. Imagine, though, what a profound impact such an exhibition of judicial will could have had on previous trials of Nazi war criminals and other cases that were never prosecuted if this standard of proof had been applied.

So now the question is: Will this verdict serve as a precedent that can pave the way for additional prosecutions?

Demjanjuk Guilty

We've been unable to post this Times article for a day -- Google's blogger had a major outage.

Demjanjuk Convicted for Role in Nazi Death Camp by JACK EWING and ALAN COWELL

…The case against Mr. Demjanjuk involved some 15 transport trains known to have arrived between April and July 1943 from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 29,579 people. Prosecutors initially charged Mr. Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts based on the theory that some must have died in transit or been spared for a time to work at the camp. By the end of the trial on Thursday, that figure had been revised to 28,060 counts.

Some 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor, most of them poisoned with exhaust fumes.

Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 as the infamously sadistic Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, only to have his conviction overturned in 1993. He was freed by Israel’s Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was most likely to have been Ivan the Terrible.

In a statement on its Web site the day before the verdict, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said: “This case has historic meaning because while it may be the last ‘major’ case tried in Germany, it is the first time a non-German has been charged by Germany with Nazi war crimes and brought to trial in Germany.”

Speaking to the German news agency on Thursday, Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the organization was “very satisfied” that Mr. Demjanjuk had been sentenced to a prison term. The court’s decision “sends a very strong message that even many years after the crimes of the Holocaust, perpetrators can be held to account for their misdeeds,” he said.

Avner Shalev, the head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance authority in Jerusalem said that, while “no trial can bring back those that were murdered,” the conviction of Mr. Demjanjuk showed that there was “no statute of limitations on the crimes of the Holocaust” and that the killings “could not have taken place without the participation of myriads of Europeans on many levels.”

Elan Steinberg, the Vice President of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants said in a statement that the conviction was “a clarion pronouncement that the pursuit of justice should know no barriers of time and geography.”

Forward: Deborah Lipstadt Ponders Eichmann, Bin Laden, Ben Gurion and Obama

We have wondered about this issue. Deborah Lipstadt, author of a new book on Eichmann trial, considers the similarities and differences of the Eichmann mission and the Bin Laden mission, as follows:

Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the murder of close to 1.5 million Jews. Bin Laden had far less blood on his hands. And while both men wished to kill as many Jews as possible, bin Laden was, of course, also interested in killing any American or “Westerner” he could. Each man was ferreted out, in the end, by forces operating clandestinely on foreign soil. Both operations were decisive, swift and successful.

But, of course, what happened to bin Laden and Eichmann after each was located was radically different. One was shot and killed on the spot; the other was put on trial.

It was not inevitable, however, that this would be Eichmann’s fate. It was a decision by David Ben-Gurion that prevented Eichmann from ending up like bin Laden and having justice delivered immediately, with a bullet to the head. Read more...

Times' Review of Deborah Lipstadt's new book, "The Eichmann Trial"

The Times has a review of Deborah Lipstadt's new book, here, The Eichmann Trial.

And you can hear the author interviewed as part of a pod cast.

ArtsBeat: Book Review Podcast: Francisco Goldman
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Featuring Francisco Goldman on his novel "Say Her Name"; Deborah Lipstadt on the Eichmann trial; and Pamela Paul on Beverly Cleary. 

Our family knows the Lipstadt family since the 1940s on the UWS. It's nice to know someone who gets a rave review in the New York Times Book Review.

ABC: 400 Rabbis Demand End to Nazi Talk

ABC reported that 400 rabbis took an ad out to demand that people stop using Nazi comparisons.

The Other N-Word: Rabbis Unamused. Jewish Clergy Offended by Increasing Use of the Word Nazi to Bash Opponents

This is not a new phenomenon. Years ago Amos Oz in the beginning of his superb book, In the Land of Israel (1983, 1993) decried this rhetorical trend among the Jews in Israel of calling people you don't like Nazis.

The word is not sacred. It's not worth wasting money on a full page ad.

Google Digitizes for the Web Yad Vashem Holocaust Photos and Documents

Hat tip to Barak.

Explore Yad Vashem’s Holocaust archives online

via The Official Google Blog by A Googler on 1/26/11

(Cross-posted on the Google.org Blog)

In honor of the UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow, we’re partnering with Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based center for remembering the Holocaust's victims and survivors, to bring their collections of photographs and documents to the web.

On a trip to Jerusalem three years ago, Jonathan Rosenberg visited Yad Vashem. Struck by the museum's vast historical record housed within the physical building, he hoped Google could do something powerful to showcase this information. Inspired by the challenge, a few of us, in our “20% time,” started working with Yad Vashem and eventually grew our effort into a full project, introducing a YouTube channel in 2008 and now this collections site.

Within the archive you will find more than 130,000 images in full resolution. You can search for them via a custom search engine on Yad Vashem’s collections site. And by using experimental optical character recognition (OCR), we’ve transcribed the text on many images, making them even more discoverable on the web. This means that if you search for the name of a family member who was in the Holocaust, you might find a link to an image on the Yad Vashem site.

To experience the new archive features yourself, try searching for the term [rena weiser], the name of a Jewish refugee. You’ll find a link to a visa issued to her by the Consulate of Chile in France. OCR technology made this picture discoverable to those searching for her.

Yad Vashem encourages you to add personal stories about images that have meaning for you in the “share your thoughts” section below each item. Doron Avni, a fellow Googler, has already added a story. He found a photograph of his grandfather taken immediately after his release from a Nazi prison. His grandfather had vowed that if he should survive, he would immediately have his picture taken to preserve the memory of his experience in the Holocaust. He stitched the photo into his coat, an act that later saved his life. After hiding in the forest for a year, Russian soldiers mistook him for a German enemy, but released him once they saw this picture.

Reuters: Sarah Palin Disgracefully Accuses Media of Blood Libel Against Her

Sarah Palin is definitely ignorant of what is a blood libel. From Wikipedia, which Sarah could access, if she wished to take off a minute from her incessant attacks:

Blood libel (also blood accusation) refers to a false accusation or claim that religious minorities, almost always Jews, murder children to use their blood in certain aspects of their religious rituals and holidays. Historically, these claims have–alongside those of well poisoning and host desecration–been a major theme in European persecution of Jews.

The libels typically allege that Jews require human blood for the baking of matzos for Passover. The accusations often assert that the blood of Christian children is especially coveted, and historically blood libel claims have often been made to account for otherwise unexplained deaths of children. In some cases, the alleged victim of human sacrifice has become venerated as a martyr, a holy figure around whom a martyr cult might arise. A few of these have been even canonized as saints....

We feel that the profound misuse of this concept by Palin to further her political aims is her most disgraceful act to date.

Sarah Palin accuses critics of "blood libel"

(Reuters) - Prominent Republican Sarah Palin on Wednesday accused critics of "blood libel" by blaming her rhetoric for contributing to the shooting rampage in Tucson that killed six and wounded 14, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

"Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them," the conservative Tea Party favorite and former Alaska governor said in her first major response to critics.

"Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible."...more...

Bibi Loves Pollard, Who by the way is no Dreyfus

Isn't love grand?

Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu loves Jonathan Pollard and has written a letter asking for his release from federal prison in the United States.

This just made us want to compare the historic Dreyfus Affair with its contrasting opposite, the modern Pollard Affair.

Let's see. The two start out similar. Both men were Jews who were accused of spying against their own countries.

Dreyfus was sentenced in 1894 to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and was sent to the penal colony at Devil's Island and placed in solitary confinement.

Pollard was sentenced in 1987 to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated American military secrets to the Israelis, and was sent to the federal prison and placed in solitary confinement.

Two years later evidence implicated someone else as the culprit in the French affair. But Dreyfus was further accused by the French Army with fabricated evidence.

Pollard admitted his crimes. Nobody ever claims that he was framed.

In his famed J'accuse letter, the writer Emile Zola exposed the framing of Dreyfus and the cover up of exculpatory evidence . The fallout from this affair divided French society.

The confessed spy Pollard tried to get Wolf Blitzer to interview him in prison. This infuriated the US authorities.

Dreyfus was fully exonerated and reinstated in the Army where he served with honor.

Pollard wants to be freed because he says he is really sorry and he has been in a nasty jail a really long time.

In the end the Dreyfus affair exposed the antiSemitism of European society and stimulated the Zionism of Theodor Herzl, which in turn led to the ultimate founding of the State of Israel.

In the end the Pollard affair is eroding the political credibility of all those Zionists who express support for him, in particular Bibi Netanyahu. We think it is seriously damaging the Zionist cause.

Just what motivates this present self-defeating behavior? We simply have no clue.