Pondlet in Westport

Rainy Day, Sunny Sunset

Today was a cold, rainy, windy day, but it ended with glorious sunshine.

More signs of spring from Westport, Mass.

I don't find that I really feel like posting any words during the coronavirus. I feel melancholy, and worried, and anxious, and all of the other depressing emotions that most people are feeling now. I feel like I have insights that are new to me, but not new to the world. So go read some profound thinkers. 

I can give you photos of Westport on a beautiful April spring day, however. The first photo is from the end of the driveway of my folks' house in Westport. The second photo is of the field across the road, which could have cows in it, but doesn't now. 

The next two photos are of a few of the many daffodils (and I mean many) that Eve has planted here. The last is of a forsythia bush, one of the two that's started to bloom. If we manage to get a decently warm day or two with consistent sun, I'm sure all the forsythia blossoms will come out 

Yesterday, I took a drive down to Westport Point to go look at the water - carefully, wearing a mask, avoiding other people. I saw two magnolia trees - one that was already blooming, the other one just about to pop. I'll have to go back tomorrow and investigate them again. I also saw an extremely enthusiastic big dog jumping straight up the entire length of its body, and then standing with its front legs on a woman's shoulders. I would have liked to have gotten a photo of that, but I didn't.

Sunset Views, Westport, Mass., April 1, 2020

Virus - a warning from the Chabad Shaliach to Beijing, Shimon Freundlich

Daffodils and forsythia and crocuses and spring

 

Grief and fear from Coronavirus

Four hundred Americans died today of Coronavirus (at least 400). 268 died yesterday, and 249 the day before. March 22 was the first day more than a hundred Americans died of the virus. In the last week, 1445 Americans died of the virus. We're not succeeding in "flattening the curve."

I'm having a lot of trouble making myself going to bed. I'm afraid of death. I think about the people I know who are sick. I think about the people I love, in my family, who could fall ill with the coronavirus and die of it, because they're/we're old and have disabilities like lung diseases and asthma.

 I keep reading about people dying of COVID-19 like this, and frankly it's terrifying.

The New York Times has started a section of the paper with obituaries for people who have died of coronavirus - Those We've Lost. Does anyone remember the "Portraits of Grief" - the obituaries of all the people who died on 9/11?

------------------------------------------

I'm afraid of what we're becoming. Will we / are we rationing care for people ill with coronavirus on the basis of prior disability? Are people with disabilities somehow lesser than abled people, inferior, are their lives worth less than people who don't have disabilities? One of the things that's shocked me since the 2016 election campaign is the resurgence of eugencist thinking (and actions) from people on both the left and right. People who are coming right out and saying that the lives of older people are less important, and that we should even be willing to die of the virus for the political cause they support. This is Nazi thinking.

J SHAPIRO: Ari Ne'eman is a visiting scholar at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University. 

NE'EMAN: They (disabled people) are terrified that when it comes to scarce resources like ventilators, they will be sent to the back of the line. And they're right to be terrified because many states are saying this quite explicitly in their allocation criteria. 

J SHAPIRO: Ne'eman looked at state policies for crisis care and found several - including in New York, Alabama, Tennessee, Utah - that ration care at the expense of people with disabilities. He says this violates civil rights laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act. 

NE'EMAN: Our civil rights laws don't go away in the midst of a pandemic. 

J SHAPIRO: He's worried of a repeat in this country of what's happening in Italy, where ventilators go to young people over older ones. He thinks are fairer ways. Let the ventilator will go to the first person who needs it. Others have suggested a lottery system. Meanwhile, disability groups in other states are preparing similar complaints. Another letter came from Neil Romano, who was named by President Donald Trump as chair of another federal agency, the National Council on Disability. He, too, asked the Department of Health and Human Services to take action to stop rationing. Now he's talking to the department's Office for Civil Rights.

From ProPublica:
Alabama’s disaster preparedness plan says that “persons with severe mental retardation, advanced dementia or severe traumatic brain injury may be poor candidates for ventilator support.” 

Tompkins County, NY - now 23 people have tested positive for COVID-19

Plus, the tracker for Coronavirus tests in Tompkins County, New York.

Coronavirus charts for March 25, 2020 for US and world

The chart for the increase is US deaths was made by me using Excel, relying on the Worldometer figures. The rest of them are from the Financial Times free coronavirus coverage. Worldometer link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/.

As of 9:17 pm EDT the number dead from COVID-19 in the US is 944, and the case fatality rate is 1.429%. (Number of total positive tested is 66,048). It's very possible that the CFR is actually much lower, since not very many people have been tested.

Here are the scary charts from FT. Link: https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest.

US Coronavirus deaths from February 29, 2020 to March 23, 2020

I decided I wanted to keep track of the Coronavirus deaths in the US myself, so I made a chart of the number of deaths and the daily changes from February 29 until today, using the numbers provided by the Worldometer. As a bonus, I learned how to make charts in Excel. Here's today's chart (as of about 11:30 pm, March 23).

Because I've forgotten most of the math I learned in elementary and high school, I don't know how to figure out the rate of increase.

By the way, if we continue on this trajectory without slowing the rate of infections and deaths, we're well on our way to being another Italy. See this article by Ezekiel Emanuel - Fourteen Days. That's the most we have to defeat Coronavirus: "Models from Imperial College London and others suggest that up to 2.2 million Americans could die within a year without sufficient efforts to 'flatten the curve.'"

Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe (Ben Hecht, 1943), illustrated by Arthur Syzk

s

Source: https://magnes.berkeley.edu/exhibitions/in-real-times

Israel goes to the polls, again, for the third time in a year

The Israeli election is tomorrow (yet again!). Yediot Acharonot published a wonderful first page for their election edition - Israeli elections on the Monopoly board.

The main headline, in the middle: "Israel votes: third time to the polls. Perhaps this time... Elections, third time: Netanyahu and Gantz fight for every vote. Will there be a clear decision, or will we go to a fourth round?"

Holocaust Conference on Post-War Memory - dishonest description by Algemeiner article

An article in the Algemeiner (https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/05/anti-israel-professor-hijacks-a-holocaust-conference/) presents an entirely inaccurate impression of a conference planned for this May 20-22 on "“Post-War Memory, Holocaust Memorialization, and the Implications for the Present." It is a regional conference sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, which will be held in Durham, NC

The Algemeiner article begins by saying that "A radical professor who thinks America is hopelessly racist will preside over an upcoming Holocaust education conference that will seek to show 'connections between racist ideology and policies in the US and Nazi Germany.'"

He continues: "One of those 'connections between racist ideology and policies in the US and Nazi Germany' that [Barry] Trachtenberg and his cohorts are focused on is comparing slavery in America to the Holocaust. In the conference description, they write that the event 'will also explore how the specific history of the Holocaust helps us to particularize and compare the continued controversial impact and reception of Southern slavery and segregation on our public and private lives.'"

The Algemeiner quotes one sentence from the description of the conference and leaves out the relevant context. This is the paragraph from which that sentence was taken: "Given the location of our Institute in the US South, the Regional Institute will also explore how the specific history of the Holocaust helps us to particularize and compare the continued controversial impact and reception of Southern slavery and segregation on our public and private lives. Through guest speakers and select readings, we will discuss historical connections between racist ideology and policies in the US and Nazi Germany (such as connections between Jim Crow and Nazi antisemitic legal policies) and parse distinctions between different manifestations of racism and moments in racist histories to identify what is specific to place, context, and peoples." Contrary to the Algemeiner's assertion, asserting that there was a connection between Jim Crow policies and Nazi antisemitic politics is not "radical," nor is it a sign that the organizers of the conference hate America. 

James Q. Whitman's recent book, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017), argues that American citizenship laws, anti-miscegenation laws, and Jim Crow segregation were some of the influences upon Nazi racial laws.

As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.

The Algemeiner article also did not provide any other information about the conference, except to lambaste the politics of one of the organizers, Barry Trachtenberg, who is the Michael R. and Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Associate Professor in the Department of History, and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There are two other organizers - Karen Auerbach of UNC-Chapel Hill and Paul B. Jaskot of Duke University.

This is the full description of the conference, presenting it in an entirely different light from the hatchet-job provided by the author of the Algemeiner article.

Call for Proposals HEF Regional Institute 2020 

“Post-War Memory, Holocaust Memorialization, and the Implications for the Present” 

Durham, North Carolina, May 22-24, 2020 

The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University will host the second Regional Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization in Durham, North Carolina on May 22-24, 2020, with the support of Wake Forest University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

There has been significant work in the past decades on postwar memory and memorialization as a crucial component of Holocaust Studies. Whether discussing the role of the trials of perpetrators, the reestablishment of Jewish communities in the diaspora, the rise in memorialization and other cultural representations of the Holocaust, or the explosive impact after 1993 of survivor oral testimonies for Holocaust research, it is clear that the postwar historical moment is an inextricable complement to the horrific pre-1945 history of the Holocaust. This HEF Regional Institute will build on these broad trends by engaging in depth with one particular period of postwar memory and memorialization – the end of the war to the Auschwitz Trials (1963-65). This period on the whole has not received as much attention as the post-1965 histories; conversely, in recent years, some key work has refocused our disciplinary interests on this moment, particularly in terms of issues of memory and memorialization. 

Fellows will gain a familiarity with historiographic debates related to postwar memory and memorialization (focusing on history, Jewish Studies, art history, and cultural history) but also a deep exploration into recent new work on the period that also has great relevance to the field as a whole. In addition, the institute will be especially helpful to those Fellows who are contemplating developing a post-war element to their Holocaust Studies courses. 

Given the location of our Institute in the US South, the Regional Institute will also explore how the specific history of the Holocaust helps us to particularize and compare the continued controversial impact and reception of Southern slavery and segregation on our public and private lives. Through guest speakers and select readings, we will discuss historical connections between racist ideology and policies in the US and Nazi Germany (such as connections between Jim Crow and Nazi antisemitic legal policies) and parse distinctions between different manifestations of racism and moments in racist histories to identify what is specific to place, context, and peoples. 

Higher education faculty and graduate students who have attended a HEF Summer Institute or who have previously taught courses on any aspect of the Nazi Holocaust or Jewish civilization are encouraged to apply to become Regional Institute Fellows, particularly those who live and work in the Southeast United States. A fellowship includes the cost of tuition, room, and board during the Institute. (Fellowships do not cover travel expenses to and from Durham or the cost of any assigned materials.) Please contact JewishStudies@wfu.edu with questions. 

The 2020 Regional Institute will be held from May 22 – 24, 2020. Please send application materials, which should include 1) a cover letter indicating your interest and intent to teach classes related to the topic, 2) your CV, 3) a sample syllabus of Holocaust or Jewish Civilization courses that you have previously taught, and 4) for graduate students, a letter of recommendation. Send materials in a single pdf to JewishStudies@wfu.edu by January 1, 2020. 

Organizers: Karen Auerbach-UNC Chapel Hill; Paul B. Jaskot-Duke University; and Barry Trachtenberg-Wake Forest University

Silence: the Reward for Attending a House of Mourning - #DafYomi Ber. 6a-b

Some thoughts on today's Daf Yomi, Berakhot 6a-b. (Daf Yomi means "Daily Page," referring to a page from the Talmud. It's a practice of reading through/studying the entire Talmud, one page each day, from beginning to end. It takes about 7 and a half years, and a cycle just ended last week. I decided to start doing it this time around, with no promise that I'll finish it).

One topic is the reward one gains for doing various deeds, beginning with running to hear a rabbinic lecture. The one that struck me is the reward for going to a house of mourning: "אמר רב פפא: אגרא דבי טמיא - שתיקותא" - Rav Pappa said: the reward for attending a house of mourning is silence."

What does this mean? One commentator explains it from another passage: "Those offering consolation are not permitted to speak until the mourner opens his mouth" (Moed Katan 28b).

So sitting with the mourner without speaking, with the person whom grief has silenced, until they are able to speak, to leave that condition of stillness and reenter the world of other people that is created through speech. Not to intrude onto silence with one's chattering words and self-concerns. But can the mourner escape from his or her silent world without a hand being extended by the would-be consoler? Must all the work be done by the mourner to restart the conversation? How to center speech in the silence of the mourner and reach into that person's grief without causing further pain.

Holiday photos 2019

One of the fun things I did before Christmas was to help a friend of mine trim her tree. I'm Jewish and don't have a Christmas tree, but I really like putting up pretty decorations on a tree. Here are some examples. The big teardrop shaped ornament in the middle is from the Poland (my friend's ancestors are from Poland). Notice also the little glass tea set on the right.

Some more elaborate ornaments. 

And here are some more ornaments, including a tiny ceramic tote bag, a peanut (I think that's what it is), and another tiny glass teapot.

And this is my Hanukkah menorah, with the eighth candles for the eighth day of Hanukkah. The shammash is in the other menorah to the right (I couldn't fit it in between the other candles).

Happy New Year from Ithaca - 2020 from the Ithaca College towers

Every year at the end of the year the windows in the two Ithaca College towers are arranged to spell out the last two digits of the old year. At midnight they are quickly changed to the last two digits of the New Year. I didn't see the change this year, but I drove within view of the towers soon after midnight. The windows are left this way for several days.

Again on the Hanukkah hymn, Maoz Tzur - who is the "Red One" named in the sixth stanza?

I wrote on this question on December 14, 2009, and here is the answer once again (slightly edited).

I'm thinking about the words to Maoz Tzur, the Hanukkah hymn. According to the siddur edited by Philip Birnbaum, it was composed in the 13th century (Philip Birnbaum, Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem [New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1969] 777). (The article in Wikipedia makes the same statement, based on Zunz). 

The article on Maoz Tzur in MyJewishLearning.com refers to an article by Ismar Schorsch, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, published in the journal Judaism in the fall of 1988, entitled "A Meditation on Maoz Zur." Schorsch's family escaped from Germany on the first day of Hanukkah of 1938, after his father had been freed (he had been arrested on Kristallnacht). He writes that his family always sang the first five stanzas of Maoz Tzur with great fervor during their Hanukkah celebration (p. 459): "The poem's theme of redemption seemed to offer a poignant comment on our family's experience." They omitted the sixth stanza, however.

He records the history of the poem as follows (p. 460): "In its present form, Maoz Zur consists of six stanzas. Since the days of Leopold Zunz, the first five have been ascribed to an unknown German poet named Mordecai, who lived sometime before the middle of the thirteenth century and whose name survives as an acrostic formed by the first letter of each stanza." Schorsch writes that the poem is written as if shortly after the Maccabees had retaken the Temple from the Syrian Greeks. "The rescue from 'Greek' tyranny triggers a recollection of earlier cases when God's intervention redirects the course of Jewish history." These are in Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia. The fifth stanza describes the "redemption at the time of the Hasmoneans."

The sixth stanza was composed later than the first five, and it is (p. 461) "an unabashed messianic plea for divine retribution upon Israel's Christian oppressors." He comments that it is often left untranslated in modern prayer books (like the Birnbaum siddur, which translates only the first five stanzas). The fifth stanza adds the final subjugator of the Jewish people - Edom (which in rabbinic interpretation is equated first with pagan and then with Christian Rome, thus becoming the code name for Christianity as a whole).

My rough translation (helped by Schorsch's discussion on p. 462):

Reveal your holy arm (cf. Isaiah 52:10) and bring near the day of salvation.
Avenge your servants against the evil kingdom.
The time has lengthened, and there is no end to the evil days.
Destroy the red one (Admon=Christianity) in the shadow of the cross,
and send forth the seven shepherds [Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David]

This stanza is a more urgent request for divine salvation - rather than remembering the past salvation from danger and oppression at the hands of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, it directly calls on God to save his people from the Christians. The term "Admon" (meaning the red one) is an allusion to the biblical name Edom (equated with Esau in Genesis 25), which is understood by the rabbis to refer to the Roman Empire, and then after its Christianization, to Christianity. Schorsch believes that this stanza was also written by an Ashkenazic Jew (p. 463), "stirred by the tremors and aftershocks of the Reformation," who believed that the Christian kingdom could only be overcome by direct divine intervention.

With this understanding of the meaning of the text, it's clear why Philip Birnbaum did not care to translate the stanza into English. Although he does not mention it in his entertaining introduction to the siddur (full of jabs at earlier translations and editions of the prayer book), he refrains from translating quite a number of potentially troublesome passages, particularly mystical ones, and in this case, one that could be viewed as an open attack upon Christianity, something that he presumably thought would be unwise even in the United States.

A disturbing antisemitic assault on the New York City subway.

A disturbing antisemitic assault on the New York subway.

Why tweet a VILE, VIOLENT and #Antisemitic attack of a Jewish woman on a NY subway in 2019?

For the SAME reason Ida B. Wells exposed lynchings of Blacks in the 1890s.

Ignoring #hate won’t make us invincible,

and being naive won’t make us safe. @AP
pic.twitter.com/L36XcIRSNN

— Rev. Cornell William Brooks (@CornellWBrooks) December 17, 2019

Elad Nehorai (@PopChassid) comments on Reverend Brooks' tweet:

B'Tselem: On the Palestinian victims of the Israeli occupation

Just the tip of the iceberg: One victim a year, times thirty years December 10, 2019 B’Tselem is marking 30 years since its founding in 1989. As always when reaching a milestone, we debated how, if at all, to mark this anniversary, given that it’s certainly not a happy occasion. In the end, we decided to focus on one issue we have grappled with since day one - the lack of accountability by security forces for harm to Palestinians. The result is this collection of testimonies: “Just the tip of the iceberg: One victim a year, times thirty years.” To write this publication, we went back to the hundreds of files that document in minute detail what has long since become daily life - and death - in the Occupied Territories: cases in which soldiers killed, wounded and beat Palestinians. We selected one incident from each year since our founding, and over the past few months, went back to the victims and their families to learn about how their lives were affected, and to hear their reactions to the fact that no one was held accountable for the harm done to them or their loved ones. During this process, we quickly learned two things. The first was that confining the conversation in this manner was not possible. The occupation takes control over every aspect of the lives of people living under it, and this gets reflected in what they say: a father whose son was killed by soldiers had to stop working in Israel after his permit was denied and the family was thrown into a life of poverty; a mother who could not visit her wounded daughter in the Jerusalem hospital she had been taken to because the authorities would not give her a permit; a resident of Gaza whose brother was killed when he was a child, and then, after he reached adulthood, his parents were killed in Operation Protective Edge, and many more. The second thing we learned is that while much has changed since B'Tselem was founded, the main thing remained the same: Israel imposes a cruel and brutal regime of military occupation, which denies millions their fundamental rights. Almost every decision requires Israel’s consent, and Israel, for its part, chooses to ignore the needs of the Palestinians and refuses to see them as human beings who are entitled to everything Israeli citizens are entitled to - first and foremost, life, but also a home, water, privacy and security. Israel hardly pays a price. Internally, it faces no accountability for its policies (neither criminal nor civilian), and abroad, the international community avoids taking effective action to compel Israel to change its policies. And so, without any significant diplomatic, political or economic repercussions for these policies, Israel really has no incentive to change anything. Despite all this, the horrific, intolerable reality of occupation has to be changed. The occupation is not fated. It is a policy repeatedly chosen by successive Israeli governments. As such, it can and must be brought to an end, and a different reality must be chosen, one in which all 14 million people living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River live in freedom and equality. Yael Stein Research Director

David Rich's comments on the Jewish Labour Movement's submission to the EHRC

THREAD: The @JewishLabour submission to the @EHRC that the BBC & Times have got hold of is devastating. The full doc is here https://t.co/nnbrVkcf4e. This is what it tells us about antisemitism in the Labour Party:

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019

1. Antisemitism is *everywhere*. In party meetings, at annual conference, online, affecting ordinary members, MPs and councillors. pic.twitter.com/ZJGVeje2fN

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019

2. The party leadership & staff haven't allowed this to happen by mistake. This is not a crime of omission but of active complicity. The leadership has repeatedly denied the problem, supported those accused of antisemitism and encouraged the idea it is all a smear. pic.twitter.com/cyCDYpBfbw

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019

3. People who have themselves made antisemitic comments, or who believe allegations of antisemitism to be a smear, are promoted as candidates, staff or key committee members, while whistleblowers & complainants are attacked. pic.twitter.com/bbq43QObLq

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019

4. The party's own figures about antisemitism cases are worthless because the people producing these statistics actively work to block disciplinary cases, reduce sanctions and keep cases off the books. pic.twitter.com/S2i9zyY2V0

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019

5. At one point last year, cases were not even allowed to go on the system before they had been cleared by Corbyn loyalists. It was all personal emails and USB sticks to avoid any digital trace. pic.twitter.com/1EPd8hddd4

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019

6. Overall the submission paints a compelling picture of an institutionally racist party and an antisemitic political culture, one consequence of which is the exclusion of Jews. pic.twitter.com/nWDZBxctYl

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019

7. The last point is hopefully the most important: we only know all of this because of the courage and moral determination of dozens of whistleblowers. Some went public already on Panorama; all have stood up for Jews, for anti-racism and for traditional Labour values.

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019