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Three-time war veteran and longtime JTA correspondent Tom Tugend dies at 97
(JTA) — It was the kind of story that Tom Tugend loved to tell, except he lived it.
He left Berlin, aged 13, on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, in 1939, driven out by the ideology reflected in the swastikas on the banners fluttering in the streets. Six years later, he was back in Germany as an American soldier interrogating the Nazis who had driven his family out.
“I had been a refugee a few years before,” Tugend told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2021. “They kicked me out, they were the masters. And suddenly they couldn’t be nice enough, and couldn’t do enough for us. And of course, each one, some of his best friends were Jews.”
Tom Tugend, who fought in three wars — two for the United States and one for Israel — spent decades as Jewish media’s gentleman correspondent, covering, among other beats, Hollywood.
He died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California, on Wednesday at 97, his daughter Alina said.
“His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” Alina Tugend told JTA Thursday. “He was a hero to many people.”
Tugend was unfailingly kind and soft-spoken, including in an interview last year with the JTA, in which he shared story after story, from firing swastika-emblazoned anti-tank guns in Egypt to his experience facing antisemitism as a young German immigrant in the United States.
Born in 1925, Tugend was raised in a well-to-do German Jewish family. His father, Gustav Tugendreich, a respected pediatrician, understood the danger of Hitler’s rise and left for the United States in the mid-1930s after securing a lectureship at Bryn Mawr College.
When he was able to bring them over, he urged his family to follow him, but life remained good enough in Germany that they resisted until it was almost too late — they left four months before World War II started.
It was Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, and the city’s trees and poles were draped with massive swastika banners. “Gee, I mean, they may not like the Jews, but it’s very nice of them to give us such a nice sendoff,” Tugend recalled last year with a laugh.
The transition to life in the United States was not easy. The family encountered antisemitism in their new home.
In eighth grade, for example, Tugend’s class read Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” which famously includes Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, as a main character. One of Tugend’s classmates, whom he had considered a friend, raised his hand and asked the teacher, “Wouldn’t you rather buy from an American than a Jew?”
“I don’t generally talk about it because it goes so counter, it sounds almost disloyal that you say I had a more difficult time initially in the United States than I had in Germany,” Tugend recalled.
He was restless, and joined the army when he was 18 — where he found more antisemitism. He was deployed in March 1944 and spent time in Marseille helping the French army fight SS units. When his commanders learned he spoke fluent German, they sent him to that country to interview Nazis.
He returned to the United States in March 1946 but remained unsettled. Two years later he saw an opportunity.
“Since a Jewish state is established only every 2,000 years, I was afraid I might not be around the next time,” he said, so he enlisted in the nascent and notoriously strapped Israeli army, which got its material where it could.
Tugend served as a squad leader in an English-speaking anti-tank unit, where he wound up using German guns that featured large swastikas on the barrel.
When that war ended, Tugend returned to California to complete his journalism degree. That stay was short-lived, too — he was drafted again in 1950 but was spared combat. Instead, he went to San Francisco to edit an Army newspaper.
After Korea, Tugend said, he ran out of wars. He shifted his focus to writing. He spent 30 years working at the University of California, Los Angeles and also had a parallel career in Jewish journalism, starting in 1964. He would go on to write for the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, and he spent decades as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s West Coast correspondent.
Lisa Hostein, the longtime former JTA editor-in-chief and current executive editor of Hadassah Magazine, remembered meeting Tugend on a Jewish press trip to Argentina in 1986. She told JTA last year that Tugend was “always the consummate professional and gentleman.”
Over the years, Tugend was honored by the Greater Los Angeles Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. He also received a lifetime achievement award from the American Jewish Press Association.
His last published article was last month in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles; it was an obituary for Edward Robin, a Los Angeles philanthropist and businessman, who was 80, 17 years Tugend’s junior.
Weeks before his own death, Tugend infused the article with his gentle and generous warmth. “A mere listing of his leadership roles in Jewish organizations worldwide would call for a book-length article,” Tugend wrote about Robin.
Honored at last month’s Jewish Journal gala, which he attended, Tugend never lost his love of writing. “You still get a certain kick in seeing your byline,” he told JTA last year.
Tugend is survived by his wife of 66 years, Rachel, and their daughters Alina Tugend, Orlee Raymond and Ronit Austgen.
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The post Three-time war veteran and longtime JTA correspondent Tom Tugend dies at 97 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New U2 album includes Israeli poem and a song about slain Palestinian activist
(JTA) — U2 frontman Bono delivered sharp criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and lavish praise on Jewish tradition in an interview released Wednesday alongside the band’s new EP, titled “Days of Ash.”
The album — the first from U2 since 2017 — includes a song memorializing Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen, who was killed by an Israeli settler in the West Bank in July as well as a recitation of the anti-war poem “Wildpeace” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
“As with Islamophobia, antisemitism must be countered every time we witness it. The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis on Oct. 7 was evil,” Bono said. “But self-defense is not defense for the sweeping brutality of Netanyahu’s response, measured but the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
Bono’s criticism of Netanyahu alongside the EP’s release comes months after the Irish artist broke his silence on the war in Gaza in August, writing at the time on social media that “the government of Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves a categorical and unequivocal condemnation.”
In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, Bono had struck a different tone, standing out among other artists for paying tribute to the hundreds of “beautiful kids” murdered at the Nova music festival during a performance.
The new politically charged EP comprises six songs that address a series of high-profile deaths in recent years, including the killing of Sarina Esmailzadeh by Iranian security forces in 2022 and the fatal shooting of Renee Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last month.
The Amichai recitation comes immediately before the song memorializing the death of Hathaleen, titled “One Life at a Time.”
In a wide-ranging interview about the band’s latest EP that accompanied its release, Bono lamented that Judaism was “being slandered by far-right fundamentalists from within its own community.”
He added, “While I’m someone who is a student of, and certainly reveres, the teachings in many of the great faiths, I come from the Judeo-Christian tradition and so I feel on safe ground when I suggest: There has never been a moment where we needed the moral force of Judaism more than right now, and yet, it has rarely in modern times been under such siege.”
Bono noted that another song on the EP, titled “The Tears of Things,” takes inspiration from a book of the same title by Richard Rohr, which Bono said made the case that “the greatest of the Jewish prophets found a way to push through their rage and anger at the injustices of the day … until they ended up in tears.”
Critiquing Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, Bono then cited the words of prominent Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who has described the war in Gaza as a “spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself.”
“As if all Jews are to blame for the actions of Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir. … It’s insane, but the waters get even muddier when anyone criticizing the lunacy of the far right in Israel is accused of antisemitism themselves,” continued Bono.
The post New U2 album includes Israeli poem and a song about slain Palestinian activist appeared first on The Forward.
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HaKarot HaTov: Artificial Intelligence Can Never Replace Human Love and Wonder
Illustrative: Fourth grade students from Kibbutz Parod with certificates they received from the Israel Antiquities Authority for finding and turning in an ancient oil lamp. Photo: IAA.
One of the things that primary teachers regularly encounter is children calling them “mom” or “dad.” This is usually followed by serious embarrassment on behalf of the child, and possibly nervous laughter from their classmates.
Most teachers will just smooth incidents like this over, but the good ones will perhaps reflect on its underlying meaning — how in a very real sense for the child, they can temporarily become the child’s mother or father. It’s an expression of the incredibly important role teachers play in the lives of children, acting as the adult presence that bridges across from their family existence to their encounters with the larger world. This is what, unconsciously, children are tapping into when they mix up “mom” and “miss.”
Teachers are really important to kids — and the emotional investment that teachers make in children, and that children make in teachers, is enormous. Sometimes teachers can even provide the love and care that a child’s parents cannot. Teachers matter. Or at least they did.
What it seems the future holds, as AI models improve exponentially, is children each having their own AI-powered tutor responding in real time to their learning needs. AI’s ability to gauge the progress, challenges, and requirements of each child are likely far beyond anything a human teacher could ever hope to achieve. I don’t doubt that this is coming soon, and that many parents, and many governments, will be thinking of the undeniable benefits that these AI tutors will bring.
They don’t need a salary, they don’t need time off, and they can be there at any time of day. On top of that, millions of children are already using AI chat bots for emotional support. AI tutors will soon combine academic and emotional and pastoral support in one package. Unlike human teachers, they will never get tired, or angry, or disappointed, or get distracted from their charges’ needs.
We might wonder why any of this might be a problem. In a near future where robots will care for the elderly, do our shopping, and undertake surgery, and other AI bots will be our lawyers and accountants, as they already are our software engineers, why does it matter if children are taught by AI tutors?
Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps children and parents won’t be able to tell the difference, or even care if they can. Having human teachers won’t be important. Maybe we will just need a few humans to check if the AI tutors are on track to ensure that the kids of the future (or the kids of next year) learn enough to read and write, and to count well enough so that they don’t spend their universal basic income all at once.
I had a friend who was a great teacher who taught in Jewish schools in London. He died a decade ago, far too young. He was dyslexic and he told me how he used to share this with his pupils and get them to help him with his spelling on the board. A small thing perhaps, but I just think how much this communicated to those young people — about dealing with adversity, compassion, and empathy. I also remember how, when I was walking with him, we might bump into some of his old pupils. Always, they were so pleased to see him.
He was still “sir,” someone important in their lives, who had helped them navigate the path from their families, out to the world as independent adults. There was also, I would venture, something there that no robot teacher or AI tutor could ever truly have. That thing was love. The love that teachers bring to their work, that drives their professionalism and their commitment and care for the next generation.
Children know that teachers are not parents — that they only come into their lives for a short time and then leave. Yet they also know that just like their parents, teachers can love and care about them — really care about what happens to them. Children also learn how adults apart from their parents can, like my friend, not be perfect, and not know everything, but still set an example through their own behavior, and push them to achieve or keep going, even when it is challenging. They can feel how this connection with adults, with other human beings, molds and creates their adult selves.
Another thing that my friend’s pupils had was gratitude. As Dostoevsky wrote, gratitude is a fundamentally human quality, because someone has to give it, and someone has to receive it. But Judaism recognized this decades before the Russian literary geniuses of the 19th century.
The Jewish concept of HaKarot HaTov or “Recognizing the Good” means gratitude, but it also implies something transcendent — the wonder of just taking the time to stop and reflect on what we have. HaKarot HaTov teaches us that it’s through gratitude to other people that we come closer to G-d. Large language models and algorithms don’t have aims, or desires, or feelings. They can’t love. AI tutors quite literally are incapable of caring whether the children they work with live or die. They can’t receive gratitude from their students, or give it, not really, because there is no “them.” Perhaps we should think more than twice before we sign up to an education system where children have no one to say thank you to.
Joseph Mintz is Professor of Inclusive Education at UCL. Follow him @jmintzuclacuk. His views are his own and do not reflect those of his employers.
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The Palestinian Authority Just Paid ‘Pay-for-Slay’ Salaries to 8,000 Terrorists
The opening of a hall that the Palestinian Authority named for a terrorist who killed 125 people. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.
The mask is off: The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that 8,000 terrorist prisoner pensioners would receive their monthly Pay-for-Slay “pension” salary this week — and confirmations of receipt of the deposits are already being observed over social media.
A Palestinian social media post confirming Pay-for-Slay payments have gone out.
The minimum amount for such salaries is 4,000 shekels for terrorists who spent five years in prison. Going by that minimum, the PA just paid these terrorists — which constitute only one third of all Pay-for-Slay recipients — at least 32 million shekels — over US $10 million.
However, in actuality, this most conservative estimate is far lower than the amount that was likely paid out, as some of the more infamous terrorists released in recent hostage deals have spent 30 or more years in prison. Terrorists with such status receive at least 12,000 shekels each month.
A chart detailing Palestinian payments to terrorists.
One year after PA President Mahmoud Abbas promised the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and the EU that he was ending Pay-for-Slay, there is no escaping the fact that this was just another deception and a lie.
The PA remains an unreformed sponsor of terror.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.