Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/rseliger/page/4/)
While FDR was morally flawed regarding anti-Semitism, … he was astute enough in international strategy to know that Nazi Germany was a greater threat to national security than Imperial Japan.
Carlo Strenger chairs the clinical graduate program in psychology at Tel Aviv University and is a liberal opinion writer for Haaretz and the Huffington Post. His latest post at HP, “Open Letter to Mahmoud Abbas for Yom Kippur,” asks Abbas to directly address the Israeli people, to convince them that he really believes in a two-state solution for peace with the Jewish state. Here is my abridged version of this excellent piece:
Dear Mr. Abbas,
…. [A] state of Israel that oppresses another people is an affront to my Jewishness and for that of the majority of Jews worldwide for whom human rights are an inviolable value — precisely because our people has suffered immensely from bigotry and racism.
Given my sympathy for your cause, I hope you will listen to my call to you….
When Profs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt co-authored their book on the “Israel Lobby,” they drew back from their original formulation that it had manipulated the US to invade Iraq on behalf of Israel. Their more carefully worded thesis was that it was a “necessary but insufficient cause” for the Iraq war. Still, many (including myself) took this amiss because:
1. It discounts a fuller explanation for the US warring on Iraq, e.g.: W. Bush’s animus at Saddam Hussein for attempting to assassinate his family while visiting Kuwait after the first Iraq war, the importance of oil (Noam Chomsky’s view), frustration that Saddam Hussein continued to oppress his people and to bluster against the US — even though he could have been easily overthrown in 1991, and finally the influence of neocons and some liberals who saw Saddam’s rule as both a threat to peace in the region and the source of an ongoing human rights crisis.
As preparations begin for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis are in a quandary because their best female athlete in the high jump, Gretel Bergmann, is a Jew. In the 2009 German-language feature film, “Berlin ’36,” (commercially released in New York and LA in September 2011) the Nazis force Gretel’s father to fetch her back from England, where she has won a championship. To avoid a boycott of the Olympics by the American team, the Nazis engage in an elaborate scheme to have about 20 Jewish athletes, such as Bergmann, train but then be uniformly disqualified from the team.
My post of a few days ago, “My experience of Sept. 11, 2001,” was a discussion of my emotional state at that time. This follow-up, while also emotional, is meant to be a more analytical reflection. A few years ago, someone misunderstood my point for the following statement, meant not to denigrate what happened on 9/11/2001, but rather to provide some historical perspective and a new measure for grasping the magnitude of the genocide against Jews during World War II:
I made a rough calculation of the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Using the approximate start date of June 22, 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, for its beginning — the Einsatzgruppen began their mass shootings at this time — I calculated that an average of over 29,000 Jews were murdered each week until the war ended on May 8, 1945.
Although I’m not a direct survivor, the attack on my hometown hit me hard, one of several traumatic events that disrupted my life within the course of a single year. First, my mother passed away. She died of lymphoma but also had a form of dementia which plagued her for a number of years. Rightly or wrongly, I’m haunted to this day by a feeling that my family and I should have done more for her. In a shocking instance of the personal merging with the political, her death occurred almost exactly as the Second Intifada began in late September 2000.
Meretz USA (in the process of changing its name to “Partners for Progressive Israel”) has been benefiting from on-the-scene reports from our chaver (friend, comrade, colleague), Hillel Schenker, a veteran Israeli journalist and peacenik who is currently co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal:
The signs all over Tel Aviv leading up to the big demonstration read: “Where were you on September 3, 2011?” Well, I was together with 450,000 Israelis on the streets, over 300,000 in Tel Aviv alone, with another 50,000 in Jerusalem, and 100,000 in Haifa and the north. There were clusters of organized demonstrators: from the Israeli student union wearing blue shirts, green flags and “Bring Back the Welfare State” placards among the Meretz people, red flags and placards from the Hadash (Communist) people, the City for All of Us faction and the Arab-Jewish proletarian Da’am party, and the National Left people with a placard of a smirking Netanyahu with the slogan, “You’re Fired!”- but mainly just plain people with their home-made signs. …. The march headed out with drums, whistles and slogans, placards and flags held high, and turned left on Ibn Gvirol Street.
The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia began with the annexation of the largely German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938. Rendered impotent by the loss of its heavily-fortified defensive line along the old border, all of Czechoslovakia surrendered without firing a shot when Hitler completed his conquest in March 1939. If not for having been sold out by Britain and France at Munich (with Britain’s Prime Minister Chamberlain waving his ridiculous paper promising “peace in our time”), the Czechs seemed ready and able to strongly resist a German attack. There is even evidence that had the Allies stood behind Czechoslovakia, high-ranking German military commanders intended to overthrow Hitler. Most people are unaware of the aftermath of this occupation, when the Czech people took revenge on their German-speaking neighbors.
Gertrude Ezorsky is a retired professor of philosophy at the City University of New York and a member of the editorial board of the radical socialist journal, New Politics. For some reason, Prof. Ezorsky recently sent her nearly half-century old critique of Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” and “The Origins of Totalitarianism” — originally published in New Politics in 1963 — to a colleague of mine. Because of his awareness of my recent article on Arendt, he passed it along for my perusal. It’s noteworthy and heartening to me that a radical leftist like Ezorsky includes a section that shreds Arendt’s contention that Eichmann had “Zionist” sympathies. It’s also perhaps a comment on the times (then and now) that a progressive would publish an unabashed “pro-Jewish” piece in a journal of the radical left.
I’ve come a long way from the moment on a New York City bus in 1969 or ’70, when a junior member of the sociology faculty at the City College of New York (CCNY), whom I was friendly with, told me (a student) that he was active in the “GLF” (the Gay Liberation Front). I vividly recall physically shaking as I realized that he was gay. This had to have been shortly after the Stonewall riot or rebellion, at which gay people famously resisted police harassment. It was this event on June 28, 1969 that gave birth to what is annually celebrated around that date, in the name of “Gay Pride.” For the last couple of years, I’ve been spending part of my High Holy Day observances at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST), the mostly LGBT synagogue in Manhattan, with friends of various sexual orientations.