Uncategorized
Kamala Harris is No Friend to Israel
By HENRY SREBRNIK A mere days after the Democratic Party leaders pushed President Joe Biden out the door, Kamala Harris, until then a virtual nonentity, was suddenly recast by the so-called “legacy media,” acting in complete lock-step, as a wunderkind bringing the politics of “joy” to America.
That was no surprise. She is a creature of the Democratic Party left and its journalistic enablers, themselves beholden to a woke progressive ideology. And this includes an antipathy – if not worse – to Israel.
For many American Jews, the prospect of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris prompted elation. He was clearly the candidate who could help the party bring back worried Jewish voters. But not so fast!
Why did Harris go with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a man who can’t deliver a swing state, over a young and glib governor who can? There’s only one reason: Jews are no longer allowed on the Democratic presidential ticket. Shapiro is, after all, a “Zionist,” and that wouldn’t do.
Efforts by left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists to derail Shapiro’s nomination – some called him “Genocide Josh” — worked, and it told us just where Harris stood as she made the first significant choice of her candidacy.
The left attacked Shapiro, considering him too sympathetic to Israel. Heeding their warning, she preferred a bland Minnesota liberal governor who will help her far less.
Progressive Democrats were elated. CNN senior political commentator Van Jones said “anti-Jewish bias” may have played a part in the selection of Walz and warned that “antisemitism has gotten marbled into this party.”
Remarked Micah Lasher, a New York City Democrat who is running for that state’s legislature, “There was an inescapable sense the selection had been made into a referendum over Israel.”
We all remember her egregious insult to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the U.S. Senate July 24, an event Harris boycotted. She instead spoke to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis.
“It is unconscionable to see Vice President Kamala Harris shirk her duties as president of the Senate and boycott this historic event,” stated Victoria Coates, vice president of the Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “If we can’t stand with Israel now, when can we?”
“I see you. I hear you,” Harris told pro-Hamas demonstrators in Washington during Netanyahu’s visit, as they burned American flags and assaulted police.
On August 7 Harris and Walz met with the leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement in Michigan, a state with a large Arab American population. This is the group that mobilized more than 100,000 people to withhold their votes from President Biden in the Michigan primary last February over his support for Israel.
Founder Layla Elabed reported that Harris “expressed an openness” to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo against the Jewish state. “Michigan voters right now want a way to support you, but we can’t do that without a policy change that saves lives in Gaza right now,” she told Harris. “Will you meet with us to talk about an arms embargo?”
Elabed explained that Harris wasn’t agreeing to an arms embargo but was open to discussing one “that will save lives now in Gaza and hopefully get us to a point where we can put our support” behind Harris. At a rally in Arizona August 9, Harris told pro-Palestinian demonstrators that “I respect your voices.”
Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently stated that she has “prioritized engaging with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian community members and others regarding the war in Gaza.” She herself had maintained that “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”
All this led to pushback among some Israel supporters. “Kamala Harris won’t speak with the press. But she will speak with pro-Hamas radicals and suggest she’s open to a full arms embargo against Israel,” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton stated. “Floating an arms embargo against Israel to pro-Hamas activists is disgraceful,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, added.
“If the group in line with Harris was pro-life and asked for a meeting about banning abortion, she would forcefully say ‘no.’ Don’t tell me it means nothing she said she’s open to an arms embargo on Israel when radical Hamasniks got in line,” declared Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In an interview with the far-left Nation magazine, “Is Kamala the One?”, published July 8, she had already indicated her sympathy for the young people who had mobilized against the war in Gaza and occupied university campuses across the country.
“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
The Biden administration has assembled an interagency team tasked with finding Israeli individuals and groups to sanction, in order to weaken if not topple Netanyahu.
The International Economics Directorate at the National Security Council (NSC) leads the effort. Ilan Goldenberg, who has now become Harris’ liaison to the Jewish community, has played a very enthusiastic role.
Goldenberg, who has served as Harris’s adviser on Middle East issues, has been an acerbic critic of both Netanyahu and the Palestinian leadership.
All this demonstrates that Harris is no friend of Israel. To take another example, her Middle East guru, Philip Gordon, who has served as Harris’s foreign policy adviser since she ran for the White House in 2020, sees and hears no evil emanating from Iran.
Republicans are already demanding the vice president answer why Gordon wrote a string of 2020 opinion pieces together with a Pentagon official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was tied last year to an Iranian government-backed initiative tasked with selling the 2015 nuclear deal to the American public.
“Before joining your office, Mr. Gordon co-authored at least three opinion pieces with Ms. Tabatabai blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” Cotton and New York Representative Elise Stefanik wrote Harris on July 31.
Gordon has argued that the easing of economic sanctions could have allowed Iranian businesses and civil society to better integrate internationally and potentially moderate Tehran’s clerics. He was among the most vocal Democratic critics of former President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the U.S. out of that landmark nuclear agreement.
But critics have maintained that the loosening of sanctions on Iran has provided Tehran with billions of dollars to fund its terror proxies across the Mideast, leading, among other things, to the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel, as well as providing the Houthis in Yemen with weapons to strangle Red Sea shipping.
Cotton and Stefanik, in their letter to Harris, asked if Gordon and Tabatabai purposefully spread Iranian disinformation to relieve U.S. pressure on Tehran’s theocratic rulers. “Did you request further investigation into Mr. Gordon when Ms. Tabatabai’s connections to the Iranian Foreign Ministry were revealed in September 2023? Did Mr. Gordon admit and report his ties to this individual?” they wrote. Harris did not reply.
Yet there are Jews who have eyes yet cannot see, so wedded are they to the Democrats. It’s become their ersatz religion. Not long ago the Charlottetown Jewish community hosted a mid-summer event on a beautiful day, which included many of the American summer residents. I was talking to an older man from Massachusetts who said he will (as usual) vote for the Democrat.
I suggested that it should be impossible for any Jew to vote for Harris after she went off to a sorority event in Indiana in July when the prime minister of the embattled Jewish state, suffering a traumatic loss last October and fighting for its survival today, spoke to the United States Senate, where she normally serves as presiding officer. Such a slap in the face would not have been administered to any other head of government.
And not liking Benjamin Netanyahu is no excuse. Would this man not have supported Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill during the Second World War, no matter what he thought of them? Would he have thought Britain and the United States were not worth defending, due to some of their actions during the war? Such excuses really ring hollow. I can understand why Harris favours the Palestinians, both for pragmatic reasons — there are more Muslim votes than Jewish ones — and ideological ones — progressive woke ideology — but do Jews have to go along with this?
(Yes, we know Harris has a Jewish husband. But this is a man who has had little concern with Judaism in his life. His first wife was non-Jewish and neither are his daughters; indeed, one supports anti-Israel protests. A Hollywood entertainment lawyer, he has only now been trotted out as a supposed expert on anti-Semitism, with absolutely no qualifications, so I doubt too many Jews are impressed.)
“Jews for Kamala are Living in Denial,” wrote American playwright, film director, and screenwriter David Mamet on August 9 on the website UnHerd. “Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.” We do live in strange times.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Uncategorized
It was once Sweden’s only news broadcast — what did it say about Israel?
The team behind Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 bares it all with the title of their documentary. It is, in fact, three and a half hours of footage about the conflict from the Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Television AB (SVT), stitched together in mostly chronological order.
SVT was founded in 1956 and held a monopoly on news broadcasts in Sweden until the early 90s, when the commercial channel TV4 was launched. The intention behind SVT programs was to present impartial news produced solely by Swedes.
In the two years since the beginning of the current war, there’s been a renewed interest in understanding the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. For those well-versed in the region’s history, they likely won’t learn anything new here. For those who don’t know much, it’s a good crash course — if one considers three and a half hours to be succinct.
The film, directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, documents many major developments that happened in Israel during those three decades, including big waves of American immigration in the 60s, economic growth, and, of course, the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars. Although the early footage focuses on Israel’s impressive agricultural projects and the modernization of the country’s major cities, as the years go on, the increasing focus is on the plight of Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps and the Gaza Strip, as well as political unrest within Israel.
The film opens with the statement that archival material “doesn’t tell us what really happened — but says a lot about how it was told,” so the broader implications of the footage are left up to the viewer’s interpretation. Some may see a welcome, growing awareness of Palestinian suffering. Others may see overly harsh criticisms of Israeli policies that disregard the country’s security issues. With no elaboration or editorializing, it doesn’t feel like the film is helping clarify or challenge the audience’s preconceived notions about the conflict.
And although the footage is Swedish, it’s unclear what, if anything, that lends to the conversation. There is barely anything in the film about Swedish attitudes towards Israel, though we get a peek into diverging viewpoints during a 1964 debate between diplomat Gunnar Häglöff and political scientist Herbert Tingsten about the issue of Palestinian refugees. In a 1968 broadcast, two Swedish journalists question Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban about the Israeli government destroying Arab homes. There are also interviews with Swedish soldiers from the United Nations who were stationed at a former railway station on the border between Gaza and Egypt in 1975. They have little to say about the conflict, however, and are more interested in discussing how they can build a sauna, a luxury from home they can’t live without.
How the Swedish government or its citizens have felt about Israel over the years remains strangely obscured. Whatever impact this footage may have had on Swedish-Israel relations and how these broadcasts were received is never discussed. It’s especially unfortunate that the films offers no way to compare the countries’ past relationship to current diplomatic tensions around Israel’s treatment of activist Greta Thunberg
With the humanitarian crisis in Gaza growing more dire and the future of Israel’s democracy becoming an increasingly pressing issue, one wonders what can be gained from the rehashing of history on view in Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV. The documentary primarily underscores a point most people already understand by now: The situation in Israel and Palestine is complicated. It’s violent. It feels neverending. Most people probably don’t need to watch a three and a half hour documentary to tell them that.
‘Israel and Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989’ opens at Film Forum NYC on October 10th.
The post It was once Sweden’s only news broadcast — what did it say about Israel? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
It was one of klezmer’s greatest days — will there ever be another?
18 years ago, America’s finest and most influential klezmer musicians gathered on the steps of the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for a photograph.
The picture was organized by Yale Strom, a violinist and klezmer musician who, having watched ‘A Great Day in Harlem,’ a documentary about Art Kane’s celebrated 1958 shot of America’s best-known jazz musicians, sought to do something similar by assembling those responsible for America’s klezmer revival. Strom called the photo, which was taken by Leo Sorel, ‘A Great Day On Eldridge Street’.
Whereas most of the musicians in Kane’s photograph knew each other, and indeed were friendly, a good few of Strom’s klezmer musicians had never met. “It certainly brought together a lot of people who had never been together at the same place at the same time,” recalled Hankus Netsky, a founding member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and a central figure in the klezmer revival.
For Strom, this remains the photograph’s abiding achievement. “I accomplished something no one had ever done,” he told me. “And most likely never will.”
Several of the 106 musicians photographed that day have since passed away, including Theodore Bikel, one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival; Elaine Hoffman Watts, the first female graduate of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; and renowned Yiddish poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. But American klezmer has continued to grow in popularity, thanks to the contributions of Don Byron, John Zorn, Jake Shulman-Ment, and Pete Rushefsky, among numerous other performers.
‘A Great Day on Eldridge Street’ was partly a celebration of American klezmer’s New York roots, and of the Lower East Side’s historic Eastern European Jewish immigrant community, but since 2007, the klezmer revival, which began in the late 1970s, has taken on an increasingly international character. “There’s a lot more access to international workshops now, and klezmer’s presence in the global music scene is only increasing from year-to-year,” Netsky said.
“The music is larger and more varied,” Strom added. “More sounds, more venues, more academic study, and more global cross-pollination.”
And though the 2007 photo cannot be recreated, it is past time for a sequel, Netsky said — one that honors “the incredible dedication and virtuosity of the younger generation.”
The post It was one of klezmer’s greatest days — will there ever be another? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan?
Is the Jewish joke on the verge of becoming extinct? The Last Jewish Joke, written by the veteran Parisian sociologist Michel Wieviorka, and newly translated into English by Cory Stockwell, argues that in recent years, Jews began to seem less heimish for at least three reasons: The Holocaust receded from memory; Israel’s government became guilty of actions decried internationally as war crimes; and right-wing antisemites who were always present became more boldly vocal.
Reminiscing about when he heard certain jokes, the author compiles his own consoling self-portrait in an autumnal mood. Wieviorka will be 80 next year, and his prose has a tendency to poignantly deem things as the “last” or at their “end.”
English language readers may need to be reminded that, when Wieviorka alludes to family situations in which he first heard Jewish jokes, it is in the context of his distinguished family of overachievers. His sister Annette is an eminent historian of the Holocaust. Another sister, Sylvie, is a psychiatrist and academic, and a brother, Olivier, is a historian specializing in World War II and the French Resistance. The entire mishpocheh is inspired and motivated by the memory of their paternal grandparents, Polish Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz. Indeed, Annette Wieviorka recently published a “family autobiography,” which asked subtle, eloquent, and nuanced questions about her antecedents.
In a comparable emotional aura of reverence, Wieviorka characterizes Jewish comedy of the past as “never malicious” (though apparently insult comics like Jack E. Leonard, Don Rickles, and Joan Rivers never got the memo).
The notion that joking Jews had to be sympathetic victims to elicit empathy from non-Jewish audiences may be true of some raconteurs, but is also belied by historical examples of potty-mouthed rapscallions like Belle Barth, B. S. Pully (born Murray Lerman) and Joe E. Ross (born Joseph Roszawikz), who startled nightclub audiences of their day with profanity.
Later Jewish shock jocks of the Howard Stern variety likewise chose to surprise, rather than charm, the public as a way to win notoriety. And Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, far from relying on vulnerable Jews as victims, presented characters screaming putdowns to elicit hilarity.
To bolster his arguments, Wieviorka refers to the counterexample of Popeck (born Judka Herpstu), a demure, wry entertainer of Polish and Romanian Jewish origin, who at 90 still appears at French theaters with gentle monologues akin to those of the Danish Jewish wit Victor Borge. Popeck presents himself onstage as a grumpy Eastern-European immigrant speaking Yiddish-accented French.
Wieviorka values such exemplars of rapidly vanishing tradition; as a social scientist, he is convinced that because communal settings such as the Borscht Belt no longer exist, the comics who once flourished on hotel stages in the Catskills have disappeared from memory.
To be sure, American standups like Myron Cohen, Jan Murray, and Carl Ballantine, once familiar from TV variety shows, are rarely mentioned now, though others like Eddie Cantor are periodically rediscovered by a new public, as Cantor was when he showed up as a character in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. But in his autobiographical deep dive, Wieviorka, who writes here more as a memoirist than a history of comedy, is naturally more concerned with things that he personally saw or heard, rather than any objective history of Jewish comedians through the ages.
Wieviorka also somewhat curiously refers to the “Yiddish-inflected” comedy of Groucho Marx. Apart from the word “schnorrer” which appears in “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” a song written by Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar, it is difficult to think of many other explicit Yiddishisms in Groucho’s verbal elan.
Wieviorka’s anecdotes tend to be hefty and hearty, like a family repast of kreplach that remains in the visceral memory for days after being consumed. Some of the quaintly old fashioned tales he refers to recall the precedent of Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, a dissection of pleasantries that reflects a sturdy Yekke approach to light-heartedness. Of course, in this optic of Jewish humor, there is no room for concise one-liners from the likes of Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen). For Wieviorka, as with Freud, brevity was so far from being the soul of wit that it might almost seem non-Jewish.
Another of Wieviorka’s claims appears to conflict with Jewish tradition itself, such as when he states that funny Jews laugh at themselves, never at others, negating the othering of mocked and disdained people in Chelm, a legendary village in Yiddish folklore inhabited by fools who believe themselves to be wise.
To support some of his claims, the author discusses the 1970s French film The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, a box office success, now somewhat frantic and dated-looking, starring the popular Gallic comedian, Louis de Funès disguised as a rabbi. More to the point, Wieviorka justly reveres the French Jewish comedian Pierre Dac for his still-fascinating wartime broadcasts from London for the Free French forces. Dac’s sense of humor simultaneously expressing Yiddishkeit and also undermining the enemy’s Fascist ideology is a subject that might have intrigued Freud himself.
To bolster the essentially serious messages of his book, Wieviorka mentions the writers Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart as well as the painter Marc Chagall, names rarely seen in books about humor.
Wieviorka’s elegiac, end-of-an-era tone might be cheered up by a glance at the Netflix streaming schedule or a visit to a comedy club. Of course Jewish humor is thriving, as Wieviorka himself admits; Le Monde headlined a relevant story about the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, “Israeli comedians are boosting morale in wartime.”
So, for all its methodical, highly intellectual analysis, The Last Jewish Joke might be best appreciated as a moving Kaddish for the demise of anecdotes that were once considered the height of drollery. It is very much a product of brainy French Jewish creativity, which itself deserves to be cherished and celebrated.
The post Has the Jewish joke become an endangered species — Òu sont les blagues d’antan? appeared first on The Forward.