Accusations of "dual loyalty" against Jews: Bernie Sanders on the Diane Rehm show (with update)

According to surveys by the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), about 30% of the American public believes that Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to the United State. This is a figure that has not budged in several decades of polling. The ADL have done surveys of  "Anti-Semitic Propensities" since 1964, and in surveys from 1964, 1992, 1998, 2002, and 2005, 2009, 2011, between 30-35% of the respondents agreed with the statement that Jews are "More loyal to Israel than America." A report from 2011 (pdf) shows that "Since 1964, 30 percent of Americans have consistently believed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America, despite the changing makeup of the US population."  When the ADL did a world survey, using the same questions, in 2014, they found that "The most widely accepted anti-Semitic stereotype worldwide is: 'Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country/the countries they live in.'" Of those surveyed around the world, 41% believed this statement to be "probably true." This was the most widely accepted stereotype in Western Europe (45%) and the Americas (38%).

I think this is the appropriate framework within which to understand the question that Diane Rehm asked Senator Bernie Sanders this morning on her radio show. In the middle of the interview ((Diane Rehm interviews Bernie Sanders), she asked about the statement that he had dual Israeli-American citizenship.

The report is from the Jewish Journal:

On a Wednesday morning broadcast, longtime NPR host Diane Rehm interviewed presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), and asked the Jewish self-described socialist some strange questions when it came to his connection with Israel.
Here’s the relevant exchange, which begins at about the 24-minute mark if you want to listen for yourself:

Diane Rehm: Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel. 

Bernie Sanders: Well, no I do not have dual citizenship with Israel. I'm an American. I don't know where that question came from. I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I'm an American citizen, period. 

Rehm: I understand from a list we have gotten that you were on that list. 

Sanders: No. 

Rehm: Forgive me if that is— 

Sanders: That's some of the nonsense that goes on in the internet. But that is absolutely not true. 

Rehm: Interesting. Are there members of Congress who do have dual citizenship or is that part of the fable? 

Sanders: I honestly don't know but I have read that on the internet. You know, my dad came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket. He loved this country. I am, you know, I got offended a little bit by that comment, and I know it's been on the internet. I am obviously an American citizen and I do not have any dual citizenship.

Right after this, the interview returns to Planet Earth. Rehm asks him about whether he supports a two-state solution. He answers by saying that the Palestinian people "deserve a state of their own" and that "Israel needs to live in security without terrorist attacks." He also reveals (no surprise) that he's not a fan of Netanyahu, and that he thinks that President Obama is doing the best he can in a difficult situation.

I'm trying to remember if anyone in the news media ever interviewed Joe Lieberman, either when he was running for vice president on the ticket with Al Gore, or when he was running for the Democratic nomination for president, and either assumed or asked him if he had Israeli citizenship. I don't remember this happening, and I'm sure that I would have noticed. The assumption that Bernie Sanders had dual citizenship is an example of the suspicion that Jews are not really full American citizens, that we have dual loyalty to the US and to our Jewish identity or the state of Israel.

It is a canard that goes back to the earliest years of Enlightenment and Emancipation, when the demand was made that for Jews to become equal citizens of European states, they had to lose entirely their Jewish distinctiveness and assimilate into European culture and society. When most Jews refused to do this, arguing that it was possible to be a loyal citizen of a state without ceasing to be a Jew, many people did not accept this. Jews were accused of forming a "state within a state" by the German philosopher J. G. Fichte. He feared that they could "undermine" the German nation. He wrote that Jews could only be granted civil rights, if it was possible "to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea." (Quotations from the Wikipedia article on Fichte - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte).

So where did Diane get this weird idea? What "list" does she have? Is it as mythical as the "list" of American communists that Joe McCarthy waved around and claimed that they worked for the US government?

Jared Sichel, the author of the Jewish Journal article, writes further:

A cursory search on Google of “Bernie Sanders Israeli citizenship” shows that his name comes up in the comments section of the “We are all Vittorio Arrigoni” Facebook page. Arrigoni was an Italian pro-Palestinian activist who was kidnapped and murdered by non-Hamas Islamists in Gaza in April 2011. In the comments section of the Facebook page, on May 2 a user posted a list of senators and representatives who “have both Israel and U.S. citizenships.” Sanders is on the list. No source is given because the list is a total fabrication, not to mention created by an anti-Semite and anti-Zionist, which is given away by the fact that it says “Jewish Lobby”, “#israelwarcrime”, “AIPAC: Buying Congress one seat at a time”, “Rothschild”, and features an American flag with a Star of David replacing the 50 stars. 

If this is in fact the “list” that Rehm was referring to, it’s a remarkable feat of shoddy and lazy journalism.

TPM also has a short article on the interview: Diane Rehm Presses Sanders on Whether He's US-Israel Dual Citizen, and Josh Marshall has a good take on it:

Where did this come from? Today on the Diane Rehm Show, Rehm pressed Sen. Bernie Sanders on whether or not he is a US-Israeli dual citizen. He's not. After pressing the point and having him deny it, she shifted gears to "Are there members of Congress who do have dual citizenship or is that part of the fable?"

A lot of things that are offensive or maybe shocking are ... well, not really that shocking because look who the person is. Think of this as the Gohmert Principle. But this ... yes, I'm genuinely shocked. What was Rehm thinking? Saying she found it on "a list we have gotten" hardly inspires a lot of confidence. 

What particularly struck me about the back and forth is this: Rehm asks her question. Sanders denies it. She presses again. He denies it. At this point, maybe you figure she just got put in a really awkward position by an idiot researcher (though that's dubious because even a half-educated person would recognize the incendiary nature of the question), so she might say, well, I'm sorry we oblivious had some bad information there. But she doesn't. She asks about whether there are other members of Congress with dual citizenship. 

Bizarre.

The idea that Bernie Sanders has dual citizenship definitely comes from the world of antisemitic conspiracy theories. I just Googled his name and "dual citizenship" and came up with several websites. This one, from a website named "Co-Creating our Future on Planet Earth" posted several links to someone named Michael Ruark, who has lots of lists of supposed "dual citizens." He claims to have done his own "research," His criterion for someone being a dual citizen of Israel appears to be that that person is Jewish. His list includes all the Jewish members of the Obama administration, past and present and all the Jewish members of the House and Senate (that is, if they are all Jewish - I wouldn't depend on him for accuracy there either),

My guess is that a staffer for the Diane Rehm show came upon this list on an antisemitic site on the internet, did not recognize that it was an antisemitic site, printed it off, and handed it to her as part of the background information for her interview with Sanders. See below for update.

An article (entitled "Why It's Important for Us to Know: Dual Citizens in Congress) from that highly dubious website, Counterpunch, claims that when Jews visit Israel, they can automatically be granted Israeli citizenship and receive an Israeli identification number. The author, L. Michael Hager, writes:

The recent experience of Lenny Lapon, a Jewish American citizen from Massachusetts, shows how automatic the conferral of Israeli citizenship can be. As Lapon described it when he publically renounced that citizenship last July, his flight to Israel in October 2010 resulted in the award of Israeli citizenship and an Israeli identification number. Thus it is likely that Jewish members of Congress became Israeli citizens if and when they visited Israel. We don’t yet know if this was the case for any or all of the visiting Jewish Members. Nor do we know if any such member has renounced Israeli citizenship.

I can say from personal experience that merely being a Jew who flies to Israel will not get you Israeli citizenship. It's necessary to apply for Israeli citizenship, and part of the process is proving that one is Jewish.

The source of Hager's claim that Lenny Lapon spontaneously received Israeli citizenship when he flew to Israel comes from an article that Lapon published in Mondoweiss, about renouncing his Israeli citizenship. He writes: "On October 19, 2010 my plane landed in Israel and instantaneously I was awarded Israeli citizenship with identification card # 012706735, solely because I am Jewish." My guess is that Lapon went to Israel with the intention to make aliyah, that he had filled out the requisite paperwork and had been accepted to gain citizenship beforehand, and that he received his ID number and citizenship once he arrived at Ben Gurion airport. Hager read Lapon's article without knowing that he must have been approved for Israeli citizenship before he arrived, after having applied for it, probably with the mental assumption that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US.

The questions I'm left with are- why did Diane Rehm think this was an appropriate or relevant question to ask? What would she have asked Sanders if he had said that he also had Israeli citizenship? Where was her question leading?

Update: Diane Rehm has now apologized, and said that "she had read that Sanders was a dual citizen in a Facebook comment but that she's happy to help put 'this rumor to rest.'"

"On today's show I made a mistake. Rather than asking Senator and Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders whether he had dual U.S./Israeli citizenship, as I had read in a comment on Facebook, I stated it as fact. He corrected me, saying he did not know where the question came from. I apologized immediately," Rehm said. "I want to apologize as well to all our listeners for having made an erroneous statement. I am sorry for the mistake. However, I am glad to play a role in putting this rumor to rest."

I was too eager to blame the clueless staffer - it turns out that Rehm herself was the one who didn't know what antisemitism was when it was staring her in the face.

In the Forest of History

Yesterday, I visited the LWL-Museum für Archäologie (Westphalian State Museum of Archeology) in Herne (not far from Bochum). The oldest finds are from about 250,000 years ago, the most recent from 1945. It is set up in a unique way - the permanent exhibition is below ground, as if it were an archaeological excavation. Many of the finds are displayed as they would have appeared when the archaeologists first discovered them. I found the museum rather disturbing at several points, and especially at the end.

As you walk in, you first encounter the "Forest of History" - a number of enormous tree trunks, set up as if they were a wood, that were discovered under water or in gravel pits in this region. They are between 5,000-14,000 years old, and were preserved in the water.

You then wend your way along a path through the museum, traveling chronologically from the distant past until 1945.

In the beginning of the museum there are many many stone tools, if you're interested in seeing their development and the different kinds of stone tools.

Many of the exhibits are taken from excavated graves, and thus include many grave goods - everyday or luxurious objects that were placed into the grave. The museum covers the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, and includes a couple of dioramas of small agricultural settlements.

Model of an ancient agricultural settlement.

Model of another agricultural community, from the first millennium BCE.

Other finds, from between the sixth and the fourth millennium BCE, included a large variety of earthenware pots, some plain, some decorated.

Sixth millennium pots. The large pot in the middle has some interesting incised designs.

Fourth millennium pots.

The exhibits showed the transition from solely earthenware vessels to bronze and then iron objects. Bronze itself could not be manufactured in this area, because of the lack of copper and tin. Bronze was imported and was then worked on by local metalworkers.

Bronze knives and other objects, from between 2800-700 BCE, also grave goods.

A large bronze beaker, probably acquired through trade.

Apparently, before the Romans came and even for several hundred years after that, most people lived in isolated family farms, not even in small villages. The museum presented one example of a small settlement with bigger houses, where quite a number of families lived. The image below is a photograph of one of those reconstructed houses.

One of the most interesting pieces of historical information that I learned was that while the Romans tried to conquer the whole of Germany, they were unable to. Roman settlement had begun to the west of the Rhine, for example with the establishment of what is now known as the city of Cologne. When they tried to go east of the Rhine, the Roman legions were defeated in 9 CE in the "Battle of the Teutoberg Forest." After several more years of bitter fighting, the Romans decided to stay west of the Rhine, meaning that Bochum (which is east of the Rhine) was part of the area that did not become part of the Roman empire. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Roman history outside of what is now Israel, so I had had the image in my head that the Roman legions were always victorious (since they put down at least three Jewish revolts - in 66-73, 115-117, and 132-135). The Germanic tribes, however, were better organized and much stronger than the Jewish rebels, so they were able to keep the Romans west of the Rhine.

But this did not mean that there was no contact with Rome. The museum catalog says, "All the same the Germanic tribes must have still had contacts with the Romans since in every Germanic settlement archaeologists find goods from the Roman Empire" (Das Museum, 2004, p. 43).

The region east of the Rhine came under the rule of Charlemagne in the eighth century, and he brought Christianity to the tribes in the east. As the catalog says, "At the end of the 8th century Charlemagne, king of the Franks, integrated the region of present-day Westphalia into his kingdom and had the inhabitants converted to Christianity." In the museum, to mark this event, one walks into a small room containing a "forest" of upright spears, and hears sounds of battle, including people's anguished cries, signifying the battles between Charlemagne and the Saxons.

The path then brings one into the Middle Ages, feudal manors, the building of castles, and then to the European voyages of discovery and the Renaissance. Much less space is devoted to these events than to the Roman and early Christian periods.

What came next was very disconcerting. The path leads one abruptly into the mid-20th century, and then you see several posts from the fence of a concentration camp that was established in Witten in 1944, as well as items from prisoners in the camp - identity disks, plates, and cutlery used by the prisoners. (Witten is a town right next to Bochum).

The camp housed prisoners who worked in local factories. About 750 prisoners were originally brought there from Buchenwald (the Witten camp belonged to the larger system of camps affiliated with Buchenwald), but many died due to ill-treatment, starvation, illness, unheated buildings, and inadequate clothing.


                                                         

On the left are the bowls, a pitcher, and cutlery.








To the right are the prisoners' identity tags.

I did some online research about the camp, and my next post will provide more information about the camp. There is now a memorial in Witten, in the location of the camp, and I'd like to visit there soon.


The final part of the path passes by items discovered in the rubble from Allied bombing of this part of
Germany. After the war, the bombed out sections of towns were rebuilt, which meant that the bomb rubble was covered by subsequent building. To right, in the glass case, are metal stamps used to make ration cards.

The museum was not what I was expecting. I thought it would be a more conventional museum, with exhibits in glass cases with explanations next to them. Instead, it was much more experiential. There were different sounds throughout the room. As you first walked in, through the ancient trees, you could hear the sound of lightning. Next to the cases filled with stone tools, there was the persistent sound of tapping. Leaving the small room the upright spears, in the doorway, a voice was reciting the Nicene Creed in German. In the enclosed "tent" with religious objects, there was the sound of church music and chanting. At the end, there were sounds of bombing.

This museum did not leave me with the feeling that history was safely in the past, and that when I left the museum I left the history behind, locked up in the building. No, history followed me out of the building, it came with me - the agricultural settlements in the woods, the battle in the forest between the Roman legions and the Germanic fighters, Charlemagne's armies converting people to Christianity, the Allied bombing and the inmates of the local concentration camp. It's all still here.

Canary Mission to employers - Don't Hire Radicals!

The video posted on the Canary Mission website makes it crystal clear that their goal is to prevent "radicals" from getting jobs once they have graduated from college or graduate school. After showing a few clips of people at anti-Israel demonstrations shouting horrible antisemitic slogans (e.g., one young woman is shouting "Go back to the ovens"), the narrator says:

A few years later these individuals are applying for jobs within your company. There's no record of their membership of radical organizations. No one remembers their yelling profanities on campus or attending Jew-hating conferences and anti-American rallies.All evidence has been eradicated and soon they will be part of your team.

This campaign assumes that if an employer does not like someone's politics, he or she is perfectly justified in not hiring that person. This may be legal (I don't know if discriminating against people on the basis of their political beliefs or activism is covered by anti-discrimination laws anywhere), but unless it can be proven that a person's politics would prevent him or her from doing a good job, it seems blatantly anti-democratic to me.

US Supported Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen destroys regional archaeological museum

I received this notice from the Agade list serve and thought it was worthwhile to reproduce, about the human and historical consequences of the current war in Yemen. The US is supporting the Saudis in their campaign against the Shia Houthis. This is from the Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues blog, written by Paul Barford, who is a British archaeologist "living and working in Warsaw."

Dhamar, Yemen Museum Destroyed

The Dhamar Regional Museum in Yemen, the main museum of the Dhamar governorate, has been destroyed in a Saudi airstrike last Thursday. The Museum, built in 2002, is the repository of all work done in the province. Together with the building, it is not clear how much of the collection of pre-Islamic antiquities, including a number of dedicatory stelae and also the material produced by the Chicago Oriental Institute's work from 1978 onwards (see here too) have been lost. Some of the museum's artefacts were recently digitalised by CASIS an EU-funded project.

Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen in the last 62 days to bring its ally, fugitive president Mansour Hadi, back to power. The airstrikes have killed, at least, 3,912 Yemenis, according to FNA's independent tally. According to a recent report by Freedom House Foundation, most of the victims of the deadly Al Saud campaign are civilians, including a large number of women and children. Thousands of residential buildings have been destroyed, and hundreds of civil and public facilities were reduced to rubble as a result of the bombardments by Saudi warplanes on the Yemeni cities and towns, the group said.

The city of Dahmar, 100 km to the south of Sana'a, was one of the famous Arabic and Islamic culture and scientific centres in Yemen. 

We decry the many atrocities committed by Da'esh - massacres of Yezidis, Christians, Shiites and others in Syria and Iraq, their enslavement of Yezidis and Christians, taking women as sex slaves, and their destruction of antiquities that are part of the historical heritage of all humanity - but our supposed allies are bombing in Yemen in such a way as to kill many civilians, destroy residential buildings, and now also destroy antiquities.

Why those opposed to BDS should oppose Canary Mission

And on a far less pleasant topic than the previous post, a website called Canary Mission has just gone live. This website has published information about a number of students about their support for the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions - directed at the state of Israel). Why have they done it?

From their "About" page:

• ....We pursue our mission by presenting the actions of hate-fomenting individuals and organizations - clearing up the ambiguity that surrounds their activities on campus and beyond. Our hope is that by shining a bright light on radicals and their activities, the public can clarify for themselves the nature of such affiliations.
• ....We believe in the right of employers to know which potentially threatening organizations prospective employees were affiliated with during their time on campus. 
• Canary Mission provides freely available material gathered from completely accessible and unrestricted sources. We have chosen to collate this information into a concise and unambiguous format for the consumption of prospective employers and the public at large.

From this mission statement we can see that the purpose of the website is not merely to publicize individuals (almost all of whom are students) who support the BDS movement, but to threaten their future livelihood.

I am no fan of BDS or SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine), but I do not believe that students who support BDS should have their livelihoods threatened by this biased, very one-sided presentation. This website reduces people to one particular political viewpoint that they hold, and assumes that because of that viewpoint, they could be dangerous for future employers to hire. Remember Senator Joseph McCarthy? This is what he did. He smeared people as communists (none of whom he was able to prove were communists) and called for their dismissal from U.S. government service.

In almost all cases, people's political views and activism are totally irrelevant to their employment. For example, if a Ph.D. student in chemistry supports BDS, is that a reason that he or she should be turned down for a job in a chemistry lab?

Those of us who oppose BDS should not engage in McCarthyite tactics against those we disagree with politically. We should take on BDS as a political movement, and argue against it and organize against it based on why we think BDS proposals are wrong. We should never engage in ad hominem attacks on individuals, nor should we threaten people who advocate BDS in any way. The United States is a democratic country, and we should seek to defeat political ideas and actions that we disagree with through democratic means.

Appreciation of the Pseudepigrapha 1: 2 Enoch: God's Face and the Creation of Humans

I'm currently working on my chapter on the Testament of Job, Joseph and Aseneth, and Philo's On the Contemplative Life, and I keep coming across great passages from those and other pseudepigraphic works, so I thought I would post some of my favorite passages for the enjoyment of my readers.

Great passages from 2 Enoch

All translations from F. I. Andersen, "2 Enoch," in James H. Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepgrapha, volume 1 (published 1983).

According to Genesis, humans are created in the image of God. 2 Enoch takes this idea and likens God's face to the human face, which is God's image, and which should not be treated with contempt.

Chapter 44:

The Lord with his own two hands created mankind; and in a facsimile of his own face. Small and great the Lord created. Whoever insults a person's face insults the face of the Lord; whoever treats a person's face with repugnance treats the face of the Lord with repugnance. Whoever treats with contempt the face of any person treats the face of the Lord with contempt. 

In this passage, 2 Enoch likens the human face to the divine face, but in order to emphasize the fiery and frightening nature of God. This passage is reminiscent of the Shi'ur Qomah traditions ("stature/measure of the body") in Jewish mystical texts.

Chapter 39:3-5 (short recension):

And now, my children, it is not from my own lips that I am reporting to you today, but from the lips of the Lord who has sent me to you. As for you, you hear my words, out of my lips, a human being created equal to yourselves; but I, I have heard the words from the fiery lips of the Lord. For the lips of the Lord are a furnace of fire, and his words are the fiery flames which come out. You, my children, you see my face, a human being created just like yourselves; I, I am one who has seen the face of the Lord, like iron made burning hot by fire, emitting sparks. For you gaze into (my) eyes, a human being created just like yourselves; but I have gazed into the eyes of the Lord, like the rays of the shining sun and terrifying the eyes of a human being.

This last paragraph is from what is the called the "Adam Septipartite" tradition (i.e., Adam in seven parts), developed in medieval Christian literature (and thus probably not part of the earliest 2 Enoch texts).

Chapter 30:8 (long recension):

And on the sixth day I commanded my wisdom to create man out of the seven components: his flesh from earth; his blood from dew and from the sun; his eyes from the bottomless sea; his bones from stone; his reason from the mobility of angels and from clouds; his veins and hair from grass of the earth; his spirit from my spirit and from wind.

Same Sex Marriage now legal in Ireland!!

Ireland Votes to Legalize Same Sex Marriage: This is really an amazing story. It never occurred to me that Ireland would vote to approve same-sex marriage. Growing up in the 1960s-early 1970s, I always thought of Ireland as a very conservative country, its mores directed by the values of the Catholic Church (which was true). Those same conservative mores had a heavy effect in my home town, Cambridge, Mass. I know that people think of Cambridge as a very liberal, but in the 1960s and early 1970s city politics were pretty evenly balanced between liberal and conservative voting blocs. Many Irish and Italian Catholics lived in the city, and many students went to Catholic elementary schools and high schools.

Gay pride flags in windows in Ireland (Source: http://boingboing.net/2015/05/22/ireland-votes-on-same-sex-marr.html).

While Massachusetts was the first state in the US to legalize same sex marriage, that did not mean that the conservative people who ran the local St. Patrick's Day parade wanted to permit Irish LGBT groups to participate. The Boston area is now very different than it was when I was growing up in Cambridge in the 1960s-early 1970s, but it is only this year, 2015, that the first LGBT group marched in the St. Patrick's Day parade. Two groups, Boston Pride and Outvets, a gay veterans group, marched this year.

Boston Pride marching in this year's St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston.
(Source: http://www.wbur.org/2015/03/15/gay-groups-march-at-last-in-boston-st-patricks-day-parade).

Outvets marching in this year's St. Patrick's Day Parade in Boston
(Source: http://www.wbur.org/2015/03/15/gay-groups-march-at-last-in-boston-st-patricks-day-parade)

Have a happy gay day, with plenty of green beer!

Medieval Jewish community of Worms, Germany

http://argaman01.tumblr.com/post/119683503134/jewish-medieval-sites-in-worms-germany

"Long Live Israel!"

When I went out for a walk today, I found this graffiti written on the side of a planter in the Bochum Uniforum, much to my surprise. It says "Long live Israel!" in German. I hadn't noticed it before, so perhaps someone wrote it to celebrate Israeli Independence Day, which is today (according to the secular calendar).

Bochum Jewish cemetery

Today I paid a visit to the Jewish cemetery in Bochum, on Wasserstrasse. It is a consolidated cemetery that includes burials and headstones from two other cemeteries that were moved in the post WWII period. I saw headstones from the late 19th century up to this year.

There is a clear division between the pre-WWII burials and those very few that came after the war, and then burials since the early 1990s. Those buried during the war include 52 Jewish forced laborers who died working in Bochum factories.

There are also memorial headstones for those killed by the Nazis.

The post-1990 burials are almost entirely of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Here are some pictures of the headstones.

This is one side of a stone in the Jewish section of the Bochum, Germany, cemetery, for Eliezer Lipman, son of Ephraim Weiss, who was murdered by the Nazis on January 10, 1945 (Tevet 25, 5705). 

This photo depicts the other side of the gravestone in the previous photograph. Eliezer Lipman was the husband of Yital Glick (her maiden name), and the son of Leah Zimmerman (her maiden name).

This gravestone memorializes Yital bat R. Jacob Judah ha-Kohen Glick, and her children, Shmuel Benzion, Avraham Yehoshua, and Devorah-Hinda Tila; Leah bat R. Jacob Zimmerman, her daughter Rachel and her husband Hayyim Moshe ben Shelomo Zickerman, and their children Shelomo, Eliezer Lipman-Jacob, who were murdered by the Nazis on 22 Sivan 5704 (1944). "May God avenge their blood."

These are gravestones for two men who had worked as forced laborers in Bochum and died there. The one on the left is for Alfred Hofmann, born on January 1, 1945, and died on March 11, 1945. The abbreviation below his name says "May God avenge his blood." This abbreviation is on all of the stones for the forced laborers who died at the hands of the Nazis.

The one on the right is for Isidor Davidovits, born on May 31, 1911, died on March 14, 1945.

This is the gravestone of Kalman Rosenberg, born on April 5, 1897, died on December 5, 1944, another of the forced laborers.

Gravestone of Ella Neuberg-Lilienthal, who died on September 8, 1923, and three family members who died in the Holocaust and two who survived in Holland.

Alfred Neuberg died in Sobibor on May 21, 1943; Karl Neuberg died on March 31, 1944 in Auschwitz; and Lise Neuberg-Spiro died in the middle of 1944 in Poland. Two other relatives, Walter Neuberg (d. March 26, 1994) and Geertie Neuberg-Zijlstra (d. March 10, 1993), lived in Brielle, Holland.

Charlotte Salomon, "Life? Or Theater?"

I went to the city art museum in Bochum last week and saw a wonderful exhibit of Charlotte Salomon's autobiographical artistic voyage, "Leben? oder Theater?" 

All of her artistic work is now in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and this is their introduction to her life and work:

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) grew up in middle-class German-Jewish Berlin. As a girl she led a relatively carefree life, until the Nazi coup in 1933. In spite of this she almost completed her studies at Art Academy. In January 1939 Charlotte fled from Germany and went to stay with her grandparents who were living in the south of France. They had quitted Nazi Germany earlier, in 1933. Following the outbreak of World War II, in 1940, Charlotte's grandmother committed suicide. Only then was Charlotte told that her mother had ended her life in a similar way, in 1926.

Charlotte, then 24 years old, came to terms with her turbulent family past as well as her experiences as a Jew living in Berlin, in a most unusual manner. She felt herself faced with a choice: either to end her life or to undertake 'something really extravagantly crazy'. She went into retirement, as it were, and in a burst of wild creative energy, started to paint. So it was that, outdoors in the sunshine of southern France, she produced a series of almost eight hundred gouaches (watercolours).

Between 1940 and 1942, in eighteen months of concentrated work, she painted her life's story, titling it Life? or Theatre? "And she saw with eyes awakened from a dream all the beauty that surrounded her, saw the sea, felt the sun and knew that for a period she must disappear from the human scene and that she had to make every possible sacrifice in order to create her new world from out of the unfathomable depths." 

In October 1943, at the age of 26, Charlotte Salomon was killed in Auschwitz.

Here are a couple of examples from the collection:

Life or Theater?

Self-portrait, 1940

Kristallnacht, 1938

Remembrance of Armenian Genocide at Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul

Istanbul's Istiklal Avenue, happening now. pic.twitter.com/r9rHMnqzuX

— Piotr Zalewski (@p_zalewski) April 24, 2015

Daesh (Islamic State) murders Ethiopian Christians in Libya

Today the New York Times reported on a video by Daesh (the Islamic State) allegedly of the murder of Ethiopian Christians in Libya.  

During the last five minutes of the half-hour video, the footage cuts back and forth between scenes in the southern desert and a beach along the coast, at one point displaying both with a split screen. Both settings were filmed with the same sophisticated camera angles and editing that has distinguished other Islamic State films from indigenous Libyan videos. 

Masked fighters lead a row of bound captives dressed in black into the desert and then shoot each of the prisoners in the back of the head. Another group of masked fighters leads a row of prisoners in orange jumpsuits along a beach and then beheads each of them with a long knife, placing the severed heads on the bodies lying on the sand as bloody surf washes over them. 

“You will not have safety even in your dreams, until you accept Islam,” declares a masked figure, speaking English with an American accent and pointing a revolver toward the camera. “To the nation of the cross: We are back again.”

In February of this year, Daesh murdered 21 Coptic Christians in Libya. When I was in the Old City of Jerusalem last month with a friend, we went up to the roof of the Holy Sepulcher, where the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate is located. A banner lamenting the deaths of the Coptic martyrs was strung across the way.

Holy Fire in Jerusalem April 11, 2015

Today is the ceremony of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - it's Holy Saturday according to the calendar of Orthodox Christians. Tomorrow is Easter.

Orthodox #Christians hold Holy Fire ceremony in #Jerusalem's Holy Sepulcher church. Photo courtesy #Israel police pic.twitter.com/qJWglLvCyE
— Tia Goldenberg (@tgoldenberg) April 11, 2015

Finally a glimpse of the Holy Fire spreading through the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem. #HolySaturday pic.twitter.com/bSK1uwd3DR
— Mae Elise Cannon (@reverendmae) April 11, 2015

I'm hearing Syriac hymns now! Our community coming in. Love our girls. #Jerusalem pic.twitter.com/6jYTuiEe2G
— r (@zaliin) April 11, 2015

Processional of Arab Palestinian Christians in Old City of Jerusalem. #HolySaturday pic.twitter.com/kOTyHSWt1T
— Mae Elise Cannon (@reverendmae) April 11, 2015

#HolyFire #eastjerusalem #Palestine #exceptional pic.twitter.com/4adj1hncQV
— Soraya Al-Ghussein (@SorayaABN) April 11, 2015

Al Massih Qam! Hakan Qam! #HolyFire #Jerusalem #ChretiensdOrient pic.twitter.com/ic4YEj7kgJ
— Terre Sainte Mag (@terresaintemag) April 11, 2015

At the seder table, and the Wise Son

This is another illustration from the same Haggadah, fol. 6 - the participants surrounding the Seder table. The same heimish Jewish faces are represented here.

This is an image of the wise son (from the section of the Four Sons), fol. 8v.

Cute Jewish men identified - the Five Rabbis in B'nai B'rak

My colleague, Stephen Clancy, Professor of Art History at Ithaca College, has identified the source of the image in the previous post. It is taken from MS London, British Library, Add. 14762, "Haggadah for Passover (the 'Ashkenazi Haggadah'), German rite with the commentary of Eleazar of Worms." It is dated to the third quarter of the 15th century, ca. 1460, from southern Germany. The scribe was Meir Jaffe, and the illustrator was Joel ben Simeon Feibush. This is fol. 7v.

The five men are at the bottom of the page. They illustrate the story of the five rabbis in B'nei B'rak, who stayed up all night studying until their disciples came in the morning and told them that it was time to recite the morning Sh'ma.

"A story about R. Eliezer and R. Joshua and R. Tarfon and R. Elazar ben Azariah and R. Akiba who were sitting in B'nai B'rak and were telling about the exodus from Egypt, all that night, until their students came and said to them, 'Our masters, the time has come for the morning recital of the Sh'ma.'"

Cute Jewish men in a medieval manuscript

This is one of my favorite depictions of Jewish men from a medieval manuscript, because they all look so haimish. This image is taken from the cover of Talya Fishman's recent book, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures. I've searched for the image through Google Images, but I haven't found a source for it other than the cover of the book. I would love to know what manuscript it's from and what it's supposed to be depicting. Who are these five guys, and what book are they discussing? If any of my readers know, please let me know. 

Medieval Maps of Jerusalem - Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Cloister of the Redeemer Church

Last Friday I visited the Old City with a friend, and one of the places I went was a small museum in the cloister of the Church of the Redeemer, the Lutheran Church that was built in the Muristan in the late 19th century. The church is built on the site of the 12th century Latin Church of Mary, and it's very close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the museum, there was a facsimile of a map from a medieval manuscript of a pilgrim's visit to Jerusalem late in the 7th century (ca. 670). The pilgrim was Arculf, a Frankish bishop who had visited the holy places.

From the Encyclopedia Britannica (online), the entry on Arculf:

Arculf, (flourished 7th century, Germany), bishop who was the earliest Western Christian traveler and observer of importance in the Middle East after the rise of Islām. Although he most likely was connected with a monastery, some believe he was the bishop of Périgueux, Aquitaine. 

On his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (c. 680),  Arculf was driven by storm to Scotland and so arrived at the Hebridean island of Iona, where he related his experiences to his host, Abbot St. Adamnan. Adamnan’s narrative of Arculf’s journey, De locis sanctis, came to the attention of the Venerable Bede, who inserted a brief summary of it in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede also wrote a separate and longer digest that endured throughout the Middle Ages as a popular guidebook to the Eastern holy places. 

Among the places Arculf visited were the sacred sites of Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee; Damascus and Tyre; and the Nile River and the volcanic Aeolian Islands (modern Eolie Islands). He drew plans of the churches of the Holy Sepulchre and of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, of the Ascension on Olivet, and of Jacob’s Well at Shechem. His records also include the first form of the story of St. George, patron saint of England.

This illustration is from a 9th century manuscript of De Locis Sanctis, Vienna, Austrian National Library codex 458, f. 4v. The circular area to the left is the Anastasis, the rotunda where the sepulchre itself is located. Outside the rotunda, to the right, is an enclosed rectangle which has the caption "Golgatha" above it - this is the traditionally accepted place of the crucifixion, according to Christian tradition.

Another illustration is found in a different manuscript.

I don't know which plan is original to Arculf or Adamnan, or closest to the original plan.

City of Jerusalem in the Madaba mosaic map. Damascus Gate and
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are both marked.

My last photo is of the roof of the current-day Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where monks from Ethiopia live.

Election Day in Israel

It's just after 9 pm in Israel, and when the polls close at 10:00 pm, we'll get news about the exit polls. I'm starting to get nervous.

I went on a pleasant tiyul (walking trip) today with people from the Zion synagogue in Jerusalem. Some photos from today:

Menorah in front of the Knesset.

Rakefot (cyclamens) in the Valley of the Cross.

Courtyard of the Monastery of the Cross.

The all-seeing eye, above one of the doorways of the monastery.

Election posters for Isaac Herzog and the Zionist Camp.

Election posters for the Likud.

Binyamin Netanyahu in a Likud election poster.

The New York Times and Antisemitism Today

Whenever I see an article in the New York Times that mentions Israel or Jews in any way, and comments for the article are open, I feel dismay, because I know that many commenters will seize this opportunity to write antisemitic responses. The same is true of the Washington Post (I think it's worse there). Why do the Times, or the Post, or many other online publications not moderate the comment sections in an effective way to keep out antisemitism? (By the way, this is also true of the Forward, and of the English editions of Haaretz and Ynet - I really don't understand why they don't erase such comments). Often one can even see antisemitic remarks in comments on articles that have nothing to do with Israel or Jews.

It's clear (to me, at least), that the lack of moderation of antisemitic comments is an important way that antisemitism is being spread today. Vile ideas that should have buried with the Nazis are now published on the websites of respected, leading newspapers and magazines, with no criticism or condemnation ever coming from the writers or editors of these news sources. If David Duke or Louis Farrakhan wanted to publish an op-ed in the New York Times denouncing the Jews, the Times would never print it. Why do they let equivalent words remain in the comments sections?

This issue came up for me today because of a column by Roger Cohen (pictured left). It is not political. It has nothing to do with Israel or with the negotiations with Iran.

Roger Cohen writes movingly today about the book Where the Road From Auschwitz Ends. He ends his essay with these words:

Written with tender precision, “A Brief Stop on the Road From Auschwitz,” recently published in the United States, is the most powerful account I have read of the other death — the death after the camps, the death from damage that proves insuperable, the death that in this case comes 15 years later, in 1960, after electroshock treatment, in a Swedish lake beside a mental hospital. The project was indeed brief.

The entire essay is about David Rosenberg, the father of the author, Goran Rosenberg. Contemporary politics are not mentioned. Cohen says nothing about the state of Israel.

Yet among the 109 comments currently posted to the article, quite a few take the opportunity to attack Israel and Jews for not learning the lesson of the Holocaust. 

One writer says: 

A touching recount of the lingering wounds that must accompany such trauma. Perhaps someday an articulate Palestinian refugee will pen a book describing the enduring psychological and physical wounds the he or she suffered in Israeli prisons or in the aftermath of the cluster bombings of schools and hospitals, or in observing the intentional demolition of his family's home by Israeli soldiers whilst his parents were still inside.

Another writer castigates the United States, taking Sweden as an example to be followed (because it was neutral during WWII):

Death comes to us all, and is sometimes a merciful end to suffering. Nothing says we must all be so "heroic" and to slough off the worst torture humans can devise for us. 

Sweden was "neutral" in WWII, not because that's what they all wanted. Some, wealthy industrialists, supported Hitler the workers supported his enemies. Swedes opted for a course that would not tear their country apart irreparably. America could learn from that. BTW, it's Göran and Södertalje. Let's try to end America's disdain for foreign languages and our assumption that they don't matter.

Another writer complains that we always hear about the Jews at Auschwitz - how about the non-Jews? 

There are so many stories of Jews who were confined in Auschwitz. Such a terrible place for everyone confined there. And so many confined there were non-Jews whose stories have never been told. Why?

Another writer, thank goodness, recognizes the viciousness of such comments:

Reading the bitter denunciations of Israel, Mr. Netanyahu and Jews (yes, Jews) that appear each day in large numbers among reader comments in this newspaper, I can't help but think that the day when Holocaust memoirs, no matter how beautifully written or evocative of the damage done to the Jewish people during and after the Hitler-time, can have much, if any, real influence or impact is past.

This writer received the following response, from another person who thinks that Jews didn't learn the correct lesson from the Holocaust:

It is wrong for you and others to equate my condemnation of the practices of the State of Israel with antisemitism. I am not against Jews, or the existence of the State of Israel. I am against the barbaric treatment of the Palestinians by the State of Israel. It is easy and morally dishonest to brush aside the protests against the actions of the State of Israel as being anti-Jew. The Holocaust is no excuse to treat the Palestinians the way Israel does.

Another response is even more revolting. This author has failed to comprehend that the arrow of time points only one way:

The Holocaust will never be adequate justification for Israel's behavior, today. If fact, that behavior besmirches the very memory of that evil time.

Whatever the state of Israel does today cannot "besmirch" the memory of the Holocaust, since the state was founded after the Holocaust.

This writer is confused, and comes close to equating the crimes of the Nazis against the Jews with the actions of the IDF:

I am not Jewish, but the stories of the Holocaust move me to tears and anger. It doesn't matter how many stories of I've heard- each is different, yet each is painfully the same. I feel these same emotions for every story I hear of Palestinian suffering - lives lost, despair and brutality of the IDF. Mr. Netanyahu has it exactly wrong. By showing compassion towards their enemy will Israel keep the Holocaust flame lit. Mr. Netanyahu, himself, diminishes the Holocaust by using it as a defense for the murder of thousands of civilians who pose no real danger and whose only crime is being stuck in an open air prison and not being Jewish.

Another righteous soul writes:

From 1950 to 1962 I attended the Fieldston branch of the Ethical Culture Schools which was about 95% Jewish. We even had mandatory Ethics Class taught by a Holocaust Survivor. "Never Again" was a part of life. Being non Jewish and German on my fathers side I couldn't help but feel some guilt even though my father's family had left Germany over 80 years before the rise of Hitler. 

Reading this column I couldn't help but think about how years from now my children or grandchildren will be reading about the personal damage caused by the oppression and dehumanization of despised minority. It seems even worse to me that now it is the Jews "Mowing the grass" as they call dropping bombs on Gaza, and not even allowing students to leave to study in America, Israel's biggest supporter. 

I always thought "Never Again" was supposed to apply to all oppressed peoples. Obviously I was wrong, at least when we are talking about Israel.

He also belongs to the club of those who think that "the Jews" failed to learn the lesson of the Holocaust.

One response to him: "If rockets would be falling on your head or your relatives dying in suicide bombing attacks you would not be comparing Israel to Nazis. Thanks to people like you 'Never Again' will never work."

Another person is annoyed that the tour he took of Auschwitz did not devote enough attention to the death of Maximilian Kolbe:

The holocaust was a terrible thing but I was very disappointed when I visited Auschwitz with a tour group and there was not one mention of St. Maximilian Kolbe who volunteered to die in order to save a Jewish man with a family. The holocaust was horrific but it was not only Jews who were murdered even though they were the majority.

They had St. Koble's cell on display with his religious artifacts and I do think it should have been pointed out to our group. He was a courageous man who should have been honored.

Any sentence that starts out "The holocaust was a terrible thing but...." does not end in a good way. As a respondent commented, Jews were the overwhelming majority of those killed at Auschwitz.

A writer from France accuses Roger Cohen of writing about the Holocaust because Israel is once again in the news.

I have nothing against keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, so that "never again" remains front and centre. But I do have a problem with the Holocaust memory being abused for political gain. It seems every time Israel gets itself into hot water, there is a surge in Holocaust writings in the press. Mr. Cohen should not confuse our pledge of "never again" with our acceptance of Israel's transgressions.

As I said before, Cohen didn't mention anything about Israel in his essay - this conspiracy exists only in the mind of the author. Fortunately, someone else responded: "Trust me, Mr. Cohen is not an apologist for Israel; this essay has nothing to do with Israel's 'being in hot water.' It is about the half-life left to most survivors."

Another commenter, bizarrely, seems to think that Cohen is opposed to the US negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Although he claims to be an avid reader of Cohen, he doesn't seem to have understood what he said.

I have been an avid reader of Mr. Cohen for quite a long time. But I was aware of the Holocaust before I read one of his column. In fact, as a Vietnam veteran. I actually witnessed a Holocaust many Americans wish to forget about or remain in denial about, namely, how we attempted to commit genocide against the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. I'm still waiting for that column from Mr. Cohen. But Mr. Cohen fails the crucial test to me for being a true and credible public intellectual, that is, using a tragedy merely to manipulate the readers rather than guiding them on the search for the truth. And to be really blunt with you, I grew up in what can only be termed an anti-Semitic family of origin. So I have always been quite sensitive to that issue having grown up around that virus when I criticize one of Mr. Cohen's column. But we have to give - at least for now - diplomacy a chance in our negotiations with Iran. But what really disturbs me about Mr. Cohen's latest column really isn't what he wrote about, it's about what he avoids writing about. That was my main point. He's being intellectually dishonest. And that debases his currency as a public intellectual. But that is his choice.

Another writer thinks that Cohen wrote this column about a man who survived the Holocaust in order to deceive his readers about Israel. He accuses him of using the "Auschwitz card." This is among the most vile comments on this article.

This deeply biased commentary should not be left unrefuted. The Palestinians had no role in what Europeans did to the Jews among them, and owe no one anything. Indeed, they are the inhabitants and owners of Palestine and have been for thousands of years. European Jews forced their way onto the land, with the connivance of British imperialists and expelled the Palestinians at gunpoint or worse. They have ever right to our support in their fight to regain at least some of their land. At a minimum we should resist those among us who would give yet more weapons and money to help the Israelis in their oppression of Palestine.

Cohen knows this only too well and writes about it, but can not refrain from playing the Auschwitz card. Decent Americans should not be taken in by it.

And finally, another response (confused, badly written, and conspiracy theory ridden) that traffics in antisemitic tropes:

Why is the media not also conducting, distract our attention from contemporary genocides -out sourcing of US jobs, flood of immigrants used as the functional equivalent of US slaves etc, with almost daily rehashes of the "Second Holocaust" that the east European countries and Russia conducted before, during and after WWII that killed another 6 million Jews? Could it be, that again distraction is the fundamental Zionist part of the 1% reason for the continual avalanche of "never forgetting" the Nazis, while to "remember" the radical east European and Russian pogroms and gulag Holocaust would anger potential customers for high profit margin junk, and threaten access to all that now cheap East European labor. Seems it really is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY!

The Nazis killed 6 million Jews; there was no "Second Holocaust" by the Russians and Eastern European countries that killed another 6 million. What is the "fundamentalist Zionist part of the 1% reason, etc."? Why is the New York Times permitting the publication of such an insane piece of nonsense?

"Walking while Jewish" in Europe

An article from the Daily Mail presents several instances of people "walking while Jewish" through various European cities - all men wearing kippot.

In Bradford and Manchester, British journalist Jonathan Kalmus encountered antisemitic jeers and insults, and one person followed him and took pictures of him.

He writes: "'You Jew' was the anti-Semitic scream which came from a passing car. My shaken wife tried to explain it away to my seven-year-old daughter as a very large sneeze. They were simply playing in a local park in Manchester a few weeks ago when the incident ripped through what should have been a peaceful and wholesome time for any mother and child. 

"'Fight the Jewish scum' and 'Jew, Jew, Jew... Run', were the more vicious threats hurled at me in the past few days, however, when I decided to secretly film and find out whether 'Jew-hatred' really is alive and kicking on British streets."

The article also reports on similar walks; in Paris, by Israeli journalist Zvika Klein, who was a victim of harassment, threats, and spitting; in Copenhagen, where Omar Shargawi, an award-winning Palestinian-Danish documentary maker, put on a kippah - for the most part he was not harassed except when someone shouted "F**k you little Jew"; in Rome Ben Katz was greeted in a friendly fashion by some people who said "Shalom" or "Shabbat Shalom" to him, but he was also cursed at by right-wing hoodlums; in Berlin Adam Goldman was undisturbed, except when some teenagers "turned their heads and pointed as if they couldn't get over the fact that there was a real living Jew standing close to them but that is just ignorant teenagers"; and finally in Stockholm, Simon Moser rode the subway and got no reaction whatsoever from people who saw him.

In Germany I've felt quite apprehensive about wearing a star of David on a necklace, but perhaps I shouldn't be so nervous about it. It seems like I'd get a far more hostile response in other parts of Europe.