Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on August 13, 2022

SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF COIN SPINNING)

MARY CHILDS, HOST:

In the game of congressional dysfunction bingo, I would propose that just maybe the free space in the middle should be the three words that seem to come up over and over and cause problems for Republicans and Democrats. It is the carried interest loophole.

KENNY MALONE, HOST:

The carried interest loophole - it's a tax thing, a tax break. We're going to keep saying loophole because that's how it's become known. But it is a way that wealthy people - often people who manage things like hedge funds, venture capital firms, private equity companies - a way that those people are able to pay lower taxes. Specifically, it lets them say, you know, like, no, no, no, my money coming in here isn't income, which has a high tax rate. It's this other thing called carried interest that has a much lower tax rate.

CHILDS: And the Inflation Reduction Act - nay, the climate bill, nay, also, Build Back Better - was going to sort of close this loophole - or, like, start to think about closing it. But then, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema made her fellow Democrats take it out.

MALONE: But, you know, all of this got us thinking that a tax loophole - it does feel like this thing that's born of a conspiracy hatched over expensive steaks with butter on them. And I mean, maybe it's not not that, but in the case of carried interest, it is so much more than that. The carried interest loophole in particular is the result of decisions and indecisions and literally 1,000 years of history.

(SOUNDBITE OF HARUN LYICIL'S "WHAT DA FUNK")

MALONE: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Kenny Malone.

CHILDS: And I'm Mary Childs. Today on the show, we chase the carried interest loophole across time and space to bring you some of the greatest moments in carried interest history - three vignettes that explain how we ended up where we are today.

MALONE: It is a proper epic. We've got medieval ships and pirates. We've got the great tax dodge free-for-all of the 1950s, and we've got a genius artist whose medium is the tax code.

(SOUNDBITE OF HARUN LYICIL'S "WHAT DA FUNK")

MALONE: OK, carried interest loophole - today, we want to show you how America's favorite tax loophole was kind of assembled piece by piece over time. And to show that, we are going to travel to three of the great moments in carried interest loophole history.

CHILDS: Great moment No. 1 - the creation of carried interest - no loophole yet, just carried interest.

(SOUNDBITE OF DENNIS WINSLOW, ROBERT J. WALSH AND RONN L. CHICK'S "FUN IN THE SUN")

CHILDS: The year was '63, and topping the old charts was everybody's favorite - Moshedarai (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Hebrew).

MALONE: Yeah, of course, we are in the year 1163. There is apparently a golden age of Hebrew poetry in Islamic Mediterranean countries - hence this poem.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Hebrew).

CHILDS: But also in the Mediterranean in the 1100s, there is more and more commerce.

FRANCESCA TRIVELLATO: My name is Francesca Trivellato. I - do you want me to say more about my profession?

MALONE: Yeah. Francesca is at the Institute for Advanced Study - she's a historian - and she knows boatloads about boatloads, like medieval shipping and trade. And Francesca thinks our carried interest origin story very likely begins earlier. But it's really starting to become commonplace in the 1100s in Mediterranean shipping.

TRIVELLATO: So say you're in Alexandria, in Egypt.

MALONE: OK.

TRIVELLATO: And you have a shipment of pepper...

MALONE: Oh.

TRIVELLATO: ...To send to Venice.

CHILDS: In the 1100s, the Mediterranean Sea was like an enormous flea market. You had a bunch of ships bopping around from Egypt to Greece to Italy. And Francesca says the merchant would get off and sell or trade whatever they had - for example, pepper.

MALONE: Is pepper a - is it fancy, or is this just, like, a spice...

TRIVELLATO: It's a luxury good, yes.

MALONE: OK, a luxury good.

TRIVELLATO: Right in the Middle Ages, people had very sophisticated culinary tastes.

MALONE: So I'm imagining ships full of pepper, spices - I don't know - perfumes, perhaps? Are these wonderfully smelling ships that we're on?

TRIVELLATO: I think anything before very recent time was very smelly.

MALONE: (Laughter).

CHILDS: So we've got a bunch of stinky ships bobbing around the Mediterranean Sea.

MALONE: And Francesca says this is the 1100s Mediterranean Sea, where there's a much higher risk of shipwreck and a higher risk of other bad things.

TRIVELLATO: Pirates, you know, sickness, drunkness (ph), mutiny.

MALONE: And it is from this commercial, risky slurry, Francesca says, that we can see carried interest really emerge.

CHILDS: Here is the basic situation. Our pepper merchant - let's say he's been at this for 20 years, done quite well. And he's starting to think, do I really want to leave my family again, get on this boat for weeks and weeks, and sell things at port, what with all the drunkenness and the mutiny and the smell?

MALONE: Yeah, sure. And so, you know, the merchant of pepper must find someone else to do all of that - a family member, a younger merchant, maybe even a ship's captain who wants a little side hustle.

CHILDS: Whoever it is, this new traveling merchant - they're going to be taking lots of risks.

MALONE: Plus, for the older, rich, back on shore merchant, this new arrangement does introduce a whole new kind of risk.

TRIVELLATO: Complete incompetence - I mean, the guy can just sell the goods and disappear from the face of the earth.

MALONE: Right.

TRIVELLATO: So the traveling merchant need to have some interest in his future career.

MALONE: Right, yes, that's right. There needs to be some incentive for the traveling merchant to not sell all of this pepper and then just peace out and...

TRIVELLATO: Take the money and run, yes.

CHILDS: And one solution that seemed to emerge was this The stay-at-home merchant would promise the traveling merchant a share of the pepper profits - maybe even half of the profits.

MALONE: Sure, that guy could still run away, but it's probably better business in the long run to be good and keep doing these trips and keep getting a cut of those pepper profits.

CHILDS: And this - this cut of the pepper profits - this is a version - maybe one of the very early versions - of what we now know as carried interest.

MALONE: Is it carry, like, is it as simple as, like, you're carrying goods, who, like...

TRIVELLATO: That's beyond my speculation ability.

MALONE: Beyond your - totally fair.

TRIVELLATO: I was hoping to find out by listening to PLANET MONEY.

MALONE: Oh, no (laughter).

CHILDS: I mean, it makes sense - right? - like, carrying stuff, interest, skin in the game, you know?

MALONE: Yeah. Email us if you've got better etymology. But yes, carried interest is a profit share given in a shared risk-taking venture. And this first shows up in shipping arrangements, and it shows up again and again in history.

CHILDS: Francesca had a theory that, even back then, carried interest may have been controversial. In the 1100s, the question would have been, hang on, is this carried interest arrangement actually a secret kind of loan?

MALONE: Yeah. Yeah, loans - loans with interest, particularly - were a big deal. In early Islamic and Christian and Jewish societies, loans were a big no-no, as in illegal. And, you know, if you really hate loans, there is a case that carried interest looks a little like a loan.

CHILDS: Right? You've got the old rich merchant, and is he not kind of loaning all of his pepper to the young merchant?

MALONE: Yeah, and then, you know, the young merchant has to pay him back plus profits.

TRIVELLATO: Any sum repaid in addition to the principal on a loan is usury.

MALONE: Usury meaning illegal loaning, basically - even if your principal is a bunch of pepper. It could count.

CHILDS: So Francesca suspects that this carried interest arrangement had to be carefully labeled - like, no, no, this isn't a loan. This is a partnership - two merchants just trying to make it in this stinky, wrecky (ph), risky business.

TRIVELLATO: And therefore, the amount of money that the resident merchants invested and the forms of rewards that both he and the traveling agent were entitled to were understood as a form of shared risk. In that way, the charge of usury was bypassed.

MALONE: Now, over the next thousand years, a lot of really smart people would spend a lot of really smart time finding their own ways to carefully label this carried interest arrangement. Which brings us to...

CHILDS: Great moment in carried interest loophole history No. 2 - the loophole part of the carried interest loophole.

MALONE: And to be clear, this isn't just about carried interest. This is really about how the tax code wound up riddled with exemptions and carveouts and - yeah, sure - loopholes, if you will.

STEVEN BANK: I'm Steven Bank. I'm the Paul Hastings Professor of Business Law at UCLA School of Law.

CHILDS: Steve specializes in tax law - used to practice it.

BANK: I've written a lot about the democratization of tax avoidance in the '50s and '60s - you know, when did tax avoidance become respectable?

MALONE: When did tax avoidance become respectable? The year is 1950s.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ABBOTT AND COSTELLO SHOW")

BUD ABBOTT: You have the brain of a low-grade moron.

MALONE: Comedians Abbott and Costello are considered funny and have been doing a surprising number of taxation bits.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ABBOTT AND COSTELLO SHOW")

ABBOTT: Got to get rid of that $3,000 or we'll have to pay income tax on it.

LOU COSTELLO: I wonder how I can get rid of this money.

ABBOTT: Wait a minute, I've got it. We'll give $1,000 apiece to the first three people we meet.

MALONE: That is tax avoidance.

CHILDS: It's pretty amazing.

MALONE: So one might ask, why are there arguably funny bits about tax at all in the 1950s? And, well, leading up to 1950, there had, of course, been decades of wars. And to help pay for those, personal income taxes in the United States had gone up and up. And the top tax rate in 1950 was 91%.

CHILDS: So if you were a really rich person, there'd come a point where every time you earned a new dollar, you kept 9 cents and gave 91 cents to Uncle Sam.

MALONE: And yet - and yet Uncle Sam, i.e. politicians, they didn't necessarily want all of this. They didn't want these wartime rates, but they were scared to cut them because it would look like a break for the rich.

BANK: At that time, that was, like, kind of embarrassing. So Eisenhower didn't want to - nobody wanted to lower the top rate, but they all recognized that the top rate was outrageous. So the way to deal with that without lowering the top rate was to provide a lot of exemptions, to overlook a lot of things.

MALONE: As in overlook some of the creative ways that rich people might try to avoid paying taxes.

CHILDS: So we've got this huge incentive to avoid income tax and politicians willing to look the other way. The 1950s had the perfect conditions for a tax-avoidance bonanza.

MALONE: So rich people call in the tax lawyers and the accountants who basically, you know, had two main tools. No. 1, asking for those exemptions or deductions or deferrals, that was a big one - getting special language in the actual tax code. It was like tax Oprah. You get a tax break. You get a tax break. You get a tax break.

CHILDS: One infamous example - somehow, the tax code ended up with a tax break for, like, film executives who happened to leave their jobs but had been there for 20 years and happened to have held profit shares for 12 of those years. And everyone was like, wait, this only applies to L.B. Mayer - you know, the second M in MGM.

MALONE: It was good to be a rich person with tax people. And tool No. 2 that they got access to - capital gains conversion. Capital gains is the tax-y (ph) way of saying money you make when you sell something like property or an investment. And if that sounds vague, maybe usefully vague, then you might be a great tax lawyer because, you know, what is capital gains versus personal income, really?

BANK: So just to use a simple example - if I sell you tax advice, you pay me; that's ordinary income. What if I write a book on how to avoid taxes and then I sell the rights to the book to somebody else - right?

MALONE: OK.

BANK: So I've sold the rights. I haven't sold the book. Like, I'm selling intellectual property, right?

MALONE: OK.

BANK: Can that be now capital gains 'cause I'm selling an asset? Right? Rather than - you know, I'm not selling, like, copies of it.

MALONE: So, you know, there are ways to convert personal income-y (ph) stuff to capital gains-y (ph) stuff. And you might have wanted to go through all of this trouble in the 1950s because the top rate for personal income, again - 91% as opposed to 25% for capital gains.

CHILDS: So creative tax solutions became a superhot industry. Today, people sometimes complain that, like, our best and brightest end up working just to make Facebook marginally more addictive or whatever. Well, in the '50s, people had the same complaint except it was about geniuses helping rich people avoid taxes.

BANK: Large portion of the tax industry was devoted to conversion. If you could just recharacterize - didn't even have to...

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The origin story of the carried interest tax break (or carried interest tax loop : Planet Money - NPR

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Posted By admin on August 13, 2022

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Buried inconspicuously in this weeks parshah is a short sentence with explosive potential, causing us to think again about both the nature of Jewish history and the Jewish task in the present.

Moses had been reminding the new generation, the children of those who left Egypt, of the extraordinary story of which they are the heirs:

Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of? Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived? Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? (Deut. 4:32-34.)

The Israelites have not yet crossed the Jordan. They have not yet begun their life as a sovereign nation in their own land. Yet Moses is sure, with a certainty that could only be prophetic, that they were a people like no other. What has happened to them is unique. They were and are a nation summoned to greatness.

Moses reminds them of the great Revelation at Mount Sinai. He recalls the Ten Commandments. He delivers the most famous of all summaries of Jewish faith:

Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. (Deut. 6:4) He issues the most majestic of all commands: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. (Deut. 6:5) Twice he tells the people to teach these things to their children. He gives them their eternal mission statement as a nation: You are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the Earth to be His people, His treasured possession. (Deut. 7:6)

Then he says this:

The Lord did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you are the fewest of all peoples. (Deut. 7:7)

The fewest of all peoples? What has happened to all the promises of Bereshit, that Abrahams children would be numerous, uncountable, as many as the stars of the sky, the dust of the Earth and the grains of sand on a seashore? What of Moses own statement at the beginning of Devarim?

The Lord your God has increased your numbers so that today you are as numerous as the stars in the sky. (Deut. 1:10)

The simple answer is this. The Israelites were indeed numerous compared to what they once were. Moses himself puts it this way in next weeks parshah: Your ancestors who went down into Egypt were 70 in all, and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky. (Deut. 10:22) They were once a single family, Abraham, Sarah and their descendants, and now they have become a nation of 12 tribes.

But and this is Moses point here compared to other nations, they were still small.

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you (Deut. 7:1)

In other words, not only were the Israelites smaller than the great empires of the ancient world. They were smaller even than the other nations in the region. Compared to their origins they had grown exponentially, but compared to their neighbors they remained tiny.

Moses then tells them what this means:

You may say to yourselves, These nations are stronger than we are. How can we drive them out? But do not be afraid of them; remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. (Deut. 7:17-18)

Israel would be the smallest of the nations for a reason that goes to the very heart of its existence as a nation. They will show the world that a people does not have to be large in order to be great. It does not have to be numerous to defeat its enemies. Israels unique history will show that, in the words of the Prophet Zechariah (4:6), Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord Almighty.

In itself, Israel would be witness to something greater than itself. As former Marxist philosopher Nicolay Berdyaev put it:

I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history.

The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: All these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny. (Nicolay Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, Transaction Publishers, 2005, p. 86.)

Moses statement has immense implications for Jewish identity. The proposition implicit throughout my Covenant & Conversation series is that Jews have had an influence out of all proportion to their numbers because we are all called on to be leaders, to take responsibility, to contribute, to make a difference to the lives of others, to bring the Divine Presence into the world. Precisely because we are small, we are each summoned to greatness.

Y. Agnon, the great Hebrew writer, composed a prayer to accompany the Mourners Kaddish. He noted that the Children of Israel have always been few in number compared to other nations. He then said that when a monarch rules over a large population, they do not notice when an individual dies, for there are others to take their place.

But our King, the King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He chose us, and not because we are a large nation, for we are one of the smallest of nations. We are few, and owing to the love with which He loves us, each one of us is, for Him, an entire legion. He does not have many replacements for us. If one of us is missing, Heaven forfend, then the Kings forces are diminished, with the consequence that His kingdom is weakened, as it were. One of His legions is gone, and His greatness is lessened. For this reason, it is our custom to recite the Kaddish when a Jew dies. (Quoted in Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish, London: Picador, 1998, 22-23.)

Margaret Mead once said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Gandhi said: A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history. That must be our faith as Jews.

We may be the fewest of all peoples but when we heed Gods call, we have the ability, proven many times in our past, to mend and transform the world.

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have been made available to all at rabbisacks.org. This essay was written in 2014.

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A Word of Torah: The Fewest of All People Detroit Jewish News - The Jewish News

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Posted By admin on August 12, 2022

JERICHO, New York The last time a bar or bat mitzvah read from the Torah at the Jericho Jewish Center was well before COVID-19. Its been at least four years since a full-time cantor sang from the Conservative Long Island synagogues pulpit. And except for Shabbat, it no longer supports morning prayers.

These are perhaps the starkest examples of how the center, known as JJC, has changed over the last 25 years. Its also why the majority of the synagogues members believed consolidating with the nearby Conservative Woodbury Jewish Center was the key to saving it.

Yet, although an overwhelming majority of congregants favored the plan, the merger between the two Conservative synagogues, located a mere five miles apart, failed.

On June 22, after 20 months of negotiations, a two-thirds majority of the synagogues board voted to dissolve the 60-year-old synagogue and give the proceeds to charity. The vote left congregants angry, surprised and saddened. But the story didnt end there.

On August 3, a new board voted to postpone the dissolution, leaving the synagogues future in limbo. No new vote has been scheduled.

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At least 20 members have already left to join the Woodbury Jewish Center exacerbating an already serious issue with funding. Additionally, Rabbi Matt Abelson, who had signed on to lead the congregation in 2019, took a new position at pro-Israel nonprofit StandWithUs following the vote.

Over the last two years, I was often quite desolate and quite upset not just for myself, but for the congregation, Abelson said.

The fate of JJC might be attributed to changing demographics, declining membership, the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic or differing views as to the role of a synagogue. However, one thing is clear: What happened at JJC reflects the many changes taking place within the American Jewish community.

Rabbi Matt Abelson, fourth from right, celebrated Shabbat in the park with the Jericho Jewish Center. (Leslie Hartman)

Studies show the number of unaffiliated US Jews growing, forcing congregations to compete for a dwindling pool of possible members.

According to a 2021 Pew Research Center study, while 17 percent of American Jews said they were raised with no particular denomination, 29% identify as such today. Among American Jews under the age of 30, more than four in 10 are unaffiliated, the survey found.

The squeeze is particularly acute for Conservative Judaism. The study found that while 25% of US Jews were raised in the Conservative movement, only 15% identify as Conservative today.

By contrast, the Reform movement is growing. Whereas 28% of US Jews said they grew up in the Reform movement, 33% of US Jews currently identify with it.

In general, younger American Jews have multiple identities and dont always identify based on denominational labels, suggested Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, Joint CEO of United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly. They grow up in our congregations, attend our Ramah camps, and feel closely connected to Judaism, but dont always limit themselves to a denominational label.

More than one-third of Conservative synagogues and an estimated one-in-five Reform synagogues have closed in the past two decades, according to the Pew study. Others have looked to partnerships, with some congregations even partnering with Orthodox organizations such as Chabad to stay open.

Our movement will continue to help synagogues grow and thrive. However, emerging and young adults are not necessarily drawn to synagogue life, and we will look for new ways to engage them online and through in-person engagement, Blumenthal said.

The Jericho Jewish Center website describes the congregation as a friendly progressive Conservative synagogue founded in 1956, at the tail end of a short-lived real estate development boom. The suburban, upper-middle-class hamlet on Long Islands north shore is quiet, with a population of around 15,000. Its also getting older the median age in Jericho in 2020 was 46, compared with the United States median of 38.

Jay Sherman, former president and member of the consolidation exploratory committee at the Jericho Jewish Center. (Courtesy)

When former synagogue president Jay Sherman and his wife joined JJC in 1997, he said they were attracted by its large, robust congregation, and style of worship, he said.

Over the past couple of decades, weve seen a significant change in the demographics of the Jericho community, said Sherman, who also previously served as a trustee. We used to have as many as 600 family units, we now have a fraction of that. We no longer have a religious school because we dont have young Jewish families moving into the Jericho community.

JJC isnt an outlier in this regard. Only one-in-five American Jews attend religious services once or twice a month, according to the 2021 Pew Research Center study.

Congregants at the Jericho Jewish Center gather for an event in this undated photo. (Courtesy)

COVID-19 also played a role in challenging JJCs long-term viability, Abelson said.

We experienced attrition through death and also people dropping off during the pandemic. And I think thats what motivated leadership to seek this option. I must have done 40 funerals in two years. It was extreme. People were dying. Were not having simchas and there were very few bnai mitzvah, Abelson said, using Hebrew terms for celebrations.

A celebration with a Torah at the Jericho Jewish Center in this undated photo. (Courtesy)

When it became clear a plan was needed to save JJC, Abelson thought it made sense to explore a consolidation with Woodbury Jewish Center, also known as WJC.

The reason I was so in favor of the consolidation is because I feel that most places in the country, their best chance is to merge outside of their movement, and here we could merge inside our movement, Abelson said.

In September 2020, the synagogues leadership formed an exploratory committee to look into consolidation. A memorandum of understanding, which has since expired, was signed between JJC and WJC.

An internal survey showed that 76% of JJC members favored a merger, said Sherman, who served on the committee.

We viewed the opportunity to consolidate and create a new congregation as a means to build a robust, Conservative congregation on the North Shore of Long Island that would appeal to multiple parts of the Jewish community, Sherman said.

Congregants of the Jericho Jewish Center in the synagogue library. (Leslie Hartman)

Many of those who were opposed were turned off by WJCs more egalitarian approach to services, preferring JJCs tradition of men and women worshiping in separate seating. They also opposed the idea of women clergy despite the fact that the Conservative movement ordained its first female rabbi in 1985.

Throughout 2021 and up until the first June vote, the exploratory committee and WJC continued to work to try and find a solution. At one point the WJC offered to create a second minyan that would follow JJC ritual practices. Then, nearly one year into the negotiations, the WJC rejected the idea of a second minyan.

At that point, the traditionalists asked if JJC would carve-out some of the proceeds from the sale of the synagogue to help them maintain their own independent prayer quorum in Jericho.

That effort also failed, causing tensions to flare in the ensuing weeks. One member threatened litigation in early 2022, the committee chairs resigned, the memorandum of understanding expired and the plan was permanently derailed.

On June 8, two weeks before the JJC voted to dissolve, WJC president Dr. Ellen Feit sent an email to JJC members to express extreme sadness that our potential consolidation is not proceeding.

Congregants of the Jericho Jewish Center celebrate Shabbat in the park in this photo from 2019. Rabbi Matt Abelson is standing, center back. (Leslie Hartman)

In her email, Feit said she considered consolidating as an opportunity to build a united and strong Conservative synagogue. Feit declined to comment further, saying there were still ongoing discussions.

On June 16, a week before the fateful vote, another email circulated among congregants. Signed by JJC board member Daniel Krieger and a core group of 50 JJC congregants who wished to remain anonymous, this email said the consolidation efforts collapsed for a myriad of reasons, including the carve-out issue. It also implored congregants to renew their memberships.

Krieger declined to comment further.

When the synagogue voted to dissolve in June, the institution had intended to donate the sales of its assets to various non-profits, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish National Fund, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County.

That plan is now on hold.

As the synagogues final chapter is yet to be written, Sherman said people need to understand that in spite of everything, there are plenty of places where Conservative Judaism is not just surviving, but thriving.

While declining membership is true in many instances, Im aware of many successful congregations in Nassau County that are close to bursting at the seams, he said. I think part of it is listening to your members or listening to your community, or listening to your prospective members.

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NY synagogues looming demise highlights Conservative Judaisms struggles to survive - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on August 12, 2022

On Friday night in Charlottesville, Va., an interfaith group of religious leaders will hold a service called Unite the Light.

The name is a play on Unite the Right, the neo-Nazi march in the city that took place exactly five years ago and sparked violence that led to the death of a counter-protester. Chanting antisemitic slogans, the marchers walked right past the city's only synagogue: Congregation Beth Israel.

Half a decade later, Charlottesvilles Jewish community is still processing the events of August 2017.

I grew up as a child watching these old black and white newsreels of the rise of Hitler and of the Nazi Party, says Rabbi Tom Gutherz of Congregation Beth Israel. They always had the sense of being sort of history and far away. And yet to see and to hear and to be face to face with this kind of hatred, and to have it screamed at you and to see it marched by, probably was really quite shocking.

Congregation member Diane Hillman mentally returns to Saturday morning Shabbat service on Aug. 12, 2017. Then-president Alan Zimmerman suggested members exit the synagogue through the side door because of the violence escalating in the streets, she says.

Hillman stood on the synagogues steps and watched the marchers go by.

The groups marched by and scream profanities and antisemitic slurs at the synagogue and a block away, [there was] conflict. Confederate flags marching down the street, Hillman says. And those images have stuck with me and probably will always be with me.

The white nationalists who marched at the rally largely travelled from outside Charlottesville. The citys removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee prompted the Unite the Right march. Smack in the middle of the city, the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society overlooks the park where the statue stood for a century.

The building is classically-designed with white pillars in front. It stands as an example of how Charlottesville like most southern cities has a complicated racial past, says historical society president and Congregation Beth Israel member Phyllis Leffler.

The historical societys McIntire Building was the site of Charlottesvilles first public library. Philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntire donated the money for this building and the Lee statue in the 1920s.

So what do you do with Paul Goodloe McIntire? It's the question being asked about lots of people who were supporters of the Lost Cause, Leffler says, who were segregationists, who probably carried a lot of internal racism, but also did generous and good things for the city.

Leffler sits at a table surrounded by boxes of historical papers and photos that tell her a mixed story of Charlottesville and antisemitism.

People often think of Charlottesville as a religiously tolerant city in part because of Thomas Jefferson and his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. But Jewish residents were long a tiny minority in the city that tried to stay beneath the radar, Leffler says.

The long-term Jewish history of Charlottesville is one in which Jews were perceived as white and did not rock the boat. They were fully incorporated into the life of the city, Leffler said. When Jews did rock the boat or take contrary views to the mainstream views, they were less welcomed.

In the early 20th century the Ku Klux Klan in Charlottesville spewed their hate toward both Black Americans and Jews.

You could go back to the 1920s and look at the Klan rallies that were held in this city and the efforts to encourage people to join the Klan, Leffler says. And you could look at the notices that were posted around town in which they said, If you are white and Christian, we welcome your joining with us and we welcome your membership. No foreigners allowed.

Jewish residents understood clearly that they were not welcome, Leffler says.

Nearly 100 years later, the Unite the Right rally reminded Charlottesvilles Jewish community of its vulnerability. White supremacists chanted into the ovens referencing the Holocaust, Leffler says.

Leffler started recording oral history interviews with members of the Beth Israel synagogue such as Gerald Donowitz.

I thought that Nazism was dead. I thought antisemitism was dead, Donowitz says. And it wasn't. It was, like, holy God, I was really wrong.

Five years later, the events of 2017 are more than a reminder: They are a prompt for a new set of questions.

The Unite the Right rally became a trigger, to look more deeply into the whole notion of white supremacy and what it means for this community, Leffler says.

To Leffler, the rally became a precursor to later expressions of white supremacy, including the events of Jan. 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.

The idea of a common struggle between Jews and racial minorities now has Congregation Beth Israel enhancing its work against white hate. Rabbi Gutherz is working with an interfaith group of religious leaders in Charlottesville to promote dialogue.

Fridays Unite the Light event is meant not only to uplift, but also to prompt uncomfortable questions about what Charlottesvilles Jewish community failed to see.

After the Unite the Right rally, the city wanted to say, Hey, hey, hey, this is Charlottesville. We're a nice quiet university town. These people all came from out of here. This is not us, Gutherz says. African American colleagues said, Well, hang on a minute, you may never have seen this hatred walking in the street. You may never have heard this violence or encountered it yourself but we sure have.

In that message lies a challenge to the Jewish community: Should they see themselves as privileged or as vulnerable?

Both of those are true, Gutherz says. Both of those are aspects of my life and my experience.

Going forward, Beth Israel member Hillman says the community plans to take on stark, and sometimes measurable, racial inequities in Charlottesville that were barely discussed for the longest time.

Its coming down to the practical aspects of that. So where do kids go to school? Which schools do they go to? Where do people live, Hillman says. And there are huge differences across the city that are being exposed in a way they never were before. We never talked about them before.

But Hillman says progress has been slow so far.

Im starting to see glimmers of awareness that we are not what we thought, she says. It could take 10 or 20 years. It probably will, but at least we're not hiding from it any more.

Or, in some cases, no longer hiding from their own Jewish identity an easy thing to do for years in Charlottesville.

If people are going to hate me and want to kill me and want to replace me because I'm Jewish, maybe I should be a little more Jewish, Donowitz says.

James Perkins Mastromarinoand Jorgelina Manna-Rea produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Eileen Bolinsky and Catherine Welch. Welch also adapted it for the web.

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Charlottesvilles Jewish community uses dialogue to combat white hate, 5 years after Unite the Right - WBUR News

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Posted By admin on August 12, 2022

Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell star in Ed. Weinberger's 'Two Jews Talking.' Courtesy of DDPR

By Mervyn RothsteinAugust 10, 2022

The older I get, the more Jewish I get, the longtime television producer, comedy writer and, in his more recent years, playwright Ed. Weinberger said. I do not practice Judaism in any way, except that I am a Jew and know that I am a Jew, and I root for Jews. Obviously, either in embracing it or escaping from it, youre always a Jew.

Weinberger(the punctuation after Ed is correct, but more about that later) has called on his Jewish heritage to create an evening of theater two one-act plays, with the title Two Jews,Talking. Each play features two different Jews, all senior citizens, who, well, talk. The plays take place 3,557 years apart.

The first is set on a late Tuesday afternoon in 1505 B.C.E. in the Sinai desert as the freed Jews follow Moses from Egypt to the Promised Land. The second is set now, on a summer afternoon on Long Island.

The plays star two show-business veterans, both Jewish Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell. Linden, 91,is best known for his seven years as police precinct captain Barney Miller on TV. He won a Tony Award as best actor in a musical in1971 for The Rothschilds.Kopell, 89, portrayed Dr. Adam Bricker on The Love Boat and has appeared on more than 100 TV series. TheObie-winning director is Dan Wackerman, the artistic director of the Peccadillo Theater Company in New York City. Previews begin Aug. 20, with opening night Aug. 28 off-Broadway at the Theatre at St. Clements.

Among his many television credits, Weinberger wrote and was a producer for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and was a co-creator of Taxi and The Cosby Show. In his more than half-century career, he has won three Golden Globes, a Peabody and nine Emmys. He wrote for the comedians Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Johnny Carson and Bob Hope. In recent years, Weinberger penned the one-man play A Man and His Prostate, which dealt with his own serious medical adventures and starred Ed Asner.

Weinberger is listed on Wikipedia as 77. Im older than that, he said, on the phone from the West Coast. But lets leave that go.Whatever they say I am. But Im old. (Another web source would place him in his mid-80s.)

His new plays are comedies, but they are about much more than laughter. They are in a sense an affirmation of Judaism, with the second play, the one set on Long Island, especially gradually taking on a more serious, emotionally moving tone.Its about Judaism and the nature of being Jewish. And the presence or absence of God. And belief. And belief in the face of death and disappointment. And prayer.

I set out really to make an entertainment, Weinberger said. To entertain thats been my business. If youre not doing that, then everything else doesnt mean anything, at least in my little world. But when I wrote the second play I just wanted to see what would happen if I could write about two Jews and just have them talk about anything at all that occurred to them, and then see how far to the edge they could go.

I wondered how far I could go and still make it entertaining. As I wrote I didnt know where [the two men] were. And as I got further in, I thought, this cant just be about them on a park bench on Central Park West in the 70s, where I used to live. It had to be something more. And I discovered where they were which were not going to talk about, because I want that to be a reveal but I didnt know that until I was toward the end. I said to myself, I have to make this more interesting. I have to give this a little depth. I have to make this about something rather than simply have them go from health to sex to marriage to life to give it a little bit more meaning.

He took a Shakespeare course in college, and he remembers seeing how the Bard would switch effortlessly from comedy to drama. I always love the juxtaposition of going from comedy to I dont want to call it tragedy [in my play] because I dont think its tragedy, but going from the comic to the dramatic, and showing that they can exist together, that an audience will follow you if its set up and done correctly.

He ponders for a moment. I dont want to say this is dramatic, but at least we reach another tone altogether.

The novelist Anthony Marra has said that comedyhas always felt like the most eloquent expression of absurdity, a natural reaction to darkness. Weinberger agrees.

I dont have that eloquence, he said, butI certainly would nod yes. Its a very articulate way, a very literate way of putting it. That would certainly be one definition. I think comedy is always best if its about something thats important. Its always easy to get laughs about certain subjects, and certain jokes will trigger laughs from an audience. But if you can do something besides that, it makes the work at least for me more important. It gives the work more resonance or relevance.

Weinberger grew up in Philadelphia, and traces his love of comedy to early childhood. It goes back to when I was 6 or 7 years old, he said, when I either got my first laugh or I heard somebody laugh at something somebody said. And I said, I like that feeling. Youre getting love. Youre getting approval.

I remember always being attracted to comedy. My parents would go to nightclubs and take me I was an only child at 12 or 13 years old. And there were comedians there. I was always interested in jokes and comedians.

But in college, he wanted to be a poet. I had other aspirations and pretensions. I sent in poems to The New Yorker, and they were quickly rejected or slowly rejected. I wanted to be a professor at Columbia, where I went to school. That wasnt going to likely happen. So he left college and began writing comedy.

As a child, he was religious. At a certain point, I became less observant. At one time, around my bar mitzvah years, I was very involved with Judaism. I went to synagogue to pray, I was bar mitzvahed, I went to Hebrew school and all that.

His father spent a lot of time at synagogue, in terms of mens activities, the mens club. That was a very important part of his life. Its not like he did tefillin.

As I grew older, as I went to college and went to Hollywood, I was not observant. When I had my family and my sons, I wanted them to be bar mitzvahed, and I returned to the synagogue, mostly for them. I wanted them to have the same experience that I had, the cultural experience, the feeling, the awareness that they were Jews, and what that meant.

And that punctuation in his given name? Thats an affectation Im stuck with, he said. My name is Edwin. And I grew up in a neighborhood in Philadelphia where there were no Edwins. So I was Ed or Eddie for a while. And when I did my homework this goes back to the sixth grade I put E D, and since I was abbreviating, I put a dot after it because thats what I thought you did with a name, the same way you abbreviated Pennsylvania P A and then a period. And I kept doing it. I remember when I got my first television credit on the Johnny Carson show, which was my first TV job, and they asked how did I want my name, and I said E D period all through college I was Ed with a period. Now, if I took it off, people would ask why Im not dot anymore. So Im stuck with it, and Im going to have to live with it forever.

Something else he will live with forever is his staunch defense of the art of comedy.

Comedy has always been considered less important a statement with which this show-business veteran strongly disagrees. Anybody who writes comedy is always going to say that when done right, comedy is as important as anything.

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Two very Jewish stories, separated by more than 3,000 years - Forward

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We are experiencing not only a spike in antisemitic events all around us but also the normalization of some of that gruesome rhetoric that creates the conditions for antisemitism to thrive.

Joshua Kullock| Guest Columnist

Former Wisconsin Proud Boy member saw bigotry and bullying

Daniel Berry joined the Wisconsin Proud Boys in search of camaraderie, but instead found racism, antisemitism and sadistic bullying.

Jasper Colt, USA TODAY

Let me be honest. Even if we dont say it often enough, the truth is that we are afraid.

We are afraid because, even if Jews make up only 2% of the U.S. population, we continue to be the No. 1target of anti-religious hate crimes in America.

We are afraid because we have witnessed how some members of Congress have justified white nationalists while some others continue to demonize the State of Israel.

We are afraid because, here in Tennessee, books like Maus get to be banned, and every now and then we get to read in the paper opinion columnsthat make a questionable use of the Holy Writings and propagate anti-Jewish tropes.

We are afraid because 1in 3Jewish students have experienced antisemitism on college campuses during the last school year. We are afraid because we have heard the antisemitic chants of those who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 and we have seen the antisemitic gear that was used by some of those who stormed the U.S. Capitolon Jan. 6, 2021.

Finally, we are also afraid when we see antisemitic flyers flooding our neighborhoods here in Nashville.

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We know that these and so many other hateful manifestations do not represent the very best of our nation. We know that we have a lot of allies and friends, and we are truly grateful for them.

It was heartwarming to see the swift response made by our local political leaders and to read emails and letters sent by different religious and communal leaders across the spectrum.

And yet, today we are experiencing not only a spike in antisemitic events all around us but also the normalization of some of that gruesome rhetoric that creates the conditions for antisemitism to thrive.

We are so afraid that, when we come to our synagogues, we are always trying to identify the closest exit door in case of an emergency.

Most of us must attend active shooter trainings and plan safety drills on a regular basis. We are continually looking for extra funds to upgrade the security of our buildings and always planning for the worst-case scenario.

And, you know what? It shouldnt have to be this way.

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Synagogues are called to be welcoming and warm places where people of all ages can pray, study, and embrace those who are suffering the most.

Synagogues are meant to be open places to shelter the needy and to heal the wounded without having to risk being taken hostage by deranged terrorists with distorted views of who is running the world.

So yes, we are afraid, but we wont let fear paralyze us and we wont let the anti-Semites win. In spite of everything, we still believe in hope, we know that we are stronger than those who want to destroy us, and we are committed to creating a reality in which there wont be any room for antisemitism nor for any other forms of bigotry, xenophobia or hate in our midst.

That is why today, more than ever, we are called to strengthen our resolve to shape a diverse society that is proud of embracing people of different backgrounds, races, sexual orientations, and religions.

Despite the lure of suppressing those with a different political view than our own, we should work to create a pluralistic and inclusive society, open to everyone who is willing to be part of the solution and not of the problem. We are all in this together, and together we shall overcome.

We are afraid and yet, we are not giving up hope. We still believe that we can be G-ds worthy partners in creating a better world for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren as well.

Joshua Kullock is rabbi of West End Synagogue.

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Jewish people are afraid as antisemitism rises, but fear will not paralyze us | Opinion - Tennessean

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Posted By admin on August 12, 2022

Bob Rosenthal and his older brother Leonard were eager to get off the train in Tucson, AZ to stretch their legs and purchase a cold drink. They had left Ft. Worth, Texas over twenty-four hours prior on their way to California for much needed R&R after their service in the military during WWII. Bob and Leonard were Texas born and this would be their first trip to the West Coast.

Holding their cokes, they made their way back to the tracks to reboard their train car. They were horrified to see that it was gone! Their jackets, luggage, and belongings were on their way to Los Angeles and they were stranded in Tucson with nothing! There was no way to continue their journey empty-handed they would have to turn back. Distraught and disappointed, they rented a hotel room for the night, awaiting the next train heading east to Ft. Worth.

Rabbi Aaron Moscovitz watched his wife, Ethel, put the final touches on her Shabbat dinner as he wished her Good Shabbos before walking to their Tucson synagogue for Friday night services. As Rabbi Moscovitz opened his Siddur to find the place, the synagogue door opened and two young men walked tentatively inside. They explained their predicament stranded in town after missing their train West and Aaron invited them to join his family for Shabbat dinner. The arrival of two young men caused quite a stir in the Moscovitz house especially for their teenage daughters, Judy and Ilene. Eligible Jewish men were hard to come by in Arizona!

By the end of Shabbat dinner, Leonard and Bobs troubles were forgotten as they delighted in the company of their new friends. Bob began a long distance courtship with Judy and two years later in 1948, they were married in Tucson, Arizona.

Their love story had a propitious beginning and thank G-d, a blessed continuation as they enjoyed seventy-eight years of marriage before Judy passed away in June of this year in Boynton Beach. We were privileged to celebrate Judy & Bobs 77th anniversary at a Kiddush at Chabad of South Palm Beach and we were deeply moved by the providence that brought them together and the deep love that joined them for so long.

How marvelous are the ways of G-d. The stranded Rosenthal boys were the answer to the Moscovitzes prayers. It is not every day that we glimpse the marvelous ways of Divine providence, seeing the silver lining in the gray clouds.

How often do we find ourselves stalled in traffic, on line, or on the phone? If we train ourselves to see the opportunity in every interaction, we can recognize that we are planted with precision, and not randomly stuck. We can make the most of opportunities we did not anticipate by sharing love, Yiddishkeit, or even a throat lozenge.

In 1967, the Lubavitch womens annual conference was held in Detroit. At the successful conclusion of the gathering, the women went to the airport where they found out that all air travel had been suspended because of bad weather and that none of them would be able to fly home. This was a logistical nightmare for the women in Detroit and more importantly, for their families back home.

A convention organizer reached out to the office of the Lubavitcher Rebbe informing him that all the women were stuck in the Detroit airport because of a blizzard. The Rebbes secretary responded to the women saying that the Rebbe did not understand the word stuck. As they attempted to explain the definition of the word the secretary responded, The Rebbe knows what stuck means. The Rebbe is saying that a Jew is never stuck. The women understood the challenge in the message and they made sure to make their time count.

Being stuck is feeling powerless, giving up personal agency, and losing precious time. When I recognize that everything happens with Divine will, I realize that I am precisely planted in this unique situation. How can I make the most of it? What opportunities present themselves in this scenario that I did not anticipate? When faced with a similar obstacle, you too can decide if you will be stuck or if you will be planted! I so hope youll bloom.

ShainaStolik is the Rebbetzin at Chabad of South Palm Beach, 224 S. Ocean Blvd., Lantana. http://www.chabadspb.org.

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Providence in the West | Opinion - South Florida Sun Sentinel

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Posted By admin on August 12, 2022

Few things can be as toxic, entertaining, unpredictable, frustrating, and plain stupid and all at once as student politics.

So when I was accepted onto a trip with the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) to Israel the nation that gets students flustered perhaps more than anywhere else with, you guessed it, student politicians, it was an offer I couldnt refuse. And while the trip was not as explosive as a student council passionately but incoherently debating whether to boycott the Jewish State, it was a truly unforgettable experience that had a profound, and hopefully long-lasting impact on all 26 participants Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

During the 11-day AUJS Israel Mission (AIM), we visited Israels top tourist locations, waded our way through what seemed like the entire American Jewish community, and heard from leading voices on both sides of the aisle about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other regional issues. All in all, the trip aimed to expose participants particularly those with no inherent connection to the region to the beauty and complexity of Israel and its surroundings.

In those strict terms, it was a resounding success.

Few, if any, places on Earth consistently arouse such passion among the masses, yet simultaneously have such long, tortuous histories dumbed down into simplistic caricatures that only serve to misinform. Unfortunately for our community, this often results in the broadcasting of wild anti-Israel conspiracy theories, antisemitic university motions, or vicious boycott campaigns which marginalise Jews. At higher levels, it can also lead toproblematic foreign policy.

And so, although easier said than done, theres a great way to combat this: Take people to Israel; the country speaks for itself. From the moment of arrival at Ben Gurion Airport where tourists, Jewish Israelis, and Muslim women in hijabs walk side by side through security its already clear that theres far more to the Jewish State than the impressions provided by news outlets and social media.

Crucially, these experiences can only be had on the ground. Theres no substitute for visiting Israels borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, and learning about the security challenges brought by such neighbours. After hearing stories of Israeli teens who, traumatised by life bordering the Gaza Strip, routinely wet their beds and suffer from crippling mental health issues, the exceedingly complex and often traumatising reality of Israeli life becomes inescapable.

Israelis arent a pawn in some Western morality play. But that seemingly self-evident fact is often forgotten in universities, newsrooms, and even the halls of Parliament.

Grandiose policy decisions have consequences, and the trip exposed participants to this very reality. Looking out from Alfei Menashe, a West Bank settlement deemed illegal by much of the international community, one can see an enormous slice of Israels population. If Israel is to accede to Western demands and end the occupation sentiment that I, along with many Israelis, share how does it protect its civilians from the possibility of Hamas or Iran overlooking Tel Aviv?

The trip did not shy away from Israels less rosy aspects either. Meeting with Palestinians, we heard about the daily indignities many of them endure as a result of the ongoing conflict. If this immense suffering wasnt clear before the trip, it was certainly ingrained after seeing a handmade memorial to the hundreds of Gazan children killed during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Even in Israel proper, we were confronted with the harsh realities of Israels security needs, when soldiers forced our bus driver to pull over for questioning. Why? Because he was Arab. The dehumanising encounter was lost on very few.

But Israeli-Arabs contrary to what many Western activists would have us believe vary wildly in their political, social, and religious beliefs. Take one Israeli-Arab we met, whose last girlfriend was Jewish, and whose love of alcohol propels his dislike of Hamas, which, as a fundamentalist Islamist organisation, banned alcohol in Gaza. Or another Israeli-Arab, who, contrary to many Palestinians, believes that Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aklehs death was an accident. Unfortunately, he also mentioned that he knows Palestinians who believe Jews have devil-like horns protruding from our heads.

In case I wasnt clear: its complicated. Dumbing history down to fit a narrative may be gratifying, but it helps neither Israelis nor Palestinians. Rather, the more likely result is the stigmatisation of Jews and Palestinians in other countries something Jewish Diaspora communities, and particularly Jewish university students, have seen far too much of in recent years.

This trip was by no means a quick fix for those pushing honest, principled approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their own backyards. It was, however, an immensely successful 11 days of showcasing the worlds hottest piece of real estate to a group of terrifyingly competent individuals, as one participant put it. What they do with this once-in-a-lifetime experience is up to them.

Josh Feldman is an active member of the community involved in informal education and Israel advocacy, and was part of the Australian delegation to the 38th World Zionist Congress.

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Israel the country speaks for itself - Australian Jewish News

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Posted By admin on August 12, 2022

This articleincludes graphic imagesand depictions of death.

When a ceasefire on Sunday night ended a three-day Israeli offensive in the Gaza strip, over 350 Palestinians were wounded and 46 were dead, including 16 children, according to Palestinian officials. Media coverage in the U.S. was mainly led by photographs of smoke-filled skies or Gazans walking amid piles of rubble. While the photos were accurate and recent, the safety of selecting these images, rather than graphic ones, effectively portrayed a reality for American audiences far removed from what had truly unfolded on the ground.

To look at the totality of images that are made during a news event is an experience most Americans, with the exception of photo editors in newsrooms, rarely experience. As the Palestinian death toll climbed over the weekend, images from photojournalists based in Gaza poured into massive databases like Getty Images and AP Images. A quick search for Gaza on Getty Images, for example, returns hundreds of recent photographs, a near-endless grid of brutality from the last week.

In many images, children killed by Israeli bombs are displayed prominently.These images show funerals, the faces of the deceased uncovered, their bodies held aloft and marched through the streets. In some photographs, mourners are seen taking their own images of the bodies on their cellphones proof of what horrors have occurred.

Mourners carry the body of Palestinian Khalil Abu Hamadeh at his funeral ceremony at Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip on Aug. 7, 2022.

Photo: Mahmoud Issa/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

These graphic images are arrayed, on photo databases, next to the nongraphic images that are almost always selected for publication by U.S. news organizations: Rockets flying through the sky at night, quiet moments of children surveying the damage done to their homes, and black smoke rising over the horizon.

Smoke rises above the site of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Aug. 7, 2022.

Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In Gaza, photojournalists routinely photograph within hospitals and morgues. This access to urgent care facilities, rare in the United States, provides an opportunity for journalists to directly document the wounded and dead. On Getty Images, images of childrens bodies, wrapped in white fabric, piling up at the morgue are abundant and uncensored. While shocking and deeply upsetting, they do show very clearly what bombing dense residential areas produces.

I can still see the grieving people weeping after their homes were destroyed, Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salem told The Intercept. I cant handle it anymore. Even after these three days of Israeli attacks are over, I have become more drained than before. In Gaza, there are no stories that can give us life; all we can say is how death has taken our lives and the lives of those around us.

A Palestinian boy weeps next to the bodies of four Palestinian cousins killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza Strip, on Aug. 8, 2022.

Photo: Sameh Rahmi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Yet these images are not the defining feature of the unequal conflict in which no Israelis were killed. Instead, they are rarely published at all.

In general, the majority of coverage by international and American media is weak and often does not show scenes where innocent women and children were killed, Soliman Hijjy, a Palestinian visual journalist working in Gaza, told The Intercept.

In the case of one of the 16 children killed, 5-year-old Alaa Qaddoum, one report, in the New York Times, included a photograph made after her death. This was the exception, though the photo was not featured prominently; it was placed near the end of the article. Other outlets, from the Washington Post to NBC News, did not publish the image, even as they mentioned the girls killing. What we are left with is, in essence, a sanitized and avoidant understanding of world events as newsrooms uniformly opt for images that do notinclude any graphic content. Social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, have enforced this shift away from publishing depictions of violence by implementing sensitive media policies that discourage newsrooms from prominently displaying imagesof atrocities lest they lose page views.

The body of 5-year-old Alaa Qaddoum, after she was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Aug. 5, 2022, in Gaza City.

Photo: Hosam Salem

There is no consensus on how to deal with images of intense violence. Individual newsrooms make decisions on a case-by-case basis, often after sorting through troves of images filed to major distribution platforms where none of the images are blurred or censored. On Getty Images, only within the caption information is there sometimes an editors note warning the viewer about what theyre already looking at: Image depicts death. Most media outlets, including this one, issue an editors note or content warning before surprising viewers with depictions of graphic violence.

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It is not just Palestinian bodies that are erased from mass media accounts of massacres; school shootings in America have become visually defined by makeshift memorials and candlelit vigils rather than graphic images, and the same is true for the bloodshed that occurs overseas. But there are exceptions. When Russia attacked Ukraine earlier this year, visual documentation of Russian atrocities began to dominate the news cycle. The crimes by Russia were so shocking that, in a rare move, the New York Times printed an especially graphic image by photojournalist Lynsey Addario onits front page. Addario called the paper brave for publishing her evidence of war crimes.

Critics have noted a stark contrast in global interest in the suffering of the Ukrainian people as opposed to the suffering of others, as well as the ways in which the Russian invasion was covered, factually,as an unprovoked act of aggression, rather than a more generic conflict the kind of framing used for not just Israeli attacks on Palestine, but in other war zones too. This week, for instance, there were more graphic images in the Washington Post depicting a massacre that took place earlier this year in Bucha, Ukraine, than were published of the dead in Gaza over the weekend.

Rockets fired from Gaza City toward Israel, in response to Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip are seen on Aug. 7, 2022.

Photo: Yousef Masoud/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The problem with the representation of Palestinian life and death goes well beyond the images selected to tell the story. Palestinians and many foreign observers have long condemned the international media for sanitizing Israeli crimes and deferring to Israels narrative. In a letter signed by more than 500 journalists following yet another Israeli bombing campaign on Gaza last year, the authors (including several Intercept reporters) argued that coverage of Israel and Palestine regularly amounts to journalistic malpractice.

The asymmetry in context does not just extend to the language we use; stories tend to disproportionately amplify Israeli narratives while suppressing Palestinian ones, the group wrote. Obfuscating Israels oppression of Palestinians fails this industrys own objectivity standards.

We dont want anything more than for people to know the facts. We dont have a complicated narrative.

Ahmed Abu Artemah a Palestinian writer and human rights activist who in 2018 was one of the organizers of the Great March of Return, a peaceful protest movement by the fence separating Israel from Gaza told The Intercept that Israel operated on the assumption that they would have an ally in most of the international media.

This is complicity,Abu Artemah said.We dont want anything more than for people to know the facts. We dont have a complicated narrative. Our demand is only that people watch the facts, watch the reality, see the footage of whats happening.

A man kisses the face of a child killed by Israeli airstrikes, during a mass funeral in Burij on Aug. 8, 2022, in Gaza City.

Photo: Mohammed Dahman/Getty Images

Across newsrooms, the safe choicesof showing an abstracted violence (calm moments of smoke and rubble) over overt violence (death, injury, or mourning) fall in line with the framework of the coverage itself, which in Gazas case regularly downplays the impact of civilians in favor of a narrative about Palestinian militancy even as the same kind of militancy is depicted as resistance in Ukraine.

Mohammed Mhawesh, an independent Palestinian journalist and researcher based in Gaza, argued in an interview with The Intercept that coverage of the latest Gaza assault, which Israeli officials admitted was pre-emptive, focused almost exclusivelyon Israels ostensible justification for the attack rather than its impact. And even though the majority of victims were not engaged in acts of resistance, the portrayal of Palestinian resistance, he added, stands in stark contrast with that of the Ukrainian people.

For the past months, newspapers and websites and social media have been filled with stories of Ukrainian resistance and heroism, stories about soldiers blowing up bridges to delay the approach of Russian tanks and sacrificing themselves in the process. We have seen civilians attacking armed vehicles with whatever they have, and common people receiving weapons training and digging trenches, Mhawesh said. And yet, if any of these stories took place in Palestine rather than Ukraine, they would of course not be perceived as acts of heroism and resistance. They would only be classified and condemned as terror.

Mhawesh stressed the comparison was not intended to diminish the resistance of the Ukrainian people,but to uphold the right to resist the occupation and military invasion of any land, by any nation.

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Americans Rarely See True Face of Israel's Bombing of Gaza - The Intercept

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Posted By admin on August 12, 2022

Israels housing market has been recording dramatic price hikes for a little over a decade. This is a relatively short time frame relative to price hikes of such magnitude. For example, according to the housing price index published by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, housing prices rose last year by the cumulative rate of about 15.2%. In other words, if the price of an average apartment in Israel was about ILS 1.081 million in 2010, by 2020, the average price rose to about ILS 1.58 million. Due to the pace of population growth in Israel, a relatively small country, there is a constant demand for housing, mainly in the central Dan region. Therefore, housing prices are especially high.

These price hikes indeed make Israeli real estate attractive, but they also make every transaction more significant. Therefore, it is imperative buyers not only find the right property for themselves, but also gain an understanding of the stages of purchasing real estate in Israel, Israeli real estate laws, and the most important aspects of real estate transactions in Israel.

When buying or selling a residential apartment in Israel, two main types of taxes apply: betterment tax (also known as capital gains tax) and purchase tax. Unless the parties agree otherwise, the buyer of the apartment pays the purchase tax, while the seller of the apartment pays the betterment tax.

The purchase tax rate that applies to the buyer during a real estate transaction depends, inter alia, on the number of apartments he owns at the time of purchase. If this is his only apartment in Israel, the buyer will benefit from an exemption up to the price bracket specified in the Real Estate Taxation Regulations. Above that price, the buyer will pay graduated tax according to that defined in the regulations. If the buyer has more than one apartment, then he has no entitlement to this benefit and will pay a higher property tax rate according to that specified in the regulations.

As stated, if the purchased apartment is the buyers only apartment and he is a resident of Israel, he can benefit from the exemption and the lower purchase tax brackets. On the other hand, if the purchased apartment is the buyers only apartment and he is a foreign resident, then he is not entitled to the exemption or to lower purchase tax. Therefore, he will pay purchase tax at the tax brackets applying to the purchase of a second apartment.

Correct to date, there are two purchase tax brackets that apply to foreign resident purchasers of an apartment in Israel. 8% purchase tax will apply to the portion of the purchase price up to ILS 5,525,070 and 10% purchase tax will apply to any sum exceeding the first ILS 5,525,070.

If you are buying an apartment on paper from a contractor, it is extremely important to retain professionals during the negotiations stage. They will advise you on the apartments specifications, planning, and how to make modifications according to your needs. If you are buying a second-hand apartment, it is important to retain professionals for the purpose of conducting preliminary inspections. These include identifying deficiencies in the apartment and its various systems, examining the need for renovations, measuring the land, checking for building deviations, etc.

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Everything Foreign Residents Need to Know about Buying an Apartment in Israel - JD Supra

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