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From Darkness to Light – December

Orly & Solly Dreman

By ORLY DREMAN Two months have passed since that black Shabbat on Oct. the seventh.
When I am walking with my grandchildren and they see photos of the hostages in every corner they tell me that these are pictures of people who are lost and that if we meet them we should report this to the police. I explain to them that these are people who lived very close to the border and when the war started, the enemy came and took them. Our brave soldiers are doing everything possible to bring them back.
Sirens are still sounding all around the country a few times a day with the exception of Jerusalem.
The whole country is experiencing psychic trauma and nobody is smiling. People are experiencing difficulties in sleeping, nightmares and it is hard to concentrate. When there are external noises like a truck passing by, a door slamming, something falling on the floor people experience palpitations and their stomach shrinks.
People are getting chest pain, stomach aches, headaches, back pains all stemming from stress. They obsessively check ten times that the door is locked and sleep with the lights on.
We all have a sense of existential threat and that we feel powerless.
The whole country was exposed to what happened either directly or indirectly.
We are traumatized but being partners to the same fate we desperately cling together for support.
Last week our friend notified us that his son was injured in the battlefield in Gaza and is now hospitalized and paradoxically he was “glad” because his son is out of the battle field for now and next to the family.
The mass media constantly bombards us with news about the war. Even broadcasters cry in the face of ongoing interviews with victims. When a celebrity rarely appears to entertain, he/she cries.
Everyone is worried, depressed and angry. Even help givers need help.
Psychologists and social workers are learning to treat the ongoing distress. There is no precedent to compare it with, even the psychology books will have to change.
We are still digesting what happened because of the horrendous atrocities and prevailing uncertainties after the events of Oct seventh. We experience the feeling as if the kidnapped are our own families. People identify strongly with the hostages whether adults or children. The satanic behavior of the terrorists and the ongoing hostilities are resulting in the hostage situation significantly deteriorating. and there is NO Red Cross to go in and check on them. We feel time has frozen and we got stuck on Oct. seventh. Those events are still reaping their tragic results.
The returning hostages are completely transformed and people who are here are not the same.
In the narratives of the returned hostages the situation described is even worse than expected.
The children who returned are still whispering out of fear. At the dinner table they wait till everyone else eats because they want to make sure that others get their portions.
A person shot in the head by the terrorists paradoxically may be the lucky one because they could have been burnt alive, brutally raped, or die after their body parts were cut off.
Hundreds of bodies could only be identified by archeologists who searched in the ashes for human remains.
Our soldiers in Gaza are in good spirits because they are in combat action. Masses of people are volunteering in order not to feel powerless. This is why we volunteer where ever we can: The neighborhood guard, packing goods for soldiers and evacuees, participating in demonstrations for the hostages and organizing neighborhood markets to sell the goods of farmers from the south whose families were murdered, kidnapped, missing, or their homes burnt and they are just trying to save the produce of their fields since all the foreign workers who used to work in the fields and remained alive left the country.
The IDF is a people’s army which means that since hundreds of thousands are recruited, the economy is badly affected. Yesterday, we went to a Hanukka show of our granddaughter. The crowd was mostly mothers because the fathers are recruited and the headmaster showed up in the middle directly from the combat duty in order to see his students. It was very exciting everyone stood up and applauded.
It is difficult to see how the world turned against us. Even the foreign ministry took out a travel warning, that citizens should not travel to eighty countries around the world where we formally were permitted to travel.
In spite of it all we still want to believe that goodness still prevails in the world. We are dreaming to get back to some kind of routine and normality and hope the day will come when this terrible period will be behind us.
To all our supporters we wish a Happy Chanuka and Seasons Greetings!
May the festival of lights bring us out of the darkness.

Orly Dreman is a 10th generation Israeli. Her cousin, Ruvi Rivlin, was a former president of Israel. Orly’s father was a diplomat who served both in North America and in Europe.
By profession Orly is an English teacher. She has dealt with children suffering from ADD.
Since childhood, Orly has been involved in voluntary work with the disabled, the challenged, new immigrants, the elderly and others. 

Features

As the U.S. General Election Looms, How Will American Jews Vote?

By HENRY SREBRNIK First of all, before I go any further, we should get something straight: this whole so-called debate about anti-Zionism vs antisemitism is nonsense on stilts. 

Sure, especially before the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, many Jews were dubious about or even ideologically or theologically opposed to the Zionist project of recreating a Jewish state in the land of Israel. These groups ranged from various socialists on the left, such as the supporters of the Jewish Labour Bund, to haredim like the Satmar Hasidim. The latter still are, but no one thinks of them as “antisemites.”

All of this has virtually nothing to do with today’s so-called “anti-Zionists,” almost all of whom are non-Jewish antisemites making use of a word to confuse people about their desire to destroy a modern sovereign Jewish state, now more than 75 years old. (Yes, there are some misguided Jewish students involved, and the media loves them, but this is mainly a matter of ignorance and “Stockholm Syndrome.”)

Do you remember, not so long ago, that when right-wing Republicans and/or supporters of Donald Trump, made even mild criticisms of one or another Jewish politician or Jewish organization, leftwingers immediately said these were “dog whistles,” implying that this was code for antisemitism.  

Now, though, when protestors parade around proudly with placards reading “F—k Zionism,” or ask Jewish students whether they are “Zionists,” this has nothing to do with wondering whether they are a member of a Zionist organization or a person who subscribes to the Jewish nationalist ideology centered on the Land of Israel. They are asking whether these people are Jewish, pure and simple. 

“Zionist” has simply become a derogatory slur or abusive term for “Jew,” used by Jew-haters as a synonym, and not all that different from earlier, now archaic, versions such as “kike,” “sheeny,” or “Yid.” The animus is also directed at Hillels, synagogues, and other institutions which are Jewish, not technically “Zionist” as such. Is this really that hard to understand? And we Jews should not play their games by arguing the point.

After all, the word “antisemitism” is itself a euphemism, coined by a German Jew-hater in the 19th century, so as to appear a more “scientific” word for hating Jews. It’s not even accurate – as we know, Arabs and other peoples are also Semites, and no one who hates Jews has them in mind. Judeophobia would be a more accurate term, and we should make more use of it.

Anyhow, we also must stop trying to be “even handed” by trying to equate old-style Jew-hatred on the right with today’s versions, which are coming overwhelmingly from the left, under the rubric of “anti-Zionism.” Remember, anti-Israel demonstrations began the very next days after the Oct.7 massacres, and almost three weeks before Israel even launched its counterattack.

All this is by way of a segue to a very important matter coming our way this November: For whom will American Jews turn out in the forthcoming presidential election? We all know the statistics: For almost a century, a large majority of Jews have voted for the Democratic candidate, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. No Republican, including those who were victorious, came even close to capturing a majority of Jewish voters. Over the past several decades, according to data from the Pew Research Center, an average of 70 per cent of Jewish Americans consistently voted for the Democratic Party.

But October 7 has been a genuine zeitgeist shift. Even Jews blinded by an almost-religious loyalty to the party understand that it is being quite quickly captured by its far-left wing. Joe Biden may even be the last “pro-Israel” Democratic president (and he hasn’t exactly shone in that regard of late). The president himself has been unable to really condemn unequivocally and without moral relativism the outrages taking place on campuses.

I have for a long time thought that Israel shouldn’t have put all its defence needs in the U.S. basket. America is changing, demographically and ideologically, in a manner detrimental to Israel. The Democratic Party post-Biden will sooner or later be in the hands of the left-wing Congressional representatives known as the “Squad.” The protesters on the American university campuses should be called “Young Squadniks!”

The Hamas onslaught has left a mark on how Diaspora Jews look at their identity, especially in the United States. A recent survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee found that 78 per cent feel less safe since Hamas attacked Israel. “We are seeing an awakening, a heightened sense of consciousness among Jewish Americans,” asserted Steven Windmueller, professor emeritus of Jewish Communal Studies at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.

They now have seen how elite university campuses like Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, many of which are heavily funded by Jewish donors, have been breeding and spreading a climate of antisemitic hate.

As apparently some 100 university campuses across the United States are aflame with anti-Israel and “anti-Zionist” fervor, and Jew-hatred has now become mainstream in Democratic politics, Jews are reconsidering many of their basic assumptions about their position in America generally and the Democratic Party specifically.

Many liberal Jewish Americans also feel betrayed by some of their alleged allies, those whose causes they had supported throughout the years, from the Civil Rights movement to Black Lives Matter activists. The left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on.

A few weeks ago, a sermon by Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in New York delivered a stern warning to the Democrats. “Do not take American Jews for granted.”

Hirsch explained, “I have spoken to many American Jews in the past few months who have surprised me with their anxiety about developments in the Democratic Party, and their perception that it is becoming increasingly hostile to Israel, and tolerant of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in its own ranks.”

Jewish Democratic voters who never considered voting for Republicans have been announcing that they are voting for Trump, or will stay home or vote for independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., but will never vote for Biden.

It is true that New York and California have the largest Jewish communities, and they remain firmly in the Democratic column, even if not a single Jew were to vote for them. The Jewish vote for Biden will decrease, and in the very blue states where Jews live, like California and New York, it doesn’t really matter. But four swing states –Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona — may well be decided by their large Jewish communities. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Pennsylvania, the swing state with the largest Jewish population – about 300,000 voting-age Jews — in a state President Joe Biden won by roughly 80,000 votes in 2020. (We are U.S. citizens who vote absentee ballot in Pennsylvania.)

I’m guessing that many Jews will sit it out. Of those voting, it will be hard for a lot of them to vote for Trump, constantly vilified day after day, but it may still reach 40 per cent. Still others who do vote may just leave the presidential line blank, and vote for Republicans for House and Senate seats.

I think there will be an almost perfect correlation between Jews who feel a deep attachment to the Jewish people — be it religiously, culturally, ethnically, or whatever –and voting Republican this year. For those who are Jewish mainly by “biology and genealogy” and for whom being Jewish is relatively unimportant, they are far more concerned with universal matters that now come under the rubric of terms like social justice, liberalism, diversity, inclusion, and so forth. They will come in at about 85 per cent for the Democrats. But as we don’t know the relative percentages of these two groups of Jews, predicting the overall Jewish vote for each of the two parties is difficult.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

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Features

Winnipeg-born writer Sidura Ludwig turns newfound passion for baking challah into new picture book

By MYRON LOVE With her latest book, “Rising” (published by Candlewick Press in the United States), acclaimed Winnipeg-born author Sidura Ludwig has taken her career in a slightly different direction. 


According to publicist Evan Munday (who works for Penguin Random House Canada, the Canadian distributor of the book), “Rising” is  “a quiet, joyful story celebrating a Jewish mother’s tradition of making challah with her child. A child and a mother measure, mix, knead, shape, and tuck their dough under a towel like a sleeping baby, then wait while their dough rises, soon to be baked and gratefully shared at a Shabbat gathering with loved ones.”
In “Rising,” he continues, “Sidura turns a Jewish family’s gathering into a lesson in patience, slowing down, faith, and love.”
He adds that there is an easy-to-follow recipe for challah at the end of the book –  along with a glossary and an author’s note describing the personal meaning of her family’s weekly ritual.
He describes “Rising” as “a much needed picture book that acts as both an exultation and balm in this time of exploding antisemitism in North America.” 
 As was reported in earlier stories about Sidura Ludwig in the pages of The Jewish Post & News,  the daughter of Israel and Maylene Ludwig has been writing seriously since she was a teenager.  She left Winnipeg originally in 1994 to study at York University.  After graduation, she was back here for a year working as a teacher’s assistant, then went back east to study journalism at Carleton.  In between, she married and she and her husband eventually settled in Thornhill in 2004. 

Sidura noted in an earlier story that she worked for a time as a journalist and in communications – largely on a freelance basis before starting a family.  Her first book, a novel, “Holding My Breath,” was published in 2007. 
She pointed out that, as a young mother, she didn’t have a lot of time to read novels and, as a result, gravitated to short stories – which was always her first love.
 “I had started on a second novel,” she notes, “but it just wasn’t working for me.  I began to focus on the individual characters and develop each as a short story.”
She noted that she set herself a goal of trying to send out five submissions a week and, after a year, had nine short stories published in different media.  That gave her the confidence that there was enough interest in the stories to approach a publisher.  The result was her second book , “You Are Not What We Expected” (published in 2020), which recounts the lives of the multi-generational Levine family and their neighbours over a period of 15 years, capturing the celebration, transitions and drama in their lives.
 
In November 2021,Sidura was presented with the Vine Award for fiction for “You Are Not What We Expected.”  You could rightly say that Sidura Ludwig was “over the moon” about being named the winner of that award for her first collection of short stories. (The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature “honour both the best Canadian Jewish writers and non-Jewish Canadian authors who deal with Jewish subjects in Fiction, History, Non-Fiction, Young Adult/Children’s literature, and Poetry”. Each winning author receives a prize of $10,000. The 2021 three-person jury reviewed 42 entries to the Fiction, History, Non-Fiction and Young Adult/Children’s categories.) 
 Earlier that year,  Ludwig graduated from  a Masters Degree program in Fine Arts, specializing in writing books for children and young adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.   “Rising” is in that genre.
Ludwig’s first children’s book was inspired by her own new-found love of baking challah four years ago when Covid lockdowns were in place.
“With everything turned upside down, I was looking for a way to reintroduce some consistency, something familiar into our lives,” the mother of three teenagers recalls.  “As I was stuck at home, I began waking up early on Friday mornings, mixing the dough and baking challah following a recipe.  It became my anchor. It was something quiet and peaceful I could do on a regular basis.  As well as showing my love for my family, I felt a spiritual connection.”
 
“Rising” was illustrated by Tel Aviv-based expatriate Canadian illustrator Sophie Vincent Guy.who now lives in Tel Aviv. “Rising” is scheduled to be arriving in book stores in a couple of weeks with a launch in Winnipeg set for Thursday, June 6, at McNally Robinson.  
Sidura is currently working on some picture books for younger children and a novel intended for middle grade students.   The latter is entitled “Swan” and is based on the life of 19th century Nova Scotian Anna Swan, who grew to be 8’ tall.  The book, published by Nimbus Publishing is due out in September.
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Features

Message from a Palestinian in Gaza to protesters: “You’re hurting the Palestinian cause”

Protesters at McGill University

A very brave Palestinian who was willing to put his name to paper and write an article for Newsweek Magazine has exposed the utter hypocrisy of all those students – and others, who have been setting up encampments across the U.S. – and now Canada, too.

You can read the article at https://www.newsweek.com/message-gazan-campus-protesters-youre-hurting-palestinian-cause-opinion-1894313

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