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South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70
(JTA) — Jeremy Gordin, one of South Africa’s most prominent journalists, wrote repeatedly in recent months about burglaries at his family’s Johannesburg home.
In a weekly column, he expressed dismay at the rampant levels of crime, growing urban decay and regular power outages endured by South Africans as a result of mismanagement and corruption. In one — titled “It is getting dark, too dark to see” after the Bob Dylan lyric — he addressed his two children, both in their twenties.
“I’m not suggesting that you’re going to find yourselves in desperate flight across your own border, that your graveyard may be ploughed up and strewn with garbage. But there comes a time when things are clearly falling apart,” he concluded.
He added, with the allusion to his Jewish identity clear to anyone familiar with Jewish history, “And you, who have your whole lives before you (as they say), need to consider seriously going to live elsewhere. We’ve been doing it for centuries, after all.”
On March 31, Gordin’s worst fears came to pass: He was murdered during a night robbery at his home. He was 70.
South African police described the incident as “a robbery gone wrong” but did not describe the exact cause of death. Seven people were arrested in Johannesburg two weeks later; one was driving a car that had been stolen from Gordin’s residence.
It was a tragic end for Gordin’s 70-year South African story, which, as with so many of his country’s Jews, intersected sharply with both the story of Israel and with the struggle of Black South Africans. As a lifelong journalist, he had at times headed both South Africa’s version of Playboy and its storied working-class Black tabloid, and also ran an initiative that used reporting to prove the innocence of people who were wrongfully imprisoned. He won the country’s annual top journalism prize multiple times.
Gordin was also a friend to many, frequently opening his home in Johannesburg’s Parkview neighborhood to guests. (This reporter was one of them during a stint in Johannesburg for Efe, the Spanish newspaper.)
Gordin was born in Pretoria in 1952, in a Jewish family with Lithuanian and Latvian origins. After a spell in South Vietnam, where his pharmacist father worked for the United States, the family returned to South Africa. Gordin went to high school in Brakpan, a town in the industrial east of the Great Johannesburg emblematic of the country’s white Afrikaner working class to which he often referred in his articles.
Gordin obtained a scholarship to study in Israel and completed a bachelor’s degree while playing rugby at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Back in his country, he did his military service volunteering for the South African Defence Force’s elite 1 Parachute Battalion, then started a prolific career in journalism.
In a breakout moment, he published a book in 1998 based on his conversations with the apartheid government’s death squad leader Eugen de Kock. Then incarcerated, de Kock candidly told Gordin about his deeds, but most importantly about those who had ordered his crimes, for which they were hardly questioned and never tried.
Gordin authored another canonical book of recent South Africa history, his biography of South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma. Published in 2010, a year after Zuma took power, Gordin’s went beyond the usual assumptions about the Zulu former freedom fighter who learned how to read and write as an adult and was often underestimated by South Africa’s intellectual class.
Zuma left office in 2018 after a tenure marked by charges of corruption, cronyism and incompetence. Gordin’s biography has been criticized for being excessively indulgent with its subject, but it remains essential for understanding Zuma’s psychology and the motivations behind his actions.
In the early 1990s, after a period living in San Francisco, Gordin became the launch editor of Playboy South Africa. (He posed nude, with only a magazine as cover, to promote Playboy’s South Africa launch.) In a recent essay, Gordin recounted trying to land a then-unknown Charlize Theron for the magazine’s first cover. Invoking Yiddish terms, Gordin recalled journalists who had passed away, described the actress’s unembarrassed audition, and also managed to explore changing race and class dynamics in South Africa.
(Around this time, his friend Roy Isacowitz wrote in a remembrance published shortly after his death, the pair had successfully gotten a media executive censured for calling them “pushy little Jewboys” — though he said they accepted the description.)
Jeremy Gordin, at right, stands in front of covers of the Sun, the South African tabloid he oversaw for many years. (Courtesy Gordin family)
In 2012 he was named caretaker editor of the Daily Sun, a South African tabloid wildly popular among the Black working class. The paper lost much of its appeal after the death of its founder, larger-than-life Afrikaner media executive Deon du Plessis. Gordin brought back the pride, the punch and many of the readers to the paper. Or, as a headline made for him by his colleagues when he retired said, he “brought rock’n roll back to the Sun.”
The tabloid’s news largely relied on cases of violence, gossip and sex often featuring “tokoloshes,” fantastic creatures of popular African mythology whose encounters with the Sun’s readers were reported nationwide in the first person to its many correspondents. The readership and the paper’s foot soldiers were 100% Black. They collected the stories and sent them to the Johannesburg newsroom, where a group of experienced white male journalists including Gordin translated their texts in the characteristic Daily Sun language.
Gordin’s world couldn’t be further away from the one his newspaper reflected. But as his colleague at the paper Vincent Pienaar wrote after his death, “Not only did he understand the ethos of the publication, he embraced it.”
The tabloid took on serious stories, too. During his tenure as the paper’s editor the Daily Sun broke the story of the death at the hands of police officers of Mozambican immigrant taxi driver Mido Macias. A reader had filmed his gratuitously brutal arrest and sent it to the newspaper. Eight police officers involved in the victim’s death in custody were ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After leaving the Daily Sun, Gordin took on a role coordinating the Wits Justice Project, a journalism program focused on the plight of innocent or unfairly treated prisoners. In 2011 he helped secure the release of Fusi Mofokeng and Tshokolo Joseph Mokoena, who had served 19 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.
Gordin’s many friends say that his sympathy for the underdog was inextricable from the Jewish traditions and attitudes he inherited.
Although not religiously observant, Gordin peppered his articles with Jewish stories and jokes and Yiddish words and expressions. His sense of humor was strongly influenced by his Jewishness, as it was the combination of principle and humorous compassion that defined his personality. He was extremely well-read and voraciously curious, loved to share what he discovered with friends and indulged in sassy but harmless gossip both in private and in his articles.
Sometimes, his Jewish identity and his journalism entwined as when, in 2016, he reported from Johannesburg about the extradition hearing of a Hasidic rabbi, Eliezer Berland, wanted in Israel on rape charges. His final column, published the day before his death, explained, and condemned, the proposed right-wing judicial reforms in Israel.
Rabbi Sa’ar Shaked of the Beit Emanuel Progressive Synagogue in Johannesburg said Gordin as a friend and “wild spirit” who didd’t regularly attend services but was a repeat guest speaker at the synagogue to discuss weekly Torah portions and a variety of aspects of Jewish history and law.
Despite not attending services regularly, Gordin’s role in the community is described as “very active” by Wendy Ovens, a South African health professional in the NGO sector who served with him on the management committee of Beit Emanuel in 2011.
“His knowledge on Judaism and Jewish history was incredible,” Ovens said. She said his Jewish identity fueled his core mission: “He was community-minded and believed in justice and in what was right.”
Gordin is survived by his wife, Deborah Blake, and his children, Jake and Nina.
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The post South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish
According to the 11th-century set of Irish texts known as Lebor Gabála Érenn, or The Book of the Invasions of Ireland, there once lived a man called Fénius Farsaid — “Irishman the Pharisee.”
If the weirdness of this name is not hitting home for you, it’s a bit like if I told you my name was “Jewess the Druid.” “Fénius,” a predecessor of the modern word “Fenian,” connotes an Irish person. “Farsaid” is the medieval Irish word for “Pharisee.” Though the term is now mostly reserved for insulting hypocrites in an obscure way, in biblical times it referred to a strict Jewish sect active in ancient Judea.
How did this early example of Irish-Jewish crossover earn his name? Lebor Gabála Érenn reports that he was one of the 72 chieftains who built the Tower of Babel. When it crumbled and God cursed humankind with multilingualism, he set up camp in the Tower’s remains and ordered his scholars to go out and study the babble of the world’s newborn languages. On his own, he explored Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets (hence the “Farsaid”). As a capstone project, Fénius blended together the best elements of all the world’s languages to make the perfect tongue: Irish (hence the “Fénius”).
Fast forward almost one thousand years after Lebor Gabála Érenn was written, and you get me, Fénius Farsaid in reverse: he was an Irishman interested in the Jews; I am a Jewish woman fascinated by the Irish. There are many ways to measure a life, but mine might as well be thought of as a 22-year-long montage of fanatical Irish-themed memories: as a child, reading Maeve Binchy’s Chestnut Street and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes; as a tween, writing a racy work of historical fiction called Ballyhill inspired by the Irish Rebellion of 1798; as a teen, shaking my computer in rage when 23 & Me reported I was 0% Irish; as a young woman, discovering Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Maggie O’Farrell; and as whoever I am now, writing this confessional essay.
I do not know when or how this obsession took root, though some evidence suggests that I have a genetic predisposition towards loving the Irish. The story goes that my great-great grandfather Barnett Shapiro did not know his birthday. But on his way from Poland to America, he passed through London, where he mixed with Irish immigrants in the East End. He found them so delightful that when he arrived at Ellis Island and was asked his birthday, he, a Jewish man whose first language was Yiddish, proudly declared he was born on St. Paddy’s Day, 1888.
This recessive shamrock gene skipped a generation and reappeared in my Grandpa Barry, or “Gramps.” When I was 12 or so, he presented me with a copy of Snow in August, a novel by the Irish-American journalist and novelist Pete Hamill, a man as tender as he was hard-boiled. According to the book’s back cover, I could expect a tale of an unlikely, Brooklyn-bred friendship between a young Irish-American lad named Michael Devlin and an Orthodox rabbi named Judah Hirsch. I admit I was skeptical. Gramps had already busted his credibility several times by hounding me to read his personal favorites like Young Visitor to Mars, Hardy Boys and back-issues of Flash Gordon. But against my better judgment, I read the book. And then I read it again.
It’s hard to say why this book etched itself into me so deeply. Maybe as a fifth-generation Brooklyn Shapiro, I was hard-wired to like it. But what I remember best about the book is not the plot or any particular line, but how I felt while reading it. Snow in August made me feel that magical realism was not exclusive to jungle climates like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, or Italo Calvino’s invisible cities. There were labyrinths of wonder built right under Brooklyn, like a subway system for the spirit. Pete Hamill taught me how to hear the rumble. In his Brooklyn, it was possible for a golem to rise up against your tormentors, for the dead to return for a final dance, for snow to fall in the middle of August.
Maybe you’ll be relieved to hear that in the 10 intervening years since I first read this book, I’ve tempered my admiration of the Celts by finding some Irish literature that enrages me. In my freshman year of college, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and wanted to clobber him with it. At the recommendation of my playful Bronxonian druid of an English teacher, Ted Cleary, I read Flann O’Brien’s experimental novel At Swim-Two-Birds and was wracked by alternating warp-spasms of amusement and fury. (As Oscar Wilde, another great Irishman-of-letters, would say, “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”)
But most recent and vivid among my Irish memories is the pilgrimage I made to peaty Erin this past March. I had been in Oxford for a term abroad, and when the “vac” (British for “vacation”) struck, my friends Cindy, Gemma and I set out for the stretch of western Irish coastline known as the “Wild Atlantic Way.” We walked the misty Cliffs of Moher, where we were attacked by angry winds. We took refuge in pubs and soaked up pints of Guinness, plates of beef stew and hours of foot-tapping fiddling sessions that gave enthusiastic tourists and taciturn locals a reason to engage with each other. We rode a see-sawing ferry to the Aran Islands and back, and learned that time works differently when you’re on the brink of barfing.
When I think of that week in Ireland, I remember the horizon at sundown. Behind the dark green hills, the clouds looked like silhouettes of other hills somewhere far away. The wind plunged down my collar and shimmied up my pant legs. I could see no end to the ocean, only the thin line where sky and water met in some unreachable place. I feared the vastness of the world, and loved it at the same time.
In a way, that wild Atlantic scene was repeating what many Irish writers had been trying to tell me for years: Life is immense, often surprising, and occasionally tragic. Still, why not hope? The words of Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Gravel Walks” provide a lodestar for living: “Walk on air against your better judgment.”
Poetic spirits in the Jewish world have come to uncannily similar conclusions. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once described himself as “an optimist against my better judgment,” a parallel with Heaney that might have delighted Fénius Farsaid. Even a central premise of Judaism — that the messianic age when “nation will not lift up sword against nation” will arrive someday — would be impossible without a commitment to walking on air against your better judgment until that day comes.
Nobody is born knowing how to walk, let alone knowing how to walk on air. But in his poem “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney describes how to take those first steps —
“So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.”
Believe that snow could come next August.
The post Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish appeared first on The Forward.
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When does Shabbat end? This astrophysicist thinks we’ve been getting it wrong
Aster Taylor observes Shabbat on their own time — literally.
For the past year, Taylor, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the University of Michigan, has been keeping Shabbat according to a schedule they devised using astronomical data.
So this Saturday, when Chabad of Ann Arbor says Shabbat will end at 9:09 p.m., Taylor will observe for nearly 11 more minutes. Where does Taylor, 25, get the chutzpah to challenge longstanding Jewish tradition?
“We live in the modern world. We have computers, we have catalogs of all the stars, and especially in the 80s, the construction of more significant telescopes,” Taylor told the Forward. “We have a pretty good understanding of how the sky affects our vision. So we can now just calculate this, right?”
They might have a point. In true “two-Jews-three-opinions” fashion, there’s actually no universally accepted time that Shabbat ends. But most people can agree on this: Shabbat ends at nightfall, defined by the Talmud as when three medium-sized stars in close proximity to one another are visible to the naked eye.
But what defines a medium-sized star and how close is close enough? Whose eyesight should be trusted? Those answers are not clear, leaving it up to rabbis to impart practical guidance.
Since without astronomical expertise, determining which stars make the grade is pretty difficult for the “average Joseph,” rabbis rely on proxy criteria. Today, many Orthodox communities use a standard credited to the venerable Rabbi Yechiel Michel Tucazinsky, who in 1929 determined three stars are visible when the sun sets 8.5 degrees below the horizon. Others follow the teachings of the 12th-century Rabbeinu Tam, who places nightfall 72 minutes after sunset.
But those approximations didn’t satisfy Taylor, an aspiring professor currently writing their dissertation about giant planet formation. Taylor craved a more scientific approach.
So for a few nights over several months, Taylor went to a local park, sat at a picnic table and every two minutes measured the sky’s brightness with a light meter.
Taylor settled on a brightness standard for a medium star — between magnitude 2 and 3 — and determined that three stars of that brightness need to be within 10 degrees of one another, close enough that an observer could see all three stars without moving their eyes.
Taylor then built a computer model to determine when three stars that meet those conditions become visible, taking into account various atmospheric conditions. That model became a web app that calculates Shabbat times for any given location and elevation.
The results were striking. Based on Taylor’s calculations, Shabbat should often end around 10 minutes later than the time given by the conventional approximation — no small discrepancy for those who faithfully observe the Sabbath.
Taylor’s computations are intriguing Jewish scholars. Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism has agreed to publish Taylor’s research paper on the topic this winter.
The Forward also shared Taylor’s findings with two rabbis: Yaakov Hoffman of the modern Orthodox Bridge Shul in Washington Heights, who wrote a scholarly article about Shabbat’s end, and Jack Shlachter — who in addition to being a retired rabbi in Los Alamos, New Mexico, just so happens to have a Ph.D in physics.
Both were impressed. “There’s always room for science to enhance these practices,” Shlachter said. “This author is doing things in a very admirable fashion — trying to be fully aware of tradition, but also incorporating more modern, sophisticated techniques.”
Hoffman said it was “very impressive” that Taylor “was trying to research these things from a contemporary astronomical perspective, and to really put so much effort and passion into accurate determination of the time.”
If Taylor “wants to add a few minutes to Shabbat,” he added, “that doesn’t bother me.”
What if Shabbat never ends?
As any city dweller knows, the stars don’t exactly come out in force at night.
Once Taylor factored light pollution into their calculations, it produced a somewhat uncomfortable result. In New York City, Taylor said, light pollution is so intense that three medium stars in close proximity will never be visible this year. In Jerusalem, only a few months of the year offer enough clear visibility to see Taylor’s criteria.
“The conditions that end Shabbat are never met,” Taylor said, “which is obviously a problem.”
Taken literally, that would mean endless Shabbat. In his paper, Taylor wrote that such a scenario would “require most observant Jews to quit their jobs, refrain from cooking, and spend their time studying Torah.” That would be both “unrealistic” and “lessen the sanctity” of the Sabbath, Taylor wrote.
Fortunately, there is a rabbinic workaround that dates back long before the age of light pollution.
The 16th-century Rabbi Yosef Karo wrote that on a cloudy day, one should wait to end Shabbat until “the doubt leaves his heart.” In other words, wait long enough after sunset to be certain that the stars theoretically would have been visible on a clear night.
Taylor agrees that the same principle for clouds can be applied to light pollution. But they argue that it’s still worth knowing just how much the modern night sky has changed.
Light pollution isn’t the only factor messing with the Jewish clock. President Trump is urging the Senate to pass a bill that would make daylight savings time permanent — a measure which many Orthodox Jews oppose because a later winter sunrise would mean a later morning prayer service, making many Orthodox Jews late for work.
But it also would also push Shabbat an hour later, which could mean a less frantic rush to get home before sunset on wintertime Friday afternoons.
Those potential changes raise a broader question. As modern life becomes increasingly divorced from the natural rhythms of the Earth, to what extent should Jewish practice evolve?
Taylor, who attends a Conservative synagogue, said they’re in favor of maintaining Jewish tradition when possible — but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be improved.
“We should be using a calculation like this in communities in the future,” Taylor said. “It’s a strict upgrade to the way we’ve been doing things in the past, and so I’m hopeful that we’ll start using this more widely.”
Paradoxically, in Taylor’s case, they believe modern technology enabled them to get closer to the literal meaning of the traditional text. It was the ancient rabbis, lacking that science, who had to settle for the next best thing.
The post When does Shabbat end? This astrophysicist thinks we’ve been getting it wrong appeared first on The Forward.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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