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Claire Golomb, Holocaust survivor and scholar of children’s art and dreams, dies at 95
(JTA) — Claire Golomb was 10 years old and living in Frankfurt, Germany when, early one morning, there was a loud knock at the door.
Nazis had come to take her father away. She, her mother and her older sister soon fled to Holland, where they would hide until the end of the war.
“You could say that I woke up with a bang during these years,” she told an interviewer for a 2008 oral history. “That’s the end of my childhood, I would say, around the age of 10, and I had a very realistic assessment of what the conditions were.”
If her own childhood ended there, her interest in the psychology of children — especially their creativity and intelligence from an early age — never waned. After making her way to Israel and later to the United States, Golomb became a psychologist and scholar whose work focused on children’s art, make-believe play, story construction and the role of gender in those pursuits.
In works such as her 2011 book “The Creation of Imaginary Worlds,” Golomb explored how children perceive fantasy and fact and are able to tell the difference.
“Being master of an imaginary universe (in art, play, dreams, and stories) can be a source of great satisfaction as it empowers the child, gives expression to often vaguely understood feelings, provides compensation for feeling helpless or powerless, and joy for having invented a world on its own,” she said in her publisher’s interview for that book.
Golomb, a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston for more than 40 years, died in her home near Boston on July 26. She was 95.
In the oral history interview, Golomb drew a connection between her childhood and her work.
“The events of the Holocaust and its effect on my family and my community no doubt influenced my decision to choose a career of service, a desire to improve upon the world in some ways,” she said. “Because clearly I had to find meaning in my life and I had to make the fact that I survived sort of a response, a positive response to what had happened in some ways. I couldn’t just go back to existing, certainly not with the kind of mindset that I had in terms of looking for meaning and for change.”
Claire Schimmel was born on Jan. 30, 1928, in Frankfurt, the second daughter of Fanny Monderer Schimmel, a homemaker, and Chaskel Schimmel, a businessman who devoted himself to reading Hebrew literature and to Talmudic studies.
Her father was arrested in October 1938, shortly before Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazis and their collaborators burned and looted synagogues and Jewish stores throughout Germany and Austria in what was seen as the start of the Holocaust. The women of the family fled to the Netherlands, where their father briefly joined them. After the Nazis occupied the country in 1940, he was arrested again and sent to a concentration camp, where he was killed.
At the end of the war, after years of hiding, Claire became involved in the Zionist Youth Organization, devoting time to youngsters who had lost their families. In 1948, she arrived in what would soon become Israel — illegally, according to the British who were in charge of immigration there — and served in the new state’s army for about one year. She lived on a kibbutz for a time before attending Hebrew University — passing the entrance exam despite not having completed her high school studies in Holland.
In Israel, she met Dan Golomb, a survivor of Auschwitz who was studying physical chemistry. They married in 1954 and shortly thereafter moved to the United States, where Dan got a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University in New Jersey and Claire attended the New School for Social Research in New York.
Dan Golomb, a professor emeritus of environmental, earth, and atmospheric sciences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, died in 2013. The couple’s daughter Dr. Mayana Golomb, a psychiatrist, died of cancer in 2006. Another daughter, Anath Golomb, a psychologist, lives in Durham, New Hampshire.
Claire Golomb studied with a number of psychologists in a field in which Jewish scholars, including refugees from Europe, were prominent — including Solomon Asch, Eugenia Hanfmann, Ulric Neisser and Abraham Maslow. She was especially influenced by Rudolf Arnheim, the first professor of the psychology of art at Harvard University.
In 1969, she received her Ph.D. in psychology from Brandeis University. Before coming to UMass Boston in 1974, she was an instructor in psychology at Wellesley College from 1969 to 1970. From 1971 to 1974 she was an assistant professor at Brandeis University.
All of her relatives on her mother’s side were killed during the war. In October 2019, Golomb returned to the Netherlands to witness the placement of “stumbling blocks” — brass sidewalk markers — commemorating four of her family members killed in the Holocaust.
Asked how her experiences during the war shaped her life and career, Golomb spoke in the oral history interview of her “willingness to question authority, even authority that I myself found imposing or impressive.”
She added, “It had a much deeper effect in terms of questioning authority, and this is what you might say I have done in my professional life.”
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The New Philosemitism: An age-old tradition has taken new shape—but who is this helping?
This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2024 edition of the quarterly magazine published by The Canadian Jewish News. Jews have always had our share of enemies, but some moments […]
The post The New Philosemitism: An age-old tradition has taken new shape—but who is this helping? appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Biden: Israel Should Mull Alternatives to Striking Iran Oil Fields
US President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, June 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
JNS.org – US President Joe Biden suggested on Friday that Israel should consider alternative targets rather than attacking Iranian oil fields in response to the Islamic Republic’s massive ballistic missile attack on the Jewish state earlier this week.
“The Israelis have not concluded what they’re going to do in terms of a strike, that’s under discussion. If I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields,” Biden said during a rare appearance at a White House press briefing.
“No administration has helped Israel more than I have—none, none, none. I think Bibi should remember that,” added the president, using Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nickname.
A day earlier, Biden said that the possibility of hitting Iran’s oil assets and infrastructure was “in discussion,” while noting that Jerusalem maintains freedom of action.
“First of all, we don’t ‘allow’ Israel. We advise Israel,” he said.
On Tuesday, Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, leading the entire civilian population of the Jewish state to be ordered into bomb shelters. One Palestinian was killed and two Israelis were lightly injured by the attack.
In April, Iran conducted its first-ever direct attack on Israeli territory, launching some 300 missiles and drones, the vast majority of which were shot down in a multinational effort. One girl was wounded.
On Wednesday, Biden told reporters that he opposes an Israeli retaliatory strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, adding that he was crafting a response with the G7 group of leading democracies.
“The answer is ‘no,’” the president said when asked about targeting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites. “We’ll be discussing with the Israelis what they’re going to do, but all seven of us agree that they have a right to respond, but they should respond proportionately.”
Biden declined to say what advice he was giving to the Jewish state and indicated that he had not spoken with Netanyahu since the Iranian attack.
“We’ve been talking to Bibi’s people the whole time. It’s not necessary to talk to Bibi,” he said.
“I’ll probably be talking to him relatively soon,” he added.
Biden spoke with the G7 leaders on Wednesday “to discuss Iran’s unacceptable attack against Israel and to coordinate on a response to this attack, including new sanctions,” per a White House readout.
Biden and the G7 “unequivocally condemned Iran’s attack against Israel,” the White House added. “President Biden expressed the United States’ full solidarity and support to Israel and its people and reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.”
Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump said on Thursday that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was fair game.
“They asked [Biden], what do you think about Iran, would you hit Iran? And he goes, ‘As long as they don’t hit the nuclear stuff.’ That’s the thing you want to hit, right?” Trump said during a town hall-style event in Fayetteville, N.C.
“I think he’s got that one wrong,” Trump said of Biden. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit? I mean, it’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons. …
“The answer should have been: Hit the nuclear first, and worry about the rest later,” Trump added.
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Nasrallah’s Possible Successor Out of Contact Since Friday, Lebanese Source Says
Smoke billows over Beirut’s southern suburbs after overnight strikes, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Sin El Fil, Lebanon October 5, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Joseph Campbell
The potential successor to slain Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been out of contact since Friday, a Lebanese security source said on Saturday, after an Israeli airstrike that is reported to have targeted him.
In its campaign against the Iran-backed Lebanese group, Israel carried out a large strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Thursday that Axios cited three Israeli officials as saying targeted Hashem Safieddine in an underground bunker.
The Lebanese security source and two other Lebanese security sources said that ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburb – known as Dahiyeh – since Friday have kept rescue workers from scouring the site of the attack.
Hezbollah has made no comment so far on Safieddine since the attack.
Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani said on Friday the military was still assessing the Thursday night airstrikes, which he said targeted Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters.
The loss of Nasrallah’s rumored successor would be yet another blow to Hezbollah and its patron Iran. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in the past few weeks, have decimated Hezbollah’s leadership.
Israel expanded its conflict in Lebanon on Saturday with its first strike in the northern city of Tripoli, a Lebanese security official said, after more bombs hit Beirut suburbs and Israeli troops launched raids in the south.
Israel has begun an intense bombing campaign in Lebanon and sent troops across the border in recent weeks after nearly a year of exchanging fire with Hezbollah. Fighting had previously been mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area, taking place in parallel to Israel’s year-old war in Gaza against Palestinian group Hamas.
Israel says it aims to allow the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to their homes in northern Israel, bombarded by Hezbollah since Oct.8 last year.
The Israeli attacks have eliminated much of Hezbollah’s senior military leadership, including Secretary General Nasrallah in an air attack on Sept. 27.
The Israeli assault has also killed hundreds of ordinary Lebanese, including rescue workers, Lebanese officials say, and forced 1.2 million people – almost a quarter of the population – to flee their homes.
The Lebanese security official told Reuters that Saturday’s strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli killed a member of Hamas, his wife and two children. Media affiliated with the Palestinian group also said the strike killed a leader of its armed wing.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike on Tripoli, a Sunni Muslim-majority port city that its warplanes also targeted during a 2006 war with Hezbollah.
Israel has meanwhile staged nightly bombardment of Dahiyeh, once a bustling and densely populated area of Beirut and a stronghold for Hezbollah.
On Saturday, smoke billowed over Dahiyeh, large parts of which have been reduced to rubble sending residents fleeing to other parts of Beirut or of Lebanon.
In northern Israel, air raid sirens sent people running for their shelters amid rocket fire from Lebanon.
ISRAEL WEIGHS OPTIONS FOR IRAN
The violence comes as the anniversary approaches of Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people and in which about 250 were taken as hostages.
Iran, which backs both Hezbollah and Hamas, and which has lost key commanders of its elite Revolutionary Guards Corps to Israeli air strikes in Syria this year, launched a salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday. The strikes did little damage.
Israel has been weighing options in its response to Iran’s attack.
Oil prices have risen on the possibility of an attack on Iran’s oil facilities as Israel pursues its goals of pushing back Hezbollah militants in Lebanon and eliminating their Hamas allies in Gaza.
US President Joe Biden on Friday urged Israel to consider alternatives to striking Iranian oil fields, adding that he thinks Israel has not yet concluded how to respond to Iran.
Israeli news website Ynet reported that the top US general for the Middle East, Army General Michael Kurilla, is headed for Israel in the coming day. Israeli and US officials were not immediately reachable for comment.
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