Jewish American Heritage Month

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Israeli security forces remove protesters blocking the entrance of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem on Monday. Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Israeli security forces remove protesters blocking the entrance of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem on Monday.

Israeli lawmakers on Monday approved controversial changes to the judiciary, part of a package of proposed actions that's roiled the country in protests in recent months and sparked opposition from broad swaths of Israeli society.

The vote in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, capped a monthslong campaign by Israel's far-right government to weaken the judiciary, a move critics say pushes the country toward authoritarianism.

The measure passed uncontested after opposition lawmakers shouted "Shame!" at their colleagues before walking out in protest. Ahead of the vote, lawmakers were unable to reach a compromise with the political opposition.

This law cancels the reasonableness clause, which allowed Israel's Supreme Court to block government appointments and decisions by elected officials that it deemed to be unreasonable and not in the public interest.

Now, the high court has loss that ability, which legal experts say was a crucial check on political power in Israel.

Israeli lawmakers celebrate by taking a selfie with Justice Minister Yariv Levin, center right in the foreground, after approving a key portion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's divisive plan to reshape the country's justice system, on the floor of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem on Monday. Maya Alleruzzo/AP hide caption

For instance, the court recently used this power to block a politician who had been convicted of tax offenses from becoming Israel's finance minister.

Under the new law, the government will be able to hire and fire public servants without the intervention of the court.

Legal experts say that may also have an effect on the ongoing corruption trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who proposed the changes to the judiciary months ago.

Israel has no constitution and a unicameral legislature, and the weakening of political guardrails could produce what's known as a "majoritarian" government, according to the American Jewish Committee.

That means the "narrowest possible majority, perhaps in the heat of the moment, could upend minority rights and make other fundamental changes in the law by overturning a Supreme Court ruling," the group said.

In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Monday's vote "unfortunate" and said it passed with the "slimmest possible majority" of lawmakers.

"We understand talks are ongoing and likely to continue over the coming weeks and months to forge a broader compromise even with the Knesset in recess," she added. "The United States will continue to support the efforts of President Herzog and other Israeli leaders as they seek to build a broader consensus through political dialogue."

President Biden had expressed concern over the plan and told Israeli media on Sunday that he had urged the country's political leaders not to rush through the law.

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The US visa waiver deal turns a blind eye towards Israel's history of ...  The National

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The First Orthodox Jew Close to Making the NBA Gets the Doc Treatment  Rolling Stone

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Its historic role

Judaism has played a significant role in the development of Western culture because of its unique relationship with Christianity, the dominant religious force in the West. Although the Christian church drew from other sources as well, its retention of the sacred Scriptures of the synagogue (the Old Testament) as an integral part of its Biblea decision sharply debated in the 2nd century cewas crucial. Not only was the development of its ideas and doctrines deeply influenced, but it also received an ethical dynamism that constantly overcame an inclination to withdraw into world-denying isolation.

It was, however, not only Judaisms heritage but its persistence that touched Western civilization. The continuing existence of the Jews, even as a pariah people, was both a challenge and a warning. Their liberation from the shackles of discrimination, segregation, and rejection at the beginning of the modern era was understood by many to be the touchstone of all human liberty. Until the final ghettoization of the Jewit is well to remember that the term ghetto belongs in the first instance to Jewish historyat the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, intellectual contact between Judaism and Christianity, and thus between Judaism and Western culture, continued. St. Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin with the aid of Jewish scholars; the exegetical work of the scholars of the monastery of St. Victor in the 12th century borrowed heavily from Jewish scholars; and the biblical commentary of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes) was an important source for Martin Luther (14831546). Jewish thinkers helped to bring the remarkable intellectual achievements of the Islamic world to Christian Europe and added their own contributions as well. Even heresies within the church, on occasion, were said to have been inspired by or modeled after Judaism.

In the modern world, while the influence of Jews has increased in almost every realm of cultural life, the impact of Judaism itself has diminished. The reason for this is not difficult to find. The Gentile leaders who extended emancipation to the Jews at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th were eager to grant political equality, but they also insisted that certain reforms of Judaism be accepted. With the transformation of Judaism into an ecclesiastical institution, largely on the model of German Protestant churches, its ideas and structures took on the cast of its environment in a way quite unlike what had ensued in its earlier confrontations with various philosophical systems. Indeed, for some, Judaism and 19th-century European thought were not merely congruent but identical. Thus, while numerous contributors to diverse aspects of Western culture and civilization are to be found among Jews of the 20th and 21st centuriesscientists, politicians, statesmen, scholars, musicians, artiststheir activities cannot, except in specific instances, be considered as deriving from Judaism as it has been sketched above.

The two central events of 20th-century Jewish history were the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. The former was the great tragedy of the Jewish people, while the latter was the light of a rebirth, which promised political, cultural, and economic independence. The rest of the world has been forced to reconsider and reorient its relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people because of these two events. At the same time, the centres of Jewish life have moved almost exclusively to Israel and North America. The virtual absence of official anti-Semitism in North America allowed Jews to flourish in pursuits previously the preserve of Gentiles. Along with these developments, theological considerations and practical realities, such as interfaith marriage, have made Jewish religious culture a point of interest for many non-Jews.

In the early 21st century, Jewish religious life continued to fragment along ideological lines, but that very fragmentation animated both moral imagination and ritual life. While ultra-Orthodox Judaism grew more insular, and some varieties of Liberal Judaism moved ritual practice even farther away from traditional observance, a vital centre emerged, running from Reform Judaism to modern Orthodoxy. This centre sought to understand Judaism within a broader context of interaction with other cultures while leaving unaffected the essentials of belief and practice. Predicting the future of Judaism is not an easy or enviable task, but there is reason to hope that the world will continue to draw upon the religious and cultural traditions of Judaism, both past and present.

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1978 American television miniseries directed by Marvin J. Chomsky

AmericanTV series or program

Holocaust (full title: Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss) (1978) is an American television miniseries which aired on NBC over four nights, from April 16 April 19, 1978.

It dramatizes the Holocaust from the perspective of the Weiss family, fictional Berlin Jews Dr. Josef Weiss (Fritz Weaver), his wife Berta (Rosemary Harris), and their three childrenKarl (James Woods), an artist married to Inga (Meryl Streep), a Christian woman; Rudi (Joseph Bottoms); and teenage Anna (Blanche Baker). It also follows Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a fictional "Aryan" lawyer who becomes a Nazi out of economic necessity, rising within the SS and gradually becoming a war criminal.

Holocaust highlights numerous events which occurred both up to and during World War II, such as Kristallnacht, the construction of Jewish ghettos, and, later, the construction of death camps and the use of gas chambers.

The miniseries won several awards and received positive reviews, but was also criticized. In The New York Times, Holocaust survivor and political activist Elie Wiesel wrote that it was: "Untrue, offensive, cheap: As a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived."[1] However, the series played a major role in public debates on the Holocaust in West Germany after its showing in 1979, and its impact has been described as "enormous".

The series has been widely credited with bringing the term "Holocaust" into popular usage to describe the extermination of the European Jews.[2][3][4]

1935 Karl and Inga celebrate their wedding in Berlin. Erik Dorf gets a job in the SS as right-hand man to top-level Nazi Reinhard Heydrich (David Warner).

1938 Dorf warns Dr. Weiss to leave Germany. Berta is adamant about staying. During Kristallnacht, Berta's father is attacked. Dorf impresses Heydrich by orchestrating the pogrom and gets promoted. Karl is arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. As a Polish citizen, Dr. Weiss is deported to Warsaw. The Weiss home is seized by a Nazi. Berta and the children move in with Inga's Nazi-supporting family. Rudi runs away.

1939 Dorf rises within Nazi society as he helps Heydrich plan the transport of Jews to occupied Poland. In Warsaw, Dr. Weiss serves as an Elder in the Judenrat (Jewish council) and works as a doctor serving the Jewish community.

1940 On New Year's Eve, a distraught Anna runs away and is soon raped by SA stormtroopers in the street. Catatonic afterwards, she is committed to the Hadamar killing centre, where she and others suffering mental illness are gassed under the Nazi Action T4. Rudi reaches German-occupied Prague. He falls in love with Helena (Tovah Feldshuh). They decide to run away together.

1941 Berta is transported to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reunited with Dr. Weiss, she becomes a schoolteacher. Inga travels to Buchenwald, where family friend Mller (Tony Haygarth) is an officer. In exchange for transferring Karl from the quarry, where he is being worked to death, Mller forces Inga to submit to sex. Heydrich and Dorf order the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen to Russia to begin massacring Jews. Dorf finds himself forced to participate in an execution. After one of Dr. Weiss's nurses is executed for smuggling food for the ghetto's children, his brother Moses joins a Zionist resistance group. In occupied Kiev, Rudi and Helena witness the Babi Yar massacre, along with Dorf. Dr. Weiss and the ghetto elders learn from a spy that the Nazis are exterminating the Jews. Dorf and family enjoy Christmas around Berta's stolen piano. They find Weiss family photos hidden in it. Dorf tells his daughter to burn them. Mller torments Karl with the knowledge that he extracts sex from Inga once a month, in exchange for passing her letters to Karl.

1942 Heydrich and Dorf convene the Wannsee Conference, at which the "Final Solution" is planned. Rudi and Helena join up with Jewish partisans.

1942 Karl is transferred to the propaganda art studio at Theresienstadt, the paradise ghetto in Czechoslovakia, maintained by the Nazis to fool Red Cross and neutral observers. Karl and the other artists secretly sketch the brutal reality of the camp. While living among the partisans, Rudi marries Helena. Dorf and Heydrich accompany Himmler to a mass shooting. Disgusted by how grisly it is, Himmler demands a more efficient murder method be found. Dorf attends a demonstration of a gas van. The partisans ambush a group of Ukrainian Trawnikis. Rudi is traumatized when he must kill one. Moses smuggles guns into the Warsaw ghetto. Himmler, Heydrich and Dorf plan the expansion of Auschwitz into a mass killing center. Inga convinces Mller, who has fallen in love with her, to denounce her and have her sent to Theresienstadt, where she joins Karl. After Heydrich's assassination, Dorf oversees construction of the death camps, choosing the pesticide Zyklon B for mass extermination. Some of Karl's sketches are discovered by the Nazis. Dorf has Karl and the other artists tortured, but they refuse to reveal where the rest of their sketches are. Dr. Weiss and the ghetto elders are ordered to select 6000 Jews a day for transport to Treblinka for extermination.

1942 Dorf asks for a transfer back to Berlin, which is denied. His wife reassures him that what he is doing is right. Dorf tours Auschwitz and observes the murder of Jews in the gas chambers. Dr. Weiss is caught saving Jews from the transport trains by falsely claiming they have contagious illnesses. He and Berta are sent to Auschwitz. Rudi is injured when the partisans attack a German barracks. Karl learns Inga is pregnant, just before he is sent to Auschwitz.

1943 Moses and the Zionists start the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Berta and the women of her barracks are gassed. After three weeks of resistance, the Uprising is suppressed. Moses and the survivors are shot to death. Dorf learns his uncle is protecting Jews on a road construction project. Dorf has them all, including Dr. Weiss, sent to the gas chamber. Most of the partisans, including Helena, are killed during a botched attack on German troops. Rudi is sent to Sobibr death camp. He escapes during the Sobibr uprising.

1945 As Auschwitz is evacuated, Karl is found dead in his barracks, slumped over one final sketch. Dorf is captured by the United States Army. Told he will be tried for war crimes, he says he was only following orders. Confronted by photographic evidence of the atrocities, he commits suicide by taking a cyanide pill. Rudi finds Inga in Theresienstadt after its liberation. She introduces him to her baby with Karl. She has named him Josef, after Dr. Weiss. She shows Rudi Karl's drawings, which she hid from the SS. They are to be given to a museum in Prague as a record of the Holocaust for future generations. Rudi joins a group smuggling Jewish orphans into Palestine.

Holocaust was produced by Robert Berger and filmed on location in Austria and West Berlin. It was broadcast in four parts, from April 16 to April 19, 1978. The series earned a 49% market share. It was also well received in Europe.[citation needed]

The 9 hour program starred Fritz Weaver, Meryl Streep, James Woods, and Michael Moriarty, as well as a large supporting cast. It was directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, whose credits included ABC's miniseries Roots (1977). The teleplay was written by novelist-producer Gerald Green, who later adapted the script as a novel.[5]

Artworks seen during the series's closing credits were created by LithuanianJewish artist Arbit Blatas.[6] Karl's paintings were created by Austrian painter Georg Eisler.

The miniseries was rebroadcast on NBC from September 10 to September 13, 1979.

In the U.S., Holocaust was released as a Region 1 DVD by Paramount Pictures and CBS Home Entertainment on May 27, 2008. The release of the Region 2 DVD followed on 15 August 2010. A disclaimer on the DVD packaging states that it may be edited from the original network broadcast version and it is shorter at 446 mins. The Region 4 DVD is unusually in native NTSC format, not having been converted to PAL. No information about the cut in footage has been released.

In the U.S. and Canada, a 452-minute version was released as a 2-disc Blu-ray set on September 24, 2019.[7]

Some critics accused the miniseries of trivializing the Holocaust. The television format was believed to limit how realistic the portrayal could be. In addition, the fact that NBC made a financial gain as a result of advertising resulted in charges that it had commercialized a vast tragedy.[citation needed] The producers of the series rebutted these charges by stating that it educated the public by raising its awareness of the Holocaust. With the exception of films such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and The Hiding Place (1975), this was the first time in which many Americans had seen a lengthy dramatization of the Holocaust.

The television critic Clive James commended the production. Writing in The Observer (reprinted in his collection The Crystal Bucket), he commented:

The German Jews were the most assimilated in Europe. They were vital to Germany's culturewhich, indeed, has never recovered from their extinction. They couldn't see they were hated in direct proportion to their learning, vitality and success. The aridity of the Nazi mind was the biggest poser the authors had to face. In creating Erik Dorf they went some way towards overcoming it. Played with spellbinding creepiness by Michael Moriarty, Erik spoke his murderous euphemisms in a voice as juiceless as Hitler's prose or Speer's architecture. Hitler's dream of the racially pure future was of an abstract landscape tended by chain-gangs of shadows and crisscrossed with highways bearing truckloads of Aryans endlessly speeding to somewhere undefined. Dorf sounded just like that: his dead mackerel eyes were dully alight with a limitless vision of banality.[8]

The historian Tony Judt described the series as "the purest product of American commercial television its story simple, its characters mostly two-dimensional, its narrative structured for maximum emotional impact" and he also wrote that, when it is shown in Continental Europe, it was "execrated and abominated by European cinastes from Edgar Reitz to Claude Lanzmann" and he responded to these negative reviews of the miniseries by noting that "these very limitations account for the show's impact", especially in West Germany, where it was aired over four consecutive nights in January 1979 and coincided with public interest in the Majdanek trials.[9] The viewership was estimated to consist of up to 15 million households or 20 million people, approximately 50% of West Germany's entire adult population. Judt describes the public interest as "enormous".[9]

After each part of Holocaust was aired, a companion show was aired in which a panel of historians answered viewers' questions by telephone. Thousands of shocked and outraged Germans called the panels. The German historian Alf Ldtke wrote that the historians "could not cope" because thousands of angry viewers asked how such acts had happened.[10] Subsequently, the Gesellschaft fr deutsche Sprache ranked the term "Holocaust" as the German Word of the Year for the publicity associated with it.[11]

During an introductory documentary that preceded the first broadcast of the series in Germany, Peter Naumann, then a right-wing terrorist with two accomplices, tried to blow up the transmission towers of the ARD transmitters at Koblenz and near Mnster (station Nottuln), to prevent the broadcast. At the Koblenz transmitter, the supply cables were damaged, and the transmitter failed for one hour. Several hundred thousand television viewers could not see the program during this time.[12] Naumann later became a politician with the NPD.

The Polish community in the United States found the miniseries controversial and inaccurate. It argued against the portrayal of soldiers as Polish military who supervised transports of Jews and killed them during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It noted that many Poles were also killed in the concentration and death camps.[13] Around the world, various unrepentant Nazis also raged against the miniseries: Ernst Zundel led a fierce and unsuccessful attempt to have the show banned from airing in Canada, and a group of American Nazis who were aligned with James K. Warner tried and failed to have NBC grant them a "right of response" which would have granted them equal prime-time coverage to present their "alternate" view of World War II events.

In 1982, during the rule of the military dictatorship of Chile, the series was censored by Televisin Nacional de Chile, beginning a row that ended when its programming director Antonio Vodanovic renounced the channel.[14]

Holocaust won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Limited Series, as well as acting awards for Meryl Streep, Moriarty, and Blanche Baker. Morton Gould's music score was nominated for an Emmy and a Grammy Award for Best Album of Original Score for a Movie or a Television Program. Co-stars David Warner, Sam Wanamaker, Tovah Feldshuh, Fritz Weaver, and Rosemary Harris were all nominated for, but did not win, Emmys. However, Harris won a Golden Globe Award (for Best TV Actress Drama) for her performance, as did Moriarty (for Best TV Actor Drama).

Holocaust was watched by an estimated 120 million viewers in the United States when it was first broadcast in 1978.[15]

The series has been widely credited with bringing the term "Holocaust" into popular usage to describe the extermination of the European Jews.[2][3][4]

In 1979, Holocaust was broadcast in West Germany, where it was watched by an estimated 20 million people, then 36% of the nation's television-owning population. Later that same year, the West German parliament removed the statute of limitations on war crimes.[4] The series is credited with educating many Germans, particularly what was then the younger generation, about the scale of common people's participation in the Holocaust.[15] Der Spiegel stated that Holocaust "managed to do what hundreds of books, plays, films and TV broadcasts, thousands of documents and all concentration camp trials in three decades of postwar history had failed to do: to inform Germans about the crimes committed against the Jews in their name in such a way that millions were shaken."[4]

On its fortieth anniversary, in January 2019, the series was rebroadcast on German television, in connection with Alice Agneskirchner's documentary, How the Holocaust Came To TV, which described the impact of the broadcast on the original German audience.[16] A survey at the time showed that fewer than half of all German school children had any knowledge of the Auschwitz concentration camp.[15]

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NEW YORK -- A Florida woman who drained an 87-year-old Holocaust survivors life savings by posing as a love interest and then lived lavishly off the $2.8 million she got was sentenced Thursday to over four years in prison.

Peaches Stergo, 36, of Champions Gate, Florida, was described by U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos as unspeakably cruel and motivated by greed as he announced the sentence in Manhattan federal court.

Given a chance to speak, Stergo said: I'm sorry. She pleaded guilty in April to wire fraud, admitting that she drained the life savings of a man she met on a dating website seven years ago.

Stergo began asking the once successful businessman for money in May 2017, claiming she needed money to pay a lawyer who was refusing to release the payout from a bogus injury settlement, prosecutors said. He paid her $25,000. Over the next four years, she used lies to coax the man to write 62 checks totaling over $2.8 million until he was broke, they added.

She got him to send as much as $50,000 at a time as she told desperate lies and faked letters from a bank employee to back up her claims, prosecutors said.

They said Stergo traveled to New York to visit the victim in his Manhattan apartment, falsely claiming she was a Florida nanny and her name was Alice and failing to reveal that she was in a long-term relationship with another man and had two children.

As the victim lost his life savings and was forced to surrender his apartment, Stergo used his money to live a life of luxury, traveling on expensive trips to Europe and Las Vegas when she wasn't living in her gated community or using her boat and numerous cars, including a Corvette and a Suburban, prosecutors said.

They said she spent nearly all of the man's money, including thousands of dollars for expensive meals, gold coins and bars, jewelry, Rolex watches and designer clothing.

As part of her sentence, she faces a $2.8 restitution and forfeiture order.

Peaches Stergo callously defrauded an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who was simply looking for companionship," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. "But she did not get away with it. As todays sentence demonstrates, perpetrators of romance scams will be held to account for their crimes.

Prosecutors said Stergo had mocked her victim when she told her real lover in a message that the victim had said he loved her. They said she followed that message with lol. And they said that when he ran out of money, she convinced him to sell his inventory of diamonds and borrow from others.

Prosecutors did not identify the victim, but they said he suffers from cognitive decline, among other health issues, and is frail.

In a letter to the judge, the victim, who was 6 when he lost both of his parents in the Holocaust and who moved to the United States in his early 20s, wrote: As a Holocaust survivor, I have endured unspeakable pain and loss in my life, but never did I imagine that I would be subjected to such a heartless betrayal in my old age.

Stergo's lawyer, Ann Marie Fitz, wrote in a sentencing submission that Stergo is a partner to her long-time boyfriend and mother to two teenage boys and that her boyfriend describes her as a great mother and a born-again Christian.

She is not the cold-hearted person the government and media have made her out to be," the lawyer wrote. "There was a genuine, caring relationship that Ms. Stergo had with the victim in this case she spent holidays with him, she took care of him when he was ill and, as the victims cousin described, she was doting on him.

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The White House expressed strong disapproval of remarks made by Fox News host Greg Gutfeld on The Five while discussing slavery and Florida's new teaching standards.

During the Monday show, Gutfeld responded to fellow panellist Jessica Tarlov, who occupies the liberal seat on the program. Tarlov raised concerns about the new Florida curriculum, particularly a provision that has faced significant criticism. The controversial part of the curriculum stipulates that students should be taught that slaves developed skills that could sometimes be utilized for their own benefit.

As Gutfeld drew intense backlash for his remark, the White House also condemned these comments made on the show, raising further debate about the new teaching standards in Florida.

According to a White House statement reported by CNN, Andrew Bates clarified a crucial point that Americans should fully grasp: there was absolutely nothing good about slavery or the Holocaust. He emphasized the need to unite rather than divide people with harmful rhetoric, and he stressed that Americans deserve access to the truth and the freedom to learn, without facing book bans and falsehoods.

FAQs:

Q1:What is Holocaust? The Holocaust, occurring during World War II, was a genocide carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. It involved the systematic murder of approximately six million European Jews, which accounted for around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The Holocaust also encompassed the persecution and killing of other groups, such as Slavs (including ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens, and Soviet prisoners of war), the Roma, the "incurably sick," political and religious opponents, gay men, and Jehovah's Witnesses. The tragic events spanned from 1941 to 1945, marking a dark period in history.

Q2:What is Auschwitz Memorial? The Auschwitz Memorial, located in Owicim, Poland, serves as a museum and memorial site. It was once the grounds of two German Nazi concentration camps, namely Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. These camps were established in 1940 and 1941 and tragically became the sites where millions of individuals, predominantly Jews, but also including Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others, were imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

Disclaimer Statement: This content is authored by a 3rd party. The views expressed here are that of the respective authors/ entities and do not represent the views of Economic Times (ET). ET does not guarantee, vouch for or endorse any of its contents nor is responsible for them in any manner whatsoever. Please take all steps necessary to ascertain that any information and content provided is correct, updated, and verified. ET hereby disclaims any and all warranties, express or implied, relating to the report and any content therein.

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A Bollywood film has been accused of trivialising and demeaning the deaths of millions of Jews killed during the Holocaust by using Auschwitz as a metaphor for relationship problems, with the main character declaring that were all a little like Hitler during a fantasy scene set in the concentration camp.

Bawaal, which was directed by the well-known Indian film-maker Nitesh Tiwari, tells the story of a history teacher who is embarrassed by his new wifes epilepsy. As they travel together to Europe to visit historic second world war sites, they fall in love with each other.

However, film critics and Jewish organisations have raised issues about the portrayal of the characters visits to some of the most horrific sites of the Holocaust, which are entwined in their love story. The trailer makes reference to the war within, and in one scene the couple visit Auschwitz. During the sequence one of them says: Every relationship goes through its Auschwitz.

In another fantasy scene in a gas chamber, the couple are pictured in striped pyjamas and the male lead says: Were all a little like Hitler, arent we? in reference to people never being satisfied.

The film prompted strong rebuke from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an organisation that works to protect the human rights of the Jewish community. The NGO called on Amazon to remove it from the Prime Video streaming platform and to stop monetising the Holocaust. Amazon has yet to respond.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean and the director of Global Social Action at the NGO, said: Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of mans capacity for evil.

He described Bawaal as a banal trivialisation of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

The film has received damning reviews from audiences online, who accused it of normalising Hitler. It has also been condemned by film critics. In a one-star Guardian review, Bawaal was described as misjudged and in spectacularly poor taste.

However, as the reviewer noted, Asian history has long been used or misused as a backdrop for lighter or romantic scenes in western films.

The Nazi atrocities of the second world war and the Holocaust are barely taught in Indias schools. The Holocaust is not mentioned by name in textbooks, and in the past some Indian textbooks glorified Hitler.

Tiwari has defended the film, saying he never intended to be insensitive and that he had used the backdrop of second world war history to bring something new to Indian audiences.

I am a bit disappointed with the way some people have comprehended it, he told an online film site. It would never be my intention to be insensitive in any which way. Dont we see Ajju and Nisha [characters] getting completely troubled and moved by what they see in Auschwitz? They do.

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1. Bollywood film accused of trivialising Holocaust with Auschwitz scenes  The Guardian
2. Bawaal: Bollywood film accused of trivialising Holocaust  BBC
3. Israel ambassador reacts to Auschwitz- Holocaust reference of Bawal: Won't watch  Hindustan Times

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America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. Those were the words spoken by then-Israeli citizen, now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2001 to a group in the northern West Bank settlement of Ofra, picked up by a hot mic. Fast forward two decades, and it appears the prime minister was rightthe U.S. public is movable, though not exactly in the way he thought. Polling over the past few years indicates that U.S. support for Israel is on a steady decline, while sympathy for Palestinians in the eyes of Americans has been on the rise.

America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. Those were the words spoken by then-Israeli citizen, now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2001 to a group in the northern West Bank settlement of Ofra, picked up by a hot mic. Fast forward two decades, and it appears the prime minister was rightthe U.S. public is movable, though not exactly in the way he thought. Polling over the past few years indicates that U.S. support for Israel is on a steady decline, while sympathy for Palestinians in the eyes of Americans has been on the rise.

Part of this is because Israel, once a bipartisan cause, has now become strongly associated with the right. Years of mutual infatuation between the U.S. Republican Party and Israels far-right Likud party culminated in the Trump administrations internationally condemned decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Israel to the disputed city of Jerusalem. In turn, the recent rise of a progressive flank within the Democratic Party has produced politicians such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal, who are both willing to openly criticize the nature of the Israeli state.

The old impulses are still there, as evidenced by the pushback after Jayapals recent description of Israel as a racist state. But more Americans than ever, especially among the young, share Jayapals assessment of Israel. A Gallup poll released in March and a University of Maryland poll released in April show, respectively, that Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis, and that more than a fifth of Democrats view Israel to be a state with segregation similar to apartheid. The Jewish Electorate Institute has found that nearly 35 percent of Jewish Americans agreed that Israels treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States.

Columnists and analysts have been keen to agree that Netanyahus multiple premierships over the past three decades have played a major role in disillusioning Americans. Since 1996, Netanyahu has served more than 15 years as prime minister in three nonconsecutive terms. His longest term lasted from 2009 to 2021, during which he publicly clashed with former U.S. President Barack Obama and embraced his far-right successor, Donald Trump. Today, Bibi is overseeing the most right-wing government in Israels history.

Yet it would be a mistake to attribute the shift in public opinion to Netanyahus rocky relationship with Obama or his love affair with Trump. While Netanyahus presence in the public consciousness has helped polarize the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict around partisan lines, the data suggests that this steep decline in support for Israel cannot be pinned on just one individual. The Gallup poll in particular, conducted entirely within the month of February, shows that there was an approximate 11-point shift in public sentiment in just the past 12 months. This is notable because Netanyahu only returned to office in December of last year, indicating that the government of change led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in rotation did little to meaningfully improve the image of the Israeli state in the eyes of Democratic voters in the United States.

Beyond the heightened polarization along partisan lines, evidenced by the various polls since May 2021, there is also a stark generational divide. While baby boomers and Generation X poll as more sympathetic to Israelis, millennials have been shifting toward Palestinians. Gallup polling finds that millennials are now evenly divided, with 42 percent sympathizing more with the Palestinians and 40 percent with the Israelis. These statistics come at a moment when Israel is more integrated into the region than ever before, with the notion of an Israel surrounded by enemies fading away as states such as the United Arab Emirates and Sudan normalize relations and deepen cooperation via the Abraham Accords. In contrast, the Palestinians are further away from an end to occupation than they were before the First Intifada of the 1980s, and with formal annexation on the horizon, the widening gap in strength has become difficult to ignore.

Even among evangelical Christians, support for Israel is plummeting. Over the span of just three years, from 2018-21, support for Israel among younger evangelicals dropped from 69 percent to 33 percent. Younger Christians, generally more racially diverse and conscious of the morally corrosive qualities of figures like Trump, are diverging from their elders on issues such as immigration and climate change, and their views on Israel are no exception.

Public outcry from the international community in response to the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli army, as well as the dispute between the Israeli state and the Palestinian Jerusalemite residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, have been massive contributing factors to these shifts in perception as well. In the United States, nearly half of all Democrats under 34 years old disapproved of President Bidens handling of the Israel-Gaza crisis in 2021. Many Democratic members of Congress, spearheaded by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, continue to demand answers in the wake of Israels decision not to prosecute the soldiers responsible for Abu Aklehs death. In the case of the latter, systemic discrimination and state-backed displacement against Palestinians has inspired Black activists across the United States to draw comparisons between the Black Lives Matter movement and the cause of Palestinian liberation.

This more intersectional approach reflects the increased awareness of what life under the occupation is like, especially after the killing of Iyad al-Hallaq, an autistic Palestinian man, by Israeli police occurred the same week that George Floyd was murdered in the United States. The jarring parallels in brutality and subjugation have caused intra-Jewish conversations about how to approach civil rights in America and Israel-Palestine as more people in both regions are drawing connections between them. Unlike the case of George Floyd, the policeman who killed Iyad was acquitted of all charges, renewing outrage and despair about the systematic lack of accountability. With social medias prominent role, more activists in social justice movements have found themselves exposed to the ways in which the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza produces conditions that amount to injustice for Palestinians.

The ascent of the progressive wing in the Democratic Party has further strengthened the Palestinian perspective in U.S. politics. In 2018, the United States saw the first two Muslim women elected to the House of Representatives. One of them is Tlaib, a Palestinian woman whose grandmother is living under Israeli military occupation. Tlaibs vocal support of Palestinian self-determination has helped facilitate a new tendency within Democratic politics that dissents from the more mainstream, bipartisan consensus touted by Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party.

Political analyst Abe Silberstein noted that its not just Tlaib anymore who strongly supports Palestinian self-determination. Whereas in years past, commemoration of the Nakbathe displacement of Palestinians by the creation of the Israeli state in 1948would have been completely taboo on Capitol Hill, Tlaibs Nakba Day event was hosted by Jewish Sen. Bernie Sanders in a Senate hearing room and also saw a prominent Black congresswoman, Cori Bush, in attendance. Progressive organizations within Jewish American society, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and J Street as well as more broadly left-wing organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, are beginning to take a sharper line toward Israel, thus applying pressure to the Democratic Partys consensus and moving some Democrats, even moderates such as Betty McCollum and Andre Carson, toward a proactive approach.

The situation is only likely to get more divisive. With a government of self-described fascist homophobes and militant followers of the ultranationalist Meir Kahanes ideology, Israel teeters on the edge of embracing an openly Jewish supremacist, anti-democratic political program that risks alienating even traditional Democratic supporters of Israel. As the occupation continues to crystalize and de facto annexation takes place under the auspices of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, criticism of Israels role in the conflict is likely only to grow in scope and harshness, especially given the recent and rapid deterioration in the relationship between the Israeli government and the Jewish diaspora in the United States. It is unlikely that these actions can be easily reversed, especially without pressure from Washington and the broader international community.

In recent months, settler-led pogroms in the Palestinian villages of Huwara and Turmus Aya have further shocked the consciousness of Americans: Jewish, Arab, and otherwise. The U.S. public is sensing that the status quo of 2023 resembles something more of an unequal, unjust one-state reality than a complicated war between two nations. Today, the Palestinian narrative of a desire for the end of the occupation and some arrangement of self-determination or equality is compelling to progressives. Tomorrow, barring a dramatic change in the trajectory of the conflict, that narrative is bound to become compelling to more and more people. Perhaps America can be moved in the right direction.

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Young Americans Are Swinging Toward Palestines Cause

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