Last winter I drove to Providence, RI full of trepidation and sadness. My incredible Aunt Esther, my maternal grandfather’s sister, had pneumonia. I was going to see her to make sure I had the chance to say goodbye.
To everyone’s, including her own, surprise, she pulled through. “I saw the pearly gates—and they shut!” she said to us bemusedly. Thus we were able to have the pleasure of gathering together in Providence this summer to celebrate her 99th birthday and the start of her 100th year.
I’m one of the lucky early members of the seesmic video blogging community. Seesmic is cool because a) you can record directly to the site and b) it is set up like twitter to be real social and encourage conversations via video. For a fuller explanation, see the link to Steve Garfield in my previous post.
I’m a total novice when it comes to video blogging. This is my very first, and it is nothing serious… Anyway, I hope you like it.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 26, 2007 at 12:12 am
Max Blumenthal – Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour
I don’t call myself a Zionist because I don’t think the ideology is good for Israel, Israelis or Jews, let alone for Palestinians. Blumenthal doesn’t make the mistake of calling the evil nut jobs Zionists, but the usage is so widespread, even among legitimate critics of the so-called Christian supporters of Israel, that I just wanted to make the point.
I am deeply ashamed of Joe Lieberman. Watch the film. You’ll see what I mean.
Blumenthal wrote a bit about making his film over at Huffington Post:
I have covered the Christian right intensely for over four years. During this time, I attended dozens of Christian right conferences, regularly monitored movement publications and radio shows, and interviewed scores of its key leaders. I have never witnessed any spectacle as politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre as the one Christians United for Israel produced last week in Washington. See for yourself.
As the White Queen said, “What good is a memory, when it only works in one direction and that is backwards?” In this day of TV and make-believe we have become desensitized and some things are too beautiful to forget.
Thus was Linda!
“A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing–
A simple chime that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing–
When echoes live in memory yet,
Through envious years should say, “forget”
Linda lived a life of value undefined by property and prosperity.
She lived a life in pursuit of the beauty nestled in everyone and everything – a beauty that is unrecognized by most of us.
Linda led an ever-changing life exploring the unthinkable and the unknowable. Finding the magnificence that is buried deep beneath the surface.
Linda was compelled to give all that she had – a burden not generally appreciated nor understood.
I do not know the time nor the place when she came into my life – but today as I sit with the knowledge that I’ll not hear her happy voice or see her smiling face – I roam from room to room touching the material things that we shared, the precious items she willingly gave away; a set of 19th Century French classic books; a stack of Civil Rights era recordings, [“The Freedom Singers Sing of Freedom Now!” –Mercury Records –1964 – “The Freedom Movement Told by Coretta Scott King” – Caedmon –1969] and many more; her father’s sculptures and of course her love and wisdom.
Linda understood when we give away a small piece of ourselves we get an even greater reward.
And she did give –
I called her “The Modern Day Harriet Tubman”
This Jewish woman with all the gifts that upper middle class in New York can bestow – opened her household to anyone and everyone fleeing the south. Legends of the Civil Rights Movement, the people who most of us only read about and worshiped at their altar, were real to her – because they had stayed at her home.
Linda gave voice to students of other cultures where English was a second language. She opened them to the elements – a world of communications – gave them the courage to read, write and dream in English. She introduced them to poetry in French and Farsi as well as Mozart on the out of tune school piano.
“I have not seen they sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter:
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy life’s hereafter-
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.”
“Love is grabbing hold of the great lion’s mane.” The ancient, fiery, Persian poet Hafiz wrote. And she did!
Linda was a warrior: The struggle for equality and justice was never far from the surface. Linda was prepared to suffer for the greater goodness of the world without falling prey to the continued enticement of money and fame. Linda had to go her own way, embolden the weak, bringing light into darkness with a spirit unbroken by the heartbreak and false promises of a world that did not understand.
Playing Beethoven on her beautiful Baby Grand from her living room overlooking West Loch, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – Linda told me “the ambient noise of your daily routine is about to increase.”
“That is not possible,” I replied.
Bang! Went the piano top. She stood up. The cats scattered.
“Oh yes, they want to build an incinerator in my back yard – we must stop it!”
I walked over to the Lanai doors – It was a clear, bright Sunday. The afternoon sun, moving toward the south facing shores was just beginning to cast shadows. The gentle winds and billowing soft clouds gave an imperceptible repose to the surrounding loch. The sheer beauty of the waves gently licking the shore belied the carnage, which took place here at West Loch- the site of one of the bloodiest events of WWII.
She was right. The noise did increase. We were back on the path again. This time against the modern day Klan dressed in three-piece suits – the corporations and the City & County of Honolulu government and we did stop the incinerator.
“Come; hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear
Who fret to find our bedtime near.”
Last October, Linda, ScottyB, my son, Christopher and I ventured down to Lowndes County. Me, complete with all of my fears and prejudices and Linda armed only with her camera – she so loved everything about the place. The people who’d been involved in the Lowndes County Movement; the overgrown cemetery with its many secrets; the rustic homes that had provided shelter from the rage; the smell of autumn; and the chill in the air. We should all be privy to her view of Lowndes County.
“Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind’s moody madness—
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the waving blast.” Linda’s father told her “even if you do not practice being Jewish – always say you are Jewish so that Hitler will not have won”.
Linda lived and loved around the world – from New York, France, Iran, London, Hawaii, California, and “The Black Belt” being devoted to justice and equality – I think when her father welcomed her into the hereafter his first words to her “thanks to you – Hitler will not have won.”
“And, through the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story
For “happy summer days” gone by,
It shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasure of our fairy-tale”
Lewis Carroll
“Through the Looking-Glass
And what Alice found there”
MarshaRose
June 28, 2006
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 29, 2006 at 8:56 am
That’s my friend Jesse’s blog. Jesse is a friend from my neighborhood and my Jewish community who is training for his second Boston Marathon this year. As last year, Jesse is running—and fundraising!—for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Marathon Challenge Team. This year, Jesse is keeping a blog where you can follow his training through the cold weather, which includes the added challenge of his being a new dad (Baby Yonatan is about five weeks old!) and, come spring, finding kosher for Passover alternatives to powerade and gu.
Jesse is running his second marathon after overcoming years of knee problems and surgeries that left him unsure he’d ever be able to run again. For his friends who saw Jesse struggle with his injuries, periodically needing to walk with a cane, it was a miracle that he trained and ran last year and a great excitement that he is running the marathon this year, once again.
On April 6, 2005 Carolyn and I received a phone call with the news that we had lost our Uncle Chris to pancreatic cancer at age 44. Twelve days later, I ran the Boston Marathon in Chris’ memory with the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team. About 6-8 miles into the race, the cheering started to change from “Yay!” to a more focused cheer – “Go Jesse” (my name was on my arms) and “Do it for Chris!” (“For Chris” was on my shirt). I lost count somewhere between miles 8 and 10 of how many times Chris’ name was yelled along the course. It was in the hundreds by that point — with 16 miles to go! There were people thanking Dana-Farber runners for raising money that helped get them treatment, small kids running after us with cups of water or oranges, and my personal favorite — juice pops at the turn onto Commonwealth Ave! Thanks to your help, I raised $5500 for cancer research.
This year, I am running the Boston Marathon again to raise money for the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team. The DFMC team’s goal is to raise $3.6 million to support cancer research for the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research. Since 1987, this program has helped to provide hundreds of researchers with the money to begin researching new cancer treatments. Experimental treatments such as the ones developed through the Barr Program gave Chris valuable extra time with his friends and family.
Today, you have the opportunity to help cancer patients from around the world benefit from the treatments developed at Dana-Farber. My personal fundraising goal this year is $10,000. This is almost twice the amount that I raised last year. Please take a moment to click on the DFMC link under “Sponsor Me.” By giving to DFMC, not only are you supporting my dream of running the Boston Marathon, you are supporting the opportunity for cancer patients to receive critical treatment options.
Training for the Boston Marathon in New England is always an interesting challenge. Last year there were frozen water bottles, frozen goo, and a 12 mile run with 30” of fresh snow. This year, in addition to the weather, I’ll be training with a new baby and running the Marathon during Passover! To track this year’s challenges, check back in on the Long Cold Run.
This is good stuff for non-Jews (as well as Jews) to read. Aron states precisely why I, too, would much rather people just come out and say “Merry Christmas,” instead of the supposedly ecumenical “Happy Holidays.” The so-called war on Christmas is an utterly stupid concept, except for what it reveals about the right wingers’ imagination of Jews. Feh to O’Reilly and a Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends.
Personally, I too am annoyed by the PCness of the “happy holidays” greeting. Growing up as an Orthodox Jewish kid with Eastern European parents and grandparents, Christmas had a rather ominous feel to it. That was a result of the memories passed down to me of Christmas as one of the Polish pogrom seasons, where my grandparents had to live in fear of rape and murder. Despite New York’s reputation, rape and murder by rampaging goyim is not a real concern for the Jews of this great city. But the site of Christmas trees nonetheless evoked a quesy feeling in me when I was a child.
That feeling along with a sense of inferiority as a minority, induced American Jews to pump up the rather minor holiday of Hanukka into something far more important than it is. A Holy Day in the Jewish calendar – a hag – is a pilgrimage specifically to the site of the Temple in Jerusalem (in an ecumenical spirit, I remind my readers that the Muslim haj is really the same word, except the pilgramage is to Mecca). Hanukka is not a pilgrimage holiday ordained in the Bible but a holiday instituted by the Hasmonean kings, whom the Rabbis despised.
Hannuka barely gets mentioned at all in the Talmud. The source of our knowledge about the holiday is the Book of the Maccabees. Unlike the Book of Esther and its associated holiday of Purim, Maccabees was left out of the official Biblical canon – the Rabbis of the Talmud no doubt would have preferred it never got written in the first place. The Rabbis’ antagonism was rooted in the fact that the descendants of Judah the Maccabee, the Hasmonean dynasty that ruled Israel until the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE, were in fact blood thirsty tyrants of the worst sort, who, ironically, advocated close ties to Rome and were intimately associated with the wealthy elite Sadducee establishment.
Side note: Rabbinical Judaism in its roots was an anti-establishment working class movement. Jesus probably was a leader of one of the more radical fringe groups within the overall revolutionary rabbinical movement. It was the wealthy Sadducee toadies who betrayed Jesus to their Roman masters.
Fast forward to modern day US of A, where assimilationist toadies emulating their Sadducee forbears in wanting to please their capitalist masters, had to find an equivalent Jewish shopping holiday to Christmas. Hannuka is the perfect fit in more ways than one. And they even one-upped the goyish capitalists by instituting eight days of gifts.
Considering the abysmal record of the Hasmoneans and the Sadducees, it is even more ironic that Hannuka and the Maccabees were seen as models by Zionists as a fore-runner to modern day Jewish nationalism. Hannuka is hardly as important in Israel as it is in the US, but it still is accorded far more importance than it should be….
So if you wish me a happy holiday it would take me a few minutes to even know what you are talking. The main Jewish holiday season is not December but September and October. We Jews have plenty (probably too many) holidays of our own and I for one am quite happy to concede this time of year exclusively to my Christian friends. So to all of you, Merry Christmas.
P.S. … right-wing politics in America has long been associated with xenophobia and hatred of Jews. Intellectuals, liberals, gays, New Yorkers, Hollywood and the like, all of whom the right-wing hate so much, are used by them as code words for Jews. The neo-cons, Likudnicks and other Jews, who ally themselves with these right-wing creeps, are like their Sadducee counter-parts, stupidly aligning themselves with their true enemy. As for Bill O’Reilly, no happy holiday greetings from me to him. My fervent holiday wish for Mr. O’Reilly is that he get trapped in a store playing Christmas jingles non-stop for a full year. The horror, the horror!
I was reading Aron’s blog before I even got into blogs and blogging. I rarely write about Israel/Palestine stuff here, but if you want to know where I’m at with those issues, I usually agree with Aron.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 25, 2005 at 2:29 am
If Rokhl (or even I) piqued your interest about secular Jewish American culture, you may want to check out her blogging from Klezkamp, which is this week from Dec. 25-30. Her freylikhe Klezkamp blog is called Mit der kapelye- I’m with the Band; usually you can find her here. If Klezkamp sounds like klezmer to you, that’s because klezmer classes and performances and jam sessions are a big part of what will be going on there. Interested yet? Go check it out…
(Readers who have been around for a while may remember this post, where I mention the influence of Klezcamp on my family, via my mother.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 23, 2005 at 4:45 pm
Edward Sebesta has a new blog, Anti-Neo-Confederate. Who are the Neo-Confederates and why should you care? Back in August, Max Blumenthal had an article in the Nation about powerful lobbyists in Washington, who are also part of an extremist takeover of Neo-Confederate groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The article closed with this telling scenario:
On Memorial Day, 2001, George W. Bush resurrected a tradition his father discontinued during his presidency: laying a wreath at the base of the Confederate monument at the Arlington National Cemetery. The White House has claimed that the practice continued from the Bush Sr. Administration through the Clinton years, yet according to Hurley, “not a single person in the Confederate community ever saw the wreath back at the Confederate memorial until Geoge W. Bush came into office.” Hurley says Bush merely changed the day of the wreath’s delivery, from Confederate Memorial Day–Jefferson Davis’s birthday–to the US Memorial Day. Last Confederate Memorial Day, Hurley witnessed [Richard T.] Hines at the memorial leading a gathering of Washington-based conservatives, including members of the Jefferson Davis Camp 305 that met at the Mary Surratt site. Now Bush Administration officials joined the commemoration, most prominently Robert Wilkie, the former foreign policy adviser to Senator Lott who was appointed last October by Condoleezza Rice as the National Security Council’s senior legislative director. Attired in all-white plantation garb and white top hat, Hines fired an artillery cannon he had carted along for the occasion. Then he and the ceremony’s attendees solemnly saluted the Confederate flag.
Here is some background from Blumenthal, on Richard T. Hines:
In 1996, standing beside members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Jefferson Davis Camp 305, Hines unfurled a Confederate battle flag in downtown Richmond, Virginia, to protest the dedication of a monument to black tennis great Arthur Ashe. He called the Ashe statue “a sharp stick in the eye of those who honor the Confederate heritage.”
Hines’s protest reflected the brand of resentment found on the pages of America’s major neo-secessionist publication, Southern Partisan, of which Hines was managing editor for nearly two decades. Southern Partisan served partly as a forum for historical revisionism that cast Lincoln as a villain; in 1984 Hines himself penned a paean to Preston Brooks, the secessionist South Carolina congressman who caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor in 1854 for his speeches against slavery. The magazine also acted as Hines’s instrument for connecting sympathetic political movers and shakers to the neo-Confederate base. Hines arranged a 1993 Partisan interview with Washington Times senior editor Wes Pruden, whose father, Wes Pruden Sr., as the chaplain of the Little Rock White Citizens Council, led resistance to the integration of Central High School in 1957 with the cry: “That’s what we’ve gotta fight, niggers, Communists and cops.” In 1997 Hines interviewed Senator Trent Lott, who as a young congressman convinced Reagan to initiate his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Klansmen had murdered three young civil rights workers in 1964. In 1998 Hines chatted with Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri, who praised Hines and the Partisan for “setting the record straight,” a comment that nearly doomed his nomination as Attorney General when it was dredged up during his confirmation hearings in 2001. In the year before Bush’s election, Southern Partisan advertised the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with a Confederate flag shaped like a Republican Party elephant beside the phrase “Lincoln’s Worst Nightmare!”
By 2000 Hines was positioned to help rescue George W. Bush’s flagging presidential candidacy from the jaws of defeat with an inspired dirty-tricks campaign. When Bush arrived in South Carolina in May, he was licking his wounds from a stunning defeat in New Hampshire to John McCain. For Bush, who needed to win the South to gain the nomination, the South Carolina primary was do or die.
Hines’s link to the Bush campaign was Bush’s South Carolina spokesman Tucker Eskew, a local protégé of the legendary dirty-tricks master from the Palmetto State, Lee Atwater. Eskew was in constant contact with another former Atwater protégé, Karl Rove. Hines turned an unregistered political action committee called “Keep It Flying,” which he created to fight the NAACP’s attempts to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, into a vehicle for the Bush cause. He sent out 250,000 fliers that he signed with his own name accusing McCain of “changing his tune” on the Confederate flag and describing Bush as “the [only] major candidate who refused to call the Confederate flag a racist symbol.” In fact, in a January appearance on Meet the Press, McCain had called the flag “a symbol of heritage” and an issue “to be settled without interference from presidential candidates.” Regardless, the tactic succeeded brilliantly. In the wake of the mailing Bush surged ahead of McCain and defeated him in the primary. Bush finally returned his debt of gratitude late last year, when he appointed Hines’s wife, Patricia, to the National Committee on Libraries and Information Science.
Hines’s direct-mail campaign might not have been so timely were it not for the political atmospherics that his close allies in South Carolina had generated. In January 2000, immediately after the NAACP announced a tourist boycott of South Carolina, Hines’s college buddy Roger McCredie marshaled groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens at the state Capitol in Columbia to rally around the flag. Six thousand people showed up, many waving Confederate battle flags and dressed in Civil War-era battle uniforms. Compared with the 50,000 who marched through Columbia earlier that month for the flag’s removal, it was a paltry turnout. Yet the rally demonstrated a residual level of vitriol toward Confederate flag opponents. State Senator Arthur Ravenel drew gales of applause when he blasted the NAACP as “the National Association of Retarded People.”
Lurking in the shadow of the grandstand throughout the rally was a scraggly man oddly wearing a top hat–one of Hines’s most important political allies. Kirk Lyons earned far-right celebrity status in 1988 for successfully defending white supremacist Louis Beam against a sedition charge of plotting to overthrow the government by force in order to set up an all-white nation in the Pacific Northwest. Lyons’s ubiquity as a legal counsel to white supremacists and a speaker at neo-Nazi events prompted the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify him in 1991 as one of the top ten “Leaders in Today’s White Supremacy Movement.” Lyons dreamed of resurrecting the white supremacist movement as a more sophisticated incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. “I have great respect for the Klan historically, but, sadly the Klan today is ineffective and sometimes even destructive,” Lyons told a German neo-Nazi magazine in 1992. “It would be good if the Klan followed the advice of former Klansman Robert Miles: ‘Become invisible. Hang the robes and hoods in the cupboard and become an underground organization.’” When Lyons discovered the Sons of Confederate Veterans, he realized he didn’t have to go underground after all.
If you want to know more about this part of the right, Anti-Neo-Confederate is a good resource. The blog savvy will be frustrated that there are no permalinks or rss feeds; but it’s valuable content from an authority on the subject. One of Edward’s recent posts offers a who’s who among the Neo-Confederate groups. Another one describes the rise of anti-Semitism in the Neo-Confederate movement—a trend in far right groups across the board, it seems. There’s much, much more there, as well as links to Edward’s other webpages. Of particular interest is Edward’s page for tracking how political candidates do and don’t align themselves with the Neo-Confederates.
UPDATE: added link to Max Blumenthal’s article.
UPDATE 12/19: Edward Sebesta has moved his blog over to blogger in order to improve our access to his contnet. The new url is: http://newtknight.blogspot.com. Links have been modified, above. Some of the Anti-Neo-Confederate content mentioned, above, is still only available at Edward’s old blog, which is therefore still worth visiting.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 17, 2005 at 6:03 pm
3. Jewish religion cannot be divorced from Jewish culture.
To do so yields the current demographic and spiritual crisis now facing the American Jewish community.
Jewish philanthropists like Michael Steinhardt want to revive the non-Orthodox Jewish community by replacing “victimhood” with “joy.” (See his Jerusalem Post opinion piece in February of this year.) I think we all know that you can read “Europe” for victimhood and “Israel” for joy. Didn’t that attitude get us in this mess? Turn a shul into a temple, a khazn into a cantor and Jewish music into Debbie Friedman — well, you better lock the doors cuz the inmates will be breaking out. Witness our so-called youth crisis. American Jewish culture has turned Camembert into CheezWhiz: It is boring and every young Jew knows it.
Real Jewish Culture is the product of hundreds, thousands of years of joy and pain; it’s the expression of the realities of halokhe [Jewish law] lived in a hostile world. It’s the result of every Jew’s struggle between tradition and modernity. Most importantly, Real Jewish Culture is our connection to those who came before us, and without access to it, well, that bagel in your hand is not a symbol of anything, just a bunch of empty calories masquerading as breakfast.
4. I am not an Israeli.
About two thousand American Jews make aliyah [emmigrate to Israel] every year. Out of a total Jewish population of 5,200,000, this comes out to about .04% of American Jews each year who will choose to live in Israel. I am an American and, like 99.96 percent of my fellow American Jews, I will never become an Israeli. I care deeply about the State of Israel, most of all because my fate is linked to that of every other Jew. But where does the spirit of klal yisroel end and the unquestioning acceptance of Zionism begin?
Open a magazine like Moment and you’d think every Jew in America had already put down a security deposit on an apartment in Jerusalem. Moment bills itself as “Jewish culture, politics, and religion.” Three of four cover stories in a recent issue were Israel-related, with more inside — and this was the music issue! Now, I would understand if this were a newspaper for a small Jewish community somewhere in the world. I doubt that the Jewish community of Honduras has enough news to fill twelve issues of a monthly magazine. But we don’t live in Honduras. We live in the other Jewish state, a country with a Jewish population roughly equal to that of the Jewish state. And let me tell you, we’ve got enough news here to fill up every single Jewish newspaper, magazine, newsletter, leaflet and ’zine.
Mark Rubin, who alerted me to Rokhl’s manifesto, doesn’t think non-Jews need read it, that it’s more for us Jews to talk about amongst ourselves. While the subject matter is an internal conversation, I encourage everyone to read the whole thing. My own experience is that most non-Jews don’t know much about American Jewish cultural issues and experiences, beyond the stereotypes and the canned, Jewish institutional PR.
I would just add to Rokhl’s assertions about secular and religious Jewish culture(s), that a secular Jewish world-view can also include not just knowledge but practice of Judaism. While Jewish law excludes those who profess belief in Christian or polytheistic religions from Jewish religious participation, there is no requirement that one demonstrate a positive belief in God. It’s been my experience that many practicing Jews have changeable ideas and beliefs about theology while remaining consistent participants in the religious community. I don’t know how many would go as far as I do to say their world view is closest to secular and agnostic while maintaining a somewhat traditional Jewish religious practice—though I know my mother would as would my great-uncle, my maternal grandfather’s brother, who, at age 95, is the minyan facilitator for the daily services at his synagogue in Florida. You have not heard leyning (chanting) from the Torah until you’ve heard him.
The summer of 2002, my first cousin, who is an Orthodox Jew, invited me to lead the davenning (praying) for his auf ruf, an east European Jewish celebration at morning prayer services in the week before one’s wedding. This was a particularly special occasion because my cousin decided to have the auf ruf in my maternal grandfather’s synagogue, Young Israel on East Broadway, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.* The Young Israel on East Broadway is a very traditional, Orthodox synagogue, which my grandparents were members of from around time it was founded, until they died six weeks apart, in November and December 2002, respectively, both at age ninety-nine.
I was a little nervous to accept the honor, since I don’t regularly attend services in such Orthodox congregations, where the ritual life is very tightly choreographed and fast paced, without a lot of time spent explaining and instructing. Still, there was no way to say no, especially knowing my grandfather would be there (my grandmother was not well enough to attend).
At one point, during the breakfast that followed services (bagels, lox, herring, fruit, etc.), my uncle, whose son was getting married, pulled me aside to report that during services my grandfather turned to him and said, “who would have thought that Paul Greenberg’s son could daven like this.”
My father, a founder of New Jewish Agenda, who identified not as a Zionist but as a Jewish nationalist supporter of Jewish and Palestinian self-determination in the middle east, was a secular radical in the Jewish socialist tradition, for the first half of his life. As he reached his 40s, he started to become increasingly religious in his outlook, though he never learned to read Hebrew or the ritual skills he and my mother decided I should learn in my eight years of Jewish parochial school.
Notes
*If you click on the Young Israel link, above, you can also see an arial shot of the apartment buildings where my grandparents lived through all the years that I was alive to know them. They lived at 383 Grand Street, in what are known as the Seward Park Cooperatives. In the area marked “Seward Park,” between Essex and Clinton, there are two buildings. 383 Grand Street is the one closer to Essex and to Grand.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 15, 2005 at 6:15 pm
Go read Kaspit’s Ten days after hurricane Katrina: interim critique for a thorough yet concise critique of I) Preparation, II) Response, and III) Political smoke and mirrors and for many valuable links for further reading. Take special note of Kaspit’s grasp of the environmental issues that follow the Katrina disaster. It is unfathomable that the EPA is being kept out of NOLA cleanup management. (Did you know that??)
I had stopped trying to follow the fine details of the controversy over Cindy Sheehan’s Nightline letter. But a couple of nights ago I got drawn back into it. There are nasty elements on both the right and the left who opportunistically insist that Cindy made the comment that she denies.
(That’s Christopher Hitchens linked as my representative right-wing hack. Some will say he is a centrist and I should be linking someone else. But Hitchens cannot deliver his quasi-defensible centrist position on the war without compulsive, unsupported attacks on Sheehan—landing him squarely in winger city. It is worth reading Max Blumenthal on Hitchens to understand his hypocrisy and to get the dirt on his admiration for Holocaust deniers.)
(As I’m linking to some of the commentaries on this controversy, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention billmon on antisemtism in the DLC, neocons, Israel, Iraq, Iran and, yes, Cindy Sheehan. If you’re going to read anything on the Sheehan brouhaha, billmon’s post is a good one. It’s also where I stole the the first part of my title from.)
I spent a little more time over at the bullyard google group, where Cindy’s letter made its internet debut in March. I ran searches on Tony Tersch and Skeeter Gallagher’s posts—the two men who were responsible for forwarding emails from Cindy Sheehan to the group. Sheehan never joined the group and posted messages to it directly. I could not find anything in Tersch or Gallagher’s posts that was even remotely anti-Israel or antisemitic. But there are others at bullyard who are virulent with conspiracy theories about Israel and a war mongering Jewish “cabal.”
James Morris, who forwarded Cindy Sheeehan’s letter to Nightline is, according to Wilson, an “an anti-Zionist activist.” What exactly does that mean? What sort of activism is he involved in? What is his “anti-Zionist” ideology? Why haven’t any of the reporters who are trying to authenticate the content of Cindy’s Nightline letter provided any other details about Morris? In fact the only two news sources on Morris are Britt Hume (Fox) and Blake Wilson (Slate). Morris has very little, if any, webpresence (i.e., I cannot verify the James Morris at those links is the one who knows Cindy Sheehan). The two news reports that mention contact with him do not even say where he resides, though we know that Tony Tersch resides in Thailand and can be reached by email, postal mail, phone and fax—contact info he has sent me, since my initial attempt to contact him.
Meanwhile almost anywhere you look for conversations about the Nightline letter—including, as of last week, at bullyard—there is someone who goes by truthseeker (aka justiceseeker2000) posting links and brief comments to promote the idea that Casey Sheehan died for Israel and that Cindy Sheehan has said this is so. One of truthseeker’s favorite things to do is post a link to the haloscan comments for the post at the Representative Press blog, which I linked to, above, on the word “left.” In that comments thread and nowhere else, you can find, posted by truthseeker, supposed correspondence from James Morris on Cindy Sheehan. In a supposed exchange with Daniel Levine, a “producer at FOX news channel,” truthseeker’s James Morris talks about the “Israel agenda,” asserting that “it is time that Ms. Sheehan addresses the truth of what she had so accurately written in the email.” You will find similar stuff in the truthseeker James Morris letter to Christopher Hitchens.
Is truthseeker James Morris? If so or if not, is the correspondence with Levine and Hitchens authentic? I emailed truthseeker yesterday and also left an inquiry in the haloscan thread on the Representative Press blog. While truthseeker has since posted another comment there, he or she has not responded to my queries. My point is not that truthseeker is the key to all of our unanswered questions, but that the circumstances surrounding Cindy Sheehan’s letter to Nightline continue to be murky with provocateurs and defamers available in abundance.
The prevalence of provocateurs and defamers should be a big tip off for everyone. Figures on the left with Cindy Sheehan’s power to galvanize public opinion and inspire action have long been targets for these tactics. I alluded to this before, and I bring it up again because the sad history is just too welldocumented.
So I’m remaining agnostic on the antisemitism question, as billmon puts it, and remaining a supporter of Cindy Sheehan’s protest—especially since the murky circumstances and all of the other charges of sedition and guilt by association make Cindy’s story seem much too familiar to anyone with a good sense of history.
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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