Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 4, 2020

Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018.

Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018.

Photo: Pool /Getty Images

Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018.

Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018.

Facebook is working to persuade advertisers to abandon their boycott. So far, they aren't impressed.

Facebook has spent the past few days in round-the-clock conversations with advertisers, trying to persuade them to come back to the platform with the promise of modest changes to address concerns that the social network profits from hate and outrage.

But advertisers and the agencies they work with say they are still negotiating. And they say they are so far unimpressed with promises to better police hate speech, including labeling some politicians' posts when they break the company's policies. On Tuesday, when the civil rights groups that organized the efforts expect to sit down with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, they plan to push for a rash of changes, including adding a C-suite-level executive dedicated to ensuring that the company's policies don't contribute to racism and radicalization.

More than 750 companies, including Coca-Cola, Hershey and Unilever, have already temporarily paused their advertising on Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram. More companies have joined the movement every day, with recent additions including Walgreens, Best Buy, Ford and Adidas. More than 200 advertisers joined in the past 24 hours.

Kerri Pollard, senior vice president of the membership platform Patreon - which is pulling all of its ads from Facebook and Instagram - said that the recent string of concessions still did little to address the company's core concern: Zuckerberg's characterization of free speech. The Facebook CEO has said he believes that social platforms should not fact-check politicians.

"Until he softens that, which would affect that entire business internally and externally, we're not going to feel comfortable returning to the platform," Pollard said. Patreon in 2018 booted far-right personalities off its platform in response to criticism.

But fact-checking politicians could have wide-ranging consequences, too. Facebook's business model depends on engagement: The more time people spend viewing content on the platform, and the more they click and interact with others, the more they are exposed to advertising in Facebook's scrolling news feed. Critics have argued that divisive and emotional content spreads more rapidly, particularly in like-minded private Facebook groups. That outrage is built into Facebook's ability to profit.

The boycott is the largest flare-up in a long-simmering battle between advertisers and social platforms over who gets to control what content the ads pop up next to. The campaign, which was triggered by Facebook allowing content that organizers said could incite violence against protesters, represents the most substantive effort to date to sanction the social network, which commands the second-largest share of the U.S. digital ad market behind Google.

Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja said in a statement that it invests billions every year to keep users safe and works with outside experts to update its policies.

"We've opened ourselves up to a civil rights audit, and we have banned 250 white supremacist organizations from Facebook and Instagram," she said. "We know we have more work to do, and we'll continue to work with civil rights groups, [the Global Alliance for Responsible Media], and other experts to develop even more tools, technology and policies to continue this fight."

Still, the initiative probably won't affect Facebook's bottom line. The company has 8 million advertisers, which generated almost all of its approximately $70 billion in ad revenue last year. Most are small businesses.

"Given Facebook's colossal scandals and rare repercussions to revenue, the advertisers' boycott is a body blow that will decimate Facebook's top line. I expect to see a revenue bleed out of more than $7.5 billion in 2020," said Eric Schiffer, chairman and chief executive of the Patriarch Organization and Reputation Management Consultants.

Zuckerberg appears to have to dug in. He told employees last week at a company meeting that he wasn't going to "change our policies or our approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue," according to the Information.

Facebook has been meeting and talking with advertisers "almost every minute of every day," said a senior executive of a major ad agency who, like others for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the company works closely with Facebook. Another ad industry executive who participated in meetings with Facebook said she came out disappointed.

The company is "slow and blame-sharing, acting like they are just the platform and society itself is full of bad actors," she said. She added that it is also blaming rivals YouTube and Twitter for their own practices over hate speech.

The reckoning goes beyond Facebook. A recent survey of nearly 60 companies by the World Federation of Advertisers found that about a third were likely to halt ad spending across social media due to hate speech, while 40 percent were considering doing so. Companies including Coca-Cola, Verizon and Unilever say they are reconsidering their ad spending not just on Facebook, but on all social media platforms.

Some skeptics say it's convenient timing for the advertisers, many of which are already cutting their marketing budgets amid a downturn in consumer spending.

The campaign against Facebook first emerged amid a national conversation on race sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man in Minnesota. Organizers said that Facebook's platform in particular was providing a forum for violent militia groups with plans to attack protesters. Some self-described members of those groups have been arrested in recent weeks for carrying weapons to protests and for allegedly planning to commit violent acts.

"It was the killing of George Floyd that told us that we needed to move," said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the civil rights groups behind the campaign.

"It was an obvious moment to say, you can't talk about race in your news release but not stand for racial justice in your product," he said, referring to social media companies publicly sharing support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Outdoor apparel company North Face was the first to join, followed by industry peers Patagonia and R.E.I. Those companies are known for taking stances on social issues.

"The stakes are too high to sit back and let the company continue to be complicit in spreading disinformation and fomenting fear and hatred," Patagonia tweeted on June 21 as it joined the #StopHateForProfit campaign.

The campaign's demands are broad and aim to address a host of grievances, including the removal of Facebook groups dedicated to white supremacy, militia movements, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation and climate denialism. The campaign also asks that Facebook end its policy of exempting politicians from its hate speech guidelines and hire a C-suite executive.

"We've been down this road with Facebook so many times," said Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, who is leading the campaign for the racial justice group Color of Change, noting that the boycott effort was a response to years of "fruitless" private meetings with Facebook staff as well as Zuckerberg. "At this point, we have reached an impasse."

Other brands joined after outreach from civil rights groups and their supporters, including Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, whose representatives contacted the head of the Anti-Defamation League recently to ask how they could help, said a spokesman for the organization.

The organizers of the boycott were also concerned about a post by President Trump, who appeared to endorse violence when he invoked a racially divisive phrase that dates to the civil rights era to describe the potential involvement of the U.S. military in the Minnesota protests. "When the looting starts, the shooting starts," he said on Twitter.

Facebook refused to take down the president's post, despite widespread protests by employees and outsiders, while Twitter slapped a warning label on it, noting that it violated the company's policies prohibiting incitement to violence. Snapchat stopped promoting the president's account.

Some smaller companies like Patreon that joined the boycott are an example of businesses that largely built on the ability of Facebook and others to help target specific groups of consumers.

As advertising migrated online over the past couple of decades from print and other media, advertisers lost control over the tone of the material alongside which their ads appeared. On social media, an ad could appear next to a racist post or one by a terrorist organization.

In 2017, Verizon, Walmart, Pepsi and other major brands suspended their ads on YouTube after reports that they had appeared alongside objectionable content promoting extremist or racist views. Last year, some advertisers boycotted YouTube after they saw their ads appear next to predatory and exploitative activity. As a result of the 2017 boycott, YouTube changed its policies and invested heavily in tools to give advertisers more control.

Katia Beauchamp, the co-founder and chief executive of the beauty box subscription company Birchbox, said the company, which is participating in the boycott, has committed to decreasing its ad spending with Facebook and Instagram for the rest of the year and is "aggressively" exploring other avenues for advertising. She called the decision a matter of "legacy."

"What we're most focused on is profiting from perpetuating prejudice, racism and hate," Beauchamp said. "We're not as focused on any reparations based on where our advertising shows up."

Facebook and other social media companies have extensive policies prohibiting hate speech, graphic violence and calls for violence, harassment and other ills, and have hired thousands of content moderators to enforce those policies. But the companies also give wide latitude to political expression across the board and have been reluctant to listen to organizer complaints. Objectionable content has spread as a result, causing flare-ups with advertisers.

Facebook has offered modest concessions to the boycott. At a town hall on June 26, Zuckerberg announced that the company would attach labels to some politicians' posts. In his most explicit terms to date, he said that it would take down posts by anyone who incited violence or suppressed voting rights and would label posts by politicians that break its other policies. The company has long had a policy that has allowed the spread of misinformation by politicians.

Facebook on Monday also agreed to an external audit of how it polices hate speech, a specific request by the boycott's organizers. Zuckerberg will meet with them next week, the Anti-Defamation League said. Other organizers include Color of Change, the NAACP and Common Sense.

In correspondence with advertisers and journalists, Facebook has cited a European Union report on hate speech that found that Facebook assessed more hate speech reports in 24 hours than Twitter or YouTube. Twitter spokesman Brian Poliakoff confirmed that it is also consulting with advertisers after Unilever said it would boycott all social media. YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.

Kevin Urrutia, co-founder of Voy Media, an ad agency specializing in Facebook ads, said most businesses are so reliant on Facebook that it's almost a nonissue: Less than 10 percent of his clients are participating in the boycott or are concerned about their relationships with the company. The other 90 percent hope it could result in cheaper ad purchases, he said.

"We have lots of clients that are pulling budget out this time of year," he said. "It could just be a matter of companies readjusting the budgets and using it as a way to get credibility with customers."

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Facebook is working to persuade advertisers to abandon their boycott. So far, they aren't impressed. - Thehour.com

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Posted By admin on July 4, 2020

(JNS)Is there any red line that the Anti-Defamation League wont cross in order to pursue its current agenda that prioritizes partisan politics over combating anti-Semitism? In the five years since Jonathan Greenblatt succeeded longtime ADL leader Abe Foxman at the helm of the anti-Semitism monitor, the answer to that question has always been clear. But by openly allying itself with Al Sharptonthe man who helped incite the Crown Heights riots in the summer of 1991the ADL has not just abandoned its core mission in favor of partisan politics, but has utterly disgraced itself in a manner that ought to shame its staff and donors.

Greenblatt, a veteran of the last two Democratic administrations, moved the group away from its nonpartisan stance into one in which it has become a faithful auxiliary of the Democratic Party. That has been made painfully obvious repeatedly as Greenblatt has taken openlypartisan stanceson issues like Supreme Court nominations and consistent attempts to link President Donald Trump toanti-Semitism. But while the groups championing of the Stop the Hate campaign, which aims to pressure Facebook to begin censoring content, sounds like it is reverting to its job of bearing witness against anti-Semitism, thats not true.

That has been made painfully obvious repeatedly as Greenblatt has taken openlypartisan stanceson issues like Supreme Court nominations and consistent attempts to link President Donald Trump toanti-Semitism.

The #stophateforprofit campaign claims that its goal is to mobilize the country to force Facebook to cease allowing its platform to be used to promote hate. That sounds laudable. It is represented by its principle advocates, such as Greenblatt and actorSacha Baron Cohen, as merely a request that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stop serving as an enabler of neo-Nazis. And if it were that simple, who would oppose it?

In practice, that means setting up a system to censor political ads subjectively so as to treat those from conservatives as inherently hateful or untrue while giving a pass to the left. Under any circumstances, that would be questionable. But in the context of a presidential election being contested in an environment in which many, if not most, Americans get their news from their social-media feeds, pushing Facebook to censor or tag ads and posts in this manner is an outrageous form of political cheating.

As Ivepreviously noted, the ability of Internet giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google to use their enormous power to control the information superhighway is a clear and present danger to democracy. While Trumps critics treat his bluster and coarse language as evidence of incipient authoritarianism, it is the potential for social-media giants to tilt the scales for or against certain politicians and ideas that constitutes the real possibility of establishing authoritarian rule.

Googles attempts to deny the use of its ad revenue to conservative websites are deeply problematic, as is the decision of Twitter to dabble in censorship. But Facebook, with its billions of users, is in a unique position to ensure that its platform, which is so successful because it is so ubiquitous, to mute or silence views its left-wing staff doesnt like. While Democrats have mythologized the activities of Russian bots on Facebook into an excuse for Hillary Clintons defeat in 2016, the point of this campaign is to weaponize the same forum to aid former Vice President Joe Biden.

Though his motives have more to do with profit than principle, Zuckerberg has deserved some credit for resisting this pressure. But last week, it took thefirst stepdown the slippery slope towards censorship by agreeing to label posts from politicians that it deems an effort to incite violence or to suppress voting.

In a political environment in which liberal journalists are treating any call to enforce the rule of law against rioters asinciting violence, Facebooks adoption of such vague language is ominous. The same is true with talk of voter suppression, which is the way some on the left define any attempt to ensure the integrity of elections.

But the interesting thing about ADLs decision to partner with Sharpton is that it illustrates how such partisan goals have now superseded its task of monitoring Jew-hatred.

But the interesting thing about ADLs decision to partner with Sharpton is that it illustrates how such partisan goals have now superseded its task of monitoring Jew-hatred.

Greenblatts predecessor Foxman was a child survivor of the Holocaust, and he took the job of granting absolution to those who were guilty of anti-Semitism in the past seriously. Those who would seek his blessing actually had to repent of their hate and behave in a manner that wouldnt embarrass their sponsor.

Greenblatt, however, hasnt required Sharpton to fully confess his role as a race-baiting inciter of anti-Semitic violence. Instead, he treats Sharpton as a valuable political ally whose support for ADLs ventures is a gift for which he is truly grateful.

To be fair to Greenblatt, hes not alone in this respect. Last year, the Union of Reform Judaism played the same game with Sharpton when its Religious Action Center granted itsseal of approvalto him. That was particularly painful for many in Crown Heights and the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose adherents were the victims of what can only be described as a modern-day pogrom that Sharpton helped start.

In that case, as with this one, both groups judged politicsin the form of an anti-Trump allianceas having far greater importance than holding Sharpton accountable for his past.

To be a foe of Trump and an ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, which at this moment has become the most powerful force in American public life, is to grant a person a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card. It is deeply ironic that this is happening at the same time that BLM advocates and the social-media outrage mobs that enforce adherence to the movements catechism are canceling people left and rightboth ordinary citizens and celebrity hypocrites alikefor the sin of opposing any part of the groups radical agenda.

Greenblatt has already so trashed ADLs reputation in his pursuit of a liberal political agenda (and perhaps a post in the next Democratic administration) that it may be hard to gin up much outrage about his embrace of a figure as disreputable as Sharpton. But it is no less outrageous for being so predictable and servile.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNSJewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

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Can the ADL 'Stop the Hate' by Embracing Al Sharpton? - Jewish Journal

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Posted By admin on July 4, 2020

San Francisco, CA

Earthjustice announced that it would join the #StopHateforProfit and pause all of its advertising on Facebook and Facebooks subsidiaries beginning in July. #StopHateforProfit, a campaign launched by the Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change, Common Sense, Free Press, NAACP, and Sleeping Giants, is a call for organizations to take a firm stand against the racism and hate that Facebook allows to spread on its platforms.

The following is a statement from Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen:

In solidarity with #StopHateforProfit, were pausing all of our ads on Facebook and Instagram. As an organization that centers justice, it is our duty to stand firm against racism and hate. We must be unequivocally anti-racist in all that we do, and that includes how we spend our ad dollars. We encourage Facebook to take a similar stand and stop the spread and amplification of hate and racism on its platforms.

Learn more about the #StopHateforProfit campaign.

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Earthjustice Pausing All Advertising on Facebook, Instagram to #StopHateforProfit - Earthjustice

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Posted By admin on July 4, 2020

In the weeks since protests erupted after the death of George Floyd, one mysterious word has consistently popped up in press briefings, cable news broadcasts and social media posts: antifa.

President Donald Trump has tweeted several times about the left-wing movement since late May, likening it to "other wacko groups of anarchists." Attorney General William Barr said violent demonstrations appeared to have been planned by "far-left extremist groups and anarchic groups using antifa-like tactics."

Meanwhile, conservative outlets like Fox News and the Washington Times have aired similar claims about antifa. Search interest in the movement spiked in early June, and unsubstantiated theories about antifa were among the most popular pieces of misinformation about the protests, according to the New York Times.

But what is antifa and why is it suddenly all over the press and our social media feeds? PolitiFact investigated.

"Largely its become the in-vogue, far-right bogeyman," said Mark Bray, a historian and part-time lecturer at Rutgers University.

Do you have a question for us? Email us at [emailprotected], and well try to answer it. Put "Ask PolitiFact" in the subject line.

What is antifa?

Antifa stands for "anti-fascist." Its a broad, loosely affiliated coalition of left-wing activists thats been around for decades. It has had a resurgence since the election of President Donald Trump.

In "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," Bray traces the modern antifa movement to German and Italian leftist groups that fought proto-fascist gangs following World War I.

"Antifa" takes its name from Antifaschistische Aktion "anti-fascist action," in English a phrase that the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany adopted in 1932, as the Nazis were gaining power. The party also adopted the logo that is now commonly associated with antifa groups. The symbol combines the red flag of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the black flag of 19th-century anarchists.

"Antifaschistische Aktion aimed to provide a framework in which people from all walks of life could be brought together in loose coalition to fight economic, social, and legal repression, and above all a basis on which Social Democrats and Communists could join in self-defense against the Nazis," Bray wrote in his book.

An anti-fascist sticker in Frankfurt, Germany. (Shutterstock)

While the political context has changed, that framework still applies to the modern antifa movement.

In the United States, antifa groups played a role in organizing protests against Trumps inauguration. The movement regained attention after groups counter-protested white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. The movement has no leaders and is organized into autonomous local groups.

"Its a little bit like feminism," Bray said in an interview. "There are feminist groups just like there are antifa groups, but neither feminism nor antifa is a group."

Antifa groups use social media and encrypted apps to target right-wing activists and communicate with one another. The oldest antifa cell is Rose City Antifa in Portland, Ore., with similar organizations in several other American cities.

Antifa activists are "predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy," Bray wrote in a 2017 column for the Washington Post. They often wear black clothing or bandannas over their faces to stay anonymous in crowds.

Have antifa activists used violence in the past?

Yes. While experts say most antifa organizing is peaceful, the movement does sometimes turn to violence to push back against right-wing activists.

During the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally, hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis marched with torches through Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, after the City Council voted to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The demonstration turned violent when white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters. A 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, died after an Ohio man drove a car into the crowd, injuring 19 others.

Among the counterprotesters who included racial justice activists, clergy and Charlottesville residents were antifa organizers. Pepper spray was the weapon of choice on both sides of the demonstration. A few members of a group called the Redneck Revolt, which describes itself as an "anti-racist, anti-fascist community defense formation," had guns, but white nationalists were more armed, according to BuzzFeed News.

Antifa activists have participated in other violent protests across the country as well.

Antifa counter-protesters prepare to clash with Patriot Prayer protestors during a rally in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 4, 2018. (AP)

In spring 2017, antifa activists broke windows and set fires in Berkeley, Calif., to protest the appearance of right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California. More clashes erupted at rallies later that year, during which some antifa activists attacked right-wing demonstrators.

In fall 2017, hundreds of demonstrators protested against a demonstration planned by the right-wing group Patriot Prayer in Portland. Some antifa activists lit smoke bombs and threw objects at police. The scuffle came months after Portlands annual Rose Festival parade was canceled due to threats of violence against GOP marchers.

The reason that antifa activists sometimes use violence is "rooted in the assumption that the Nazi party would never have been able to come to power in Germany if people had more aggressively fought them in the streets in the 1920s and 30s," according to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish non-governmental organization.

Experts say most organizing is not rooted in physical violence. Antifa activists use other tactics to achieve their aims, such as exposing the private information of online extremists and trying to get right-wing rallies canceled.

"Theres all sorts of different ways that often succeed without even having to get to confrontational levels," Bray said. "They dont shy away from it, but it can be seen as the last step in a chain of options to stop far-right organizations, and usually earlier steps on that chain are successful without needing to get to that point."

Why have they been in the news lately?

After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in late May, several protests across the country turned violent. Since the antifa movement has a left-wing bent and a track record of violence, experts say it was an easy scapegoat for the chaos.

The Trump administration has repeatedly blamed antifa activists for picking fights with police and looting businesses. On May 30, Trump tweeted that "antifa and the radical left" were to blame for the violence in Minneapolis. Attorney General Barr made a similar allegation.

"Unfortunately, with the rioting that is occurring in many of our cities around the country, the voices of peaceful protests are being hijacked by violent radical elements," Barr said. "In many places, it appears the violence is planned, organized, and driven by far-left extremist groups and anarchic groups using antifa-like tactics."

Neither Barr nor Trump offered public evidence that antifa activists were responsible for the unrest in Minneapolis and elsewhere. But a day later, Trump doubled down, promising to label the movement as a "terrorist organization." (National security experts say Trump does not have that authority.)

Those comments came on the heels of a barrage of online misinformation about antifas connection to protests against police brutality.

On May 31, a now-suspended Twitter account posing as an antifa cell published a tweet that made it look like left-wing protesters were moving into white residential areas. We rated that claim False and the account was actually owned by a white nationalist group.

In the days that followed, several other false or unproven rumors took off on social media:

Antifa threatened to vandalize houses in Seattle if the owners didnt give them food and supplies. (False)

Antifa planned to raid a wealthy neighborhood in Raleigh, N.C. (False)

Antifa staged bricks at protests across the country to stoke violence. (Mostly False)

Antifa murdered a man at a protest in Portland. (False)

Antifa planned a riot in Chesterfield County, Va. (Hoax)

The tactic of blaming antifa activists for acts of violence isnt new. Some websites falsely blamed the movement for the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas and even the death of Heyer in Charlottesville.

"For some people, it is easier to believe that a shadowy group of people are trying to undermine society than it is to accept that Americans are so angry and so fundamentally outraged at the state of the country, that they are willing to take to the streets," said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, in an email.

What has antifa actually done at the protests?

Its difficult to say for sure, but theres no evidence that antifa activists played a significant role in violent protests and looting following Floyds death.

Thousands of people have been arrested amid the nationwide demonstrations, not all for acts of violence. The number has included curfew violators, working press and others.

It isnt possible to know how many were motivated by any particular political belief or association. But government intelligence reports, media reports and experts offer no evidence that antifa played any significant role.

"While their presence at some counter-protests against events held by white supremacists and right-wing extremists over the years has been marked by physical confrontations and violence, there is no evidence that antifa supporters have organized the recent protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, or that they have coordinated any violence at the protests," Segal said.

RELATED: Florida congressional candidate blames antifa for violence without evidence

Other experts and fact-checkers back up that assessment. So do arrest reports.

The New York Times analyzed dozens of federal arrest reports related to recent protests. The newspaper found no connection between the arrests and antifa groups. Several other media outlets came to similar conclusions.

Given the lack of evidence, experts say pinning violent protests on antifa activists serves to distract from the larger conversation about police brutality.

"Antifa is just the latest placeholder," Bray said. "Maybe 10-15 years ago it was radical environmentalists. If you go back further, its communists, its Black Panthers."

"It serves the purpose of being a bogeyman because its everywhere and nowhere."

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Ask PolitiFact: What is antifa, and why is it all over my timeline? - PolitiFact

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Posted By admin on July 3, 2020

Despite the desire for a full return to routine in the fall, as schools closed this week and summer camps opened, the Education Ministry disseminated to administrators the first part of a coronavirus strategic plan for the upcoming school year.The analysis of the present-day reality requires us to prepare for a school year in the shadow of coronavirus, wrote former Education Ministry director-general Shmuel Abuhav, who prepared the report as he was preparing to step down from his role.The plan requires schools to prepare for three scenarios: a full closure closing all schools or a single school due to infection; an integrated model combining distance and frontal learning; and a coronavirus routine operating schools under the full list of Health Ministry directives.The system experienced all these scenarios in the past year, wrote Abuhav. Weve been down this path and now we have to learn, improve and plan based on that experience We are aware of the time constraints.The document calls on schools to plan to be flexible in 2020 and to understand that unlike in previous years, the guidelines will not be published in one document but could be rolled out over time through various platforms. As part of the flexible planning process for the next school year, the ministry is asking schools to 1) identify lessons learned from the first wave, 2) identify strengths and areas of improvement and 3) identify work mechanisms and processes that require designing or improvement.Map the gaps in student abilities, learning habits and knowledge levels to create a program that can function next year, the document instructs. Sharpen the schools compass, prioritizing the schools main objectives Prepare for various scenarios and create action plans for each of them.At the same time, it recommends evaluating the ability of the educational staff, including their proficiency in the use of digital tools for distance learning and their ability to handle the emotional challenges of teaching under the shadow of corona.The ministry has been preparing for a full set of online professional development tools, the report states.Finally, it calls on schools to come up with a school-parent communication plan. Even if distance learning is instituted, schools will be required to maintain a minimum amount of hours of learning per day and per week in all subjects. The ministry divided the curriculum into clusters by type of school secular, religious, Arab and Druze. Compulsory or core curriculum content makes up 70% of studies, with the other 30% for enrichment subjects. For example, secular elementary school students are required to learn between 29 and 32 hours per week depending on the grade. In first grade, 15 hours should be spent on language, heritage, society and spirit. Eight hours should be spent on culture and lifestyle and six on math and science. A similar breakdown exists for religious first graders, except in those schools, five hours is to be allotted to Jewish studies, reducing language, heritage, society and spirit studies to 12 hours and culture and lifestyle to six.During negotiations earlier this year between the Education Ministry and theTeachers' Association of Israel and Teachers Union, an agreement was made that an hour of distance learning would be paid equivalent to an hour of classroom learning. Finally, the ministry notes that maintaining the health and well-being of students in the education system is a key element of distance-learning, which must be especially emphasized during the period of coronavirus. Special emphasis should be placed on day-to-day conduct and school routines, the report concluded.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also made recommendations about how to design schools in the coming year. At a Likud faction meeting in the Knesset last month, he said that he would encourage schools to partition the desks with plexiglass dividers in the fall, based on a recommendation by the National Security Council.At the end of the 19-20 school year, a battle between over when the last day of school would be for students erupted between the ministry and the association and union. The ministry wanted teachers to work an extra nine days to help make up for the days missed when schools closed at the peak of the pandemic and to help keep the economy open after the lockdown. The teachers pushed back and ultimately won in court and school ended on time.The report is meant to help preempt these kinds of challenges, as well.On Thursday evening, the Education Ministry reported that there were 1,162 students and teachers infected with the coronavirus and 24,577 in isolation.

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Coronavirus: Here is what Israels schools could look like in Sept. 2020 - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on July 3, 2020

An ammunition stash left behind by Jordanian soldiers during the 1967 Six-Day War was exposed during excavations underneath the lobby of the Western Wall Tunnels.

The Western Wall Heritage Foundation and Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) archaeologists were surprised to find 10 magazines for a Bern light machinegun full of bullets, two bayonets of a British Lee Enfield rifle, and other rifle parts.

The ammunition was hidden in the bottom of a British Mandate period water cistern.

Israeli police bomb-disposal experts came to the site to examine the findings.

The excavations in the area are being conducted to prepare for a new tour in addition to the existing Western Wall Tunnels tour.

Photo: IAA

Dr. Barak Monnickendam-Givon and Tehila Sadiel, directors of the excavation on behalf of the IAA, said that usually, in excavations, we find ancient findings from one or two thousand years ago, but this time, we got a glimpse of the events that occurred 53 years ago, frozen in time in this water cistern.

About a month ago, the archeologists published findings of an elaborate subterranean network hewn into bedrock from the Second Temple period that was uncovered at the foot of an impressive 1,400-year-old public structure.

The water cistern we excavated served the residential structures of the Moghrabi neighborhood that was built in the area of what is today the Western Wall Plaza.

The discovery of the ammunition stash for Bern light machine guns match two other guns that were found about a year and a half ago in a different water cistern in the Western Wall Plaza.

The Western Wall Heritage Foundation stated Wednesday that along with other glorious discoveries of our nations past from the Second Temple period, we are also happy about discovering findings from the war of this past generation to return the Jewish nations heart and be able to cling to the stones of the Western Wall.

This discovery is a privilege for us to be able to acknowledge the miracles of the Creator of the Universe at this site, the organization said.

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Surprise! Jordanian Ammunition Found Near the Western Wall - Israel Today

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Posted By admin on July 3, 2020

Shira Haas has catapulted herself into the zeitgeist with her moving performance as Esther Esty Shapiro on Netflixs Unorthodox.

The series sees Esty married off to a man whom she barely knows (played by Haas real-life friend Amit Rahav) and forced to shave her head as Satmar tradition dictates. Haas recalled shooting that emotional haircut scene on the very first day on set, describing it as one heck of a beginning during an interview for an upcoming episode of the Varietyand iHeart podcast The Big Ticket.

You see 20 seconds of this scene in the episode, but it took eight minutes nonstop, two cameras, one take, thats it, Haas told host Marc Malkin. I just had the rollercoaster of emotions and, of course, it was also real.

Variety caught up with Haas from her home in Tel Aviv to talk about her unconventional path into acting, how close she feels to her character of Esty, and the importance of the series covering the Hasidic community with authenticity.

When do you decide that you wanted to be an actor?

Pretty late. I was a very shy child, believe it or not. I was into writing, and I loved watching movies, and I love theater, but I never thought I would be in this professional life, being the center of attention. Going on stage seemed like an awful thing for me. But then, I went to a theater major in high school. I really loved it, but it was more of a hobby, not something like that.Then, a casting director approached me on Facebook, actually. Thats not a good message, maybe, but thats the truth. I Googled her, so its safe. She was casting a movie, and I didnt have agent, I didnt have anything, but she just told me that shed seen that I studied this major, and she thinks that I can work out. I went there, and it was my first movie, it was Princess.

When you auditioned, did you know it was for Unorthodox? Had you read Deborah Feldmans book?

I didnt know. They told me this is for a TV series called The Orchestra for a German network platform. I was like okay, cool. I read the scenes, and I thought its amazing. I went there and I did it, and I felt good, and I thought the dialogues were amazing, and I enjoyed playing it, and then a few days later, I got the phone call from my agent, and she was like, Okay, so they loved you. Theyre coming to Israel in a few days, and its for Netflix. Its called Unorthodox.'

What do you like about Esty as a character?

Every time someone asks me if Im similar to her, I always answer that I hope. I really think that even though she comes from difficult circumstancesshes very, very present. Shes really in the here and now, which we know about it, we talk about it, and we read books about it, and we go to psychologists and think, but shes without knowing it really aware of her feelings. She really knows what she feels. She really knows what she wants. She really knows when she doesnt want something, and thats also her curse in a wayI also love the fact that shes so complex, because even when I got one scene or two scenes in the beginning of the audition, I felt shes both very strong and tough, but also so vulnerable, and she also wants to fit in, but she doesnt want to be there. Shes very gentle.

How much responsibility did you feel in depicting this community?

A lot. It was a never-ending discussion in the production, in me, that I shared also with the creators and the director. You need to root for the lead character in a series, you need to understand her struggles, but at the same time, you need to understand, to see the whole picture, to have empathy to this place that shes coming from. Its more interesting as a story when something is not black and whiteAs a Jew, as an Israeli person, I felt responsibility to have something to say, because were doing art, and thats part of it, and its important not to be scaredYou need to have a moral sensitivity because its real peopleI think that there are beautiful sides to show, and that there is complexity, and that there are both sides of the coin.

Talk about your bedroom scenes with Amit, what was shooting those like?

Im an actress, Ive had intimacy scenes before. Its not the first one that I had, but every time, even if you know the person before, even if you dont know, its kind of like a stage that you need to go through to feel comfortable, to talk about things, or not to talk, but just to feel comfortable, to be you and to say stuff and to act without thinking too much. I think the fact that I knew Amit was really, really helpfulWe always laugh that we kind of had like our secret language. We talk Hebrew, no one understood, they know German and some Yiddish, but no one understands us. We always had this, we had our laughs together. But it was also very professional.

I know youve talked about it a lot, but I do have to ask you about the head shaving. Your face during that was so real. How much did you sit there and grieve while it was happening?

When I start a new production, Im very excited, and I want it to be good, and Im happy to do these things. I was ready for it. I knew about it a long time before, even in the audition process. At the same time, Ive always had the longest hair. I never cut my hair. I love my hair. It was scary. How does my head, shaved, look? Even before we started filming, I really felt nervous and scared alongside excited, just like Esty in a way. Then, when we arrive on action, I remember [director] Maria Schrader told me, I think it was few hours before, or a day before, she was like, I know that you love to be prepared for scenes, which I do, but she was like, dont be prepared for it too much, because theres no right and wrong in that scene. All of the emotions that will come are correct. Shes right. You see 20 seconds of this scene in the episode, but it took eight minutes nonstop, two cameras, one take, thats it. I just had the rollercoaster of emotions and, of course, it was also real.

Unorthodox is available on Netflix.

You can also listen to The Big Ticket at iHeartRadioor wherever youdownload you favorite podcasts.

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Unorthodox Star Shira Haas on Portraying the Hasidic Community and That Emotional Head-Shaving Scene - Variety

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Chris McKenna|Times Herald-Record

Hasidic families whose children go to sleepaway camps in the Catskills are awaiting a federal court hearing on Tuesday in a case that will determine if those camps open this summer over the state's objections.

The Association of Jewish Camp Operators sued Gov. Andrew Cuomo this month after he barred overnight camps from opening because of continued concerns about spreading the coronavirus. The plaintiffs argue the decision violatedreligious rights and was inconsistent with the state letting other non-essential activities resume.

The upcoming hearing before Chief Judge Glenn Suddaby of the Northern District of New York concerns the camp operators' request for temporary orders allowing the camps to open while the case is pending. The camps represented by the association serve more than 40,000 children, according to its court papers.

The camps had hoped to open on Thursday of this week. While the court challenge remains pending, some operators are trying to circumvent the prohibition by obtaining permits to open as "temporary residences," the state's term for hotels, motels and cabin colonies.

The state Department of Health distributed a letter on Thursday that warned camp operators of an unusual caveat if they plan to declare themselves temporary residences:parents would have to stay overnight with their children at the camps.

The letter, reported by the Jewish newspaper Hamodia,also noted that those camps would have to forgo congregate meal service and adhere to other coronavirus-related restrictions. Violators could be fined up to $1,000 per violation per day.

Camp operators are pursuing other avenues to open their doors.

A Brooklyn-based branch of the Satmar Hasidic movementtweeted on Monday that Ulster County had granted permission for their camps in Ulster to function as day camps, and that children would be bused backed and forth to the Catskills each day. Summer day camps are allowed to open throughout New York, starting on Monday.

The same Satmar Twitter handle latercelebratedSuddaby's assignment as judge forthe camp case, calling him a "sympathetic judge" and saying the group's four camps would be ready to begin full operations within two days of a ruling allowing them to do so.

State officials determined that overnight camps posed more of a health risk than day camps. Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, said in a statement this month that the group settings and sleeping quarters at sleepaway camps made it too difficult to maintain social distancing and control the spread of the virus.

The state imposed numerous requirements and restrictions on any day camps that open, including a mandate that employees wear masks if they are withinsix feet of other workers or campers.

cmckenna@th-record.com

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GENE DEMBY, HOST:

I'm Gene Demby.

SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, HOST:

I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji. And this is CODE SWITCH.

DEMBY: From NPR.

Shereen, all right, so I have a weird question for you.

MERAJI: Hit me.

DEMBY: Does your family have any stories that they tell themselves about themselves that are not exactly true?

MERAJI: I feel like every family has these types of stories. I can think of two off the top of my head. On my Puerto Rican side, my Titi Lucy (ph) is totally convinced - or was, rest in peace, Titi Lucy - was totally convinced that we are related to the actor Benicio Del Toro. This is probably something I could figure out, but I have not tried to do that. I don't think it's true. It could be true. And then on my dad's side, on my Iranian side, we're supposed to be direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

DEMBY: Oh, wow.

MERAJI: I don't even know how you find out if that's true or not. It would be dope if it was true, but I don't think it's true.

DEMBY: Yeah. There's also - the story's too good. It's like too good to check, too good to check.

MERAJI: Yes. I don't even want to check. Yes, I am a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Well, the truth is just about every family has some sort of myth or story that they tell themselves about who they are.

DEMBY: And this week, if the past month of fireworks hasn't thrown y'all, keep your third eye open.

MERAJI: It has been three months in my neighborhood - three months.

DEMBY: Yeah. It's been a lot.

MERAJI: I am not exaggerating. I love fireworks, so I'm not hating it, but anyway.

DEMBY: It's the Fourth of July, also known as Independence Day, which means a lot of people are telling stories and myths about what it means to be American.

MERAJI: And there are lots of reasons why people tell these stories. Sometimes it's because people genuinely don't know the truth, so they exaggerate or they make something up.

DEMBY: And sometimes it just, like, make your family seem like they were part of some important historical moment.

MERAJI: Sometimes it's to hide something that is way too painful to talk about.

DEMBY: Yeah. And that can be especially true for African American families. You know, the further we go back in time - and this is true of my family - the harder it is to find records for who our family was and where they were and what they were doing. And when we do find those records, it's often, like, not a very pretty story, which leaves even more reason...

MERAJI: Right.

DEMBY: ...For people to invent a family lore.

MERAJI: So today, we're bringing in our teammate Leah Donnella. She's an editor and producer for the show. She actually does, like, everything on the show. You will hear her name in the credits like 15 times. And she became obsessed with a story that her family had been telling for more than 60 years. But it's a story that sounded a little too perfect to be true. Hey, Leah.

LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: Hey, Shereen. Hey, Gene.

DEMBY: What's going on?

MERAJI: Leah, you've been researching this family story for months now. What's it about? Set the scene for us.

L DONNELLA: Yeah. So I've been thinking about this story for a little bit more than a year, but it actually starts with my dad, Michael. And he's been looking into this story for decades. And his interest started, in part, because of our last name, which is Donnella.

DEMBY: Wait. What? What about your last name?

MERAJI: Donnella.

L DONNELLA: It's very beautiful.

(LAUGHTER)

DEMBY: I'm not shading your name. Sorry.

MERAJI: It is beautiful.

DEMBY: It's beautiful.

L DONNELLA: Thank you. I do like it. And my dad had a little bit more trouble with it, though. He said that all throughout his life, people have been commenting on it. Apparently they got real tripped up when they meet a Black man whose last name ends in an A for some reason.

DEMBY: Yeah. I thought, like, it was Italian or something.

MERAJI: Yeah. If you're a Spanish speaker, you want to say Doneya (ph) when you see it, you know. But then it has two Ns. And so if you're a Spanish speaker, you're like, I don't know. Is that name - like, is that a Spanish last name? It is definitely a curious last name. And I was like, where is that from?

DEMBY: And because you're from Philly, I assumed that it was like Italian, Italian American.

MERAJI: Donnella.

L DONNELLA: We've heard so many theories about it growing up. But my dad kind of wanted to figure this out. So my dad and I are both people who, as you two might know, can't let anything go.

MERAJI: Well, we know that about you, Leah. You're our editor. But now we know where you get it from.

L DONNELLA: Yeah, so you can thank my dad for the thoughtful edits. But last July, the two of us decided to figure out the truth once and for all. And so that started with us going to New Orleans together.

MERAJI: Oh, yes, New Orleans. All right, Leah, take us there, the Big Easy, one of my favorite cities in the United States.

DEMBY: The Crescent City, yes, one of the dopest places in the U.S.

L DONNELLA: So I had never been there before, so my dad was acting as my tour guide. And he took me straight to Bourbon Street.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: It's early evening when we get there. The sun is just beginning to set, casting shadows over the crowds. But it's still about a hundred degrees outside. Tourists wielding iPhones push up next to performers with kettledrums. A pushcart is selling hotdogs for a dollar. My dad and I order plastic cups of beer to drink on the street because we can.

MICHAEL DONNELLA: Thank you.

L DONNELLA: Thank you.

Also, because my dad loves beer and I'm always trying to be just like him. Chaotic processions march past us. We try to guess what they are.

M DONNELLA: This might be a funeral. Or it might just be a party.

L DONNELLA: Funeral? Party? It's hard to tell the difference here. And anyway, people always talk about New Orleans being haunted, one of the most haunted cities in America, they say. Well, I sure hope so because in addition to drinking beer and finding pretty good restaurants, my dad and I are trying to dig up a ghost, the ghost of my great-grandfather, Harrison Donnella. We'll soon be walking down the street where he used to live, sifting through records of his life, searching through graveyards.

(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMS)

L DONNELLA: Part of the reason we're interested in Harrison is because the story we learned about him and his wife, Lottie, my great-grandmother, was such a perfect origin story, like a modern-day, post-bellum, interracial "Romeo And Juliet." OK, I'm going to tell it with a little help from my dad.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: My great-grandmother, Lottie Young, was a Black woman from Louisiana. And my great-grandfather, Harrison Donnella...

M DONNELLA: Had been born in Sicily and came to the United States as an immigrant.

L DONNELLA: Harrison was part of a huge wave of immigrants that came to Louisiana at the turn of the 20th century, traveling by boat from Palermo to the Crescent City.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: So Harrison and Lottie met in New Orleans at the beginning of the Jazz Age, maybe at a dance hall or strolling by the Mississippi, eating a beignet. And it wasn't long before they were truly, madly, deeply in love. But there was a problem because...

M DONNELLA: At the time, in New Orleans, it was illegal, as it was in many places, for a white person and a Black person to get married.

L DONNELLA: Louisiana was one of 30 states where interracial marriage was illegal in the 19-teens and '20s, which meant that as long as they stayed there, Lottie and Harrison couldn't be together - star-crossed lovers. Fate was keeping them apart. But they decided to defy fate.

M DONNELLA: So part of my theory was they came to Chicago to get married because they couldn't in New Orleans.

L DONNELLA: That's right. One night, as the story goes, they packed their bags and, at the stroke of midnight, they stole off to the Windy City in search of a better life. At least, that's how I imagined it. Anyway, in Chicago, Harrison and Lottie could finally be together. They got married in a Catholic church. Soon after, they had their first son, John Donnella, my great-uncle. After that, they had their second son, Joseph Donnella, my grandfather. And life was good, but it wasn't always easy.

M DONNELLA: I knew that they were poor. You know, both my father and my Uncle John, you know, greatly emphasize that they grew up in a very poor background.

L DONNELLA: John and Lottie both worked all the time. They lived in a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago full of books and records, lots of that New Orleans jazz. But here's where it gets a little weird. As the years went by, something kind of funny started happening. People started to think of Harrison, this immigrant from Italy, as Black.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

M DONNELLA: In Chicago - certainly, during the time I grew up in Chicago - even though it was technically lawful for a Black and white person to be married, it was still quite a segregated city racially, and quite socially uncommon and unaccepted, really.

L DONNELLA: My dad's theory was that in order for Harrison and Lottie to live together without causing a stir, it would be natural for people to assume that they were both the same race, which was, of course, going to be Black. Lottie was Black, and they lived in a Black neighborhood, sent their kids to Black schools, hung out with Black people with all different skin tones. And that assumption that Harrison was Black stayed with him the whole rest of his life. Harrison died in 1941 when he was 68 years old. And on his death certificate, no huge surprise, he's listed as colored. But his family, of course, didn't forget the real story of the young Italian man who fell in love in New Orleans, and they passed that down to my dad.

I think that story was especially meaningful for my parents because they were also an interracial couple trying to make it work in challenging social times. My dad, again, is Black, and my mom's people were immigrants from Eastern European Jewish stock. So I think this felt like a kind of nice prelude to their relationship. But, of course, there was something about this story that was not true.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

M DONNELLA: Some of the things that my father said about him turned out to be in conflict with the public records that I was able to ascertain.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: So fast-forward about 40 years. It's 1979. My dad is 25 years old, living in Atlanta, fresh out of law school, and he gets sent on that work trip to New Orleans. And while he's there, he decides to dig into this story a little. So he visits the public library to see if he can find out anything about his grandfather. He finds a bunch of documents, including a birth certificate for Harrison Donnella Jr. - an American birth certificate.

M DONNELLA: Basically, what I found out is that, you know, my father's family had been in this country for several generations. I would say at least four or five.

L DONNELLA: That's when my dad first realized that something was not checking out. Harrison Donnella Jr., my great-grandfather, was not an immigrant, not even the child of immigrants. My dad didn't even know if he was Italian at all. He was able to find the names of Harrison's parents - Harrison Donnella Sr., who grew up in New Orleans, and Anna Stewart (ph), who was from Texas. But earlier than that, it was still a mystery. My dad didn't know where these families came from, or even for sure what race they were. So I wondered if he knew what any of them looked like. My dad told me he's seen a picture of Harrison - just one. In it, he said, Harrison looked like he was in his 20s or 30s, kind of skinny.

M DONNELLA: And kind of pale.

L DONNELLA: It was a black-and-white picture, so the coloring was kind of ambiguous. My dad said Harrison seemed to have a full head of straight brown hair. He was wearing a suit.

M DONNELLA: But, I mean, I looked at the picture. And I think most people would look at it and say it's a white man, you know? But on the other hand, I have seen light-skinned Black people that you would also look at and assume they're white, too.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: And even though that Italian thing turned out to be pretty dubious, even though no one in my family really knew very much about Italy or had any customs whatsoever that were tied to Italy, I and all three of my siblings grew up believing that we were at least a little Italian. And it wasn't just my generation. My dad had believed this story, too. And my dad says my grandfather and great-uncle, Harrison's own kids, they seem to have believed it, too, that their dad was a white immigrant from Italy, although they're dead now, so it's hard to know for sure what they really believed. My dad said he didn't think my grandparents were intentionally making this story up.

M DONNELLA: But part of the reason why it could be compelling was I was talking about people - you know, they come from modest or poor means. Like, the family history can be the link to nobility.

L DONNELLA: According to my dad, in 1930s Chicago, Sicilians had a reputation as being scrappy, hardworking, kind of edgy and cool.

M DONNELLA: So that would provide you with a higher social status in racist Chicago or many racist parts of the United States than being Black.

L DONNELLA: My dad thought maybe Harrison was just light-skinned, pretending to be Italian to get ahead. I also talked to my brother, David, about this, and he had a different theory, a much less romantic one.

DAVID DONNELLA: You know, you hear a lot of Black people talking about having, like, Indian heritage, right? And sometimes - a lot of times, actually - right? - that's - that was used as an explanation for, you know, why is grandma so much lighter-skinned than everybody else?

L DONNELLA: David brought up that part of the reason Black people look all sorts of ways is, of course, because of the legacy of slavery. The vast majority of African Americans have some white ancestry, and part of the reason is that a lot of enslaved Black women were raped by white men. So if Harrison was very light-skinned...

D DONNELLA: It might've been something that he had taken advantage of, the last name Donnella, and said that he - you know, we are Italian, and used that as an excuse - or not excuse, but (laughter).

L DONNELLA: But a more wholesome story than the truth. And I was starting to get a feeling that the truth was going to be kind of hard to stomach.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: So I was determined to learn the truth. But after months of research, I'd run into more dead ends and false leads than I could count. My desk was a mess, covered with half-drawn family trees, wild theories scrawled on the back of old scripts, printouts of documents I found on Ancestry.com. There were days it probably looked like I was a TV detective, slightly crazed, trying to string together death certificates, census records, photographs of gravestones. But in those moments, I feel like I need to know.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: Was Harrison a light-skinned Black man passing as Italian? Was he a white man assumed to be Black? Was the confusion about his identity imposed from other people, or was there something about his past that he was trying to hide? The answers to those questions wound up stretching all the way back to the antebellum South and would completely blow up everything that I and my dad and my family believed about who we were.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

L DONNELLA: It is 7:47 p.m., and I am right now in Baton Rouge in my hotel room. I'm here to go to the Louisiana State Archives tomorrow. Back to Louisiana. I've spent the past few months digging up all the information I can find about my Donnella lineage, and I just have this bad feeling. I'm a little nervous for tomorrow because I don't know what I'll find, and I really don't want to be related to someone who owned slaves.

After talking to my family, I spent a long time thinking about what could be so bad that a family would want to hide it for generations. And one of the worst things I could imagine was having owned slaves. I didn't have any proof that that was the case, but I felt it in my gut. So the next morning, bright and early, I'm there at the archives, ready to go in and find some answers - well, if I can get in. My gear causes a bit of a stir.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: What is that?

L DONNELLA: A microphone.

Excerpt from:
We Aren't Who We Think We Are : Code Switch - NPR

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Posted By admin on July 2, 2020

Eliot Engel votes at a school near his home on June 23, 2020. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

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It is usually a mistake to try to draw historical lessons from events just days old. Its an even dicier proposition when it involves just the 50,000 voters who participated in last Tuesdays Democratic primary in New Yorks 16th district. But Ive been working for years on a book about the history of the Israel/Palestine debate in the United States and Im going to risk it, because I think American politicsspecifically American Jewish politicsis undergoing a significant shift with important implications.Ad Policy

Whether drawn to socialism, communism, anarchism, or plain old liberalism, American Jews have always tended toward the left side of the political spectrum. And for many decades, the founding and defense of the state of Israel proved largely consistent with the social and economic liberal ethos upon which the American Jewish community eventually settled. Sure, the story that American Jews told themselves about Israel was always a distorted one, and the Zionist ideology Israel eventually embraced was far more amenable to democracy and equality in theory than in practice. But wasnt that true of American liberalism as well? Yes, a significant percentage of the 750,000 or so Palestinians who were exiled in 1948 did not leave voluntarily and the ones who remained did not enjoy anything like the democratic rights or economic opportunities that Israeli Jews did, much less the idealistic promises of Israels Declaration of Independence. But there was so much else to celebrate about Israel. Despite being surrounded by nations that wished to destroy it, its pioneers were making the desert bloom, rejuvenating the Hebrew language, producing great literature, and, on the Kibbutzim, proving that socialism was not a pipe dream. In the wake of the Holocaust, it felt to many like a divinely inspired miracle.

In its policies on the world stage, Israel also offered a great deal for liberals to admire. Israel initially avoided taking sides in the Cold War, and, while the United States was stuck in the throes of its McCarthyite Red Scare, the country remained sufficiently democratic and committed to free speech as to allow Arab-supported Communists to be seated in its parliament. Former prime minister Golda Meir would recall that she was prouder of Israels International Cooperation Program and of the technical aid we gave to the people of Africa than I am of any other single project we have ever undertaken. (Tanzanias Julius Nyerere called her the mother of Africa.)

Matters grew far more complicated after the 1967 war and the resulting occupation. Many American Jews drew far closer to Israel than before as both the threat of its potential destruction and the exhilaration of its spectacular victory struck an emotional chord. This, however, had the effect over time of hollowing out their own experience of Judaism and replacing it with Zionism. In the early 1970s, a small group of liberal Jewish intellectuals, including a number of highly respected rabbis, began to raise difficult questions about Israels willingness to make peace with the Palestinians and formed an organization called Breira (Choice in Hebrew). But they found little resonance among most American Jews and were unceremoniously quashed by the mainstream Jewish organizations, who considered public criticism of Israel akin to treason. It was not until 1982when those admirable socialist pioneers had been replaced by the likes of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, and these far less romantic figures launched their invasion of Lebanon and cruel siege of Beirutthat uneasiness with actual, existing Israel reached a sufficiently critical mass that liberals could voice their discontent in public without fear of Spinoza-like excommunication.Related Article

Since then, as anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to the question is well aware, Israel has become a conservative cause. Capitalism and creeping theocracy replaced socialism. The occupation became further entrenched and increasingly brutal. In foreign policy, Israel supported apartheid in South Africa and dictatorships in Latin America. In the United States, it became the pet cause of the most regressive elements: first neocon warmongers, then evangelical anti-Semites, and finally the likes of Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and other avatars of American fascism.

Conservatives, neo- and otherwise, have insisted for over half a century that American Jews should abandon their liberalism and join up with the right wing, where support for Israel is not merely uncontroversial but obligatory. Instead, most liberals chose just to make an exception for Israel while sticking to the rest of their left-leaning agenda. Since his first election in 1988, Eliot Engel was an extreme example of this tendency. Over and over, when Israels lobbyists and their funders demanded 100 percent support for Israel regardless of how much it contradicted everything else about ones beliefs, these liberals caved. As The Nations Ken Klippenstein demonstrated, Engel never met an Israeli priority he couldnt wholeheartedly back. When it came to the Iran nuclear deal, he stood with Benjamin Netanyahu over Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Later, he stood with Trump and Kushner on moving the embassy to Jerusalem and continuing to support the Saudi murderers of Jamal Khashoggi. But being AIPACs patsy was not enough for Engel. He even embraced the racist right-wing leader of the Zionist Organization of Americaan organization that owes its existence to the far-right Trump and Netanyahu funder Sheldon Adelson and whose leader, Morton Klein, recently tweeted of Black Lives Matter, BLM is a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters.

As chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Engel was a macher in Washington but nowhere to be found at home. His power as a committee chair and decades of schmoozing his colleaguestogether with their own sense of self-preservation in opposing almost all primary challengersled to his endorsement in his primary by almost all national Democratic politicians, including many members of the Black caucus. But his absence from the district along with its changing demographics made him the perfect target for the progressive group Justice Democrats, who famously recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Justice Democrats found a remarkable opponent to run against Engelan African American former middle school principal named Jamaal Bowman.Current Issue

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Endorsed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Bowman made it a point of reaching out to Jews. Bowman explained that while he believed firmly in the right of Israelis to live in safety and peace, free from the fear of violence and terrorism from Hamas and other extremists, and support continued US aid to help Israel confront these security challenges, he also believed that Palestinians are entitled to the same human rights, safety from violence and self-determination in a state of their own.

He said he also strongly objects to Benjamin Netanyahus move toward annexation, increased settlement expansion, and racist rhetoric toward minorities. And as for the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement, Bowman opposes it, though not to the point of shutting down its supporters First Amendment rights.

Most political reporters treat what is commonly referred to as the Jewish vote as entirely dependent on how pro-Israelthat is, how hawkish/anti-Palestiniana candidate is. This has long been nonsense. The vast majority of Jewish voters no longer prioritize Israel over issues of economic and social justice. The fact that so many liberal politicians do is largelythough not exclusivelythe product of the corrupt nature of our political funding system and the ability of the AIPACs and the Adelsons to exploit its weaknesses.

The 16th District is just under 12 percent Jewish and nearly 60 percent Black and Latino. With Engel looking vulnerable, the Democratic Majority for Israel, a PAC led by consultant Mark Mellman, spent an estimated $2 million trying to prop up Engel and smear Bowman. Progressive Jewish organizations like If Not Now and The Jewish Votean offshoot of Jews for Racial and Economic Justicecampaigned and raised funds for Bowman alongside Justice Democrats. The progressive Jewish City Council member Brad Lander wrote in an op-ed for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, To my fellow liberal Jews: please dont take the bait. Bowman shares our commitment to a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ensures the self-determination, safety and human rights of both peoples. MORE FROM Eric Alterman

When it was over, Bowman won in a landslide. Engel could not even, it appears, carry the Jews. We dont actually know how much of Bowmans more than 60 percent landslide was attributable to Jewish voters, but one clue comes from the polling station at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale: It went for Bowman 500, Engel 324.

Engel did not lose specifically because his district liked Bowmans position on Israel better than his, though many obviously did. He lost because, given all the crises facing his constituents, Israel had lost its centrality. Engel stayed in Washington during the pandemic to keep his eye on the committee, especially no doubt its reaction to Netanyahus recent push to annex parts of the West Bank, rather than returning home to tend to the needs of his constituents, reeling under the threat of the pandemic and inspired by the politics of racial reawakening. Zionism and liberalism faced off, and liberalism won.

The lesson here for Jews is that the days when AIPAC directives and Mellman-like scare tactics on behalf of Israel could trump commitments to liberal principles are coming to an end. Bowmans victory is one harbinger, and so was the strong support for Sanders and Warren, both of whom supportedwith Bowmanconditioning US aid to Israel, a position thats been anathema to the so-called pro-Israel community for nearly 60 years.

As Israel grows increasingly illiberalembracing not only annexation but also official racism, theocratic governance, and increasingly anti-democratic restrictions on the freedoms of its Arab minoritythe choice for American Jews will grow increasingly stark. Liberal Zionisma cause to which I have committed myself for my entire adult lifehas come to look like a contradiction. The Jews of Israel, alas, appear to have made their choice. Bowmans sweeping victory demonstrates that American Jews will now be making their own.

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In New York, Zionism and Liberalism Faced Offand Liberalism Won - The Nation

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