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Posted By admin on May 7, 2020

They Survived the Holocaust. Now Theyre Confronting the Virus. - Trends Wide

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One got out of Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train to Sweden, never again seeing his parents, who were exterminated in the death camps. One survived two notorious concentration camps, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and was discovered by British troops on a pile of bodies, half-dead with typhus. One endured freezing temperatures and near starvation in a slave-labor camp in Siberia.

David Toren, Faye Becher and Joseph Feingold survived the Holocaust, bearing witness to the seismic events of the last century. Last month, all three died by the same tiny microorganism, isolated once more from their family members. Mr. Toren, who spent his late years fighting to recover paintings looted by the Nazis, was 94; Ms. Becher, matriarch of a close Brooklyn family, was 95; Mr. Feingold, who was the subject of the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary short Joes Violin, about his gift to a young Bronx girl, was 97.

The New York area is home to just under 40,000 Holocaust survivors, down from nearly twice that many in 2011, according to Selfhelp Community Services, which serves Nazi victims. Now those survivors, mostly in their 80s and 90s, face a new menace that targets people like them: In New York State, the coronavirus has killed more than twice as many people age 80 and up as it has people under 60.

This pandemic is the greatest threat to this generation since the Second World War, said Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, which interviews survivors of genocide. Many are only now telling their stories in full, he said.

For Diana Kurz, 83, the virus brought back memories. Ms. Kurz, who has not been infected, escaped Vienna with her mother when she was 4 years old, and grew up steeped in her mothers stories of constant danger. When the coronavirus hit New York, she likened it to those years in Vienna, when any random encounter might be deadly.

I guess I picked that up as a child, she said, that feeling of dread all the time. Thats what it is like now. You never know if other people on the street are going to give you the virus, or were going to turn you in to the Gestapo because you were a Jew.

Yet Ms. Kurz said that her proximity to the Holocaust gave her emotional leverage on the pandemic that others might not have. I knew that the world could change all of a sudden, she said. So it was shocking and terrible, but I never thought the world was so safe.

The lockdown has been just one more adjustment. We get used to living under all kinds of conditions, she said.

This resilience is common among Holocaust survivors, said Gary J. Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center, who studies the mental health of this population. Its the norm, not the exception, he said. Those that survived are a select group.

But he said that life during the pandemic might have an unsettling resonance, especially the isolation from family members. People were confined in camps, and now to some extent were all confined, he said. And if you escaped your life was at risk. So the memories can be triggered.

Joseph Feingold never quite got over the wounds of his Holocaust experiences. As a young boy in Poland, he played violin while his mother sang, but he left both his instrument and his mother behind when he fled, never to see either again. When he got out of the Siberian slave labor camp, he bought a violin for a pack of American cigarettes, his one connection to his life before the trauma. Only recently did he tell relatives that he had nightmares about being in a gas chamber with his mother and a younger brother, who were both killed.

He didnt talk about it much at all, his niece Raima Evan said. It was really painful for him. But when the filmmakers of Joes Violin asked him about his past, he was more comfortable opening up to strangers, Ms. Evan said even giving an extensive oral history to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The risk now is that old age and the coronavirus will make these stories into artifacts rather than living accounts of the world we inhabit, a prospect that is especially troubling as Holocaust denial has risen around the world, said Diane Saltzman, the museums director of survivor affairs.

We consider this population our best teachers on the consequences of unchecked anti-Semitism, unchecked hatred, she said. Theres no substitute for meeting a Holocaust survivor up close and in person.

Michael Becher, whose mother survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, said she talked more about her family than about her time in the camps, but sometimes, after services at the synagogue, she described the horrors before returning to more pleasant memories.

I asked her, Bubbe, is there something you want to tell me based on your experiences? her grandson Ben Becher said. She would well up, close her eyes and shed say, Lets focus on the happy things, or, Be a good person. Thats how she lived her life.

Her decline, at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx, was swift. The home called her son on April 8 to say that her kidneys were suddenly failing, after no history of kidney disease. She died a day later, with no family around her. Family was the thing she cared most about, her son and grandson said.

The cause of death was reported as cardio-respiratory failure, with no reference to Covid-19. Because of social distancing, the family forewent the normal rituals of grieving, including the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. Instead, her son took condolences by telephone or video chat, and only four family members attended her funeral, the rest participating via FaceTime.

To her sons surprise, the improvised rituals were quite satisfying, he said, and were more than most of her relatives had. Those killed in the Holocaust did not have graves at all.

David Toren lost most of his family to Nazis, then lost many of his mementos on Sept. 11, 2001 he had an office in the World Trade Center, from which he was luckily absent that morning.

My father, for all his faults, he was a survivor, his son, Peter, said. He was an eternal optimist, and thats what kept him alive, to never let that get him down.

The elder Mr. Toren was a great raconteur, but he was also closelipped about the Holocaust until he scored a psychic victory against the Nazis in 2016, successfully suing to recover a collection of artwork looted during the war. A dark irony: By then, he was blind and could not see the fruits of his victory. But in interviews about the case, he told journalists things he had never told his children.

Around the start of April, one of his caregivers fell ill with the coronavirus. I knew it was a death sentence, his son said. The elder Mr. Toren started to get hoarse and have trouble breathing, then one day told his son that he was feeling a bit better. It was the last time they talked.

For him to have survived World War II and 9/11, and to die under these circumstances, is unbelievably sad to me, his son said.

For survivors who have eluded the virus, memories of that dark time, never far out of mind, find new salience in the present plague.

Fred Terna, 96, survived four concentration camps and now lives with his second wife, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, in a three-story brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He spent two years in hospitals after the war, and even now, he said, the sight of a uniform makes him anxious.

His experience led him not to fear death, he said, but there was a time in the concentration camps when he worried very much about how he would die. And there was some consolation, and it was that I will die mostly of only one thing: beaten, shot, starved. But it will not be all of them. Here I am, years later whatever it will be that causes my death, it will be only one thing. It will not be a dozen of them. Ive beaten that fear long, long ago.

The other day, Mr. Terna ran an errand with his son, Daniel, and insisted on buying bread, even though he had enough at home to last for weeks. Daniel later asked his mother about it. She told me that bread for Holocaust survivors is survival itself, her son said. Its a lifeline.

And when that thread is broken, by age or by pestilence, many stories will end with it, some never told.

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They Survived the Holocaust. Now Theyre Confronting the Virus. - Trends Wide

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Posted By admin on May 7, 2020

Unorthodox is, if anything, entirely orthodox.

That is to say, the much-viewed and reviewed Netflix offering about a young woman who flees her insular hasidic community follows the typical convention of a number of books and documentaries portraying the ostensibly suffocating lives of hasidim and the quest of some of the braver souls among them to escape into a more wondrous world. Theres a veritable cottage industry of such escapees memoirs.

The earliest such narrative, albeit fiction, was probably Chaim Potoks 1967 novel The Chosen, one of whose protagonists is a hasid who breaks from his family and its expectations to pursue a secular profession. Recent years, though, have seen a parade of horribles trotting behind that book (and exhibiting little of its laudable sensitivity).

Hasidic life, as strange, even bizarre in some ways, as it may seem to the average American, is rich and rewarding to the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands who live it. But a straightforward portrayal of a hasidic citizen hardly makes for compelling entertainment. Who, after all, wants to read about a happy family? Such families may not, as Tolstoy asserted at the beginning of Anna Karenina, be all alike. But they are at least to outsiders rather boring.

The series has garnered glowing reviews. ABC News commentator Susan Donaldson-James called it powerful, and the New York Timess Marisa Mazria-Katz found it stirring. The same papers James Poniewozik described it as a riveting thriller. And the Washington Posts Hank Stuever called the show gripping and carefully constructed.

It also has its critical critics. In these pages, Frida Vizel, herself a refugee from an insular Hssidic life, writes that she doesnt recognize the Unorthodox world where people are cold, humorless, and obsessed with following the rules. Though she has been critical of the Hassidic community, she continues, that doesnt mean everyone goes about muted, serious, drawn, fulfilling the rules and mentioning the Holocaust. She found Unorthodox to be dehumanizing.

Julie Joanes, also here, described the series as four hours of unabashed bashing of Orthodox Judaism that takes practices that have profound spiritual meaning completely out of context, debasing a religion which has stood the test of time for thousands of years.

To me, though, both those who have celebrated the series and those who lambasted it are missing something. Something important.

Their respective judgments of Unorthodox, while useful, perhaps, to the public, ignore something obvious but all the same easily overlooked. Namely, that art and fact are entirely unrelated animals.

Not only is outright fiction not fact, neither are depictions of actual lives and artistic documentaries, whether forged in words, celluloid or electrons. Art can be compelling, beautiful, instructive and enlightening. And when it is any of those things, it deserves praise, at least for its aesthetic qualities.But, at the same time, intelligent assessors of artistic offerings never forget that truth and beauty are not necessarily one and the same. At times they can even diverge profoundly. There is a reason, after all, why the words artifice and artificial are based on the word art.

A brilliant artistic endeavor that has been a mainstay of college film studies courses is a good example. The 1935 film has been described as powerful, even overwhelming, and is cited as a pioneering archetype of the use of striking visuals and compelling narrative. It won a gold medal at the 1935 Venice Biennale and the Grand Prix at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. The New York Times J. Hoberman not long ago called it supremely artful.

And it was. As well as supremely evil, as Mr. Hoberman also explains. The film was Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will a fawning but artistically fascinating documentary about the rise of Adolf Hitler.I mean, of course, no real comparison of that film and Unorthodox. But recalling the earlier offering is worthwhile, as it reminds us of the truism that art, even impressive art, is one thing, and reality, often, quite another.

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What all the critics of Unorthodox are forgetting - Forward

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Posted By admin on May 7, 2020

The new Netflix series, also called Unorthodox, was created by Anna Winger (Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86) and Alexa Karolinski (Oma & Bella). In their version, much of which is in Feldman's native Yiddish, we see a young woman, Esther Shapiro (Shira Haas), flee an arranged marriage that sours as she struggles to consummate the relationship and produce a baby. Esty heads to Berlin with little more than a passport and some cash, and she makes fast friends with a cohort of student musicians from around the world.

Esther Shapiro (Shira Haas) with her husband Yanky (Amit Rahav) in a scene from Unorthodox.Credit:Anika Molnar/Netflix

Back in Brooklyn, Esty's family erupts in disbelief when they hear she is in Germany, of all places. They enact a plan to send her husband Yanky (Amit Rahav) and his mercurial cousin (Jeff Wilbusch) to track her down and force her return.

Here Feldman talks about seeing her story come to life and what it's like to envy your on-screen counterpart.

The TV series is not an exact portrayal of your life, but it still sticks to the original plot lines of the book, namely during the Brooklyn flashbacks. Given how personal the story is, was it unnerving for you to see it on screen?The last two episodes were very hard for me. I thought I was prepared. I had experienced, written and talked about it for years, but these were other people not me interpreting it, putting it into images, playing the parts, and cutting the scenes. For the first time, I was able to see how others would interpret, or receive, the experience, based on the images fed back to me. It's kind of like if you talked to a therapist for years, and at the end of it all, she presented a book with all your experiences. You'd read them and struggle to recognise them because they've been given back to you from a foreign perspective.

You had no formal role in the making of the TV show, but were you tapped for your insights?We had a lot of discussions about when can you sacrifice accuracy and when not. We agreed you can sacrifice accuracy as long as it doesn't impact the narrative. And so we could not get real shtreimels (a fur hat worn by many Satmar men) because the real ones are made of mink; they're expensive, shops wouldn't have sold it to us, and we just didn't have the budget. I was constantly in touch with the costume designer to make fake ones that look real. Making them look real was really hard, and at some point we thought, they're never going to look 100 per cent like the real thing. But the only people who are going to know that are going to be Hasidic Jews. And guess what? It doesn't change the story if the shtreimels are fake.

Netflix series Unorthodox is set in the ultra-orthodox Satmar Jewish community in New York, and is based on Feldman's true story.Credit:Anika Molnar/Netflix

What were you homing in on while watching the TV adaptation?I was concerned about the dignity of Esty, which is also one of the things I was concerned about when writing Unorthodox; how do you write about the things that are most shameful and painful in a way that retains dignity? I was worried how Shira would manage to juggle the experience of humiliation and the kind of shattering of all hope while still maintaining some sense of dignity as a woman and human being. I was so scared for her the whole time as I watched the episodes. I felt really anxious because I knew that if she failed, then it would be like I had failed, like I would not have dignity any more in my story. It's scary to give someone your story for the screen because you can't control it. On the other hand, I knew I didn't want a part in controlling it.

In episode four, during the Passover scene, the grandfather leads the prayers and tells the story of Exodus. No women participate. Yet, if you look at the actions that move Unorthodox forward, almost all are taken by the female characters.Men tell the story and women make the story real. You have the table where the man dictates prayer, belief and narrative, but if you look at the story of Esty, it's women who are making the decisions. It's the women she's interacting with who are basically the driving force behind community life, the engine behind the story.

And do you feel that's how things are in the Williamsburg community where you were raised?I remember being surprised when I went to Sarah Lawrence [College in New York], and I took a class on feminist philosophy in which everybody told me, "You left the patriarchy!" I was like: "Well, if I left the patriarchy, where were all the men in this patriarchy? Why were they always bent over books while the people who oppressed me were women? Why was it that the people who hurt me the most were my aunt, mother-in-law, female teachers, the female mikvah attendant, the female Kallah teacher and the female sex therapist? Why was it always the women that I felt hurt and betrayed by?"

I had so little interaction with men, and the little I had made me see men as very passive and stuck. When I married my husband, I just remember being so impressed in a bad way by the fact that he was completely in the grips of his mother. It took him a very long time to free himself from that.

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How do you thread the needle and tell a story like this one without vilifying an entire culture?In German they have this great saying, "alle ber einen Kamm scheren", which is a way of saying "generalising about everyone through the prism of one experience". I think Anna and Alexa were even more concerned and sensitive than I was about this. I'm coming from this world. All I can really tell is my own story and perspective. I'm almost disadvantaged because I have this extremely subjective perspective. But Anna and Alexa have this incredible advantage of not coming from there.

And what about you?For me, it was more a question of, "Oh my God, how am I ever going to tell my story in a way that people will believe and understand me, and it will reach them." Whereas Anna and Alexa were like, "How are we going to make the story come across in all of its unique specificity without somehow telling a story about an entire community or tradition?" I think that the solution to this problem is zooming in and staying zoomed in. When you're watching the series, you don't really meet anyone far beyond Esty's family. The community is there in the background, but it never confronts you. You have a rabbi, but you don't see her in school. You don't see anyone in the synagogue. It's not about explaining the world in which the story takes place. It's just about the story itself.

Was there a particular scene that stood out as your favourite?The scene when Esty explodes in the bedroom with her husband, because it's the most powerful. She finally says everything that has been going on in her head. She finally lets loose: It's like a volcano. To me, the series climaxes in this moment. I also felt jealous because I never had a moment like that I had many small moments where I tried to express myself, and I tried to speak up for myself, but I love how she just lets it all out. It really touched me, and it made me wish I had been the same way. It made me admire her. I hope that other people will see that scene and want to be like her, too.

The New York Times

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'I thought I was prepared': Deborah Feldman's past comes to life in Unorthodox - Sydney Morning Herald

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Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected a teachers claims of race, ethnicity and religion discrimination under federal and state law, finding that his termination was legitimately based on his teaching anti-Semitic views to his students.

In Ali v. Woodbridge Township School Dist. et al., the teacher, who was an Egyptian Muslim, was terminated following complaints that his instruction minimized or denied the Holocaust, and included links to anti-Semitic writings. He sued for discriminatory termination and a hostile work environment, among other things, alleging that the principal had made disparaging comments about his ethnicity (calling him Arabia Nights, Big Egypt, and Mufasa from the Lion King).

The Third Circuit began its opinion by flatly asserting that, while there may be nuances in history that create equivocation about certain historic events, no such nuances exist with regard to the Holocaust; rather It is a historic fact. The Third Circuit thus rejected the teachers claims, finding no pretext for discrimination in the schools articulated reasons for his termination, as the teacher did not deny that he engaged in the anti-Semitic conduct, including teaching Holocaust-denial, without remorse. The Third Circuit further found that the alleged disparaging name-calling was neither sufficiently severe nor pervasive to create a hostile work environment.

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There are no nuances to be discerned regarding the Holocaust; Holocaust-Denier's Discrimination Claim Dismissed - Lexology

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Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

One got out of Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train to Sweden, never again seeing his parents, who were exterminated in the death camps. One survived two notorious concentration camps, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and was discovered by British troops on a pile of bodies, half-dead with typhus. One endured freezing temperatures and near starvation in a slave-labor camp in Siberia.

David Toren, Faye Becher and Joseph Feingold survived the Holocaust, bearing witness to the seismic events of the last century. Last month, all three died by the same tiny microorganism, isolated once more from their family members. Mr. Toren, who spent his late years fighting to recover paintings looted by the Nazis, was 94; Ms. Becher, matriarch of a close Brooklyn family, was 95; Mr. Feingold, who was the subject of the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary short Joes Violin, about his gift to a young Bronx girl, was 97.

The New York area is home to just under 40,000 Holocaust survivors, down from nearly twice that many in 2011, according to Selfhelp Community Services, which serves Nazi victims. Now those survivors, mostly in their 80s and 90s, face a new menace that targets people like them: In New York State, the coronavirus has killed more than twice as many people age 80 and up as it has people under 60.

This pandemic is the greatest threat to this generation since the Second World War, said Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, which interviews survivors of genocide. Many are only now telling their stories in full, he said.

For Diana Kurz, 83, the virus brought back memories. Ms. Kurz, who has not been infected, escaped Vienna with her mother when she was 4 years old, and grew up steeped in her mothers stories of constant danger. When the coronavirus hit New York, she likened it to those years in Vienna, when any random encounter might be deadly.

I guess I picked that up as a child, she said, that feeling of dread all the time. Thats what it is like now. You never know if other people on the street are going to give you the virus, or were going to turn you in to the Gestapo because you were a Jew.

Yet Ms. Kurz said that her proximity to the Holocaust gave her emotional leverage on the pandemic that others might not have. I knew that the world could change all of a sudden, she said. So it was shocking and terrible, but I never thought the world was so safe.

The lockdown has been just one more adjustment. We get used to living under all kinds of conditions, she said.

This resilience is common among Holocaust survivors, said Gary J. Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center, who studies the mental health of this population. Its the norm, not the exception, he said. Those that survived are a select group.

But he said that life during the pandemic might have an unsettling resonance, especially the isolation from family members. People were confined in camps, and now to some extent were all confined, he said. And if you escaped your life was at risk. So the memories can be triggered.

Joseph Feingold never quite got over the wounds of his Holocaust experiences. As a young boy in Poland, he played violin while his mother sang, but he left both his instrument and his mother behind when he fled, never to see either again. When he got out of the Siberian slave labor camp, he bought a violin for a pack of American cigarettes, his one connection to his life before the trauma. Only recently did he tell relatives that he had nightmares about being in a gas chamber with his mother and a younger brother, who were both killed.

He didnt talk about it much at all, his niece Raima Evan said. It was really painful for him. But when the filmmakers of Joes Violin asked him about his past, he was more comfortable opening up to strangers, Ms. Evan said even giving an extensive oral history to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The risk now is that old age and the coronavirus will make these stories into artifacts rather than living accounts of the world we inhabit, a prospect that is especially troubling as Holocaust denial has risen around the world, said Diane Saltzman, the museums director of survivor affairs.

We consider this population our best teachers on the consequences of unchecked anti-Semitism, unchecked hatred, she said. Theres no substitute for meeting a Holocaust survivor up close and in person.

Michael Becher, whose mother survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, said she talked more about her family than about her time in the camps, but sometimes, after services at the synagogue, she described the horrors before returning to more pleasant memories.

I asked her, Bubbe, is there something you want to tell me based on your experiences? her grandson Ben Becher said. She would well up, close her eyes and shed say, Lets focus on the happy things, or, Be a good person. Thats how she lived her life.

Her decline, at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx, was swift. The home called her son on April 8 to say that her kidneys were suddenly failing, after no history of kidney disease. She died a day later, with no family around her. Family was the thing she cared most about, her son and grandson said.

The cause of death was reported as cardio-respiratory failure, with no reference to Covid-19. Because of social distancing, the family forewent the normal rituals of grieving, including the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. Instead, her son took condolences by telephone or video chat, and only four family members attended her funeral, the rest participating via FaceTime.

To her sons surprise, the improvised rituals were quite satisfying, he said, and were more than most of her relatives had. Those killed in the Holocaust did not have graves at all.

David Toren lost most of his family to Nazis, then lost many of his mementos on Sept. 11, 2001 he had an office in the World Trade Center, from which he was luckily absent that morning.

My father, for all his faults, he was a survivor, his son, Peter, said. He was an eternal optimist, and thats what kept him alive, to never let that get him down.

The elder Mr. Toren was a great raconteur, but he was also closelipped about the Holocaust until he scored a psychic victory against the Nazis in 2016, successfully suing to recover a collection of artwork looted during the war. A dark irony: By then, he was blind and could not see the fruits of his victory. But in interviews about the case, he told journalists things he had never told his children.

Around the start of April, one of his caregivers fell ill with the coronavirus. I knew it was a death sentence, his son said. The elder Mr. Toren started to get hoarse and have trouble breathing, then one day told his son that he was feeling a bit better. It was the last time they talked.

For him to have survived World War II and 9/11, and to die under these circumstances, is unbelievably sad to me, his son said.

For survivors who have eluded the virus, memories of that dark time, never far out of mind, find new salience in the present plague.

Fred Terna, 96, survived four concentration camps and now lives with his second wife, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, in a three-story brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He spent two years in hospitals after the war, and even now, he said, the sight of a uniform makes him anxious.

His experience led him not to fear death, he said, but there was a time in the concentration camps when he worried very much about how he would die. And there was some consolation, and it was that I will die mostly of only one thing: beaten, shot, starved. But it will not be all of them. Here I am, years later whatever it will be that causes my death, it will be only one thing. It will not be a dozen of them. Ive beaten that fear long, long ago.

The other day, Mr. Terna ran an errand with his son, Daniel, and insisted on buying bread, even though he had enough at home to last for weeks. Daniel later asked his mother about it. She told me that bread for Holocaust survivors is survival itself, her son said. Its a lifeline.

And when that thread is broken, by age or by pestilence, many stories will end with it, some never told.

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They Survived the Holocaust. Now Theyre Confronting the Virus. - The New York Times

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Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

A squall over the contents of the Gove familys bookshelves sent me reeling back to two formative experiences about free speech and its near cousin, freedom of reading. They hail from contrasting ends of the ideological spectrum. The first was studying in the old East Germany, where taking a work by Orwell or Nietzsche out of the university library became a complicated ritual of applications to the Poison Cupboard, where writers deemed too dangerous forgeneral consumption were kept. Such applications were grudgingly granted and permissions were recorded, ensuring that the state could form its judgement on undesirable reading habits.

A few years later, I wrote about the libel trial brought against the Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt by David Irving, a historian who had blossomed from provocative revisionist to into a fully fledged apologist for Hitler and excuse-maker for the mass killings of Jews during the Third Reich. Oddly for someone in this line of work, he objected to being called a Holocaust denier. The outcome, as The Times put it, was that history had its day in court and history was vindicated.

So where does an Irving book belong now that it resides on the scrapheap of historical veracity? Not on the shelf of a Cabinet minister, twitch the scolds. They have confected a case in which a snapshot of a bookshelf featuring Irving turned fast into a Jaccuse moment for those with an idle moment and a grudge. It is, in my book, perfectly fine to dislike a minister or his ideas as ardently as you like. It is a very bad idea to base that on his or her books. The bad faith bit is the implication that to own a book whose arguments are bad and wrong suggests affinity which the author of his ideas. In which case, my shelfload of books on Fifties Stalinism and the archives of an eventful Erfurt communist party congress (its all light relief at my place) will see me court marshalled too, though probably not by the same noisy voices.

The bookshelf police really mean that there must be something wrong with anyone who wants to read Irving or any work they find distasteful or wrong. Yet the whole premise of Lipstadts takedown of his twisting of the truth was that she took the book very seriously indeed and enjoined others to do so (for which reason she remains opposed to censorship).

Anne McElvoy

Probably the worst argument in an admittedly generous bunch is that this dangerous book-owning political family is trying to say something dubious. But what? A coded clarion call to the shabby leagues of Holocaust deniers from a minister who is accused, more plausibly, of being a bit too uncritical of Israel? Coherence, begone.

No, I think its pretty simple, really: the notion that you can judge or condemn people by the books they have read is a shorthand for some other argument you cannot win by more forthright means. To understand the weft of ideas which make up study of history or politics, we need to read as widely as possible. So lets dispense too with the dim notion that there is nothing to learn for reading bad books like this one. The advocate of free reading should reply, Says who? and keep turning the pages.

Richard Evans, the former regius professor of history and key witness in the Irving case, has been a fierce foe of Goves in arguments about history on the school curriculum. They disagree on a lot on wider politics too. And here is his take on the bookshelf test: I was asked to take part in a campaign to remove Irvings works from university libraries. I refused. People, including students, should be free to make up their own minds.

Challenging the mystique of bad books requires knowledge of what they get wrong (I knew a lot more about Holocaust denial having read Irvings convoluted evasions).

In lockdown, the books in our Zoom backdrops might seem like idle distraction from watching our colleagues twitches and glazed expressions, a way of marketing our erudition or, in more entrepreneurial cases, the authors own writings. They do, however, say something essential about the blessings of pluralism and need to guide against its casual erosion. Having books on your shelves is not the same as agreeing with their contents. A wonderful idea this, hard fought for down the centuries and the best retort to the new battalions of armchair censors.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor atThe Economist

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Why you should never judge a person by the books on their shelves - Evening Standard

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Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

After reading news from around the world, as I try to do before breakfast every day, and before I hunkered down, late on Monday, to resume working on a book-length manuscript, I searched the hollows of my mind (which is pretty empty to begin with) for something to write about that has nothing to do with the dreaded pandemic. There had to be something.

CLOSE

I have always imagined being an essayist, in the truest sense of the word. In other words, like anyone who has ever walked the earth, I have a view on many things, but I remain ignorant of very many more. Like quantum mechanics; how everything in the universe works at a level smaller than an atom. Just writing that sentence hurt my head. But seriously, the essay, you see, is in part research, in part critical writing, and a method of embodying the writers experiences before and during the process of writing.

I often describe this as the act of writing. And so, many of us who try to eke a living from writing some of whom hang by the flimsiest of threads (cough) have spent hours at the keyboard writing about the damn pandemic for longer than I am arsed to bother. There has to be something else. Then it popped up on my Twitter feed (where else?); a discussion, broadly, about what the books on your shelf say about you.

One discussion I followed was about a picture of Michael Goves bookshelf, which contained a history book by David Irving, a notorious Holocaust denier. Gove is a minister in the UK Prime Ministers cabinet. The discussion spread across Twitter as quickly as you could say virus.

So, here are a few questions. Does your bookshelf define you? Do you have to read only those works that confirm your biases? If you have a Quran on your bookshelf, does it make you a (better) Muslim? Does ownership of the Bible make you a (better) Christian? Do writers like David Irving deserve pride of place among your books next to, say, Isaiah Berlin? Or, if you arrange your books alphabetically, does David Irving deserve a place beside John Irving, followed by Carl Jung, and Arthur Koestler?

Just by the way, whenever I do online commentaries for TV, I try to do them without showing my books as a way to parade knowledge. Know what I mean? Actually, I take personal pride in making sure that everything I write (outside Twitter) has some factual, or logical basis, or I can produce literature, or a coherent argument on every statement or observation.

Which reminds me of the brief thrill I had in a discussion with a friend and former colleague, to which I will come below. Personally, I dont think people should be defined by the contents of their bookshelves. Well, not unless they have only 100 books on a shelf, each one of which is a denial of the Holocaust, plus a copy of Mein Kampf. Its safe to draw some conclusions from that. The same can also be said of people who have only Marxist writers on their shelves.

Bookshelves can, and they cannot, give us an insight into someone. However, without also knowing the persons work, output or their ideas, beliefs and values, the contents of someones bookshelf are probably meaningless as a measure of who they are and what their most dearly held beliefs are. I would venture a guess that every lefty (and many economists who claim theyre non-ideological) has a copy of Thomas Pikettys Capital on their shelf somewhere, but not everyone has actually read it. It might as well be a doorstop, or a paperweight. The same goes for George Orwells 1984, Animal Farm, or Tolstoys War and Peace. Very many people will claim to have read these books, but very few have actually read them.

About a decade ago, The Guardian published results of a survey, Our Guilty Secrets: The books we only say weve read. The following results were published: George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four comes top in a poll of the UKs guilty reading secrets. Asked if they had ever claimed to read a book when they had not, 65% of respondents said yes and 42% said they had falsely claimed to have read Orwells classic in order to impress. This is followed by Tolstoys War and Peace (31%), James Joyces Ulysses (25%) and the Bible (24%).

My personal view is that I give Holocaust deniers no oxygen. The same goes for apologists for slavery. There are probably a few others. There are some things that have no middle ground and for which you do not have to be fair and balanced, or hear both sides. This is a type of intellectual compromise where you listen to both sides, which amounts to the permissibility of, say, killing only three million Jews, as opposed to more than six million, or you take only half of African slaves to work the plantations in the Americas because we have to listen to both sides and compromise. (I would like to insert an expletive here).

So, you can have any books on your bookshelf, and some folk will judge you by that. Personally, I think you should read as much as you can, with one big caveat. I read a book a work, I should say that stripped about two years off my life. I would discourage people from starting to read, Prousts In Search of Lost Time. If you do, dont blame me if you cant get through it or if you are angry (with yourself) for starting to read the damn book in the first place. Its worse (in terms of actual reading) than Sartres Nausea, which, sadly, I have read about four times. It is a fine work, it should be said.

To conclude, then, let me share a conversation I had with a friend over the weekend. She sent me a note.

Have you read, Darkness at Noon. So sick and tired of everything being about the virus, I gave her (on WhatsApp) a review (without her permission) of almost everything Koestler had written: from his passage into communism, to his anti-communism (see the two volumes of his biography, Arrow in the Blue and Invisible Writing); to the horrors of Stalinism (Darkness at Noon); his dabbling in parapsychology, and messing with discredited Lamarckian Theory (The Case of the Midwife Toad; The Roots of Coincidence); his fascination with Mysticism (The Lotus and the Robot); The Act of Creation; Arrival and Departure; The Yogi and the Commissar; The Sleepwalkers; the Ghost in the Machine, and The Thirteenth Tribe It was absolutely thrilling to talk to someone, albeit by WhatsApp, about something that had nothing to do with this damn Pandemic. I was so excited, that I stopped typing and sent voice notes instead

So whats the moral in all of this?

As a writer, an essayist and a columnist (and sometimes broadcaster), I dont give oxygen to Holocaust deniers, or people who say things like blacks started apartheid or Africans sold slaves to Europeans. There are very many great books out in the world, and there are some terrible books. Read as many of them as you can. As mentioned, above, there are instances when you can judge someone about the content of their bookshelf, but seriously, I read voraciously, publications that range from Haaretz in Israel, to Malaysiakini in Malaysia, The Straits Times in Singapore, The Hindu Times in India, Al Ahram in Egypt, Colombia Reports, the South China Morning Post I think I am better informed for that. DM

Postscript: Dont blame me if you start reading In Search of Lost Time, and regret its length notwithstanding it is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.

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Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

The neo-Nazi group, National Socialist Movement, that had scheduled a rally in Williamsport for April before it was canceled has requested another date to gather in Brandon Park.

"We are planning to be in Ulysses on July 17 and Williamsport on July 18," Burt Colucci, NSM "commander," confirmed on Friday. "Mayor Slaughter has not given us an approval or denial on the permit application as of yet for Williamsport. The last time he waited until the last 30 days before the event to announce it. It would be very unwise for him to deny the permit at this juncture. Not only because of the ridiculous amount of case law there is pertaining to these very events, but because he already approved the last permit. We would pursue a court order if it was denied this time."

Before covid-19 forced shutdown of all public gatherings, the National Socialist Movement (NSM) announced its intention to have a rally in Brandon Park on April 18.

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The NSM had to cancel its April rally in Williamsport and the associated "convention," that was to be held at the Ulysses, Pa. home of Daniel Burnside. Burnside is well-known in the Ulysses area for his highway-side home covered in hate symbols. The fact he is titled as NSM "regional director" is also painted on his house.

Right now, Colucci says he's in control of the NSM. The organization has been in turmoil in recent years, with a Black man temporarily controlling the organization's corporate papers in 2019.

The NSM was led for 25 years by Jeff Schoep, made leader in 1994 at the age of 21. In 2019, Schoep signed over the paperwork for the NSM to James Stern, a Black activist, without telling any other NSM members.

Schoep was one of many white supremacist figures named in a wrongful death lawsuit, after the 2017 Charlottesville rally when Heather Heyer was killed by a car driven into a crowd. It seems he was trying to get responsibility for the NSM off his hands, with hopes of legal leniency to follow.

Stern had plans to transform the website for the NSM into a Holocaust history website, according to the Washington Post.

Stern died in November 2019, and the NSM is still recovering from the shock of having its longtime leader sign over the neo-Nazi group to a Black man.

This is what the Southern Poverty Law Center had to say about the NSM in its 2019 Year in Hate report:

the National Socialist Movement (NSM), long the biggest Nazi formation of all, collapsed after its leader, Jeff Schoep, renounced the movement and reportedly signed papers transferring its assets to James Stern, a Black preacher in California who said he would shut down the group. Sterns death in October threw the NSM further into chaos. Now, longtime member Burt Colucci, the groups former chief of staff, claims that he has control.

Colucci told NorthcentralPa.com that Stern was "outsmarted" and the organization is in his control. Though he's the leader, Colucci has no idea how many members the NSM has at the moment, claiming that it's a security issue.

The NSM's political message is this, Colucci says, aligning in at least one way with the broad left:

"The message is exactly this: that Donald Trump and Republican conservatives in this country are too weak to handle Americas problems. Their track record has proved that over and over again. nobodys any wealthier, nobody's any better off, nobodys any safer."

In Colucci's telling, at least, the NSM stands for "addressing problems at home," rather than foreign wars. But this being a neo-Nazi organization, the hatred for Jews runs deep.

For anyone with Jewish heritage interested in joining a neo-Nazi organization, the NSM does allow up to 25 percent Jewish heritage.

"We don't do any DNA test per se," Colucci said. "Eventually they'll be guilted into submission or if were not sure as far as if theyre 24 or 26 percent Jewish at that point we just take a good look at them. A lot of that is if theyre sympathetic to homosexuals and blacks and everything else because thats how Jews are."

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Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

May 1, 2020 | 1:07 p.m.

The 805 Homeless Helpers was founded by Santa Barbara teens, Asher and Miles Sedlin, when their mother saw that many of the organizations that normally look after the homeless had to shut down due to COVID -19. The homeless were hungry and cold, so the Sedlins knew they had to act quickly.

Within 10 days, 805 Homeless Helpers raised enough money to provide 300 meals to the homeless community, as well as collecting much needed clothing, bedding and supplies.

The Sedlin brothers also found a perfect partnership with Congregation B'nai B'rith and its homeless program.

805 Homeless Helpers is currently marketing for the needs of the Santa Barbara homeless population. The Sedlin brothers pick up the donated items outside of peoples homes, sort and label the donations, then deliver them directly to the temple.

Congregation B'nai B'rith takes 805 Homeless Helper items and its own collection to Pershing Park every Wednesday, where they feed the homeless and pass out the supplies.

The Sedlins continue to source donations though their marketing efforts and are now doing door-front pickups for Congregation B'nai B'rith members.

They brothers are also in the process of expanding their services to Adams Angels,which also collects and distributes clothing, food and other necessities for the local homeless population.

805 Homeless Helpers is asking community members from Carpinteria to Goleta to gather non-perishable food and gently used clean clothing, blankets, camping equipment, toiletries, backpacks, and suitcases, and schedule a free pick-up by emailing [emailprotected] Donation slips available upon request.

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Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

Pittsburgh city attorneys have filed a motion to appeal a judge's order striking down three gun control ordinances passed following a deadly shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.

The Associated Press reported Monday that court documents, filed last week, argue that state law does not expresslysay that cities do not have the authority to pass their own gun control ordinances. A judge found in October that state law took precedence over local law and struck down the three ordinances, which would have banned some high-capacity magazines, armor-piercing rounds, and assault weapons.

Neither courts nor lawmakers, the city's attorneys reportedly wrote, expressly said or held that cities are completely powerless to act in this area.

A city's ability to legislate gun control policy may be limited, but it is not extinguished," they continued, according to the AP.

An attorney representing the plaintiffs in the 2019 case which resulted in the ordinances being overturned slammed the city for trying to push the case to a higher court.

The example that this sets for our youth that it is acceptable to violate the law if you do not agree with it, instead of petitioning to have the law changed is a stark reminder that the city and its elected officials believe they are above the law," saidJoshua Prince, according to the news service.

Agunman killed 11 people during a rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg in October of 2018.

The suspect,Robert Gregory Bowers, 46, has pleaded not guilty todozens of state and federal charges. A trial is tentatively set to begin later this year.

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