RSS
Jewish Life Stories: John Lennon’s lawyer, Michael Oren’s mom
This article is also available as a weekly newsletter, “Life Stories,” where we remember those who made an outsize impact in the Jewish world — or just left their community a better or more interesting place. Subscribe here to get “Life Stories” in your inbox every Tuesday.
(JTA) — Leon Wildes, an immigration attorney best known for his years-long, successful battle to keep the U.S. government from deporting the Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, died Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 90.
Wildes started his career in 1959 as a migrations specialist with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and later served on its board of directors. While working on the Lennon case, he played a key role in shaping a legal remedy allowing law-abiding individuals to remain in the United States and avoid deportation if they are elderly, seriously ill or undergoing severe hardship. It set a precedent that enabled President Barack Obama, in 2012, to establish Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, offering a path to permanent legal residence for immigrants who entered the country illegally as children.
“When you hear about ‘Dreamers,’ that is who it refers to, and that is Dad’s perpetual gift to the world — now numbering well over 1 million people — they are keeping alive the dreams of so many people to pursue the same opportunities for themselves and their own families that he himself was so fortunate to have, and instilling those values in generations to come,” his son, Michael Wildes, said in a eulogy.
Wildes taught immigration law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law for 33 years, and served two terms as president of the Queens Jewish Center.
His survivors include Michael, an immigration lawyer and the longtime mayor of Englewood, New Jersey, and Rabbi Mark Wildes, the founder and director of the Manhattan Jewish Experience on New York’s Upper West Side.
When offered the Lennon case, Wildes acknowledged, “I have no idea who these people are.” And yet, he once wrote, “I think I can say that my career pretty well fit the daydream of an All-American success story for a kid from Olyphant,” the small town in Pennsylvania where he grew up. “With this case, though, I found myself defending not just John and Yoko’s personal dreams, but the foundation of the American Dream itself.”
A champion of the “new pluralism”
Irving M. Levine was an expert on intergroup relations and public policy at the American Jewish Committee. (Courtesy Levine family)
Irving M. Levine, an expert on intergroup relations and public policy who in a 25-year career at the American Jewish Committee advanced policy reforms in education, housing, mental health care, the urban poor, philanthropy and international affairs, died Jan. 11. He was 94. Raised in Brooklyn, Levine served for 25 years in various roles at AJC, including head of urban affairs and, later, director of national affairs. As the principal organizer and chairman of the National Consultation on Ethnic America at Fordham University in June 1968, he championed a “new pluralism” that, unlike the “melting pot” theory,” balanced small group identities with a commitment to society as a whole. “There are many pathways and byways to living in a pluralistic society,” he told the New York Times in a 1982 profile. “People ought to have a chance to identify in the way they feel most comfortable.” After an early retirement, he helped found, with Rabbi Steve Shaw, the Radius Institute, a think tank on new progressive visions for U.S. and Middle East policy.
The American mom of an Israeli diplomat
Marilyn Bornstein was a teacher and family therapist in West Orange, New Jersey. (Courtesy Michael Oren)
In 2021, Marilyn Bornstein, then 92, shared her secrets for a long and happy life: a healthy diet, a busy brain (in 2004, she wrote a novel, “Hold Fast the Time,” set in Israel), a regular schedule and, perhaps most of all, “my incredibly close relationship with my family and friends.” Bornstein, a teacher and family therapist, and her husband Lester, a hospital administrator and founder of the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, raised three children in West Orange, New Jersey, including a son, Michael Oren, who moved to Israel and served four years as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. “In addition to being long, her life was filled with meaning, creativity, spirituality, humor, family, and love,” Oren wrote last week. Marilyn Bornstein died Dec. 29. She was 95.
A versatile scholar of the Middle East
David Pollock speaks on a panel at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s 2018 Barbi Weinberg Founders Conference in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy WINEP)
David Pollock, a former State Department official who brought his expertise in Arabic and Middle East polling to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank in Washington, died Jan. 9 after a long illness. He was 73. A Harvard-trained academic, he joined the State Department in 1996, advising on South Asia and Middle East policy in various positions, including senior advisor for the Broader Middle East. At the Washington Institute, which he joined in 2007, he became a Bernstein Fellow, leading the institute’s incipient Arabic-language program, and expanded its Fikra Forum, a bilingual English-Arabic blog that gives voice to diverse Middle East writers who often cannot publish openly in their native countries. He was the co-author, in 2012, of “Asset Test: How the United States Benefits from Its Alliance with Israel.”
“David was a remarkably versatile scholar-practitioner who made a tremendous impact on U.S. foreign policy as a teacher, U.S. government official, and Washington Institute expert,” the institute’s executive director, Robert Satloff, said in a statement. “David’s legacy is monumental. He will be dearly missed as a brilliant analyst, generous colleague, and a devoted friend.”
A Russian poet and critic of the Kremlin
Russian Jewish poet Lev Rubinstein, a leading figure in the Soviet underground literary scene and frequent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Natalia Senatorova/Wikipedia)
Russian Jewish poet Lev Rubinstein, a leading figure in the Soviet underground literary scene and frequent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died Jan. 14, days after being hit by a car in Moscow. Police are investigating the incident. He was 76. While working as a librarian in the 1970s and 1980s, Rubinstein was a leading light of Moscow Conceptualism, an avant-garde movement that mocked the Soviet-approved doctrine of Social Realism. After the fall of the USSR, he remained a frequent critic of the Kremlin, most recently opposing the war in Ukraine. “In war, people’s souls are destroyed and distorted, and the consequences of a war are at times disastrous even for the generations that come after,” Rubinstein said.
A pioneer of Women’s Studies
Elaine Reuben, as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1960s, helped spread the gospel of Women’s Studies as an interdisciplinary field. (Courtesy Brandeis University)
When women’s studies first entered the university in the 1970s, “merely to assert that women should be studied was a radical act,” according to a history of the field. One of those radicals was Elaine Reuben, who as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison helped spread the gospel of Women’s Studies as an interdisciplinary field. Shortly after directing Women’s Studies at The George Washington University Graduate School, she co-chaired, starting in 1971, the Modern Language Association Commission on the Status of Women. While teaching in the American Studies program at the University of Maryland, she served, in 1978, as national coordinator of the National Women’s Studies Association. At Brandeis University, she was a board member of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and founded the Reuben/Rifkin Jewish Women Writers Series.
She was also active in a number of progressive Jewish organizations, including the New Israel Fund and J Street. A native of Indianapolis, she was a longtime member of the Fabrengen havurah in Washington. Reuben died Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C. She was 82.
—
The post Jewish Life Stories: John Lennon’s lawyer, Michael Oren’s mom appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows
Pro-Hamas protesters led by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) demonstrate outside the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 14, 2024. Photo: Derek French via Reuters Connect
A new poll released on Wednesday underscores how far removed Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other anti-Zionist organizations that claim to represent Jews are from mainstream Jewish views on Israel, Zionism, and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
Commissioned by The Jewish Majority, a nonprofit founded by a researcher whose aim is to monitor and accurately report Jewish opinion on the most consequential issues affecting the community, the poll found that the vast majority of American Jews believe that anti-Zionist movements and anti-Israel university protests are antisemitic.
The findings also showed that Jews across the US overwhelmingly oppose the views and tactics of JVP, a prominent anti-Israel group which has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
Founded in 1996 at the University of California, Berkeley, JVP describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” It was infamously one of the first organizations to blame Israel following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
“Israeli apartheid and occupation — and the United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence,” JVP said as Israelis were still counting their dead and missing.
American Jews who responded to The Jewish Majority’s poll overwhelmingly reject this line of thinking. Seventy percent said they believe that anti-Zionism of any stripe is antisemitic; 85 percent believe that Hamas, whom JVP described as “the oppressed,” is a genocidal group; and 79 percent support vocally pro-Israel groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization JVP has defamed as “not a credible source on antisemitism and racism.”
Additionally, JVP’s methods of protest are unpopular among American Jews, The Jewish Majority added, noting that 75 percent disapprove of “blocking traffic” and only 18 percent approve of protesters’ wearing masks to conceal their identities. Sixty percent also disagree with staging protests outside the homes of public officials, a common JVP tactic.
“Plain and simple, Jewish Voice for Peace is an extremist group that does not represent the views of the overwhelming majority of American Jews,” Jonathan Schulman, The Jewish Majority’s executive director, said in a statement accompanying the poll results. “American Jews share a strong and consistent stance against anti-Zionists as well as a deep concern over rising antisemitism and the tactics used by organizations like JVP.”
He continued, “It is high time people see through the charade: JVP is not representative of anyone but a marginal fringe, even if a few radical Jews are involved in their movement.”
The Jewish Majority’s poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s inner workings, messaging, and political activities were recently documented in a groundbreaking report on the group published last month by StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights group based in Los Angeles, California.
Titled, “A Shield for Hate, Not a Voice for Peace,” the report noted that JVP has promoted a distorted history of Zionism and Israel, accusing the movement for Jewish self-determination of everything from training US police officers to violate the rights of African Americans to abusing “Jewish history.” In doing so, it has allied with extremist groups such as WithinOurLifetime — whose founder has threatened to set Jews on fire and led a movement to harass Jews on New York City’s public transportation — and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), which celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and has proclaimed that “the Zionist entity has no right to exist.”
The report also stated that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network,” to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
JVP has also compared Zionism to Nazism.
“This is Holocaust inversion — an antisemitic tactic in which the genocide Jews faced in the past is used to promote baseless hatred against Jews today,” the StandWithUs report said. “The only group benefiting from JVP’s Holocaust inversion is Hamas — a truly genocidal terrorist group. JVP has helped shield them from accountability for launching the war, ruthlessly militarizing civilian areas across Gaza, stealing humanitarian aid, and rejecting nearly every proposed ceasefire and hostage release deal.”
In June 2024, the Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) accusing the political fundraising arm of JVP of transgressing federal election law by misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
The complaint lodged a slew of charges against Jewish Voice for Peace’s political action committee (JVP PAC), including spending almost no money on candidates running for office — a political action committee’s main purpose. From 2020-2023, JVP PAC reported spending $82,956, but just a small fraction of that sum — $1,775, just over 2 percent — was spent on candidates, according to the complaint. The money went elsewhere, being paid out in one case for “legal services” provided by a company which “doesn’t appear to practice law” and other expenses.
JVP continues to have the support of powerful friends in the world of progressive philanthropy, a formidable subset of the American elite, amid these scandals and controversies.
Since 2017 it has — according to a 2023 report by the National Association of Scholars — received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants from various foundations, including the Open Society Policy Center — founded by billionaire George Soros — the Kaphan Foundation, and others.
According to the recent StandWithUs report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday demanded Israel pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza” and urged the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state.
During a press conference with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in West Java, as part of his Asian tour to Malaysia and Pakistan, Erdogan rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Erdogan also advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The creation of a sovereign, territorially united State of Palestine within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital cannot be delayed any further,” he said during the press conference, as aired by the Turkish TRT Haber TV channel.
“Any step, proposal, or project that undermines this matter is illegitimate in our view, and it means more conflicts, bloodshed, and instability,” he continued.
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House last week, Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
“Until there is peace in Gaza, until the Palestinians achieve peace, peace in the region is impossible,” the Turkish president said.
With talks underway to extend the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire, Erdogan also demanded that Israel must pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza.”
“The cost of Israel’s 15-month attacks in Gaza is about $100 billion,” he said. “The law dictates that the perpetrator must compensate for the damage.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Last month, both sides reached a ceasefire and hostage-release deal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.
Under phase one, Hamas agreed to release 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, in exchange for Israel freeing over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving multiple life sentences for terrorism-related offenses.
So far, 16 of the 33 hostages have been released during the first phase, which is set to last six weeks.
During the press conference, Erdogan also announced that Turkey and Indonesia will join forces in the reconstruction of Gaza.
Last month, Erdogan met with Hamas leader Muhammad Ismail Darwish in Ankara.
Turkey has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel during the Gaza war, even threatening to invade the Jewish state and calling on the United Nations to use force if it cannot stop Israel’s military campaign against Hamas.
Last year, Ankara also ceased all exports and imports to and from Israel, citing the “humanitarian tragedy” in the Palestinian territories as the reason.
Erdogan has frequently defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he described as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. He and other Turkish leaders have repeatedly compared Israel with Nazi Germany and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler.
The post Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel
College students in the Boston, Massachusetts area hold dueling demonstrations amid Israel’s war with Hamas in April 2024. Photo: Vincent Ricci via Reuters Connect
Boston University has rejected the group Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) call for its endowment to be divested of holdings in companies which sell armaments to the Israeli military, becoming the latest higher education institution to refuse this key tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East,” university president Melissa Gilliam said on Tuesday in a statement which reported the will of the board of trustees. “Our traditions of free speech and academic freedom are critical to who we are as an institution, and so is our tradition of finding common ground to engage difficult topics while respecting the dignity of every individual.”
Gilliam’s announcement comes amid SJP’s push to hold a student government administered referendum on divestment, a policy goal the group has pursued since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its hopes were dashed on Tuesday when what SJP described as “technical difficulties” caused the referendum to be postponed indefinitely. However, SJP hinted that the delay may have been caused by its failing to draw a “representative sample of BU’s undergraduate population” to the polls.
SJP’s relationship with the university is poor, according to The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s official campus newspaper. In November, the Student and Activities Office issued the group a “formal warning” following multiple violations of policies on peaceful assembly. SJP, the Free Press said, occupied an area of the Center for Computing and Data Sciences for two days and tacked anti-Zionist propaganda — which included accusations that Boston University profits from “death” — on school property inside the building despite being forewarned that doing so is verboten. Following the disciplinary action, SJP accused the university of being “discriminatory towards SJP and our events.”
American universities have largely rejected demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering a succession of blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement that students and faculty have pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations aimed at coercing officials into enacting the policy.
Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”
The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.
Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.
The losses estimated by JLens are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login