Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Have you heard the story of the Jewish mother and children who were born enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York?

Professor Laura Arnold Leibman was researching Jewish communities in Barbados when she discovered two small ivory portraits belonging to a Jewish heiress from New York. She traced the familys ancestors back to Bridgetown, Barbados in the 1700s. But instead of discovering an exclusively Sephardic ancestry, she uncovered a much more complex story of a diverse Jewish family whose identities were impacted by time and place.

Her findings became the book, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family.

Leibman, a professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Ore. will share her discoveries in a talk titled Jews of Color in Early America. This free virtual event is presented by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Georgia, hosted and co-sponsored by the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum and the Atlanta Jews of Color Council, on Sunday, Jan. 30, at 2 p.m. EST.

While Leibman was researching Barbados emancipation period from the 1790s through the 1830s, she learned that the faces in the portraits were siblings Isaac Lopez Brandon and Sarah Rodrigues Brandon, born to a Black Barbadian mother and a Euro-Sephardic Jewish father. Theyre the first portraits I know of that depict Jews with African ancestry other than those born in the [continental] Americas, she said.

Isaac and Sarah were born to an enslaved mother, Sarah Ester Lopez, in Barbados in 1792 and 1798, respectively. Their father, Abraham Rodrigues Brandon, purchased the three of them from their owner and manumitted them. When they moved to Suriname, Isaac and Sarah converted to Judaism.

At that time, at least half the Jewish community in Suriname had at least one African ancestor, Leibman said.

In their travels, the Brandon siblings learned that their racial identities shifted based on their locale. While they were considered People of Color in the Caribbean, in the United States they were assigned as white, she said. But when they returned home, they didnt have much agency about how they were being defined.

We tend to think about Jews in this period as coming mostly from Europe and thats just not the case, said Leibman, who is Jewish and not of color. Im trying to use their story to get at the bigger picture, part of a larger history that we tend not to talk about.

She connected with some of the Brandon descendants in the United States, some of whom remained Jewish and others who are Christian. They didnt know their full racial heritage, she said. They all identify as white and didnt know they had African ancestry until some of them took DNA tests, Leibman said.

Victoria Fulcher-Raggs, the co-founder and executive director of the Atlanta Jews of Color Coalition, said she attended Leibmans discussion of Once We Were Slaves in Washington, DC, and was so impressed that she was determined to bring the author to an Atlanta audience. This story really gives historical context to the relevance of the diversity of the Jewish people to show that our being a multiracial people is nothing new, Fulcher-Raggs said.

Leibman is passionate about broadening perceptions and access to varying histories.

I am trying to think about how the stories we tell shape our feeling of belonging in Jewish history, said Leibman, who said the project raised her consciousness about which materials are selected to be donated to and represented in American Jewish archives. It made me aware of the work we need to do so that people can find out about all of their ancestors, not just the white Jewish ones.

Leslie Gordon, executive director of the Breman Museum, said that institution is happy to present Leibmans book talk to Connect people to Jewish history, culture and arts.

The event is free, but registration is required.

The incredible journey of a multiracial Jewish family.

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Once We Were Slaves examines fluidity of race through a Jewish lens - Forward

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Polands Jewish population numbered well over three million before the war. At the end of the war, some 380,000 Polish Jews had survived, most of whom had fled in 1939 into the former Soviet Union. By 1950, only about 45,000 Jews were left living in Poland.

The current effort to erect dozens of monuments to Polish heroes in places of Jewish terror appears to be changing the teaching and understanding of history in Poland. Even Auschwitz, perhaps the most visible symbol of the genocide, has not been spared. According to a national poll published in 2020, nearly half of Poles today think that Auschwitz is most of all a place of Polish suffering. Thus Auschwitz which is also a museum funded by the Polish government devoted to the memory of nearly one million Jews who lost their lives in the gas chambers of Birkenau has emerged, to a certain extent, as a place of Polish suffering as much as a Jewish one.

As a historian, I myself have encountered this new and dangerous trend. In 2021 I was accused of slandering the memory of a long-deceased Polish village mayor. The claim was based on a footnote in Night Without End, a book that I co-edited. In the text, a Holocaust survivor is quoted recalling an incident in which the mayor of his village alerted the Nazis to the whereabouts of a group of Jews, resulting in their death. The mayors niece, assisted by an NGO that receives government funding, took us into Warsaws District Court to defend the name of her uncle. We were dismayed by the ruling, in which the judge, Ewa Jonczyk, asked us to apologize.

We can assume that ascribing to Poles the crimes of the Holocaust committed by the Third Reich can be construed as harmful and detrimental to the sense of identity and of national pride, the judge said last February. Attributing to the Polish nation the responsibility for the Holocaust, for the killing of Jews during World War II and for the confiscation of their property touches upon the sphere of the national heritage and, consequently, as completely untrue and harmful, can significantly impact ones feeling of own national dignity, destroying the justified based on facts belief that Poland was the victim of war operations initiated and conducted by the Germans.

Fortunately the ruling was overturned, but the chill was felt among scholars inside and outside Poland.

It seemed to me that the real objective of the lawsuit was not to rescue a mans name or alter his reputation, but to frighten scholars of the Holocaust, to instill Polands pervasive atmosphere of fear into an entire discipline and to make students and educators think twice before choosing topics that would challenge the government-sponsored version of history. The idea of a right to national pride, advanced in court, is an ambiguous and legally undefined sentiment that effectively means any member of the Polish nation has the right to sue historians whose findings offend them.

Meanwhile, Holocaust survivors are dying every day. There are few left to protest the new revisionism.

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Opinion | The New Wave of Holocaust Revisionism - The New York Times

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

A bus broadcast antisemitic invective from loudspeakers while driving through a heavily Jewish neighborhood of London on Saturday, a neighborhood watch group said.

The Stamford Hill Shomrim said it received reports that an open bus passing through the area in the early afternoon blared the slur, Yidos Go Home.

Shomrim, which shared a video of the incident, said it appeared to be targeting Orthodox Jews leaving synagogue, and asked any victims or witnesses to come forward with information.

The Metropolitan Police said its officers are aware of the Shomrim video and are making enquiries, the Jewish Chroniclereported. There has been no arrest at this stage.

The Ensign bus company saidthat it hired out the vehicle involved to what we understood to be a church group.

We had absolutely no idea that this would happen or was planned and we are now investigating the matter and will be speaking to the client, it said. We are happy to assist the police with any investigation.

The driver, who was employed by Ensign, did not hear anything due to the general amount of noise from the number of people upstairs, the company added.

The incident echoed another from May, whena convoy of cars bearing Palestinian flags drove down Finchley Road in London while broadcasting, F*** the Jews, rape their daughters. Four men were later arrested in connection with the event.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson last week described antisemitism as a very real problem in society, following a separate incident in Stamford Hill in which two Orthodox Jewish men were physically assaulted.

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Bus Reportedly Blares Antisemitic Slur While Driving Through London Jewish Neighborhood - Algemeiner

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Historians and educators view remembering the period as vital to preventing future genocides, especially as antisemitism rises in the United States.

BEACHWOOD, Ohio The stories are still painful, especially for Robert Zelwin, president of the Kol Israel Foundation. His parents lived through the Holocaust.

"My parents fled into the woods into the area where they lived and they resisted the Nazis," Zelwin recounted. "They lived in the woods for 3 1/2 years."

Historians and educators view remembering the period as vital to preventing future genocides. The Kol Israel Foundation serves as a place for families who settled in the area hoping their teachings help push back against antisemitic incidents.

"I think that a lot of people just don't know," Zelwin said. "That's why they need to be educated. They need to be educated why this happened, how it happened. and how to prevent it. But the rise of antisemitism [today] is basically due to ignorance and lack of education."

A recent example of growing antisemitism happened on Jan. 19, when a gunman held four people hostage for 10 hours inside a Texas synagogue. The FBI is calling the situation a targeted attack on the Jewish community, and as the world was watching a hostage situation play out, Cleveland native Rabbi Andrew Paley was called to action.

"Rabbi Charlie [Cryton-Walker of Congregation Beth Israel] is a colleague of mine, and [we were] sort of watching this horrible sort of scene in real time," Paley said, adding he first learned of the news at his current home in Dallas.

When Paley arrived on the scene outside Congregation Beth Israel about 40 miles away, it felt surreal. He recounted watching the selfless work of hundreds of law enforcement officers on the front line while Cytron-Walker and four others were held hostage for nearly 11 hours.

"To be a part of it in real time, was hard to process," Paley admitted. "You don't know how many people are working to make us safe and secure, and I got a little picture of that."

Paley was one of the first to comfort families of the hostages, as well as the hostages themselves after they were released.

"Antisemitism today is on the rise, and my true belief is the reason it's on the rise is the lack of education," Zelwin repeated. "Everything starts at home. How you feel about things starts at home, and I think a lot of people just don't know."

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Kol Israel Foundation and Anti-Defamation League in Cleveland hosted a discussion titled "Combatting Hate in Northeast Ohio: Seeking Justice and Taking a Stand." James Pasche, regional director for the local ADL, said hate crimes are investigated thoroughly, and awareness is key.

"Education is the largest tool in the toolbox that we have in the toolbox to prevent hate," Pasche said.

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Jewish community in Cleveland talks about Holocaust, antisemitism on International Holocaust Remembrance Day - WKYC.com

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

JNS.org For much of the 20th century, there was a Jewish seat on the US Supreme Court. It was first occupied by Justice Louis Brandeis, who served from 1916 to 1939. He was succeeded by Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1939 to 1962 and then Justice Arthur Goldberg from 1962 to 1965. When Goldberg resigned to become US Ambassador to the United Nations at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson (one of the worst decisions ever made by any justice and one that Goldberg lived to regret), he was replaced by yet another Jew, Justice Abe Fortas, who served until 1969 when he was forced to resign due to an ethics investigation.

Though there was a six-year period when there were two Jews on the court the more conservative Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who had been appointed by President Herbert Hoover, served alongside Brandeis from 1932 to 1938 when he died the tradition of a reserved place for a Jewish justice was during those decades a tradition that presidents chose to respect. Or at least they did until Fortas, a Johnson crony whom he had hoped to make chief justice, ran afoul of ethics scrutiny. His successor, named by President Richard Nixon, was Justice Harry Blackmun, who ended the streak of Jewish justices. It would not be until President Bill Clinton tapped Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the court that another Jew would be one of the nine judges at the top of the American judicial pyramid.

The question of ethnic, religious or gender-based choices for the Supreme Court is back in the news because of the announcement by Justice Stephen Breyer that he would retire at the end of the courts current term this summer.

This gives President Joe Biden the opportunity to nominate a justice for the court. It comes after a campaign by liberal media and legal figures to pressure Breyer to step down now while the Democrats still have a majority in the Senate as well as control of the White House, something that may no longer be true after the midterm elections this fall.

That will make it possible for Biden to appoint a liberal to the court to replace Breyer. That wont alter the current ideological tilt of the court, in which there are six conservatives and three liberals, though Chief Justice John Roberts sometimes joins the trio on the left (which currently consists of Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Breyer), in cases where, unlike the majority of those litigated in the court, unanimity is not possible.

Bidens search will, however, be limited by a campaign promise he made in a debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020. Biden pledged that the first person he appointed to the Supreme Court would be a black woman, a promise which the more left-wing Sanders refused to join at the time.

Mindful of both that assurance and the demands of satisfying his political base, especially in the post-Black Lives Matter movement era in which considerations of race have become paramount to liberals, Biden has announced that he will keep his word.

Its not clear how many plausible candidates fit the criteria. But the assumption is that Biden is likely to be able to pick a black female judge who is capable of gaining the support of the 50 Democrats in the Senate, as well as assuming she is not too radical perhaps a Republican or two, with Vice President Kamala Harris waiting to break the tie in favor of Bidens nominee if necessary.

As was true of the tradition of the Jewish seat that prevailed for so long, since 1916, the belief that the courts membership should not solely consist of white Christian males has become mainstream thinking. Nor is there anything wrong in principle with the notion that the members of the court should represent, as far as it is possible, a broad cross-section of Americans.

But the problem here is not so much the quest for diversity as it is with the idea that every federal appointment must be made with affirmative action-style quotas in mind.

If the court is now widely perceived as a political forum, its not so much because of the activist impulses of the judges as because of the way the political system has changed. A dysfunctional Congress has long since abdicated much of its lawmaking responsibilities to the administrative state staffed by presidential appointees and career bureaucrats in the various government departments and agencies. It is that unelected group that is making most of the laws and regulations that currently govern American society and business. That has left it to the courts and the Supreme Court, in particular to act as the sole check on the executive branch, making it a sort of super-legislature in judicial garb.

That shift has turned every Supreme Court nomination into a barroom brawl. Beginning with the way Democrats led by Biden, then the Senate Judiciary Committee chair turned the name of the distinguished conservative judge and thinker Robert Bork into a verb in 1987, nominees have been both demonized and subjected to unsubstantiated accusations of various kinds. Though the confirmations of Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan were not marked by partisan hysteria, just about every other one since Bork has been a donnybrook.

Justice Clarence Thomas was subjected to a charge of sexual harassment that he likened to a high-tech lynching. Worse, his fitness for the court was questioned because President George H.W. Bush felt constrained to nominate a replacement for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the courts first African-American, who would fit into the same racial slot. In his memoir, My Grandfathers Son, Thomas speaks of his resentment about the way he was treated after graduating from Yale Law School, when potential employers assumed he was there as a result of affirmative action rather than merit. The same was true of the way Thomas has been treated since he was confirmed, with liberal commentators denigrating one of the courts most profound legal thinkers for holding views they think a black man shouldnt have. They speak of him with the sort of condescension theyd call racist if it was directed at a liberal.

Were a long way past the point when the Supreme nine were universally accepted as the best of the best in the legal field, an assumption that the careers of distinguished legal thinkers like Brandeis, Cardozo and Frankfurter more than justified. Yet even if the person that Biden picks is given an easier time than recent Republican nominees, the increasing acceptance of the idea that gender and especially race, rather than individual merit, is the most important thing about a person is a trend that we should regard with alarm.

The occupants of the old Jewish seat were generally thought of as having been so outstanding that they made it to the court in spite of being a member of a small religious minority group rather than because of it. Nor did anyone think of Ginsburgs appointment or that of Breyer or Kagan as the result of a president wishing to score points with the Jews. With Breyers resignation, the number of Jews on the court will likely be back to one from a high of three when Ginsburg served with him and Kagan. Yet even if eventually Kagan is also replaced by a non-Jew, that wont signal anything terrible for her co-religionists.

As is the case with college admissions, the desire to promote diversity inevitably gives way to quotas in which some racial or ethnic groups are winners and some are losers, throwing the values of meritocracy so essential to democracy as well as to the rights of minorities to the winds. Preserving a meritocratic society is far more important than dubious and ultimately unattainable notions about racial or gender balance. No matter who sits on the Supreme Court, the consequences of such quotas, no matter how well-intended, are something all Americans should fear.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter @jonathans_tobin.

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The Problem With Affirmative-Action Justice | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com - Algemeiner

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Being a Holocaust educator in America today can feel like an uphill struggle, given how much resistance to the truth that we have witnessed. Over the past year, politicians have taken to comparing the Holocaust to COVID-19 mandates. Teachers have been told to balance it with opposing perspectives. Children have celebrated Hitlers accomplishments at school. Theres no getting around it: Our relationship with the Holocaust is broken. To fix it, we need to reinvent the way its taught.

For starters, Holocaust education is done most effectively in analytical, low-temperature environments, so we must stop describing antisemitism as something to be combatted or tackled. Using the language of war and encouraging students to construe antisemitism as an adversary only inflames an already difficult discussion. It also risks giving antisemites the validation they crave by enabling them to imagine themselves as fighters. Instead, we must help students realize that antisemitism and its history are defined by contradiction.

Born in late-19th century Europe, antisemitism transposed centuries of religious hatred of Jews for the newly industrialized, scientific era by painting Judaism as a race that had nothing to do with religion. In the antisemitic imagination, Jews are both rich and poor, weak and strong, controlling society and tearing it apart. Contemporary antisemites regurgitate these contradictions when, for example, they accuse Jews of using COVID-19 vaccines to rule the world on the one hand and of masterminding the anti-vaxx movement on the other.

We must also make it easier for educators to get away from teaching the Holocaust through the reductive lens of pop culture. In my 10 years of experience as an educator, Ive found that The Boy in The Striped Pajamas, Schindlers List, Number the Stars, and similar novels and movies are the staples of Holocaust education in the American classroom. Their plots may differ, but they all blend fact and fiction in a way that sets out to tug the heartstrings without dispelling myths. This doesnt help students understand what happened, let alone how or why; in fact, they often come away more confused about the Holocaust.

We must do more to cast spotlights on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust and on the internal chaos that characterized Nazism. Students are frequently taught to see Jews as lambs who went to the gas chambers without question, and Nazis as cold but efficient supermen. Learning about the Holocaust through the lens of events like the Jewish uprisings in the Warsaw Ghetto or in the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps can help them to see history in a new light.

The internet is awash with free lesson plans about the Holocaust, and many educators turn to those lesson plans. Many of them inadvertently imply that the Holocaust can be taught the same way everywhere. But the landscape of American Holocaust education is very uneven. Some schools have thriving Holocaust education programs with guest talks from survivors (who are rapidly declining in numbers), field trips to museums, and connections with local Jewish organizations. Others have never taught the Holocaust because their state doesnt require it. Some might not even have Jewish people in their community. Instead of being one-size-fits-all, Holocaust education should be flexible enough to reflect the range of local realities.

And we must treat antisemitism as more than just a Jewish concern. Antisemitism is a symptom of bigger failings in society, including political partisanship and broken communities. To ward against these divisions, Holocaust educators must embrace and promote a diverse and nonpartisan range of experiences, ideas, and perspectives. And Holocaust education organizations, including those that produce content for the classroom, must collaborate with each other and educators more often.

In recent decades, theres been a push to teach subject matter through immersive, interactive activities. Although this has largely been for the good, it isnt always suitable. The Holocaust is too historically complex and too emotionally challenging to teach as an experientially based activity. The recent story about a 3rd class reenacting the digging of mass graves is only one of the more outrageous examples of what can happen when the Holocaust is taught this way.

Doing Holocaust education right means beginning with the basic facts. Students need to learn what antisemitism is and where it came from. They need to learn what Nazism is and how it operated. They need to know what the Holocaust was, how and why it happened, and why it still matters today.

Many organizations are thinking innovatively about Holocaust education and offer accessible content and lessons for the classroom. At The Ninth Candle, which is my organization, we provide expert-led analyses of archival materials that challenge students to grasp how hatred is normalized and how that normalization opens the door to radical consequences through (See: an obscure artifact of Nazi propaganda like the hate-mongering board game Juden Raus!). 3GNY, another educational nonprofit organization, has created a living link with the Holocaust by working with the grandchildren of survivors. Facing History and Ourselves provides ethical decision making, social-emotional learning, and responsible citizenship in its Holocaust education lessons. And promising things are happening among fiction writers, too. I always recommend Liza Wiemers young adult novel The Assignment, which frames a factual account of the Holocaust in a compelling story that encourages students to think about the meaning of allyship and what it takes to be an upstander.

As the world pauses for International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the need for all of us to shake up Holocaust education is more urgent than ever. There is no quick fix, but we must all do better.

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'Holocaust Education Is Just a Jewish Concern,' and Other Misconceptions (Opinion) - Education Week

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Jon Staenberg and his 13-year-old daughter, Rivka, left their home on Sunday morning in San Francisco carrying a big garbage bag. They often spend an hour or so on the weekends picking up trash in their Pacific Heights neighborhood.

But on Jan. 23, they came upon something more distressing than litter: three flyers, printed on white copy paper, folded and placed into a plastic bag weighted down with white rice, claiming: Every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish.

I was shaken, said Staenberg. He wasnt sure exactly what to do, so he took a photo and sent it to a local rabbi. As for Rivka, who celebrated her bat mitzvah in May, it was an opportunity to teach [her] to never take anything for granted, he said. We should not ever think for a moment, even living in Pacific Heights, that antisemitism doesnt exist.

The flyers paint Covid as a Jewish conspiracy and list the names of Jews, or people suspected of being Jews, associated with the pandemic, from CDC leaders to the CEO of Pfizer. The leaflet bears a five-pointed star connected with Satanism and an advertisement for the website Goyim TV. A Nextdoor user said they picked up 20 of the baggies along Pacific Avenue between Baker and Scott streets and alerted the San Francisco Police Department.

The incident alarmed local residents and led to reports on the evening TV news. But the well-manicured San Francisco neighborhood is only the latest among many that have been hit over the past two months with antisemitic flyers bearing the Goyim TV insignia.

Over the weekend, the flyers appeared in Miami Beach. In November, residents in Beverly Hills reported they were left in driveways, weighted down with pebbles. The same flyers were left in Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, North Carolina, Texas and Vermont, JNS reported, citing the Secure Community Network.

All share a message of Jewish conspiracy and include the website for Goyim TV, the video-sharing site co-created by Jon Minadeo Jr., a Petaluma man and leader of the Goyim Defense League, or GDL.

The Anti-Defamation League, which follows the internet-based group closely, calls it a loose network of individuals connected by their virulent antisemitism that includes five or six primary organizers/public figures, dozens of supporters and thousands of online followers.

The most prominent organizer is Minadeo, 39, who last year successfully incorporated in California as Goyim TV LLC, business records show. He sometimes goes by the nickname Handsome Truth.

An avid weightlifter who has dabbled in acting, Minadeo has for months hosted hours-long livestreams on the Goyim TV website, courting digital payments from viewers all over the world. In the streams, he blasts rock music, plays with digital filters (for example, altering his face to look like Shrek) and speeds through video chats with strangers using a torrent of racial slurs and heil Hitler salutes, attempting to convince them of his worldview essentially, that Jews are responsible for the worlds evils.

Offline, Minadeo and other members of the GDL often pile in a van for what they call Name the Nose tours, during which they hang antisemitic banners on highway overpasses, including one in Oakland in 2020, that lament Jewish supremacy or claim Jews want to start a race war. Last year they held a demonstration outside a Holocaust center in Florida, denying the Holocaust and claiming Jews are engaged in white genocide. Minadeo calls these activities his activism.

GDLs overarching goal, according to the ADL, is to cast aspersions on Jews and spread antisemitic myths and conspiracy theories.

Seth Brysk, ADL regional director, condemned the flyers in a TV news interview, saying the recent Colleyville hostage crisis made clear the power of antisemitic propaganda to encourage acts of violence.

The flyers served the purpose of spreading their conspiracies and spreading their lies but also for the purpose of intimidation and terrorizing, Brysk said. There is that link to spreading [lies], trying to intimidate it can inspire violence and terroristic activity.

While the vast majority of flyering activity is protected by the First Amendment, distributing antisemitic propaganda has spurred criminal charges in California recently.

In December, law enforcement in Sacramento County arrested 34-year-old Nicholas Wayne Sherman for papering a synagogue and homes in Carmichael with flyers advertising Aryan Nations and saying Hitler was right. Officials charged one felony and 13 misdemeanors for a state statute prohibiting the use of terrorist symbols; for example placing swastikas and burning crosses on someones property with the intent to intimidate. Sherman was in custody as of Monday facing $100,000 bail.

The Goyim Defense League usually takes pains to stay within what it considers to be the bounds of the law (though one adherent was recently arrested in San Diego for hate-motivated assault). In the case of the flyers, Goyim TV included a disclaimer at the bottom: These flyers were distributed randomly and without malicious intent.

A source close to Minadeo said he has been under pressure to stop his antisemitic activities by friends and family who fear their association with him will harm their livelihoods.

According to the source, Minadeo rejects Covid vaccines and has been ill with Covid-19 recently. He has not streamed in 34 days.

SFPD Officer Adam Lobsinger wrote to J. on Monday that police were handling the flyering incident and requested leads from the public.

On January 23, 2022 San Francisco Police officers from Northern Station received reports of suspicious fliers in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, Lobsingers statement said. Officers located multiple fliers that contained anti-Semitic language. Officers collected the fliers, canvassed the scene for additional evidence, and authored an incident report.

The SFPD Special Investigations Division is handling the incident, the statement said. No arrests have been made. Anyone with information is asked to contact the SFPD at 415-575-4444 or Text a Tip to TIP411 and begin the message with SFPD.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani, whose district covers Pacific Heights, condemned the flyering on Twitter and said she was in contact with law enforcement.

Let me be very clear: this kind of anti-Semitic hatred has no place in our city, she wrote. Ive been in touch with SFPD and intend to see these individuals held accountable.

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Flyers claiming Covid is Jewish plot land in San Francisco J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Hebrew is a member of the Canaanite group of Semitic languages. It was the language of the early Jews, but from 586 BC it started to be replaced by Aramaic. By 200 AD use of Hebrew as an everyday language had largely ceased, but it continued to be used for literary and religious functions, as well as a lingua franca among Jews from different countries.

During the mid-19th century the first efforts were made to revive Hebrew as a everyday language. One man who played a major role in these efforts was Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922), who was the first to make exclusive use of Hebrew in his home, and encouraged the use of Hebrew among others, as well as its use in schools.

Today Hebrew is spoken by some 5 million people mainly in Israel, where it is an official language along with Arabic. and a further 2 million people speak the language in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, Panama, the UK and USA.

The first alphabet used to write Hebrew emerged during the late second and first millennia BC. It is closely related to the Phoenician alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet was developed from an alphabet known as Proto-Hebrew/Early Aramaic.

This system of indicating vowels was devised by the Masoretic scholars in Tiberias in around 750 AD. It is known as Tiberian vocalization, Tiberian pointing, or Tiberian niqqud, or in Hebrew.

Hear the Modern Hebrew alphabet, with example words:

Biblical or Classical Hebrew is the form of Hebrew used in Israel and Judah from about the 10th century BC until the 2nd century AD. Texts include the Hebrew Bible, and other religious and historical writings. It was written without vowel indication at first, and over time some consonants, known as matres lectionis, came to be used to indicate vowels.

Biblical Hebrew was first written with the Phoenician script, which developed into the Paleo-Hebrew script by the 10th or 9th century BC. By the 6th century BC the Aramaic script began to replace the Paleo-Hebrew script.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Hebrew

Hear the Biblical Hebrew alphabet:

This is the reconstructed pronunciation of the Hebrew used between 750-950 AD by Masoretic scholars living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Judea.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_Hebrew

Hear the Tiberian Hebrew alphabet:

The Rashi style is used mainly to write commentaries on texts. It is named after Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (1040-1105 AD) a.k.a. Rashi, one of the greatest medieval Jewish scholars and bible commentators. Rashi did not use the Rashi sytle to write his commentaries but it is named in honour of him.

Download a Hebrew alphabet chart in Word or PDF format

Kol benei ha'adam noldu benei xorin veshavim be'erkam uvizxuyoteihem. Kulam xonenu batevuna uvematspun, lefixax xova 'aleihem linhog ish bere'ehu beruax shel axava.

A recording of this text by (Gal Weisberg)

Another recording of this text by Tal Barnea

Kol benei ha'adam noldu benei xorin veshavim be'erkam uvizxuyoteihem. Kulam xonenu batevuna uvematspun, v xova 'aleihem linhog ish bere'ehu beruax shel axava.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Corrections and text samples provided by Tal Barnea

Information about Hebrew | Phrases | Numbers | Time | Video lessons | Tower of Babel | Articles | Biblical Hebrew video lessons | Modern Hebrew video lessons | Hebrew links | Hebrew learning materials

Information about the Hebrew language and alphabethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_languagehttp://judaism.about.com/od/hebre1/Hebrew.htmhttp://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0008_0_08629.html

Modern Hebrew lessons and courseshttp://www.zigzagworld.com/hebrewformehttp://www.hebrewpodcasts.comhttp://www.ulpan.nethttp://hebrewspeaker.blogspot.comhttp://www.linguanaut.com/learn_hebrew.htmhttp://foundationstone.com.auhttp://www.hebraico.pro.brhttp://polymath.org/hebrew.phpBiblical Hebrew lessons and courseshttp://www.netwaysglobal.comhttp://www.shalom.50megs.comhttp://www.hebrew4christians.nethttp://visualhebrew.blogspot.ie/

Learn Hebrew online with HebrewPod101Practical Hebrew - learn to speak the Hebrew that really matters

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Free Hebrew fontshttp://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Hebrew.htmlhttp://opensiddur.org/tools/fonts/http://oketz.com/fonts/http://www.daniella.co.il/daniella/bloog/font/Hebrew-font-page1.htmhttp://www.mendelsson.co.il/yakov/myfonts.htm

More Hebrew language links

Akkadian, Amharic, Arabic (Algerian), Arabic (Chadian), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Hassaniya), Arabic (Lebanese), Arabic (Modern Standard), Arabic (Moroccan), Arabic (Syrian), Aramaic, Argobba, Assyrian / Neo-Assyrian, Canaanite, Chaha, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, Ge'ez, Hadhramautic, Harari, Hebrew, Himyaritic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, Maltese, Mandaic, Nabataean, Neo-Mandaic, Phoenician, Punic, Qatabanic, Sabaean, Sabaic, Silt'e, Syriac, Tigre, Tigrinya, Turoyo, Ugaritic, Western Neo-Aramaic

Aramaic, Bukhori, Domari, Hebrew, Jewish Neo-Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Juhuri, Knaanic, Ladino, Mozarabic, Yiddish, Yevanic

Ancient Berber, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Manichaean, Nabataean, Pahlavi, Parthian, Phoenician, Paleo-Hebrew, Proto-Sinaitic / Proto-Canaanite, Psalter, Punic, Sabaean, Samaritan, Sogdian, South Arabian, Syriac, Tifinagh, Ugaritic

Other writing systems

ALPHABETUM - a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient scripts, including classical & medieval Latin, ancient Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Messapic, Picene, Iberian, Celtiberian, Gothic, Runic, Old & Middle English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Old Nordic, Ogham, Kharosthi, Glagolitic, Old Cyrillic, Phoenician, Avestan, Ugaritic, Linear B, Anatolian scripts, Coptic, Cypriot, Brahmi, Old Persian cuneiform: http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

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Hebrew language, alphabet and pronunciation

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

Hebrew language, Semitic language of the Northern Central (also called Northwestern) group; it is closely related to Phoenician and Moabite, with which it is often placed by scholars in a Canaanite subgroup. Spoken in ancient times in Palestine, Hebrew was supplanted by the western dialect of Aramaic beginning about the 3rd century bce; the language continued to be used as a liturgical and literary language, however. It was revived as a spoken language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is the official language of Israel.

The history of the Hebrew language is usually divided into four major periods: Biblical, or Classical, Hebrew, until about the 3rd century bce, in which most of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is written; Mishnaic, or Rabbinic, Hebrew, the language of the Mishna (a collection of Jewish traditions), written about 200 ce (this form of Hebrew was never used among the people as a spoken language); Medieval Hebrew, from about the 6th to the 13th century ce, when many words were borrowed from Greek, Spanish, Arabic, and other languages; and Modern Hebrew, the language of Israel in modern times. Scholars generally agree that the oldest form of Hebrew is that of some of the poems in the Bible, especially the Song of Deborah in chapter 5 of Judges. The sources of borrowed words that first appeared during this period include the other Canaanite languages as well as Akkadian. Hebrew also contains a small number of Sumerian words borrowed from an Akkadian source. The Hebrew of the Bible exhibits little dialectal variety, but literary traces within the text indicate some degree of variation according to geography. In addition to the Bible, a small number of inscriptions in Hebrew of the biblical period are extant; the earliest of these is a short inscription in Phoenician characters dating from the 9th century bce.

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During the early Mishnaic period, some of the guttural consonants of Biblical Hebrew were combined or confused with one another, and many nouns were borrowed from Aramaic. Hebrew also borrowed a number of Greek, Latin, and Persian words.

Use of the spoken language declined from the 9th century until the 18th century. Nevertheless, the medieval language underwent development, however spasmodic, in various directions. The cult of the liturgical poem called a piyy (itself a Greek word) in the 6th9th century enriched the written vocabulary by giving fresh meanings to old words and coining new ones, especially in the so-called Kalirian style, and the Spanish-Hebrew poets of the period 9001250 followed suit. This period also saw the addition of about 2,000 or 3,000 scientific, philological, and philosophical terms; some of these were formed by making new use of old roots, as in the case of geder fence, which served also for definition. Some were based on existing Hebrew words such as kammt quantity, from kammh How much?; and others, such as aqlm climate and ib natural, were adapted from foreign languages, chiefly Greek and Arabic.

Modern Hebrew, based on the biblical language, contains many innovations designed to meet modern needs; it is the only colloquial speech based on a written language. Everyday words are derived from existing Hebrew phrasing(e.g., an clock from aah hour) or borrowed from contemporary languages (e.g., mishmesh apricot from Arabic mishmish). A handful of words are repurposed from biblical expressions (e.g., amal electricity from amber). The pronunciation is a modification of that used by the Sephardic (Hispano-Portuguese) Jews rather than that of the Ashkenazic (eastern European) Jews. The old guttural consonants are not clearly distinguished (except by Palestinian speakers) or are lost. The syntax is based on that of the Mishna. Characteristic of Hebrew of all stages is the use of word roots consisting usually of three consonants, to which vowels and other consonants are added to derive words of different parts of speech and meaning.

The language is written from right to left in a North Semitic script of 22 letters (see Hebrew alphabet). Only consonants were written in the languages earliest period, and some of those consonants were later employed to represent long vowels as well. In the 7th century ce the Masoretes in Tiberias introduced into the writing system diacritical marks, which represented short vowels and other phonological information.

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Hebrew language | Origin, History, Alphabet, & Facts ...

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Posted By admin on January 30, 2022

UVA Today caught up with Halvorson-Taylor to learn more about her passion project.

Q. At what point in your career or life did answering the question of Who wrote the Bible? become something you wanted to pursue?

A. Its always been of interest to me because knowing when a text was written, and why and by whom, helps you to understand what it means.

It helps to understand the Bible in its fullest dimensions if you know that this (chapter) was written by a group of exiles who were living in Babylon or that (chapter) was written by people who were under threat of the Assyrians. Context matters.

And then, when I began to teach, I realized there were many assumptions out there about what the Bible is, and how it works, that dont line up with what the Bible actually is and how it was written. Once, I taught a seminar and my students and I sort of teased each other and said that the tagline for the course should be The Bible its not what you think it is.

In a way, that is the starting point for Writing the Bible, because to ask the question, Who wrote the Bible is to actually challenge the assumptions behind every part of that question. Who in the sense that it was not one writer, but many. It challenges our Western modern assumptions about what writing is. We think of writers as the lonely creative genius in a garret somewhere, writing things in one sitting. When in fact, the Bible is the accumulation of writing over centuries. And that involves scribes copying, interpreting, recontextualizing and filling in gaps over time.

Q. Its safe to assume the question of Who wrote the Bible? has been tackled before. What was your approach to this project?

A. My approach was largely historical. I tried, at every point, to give the context for when we think these things were written. And, too, I tried as much as possible to take advantage of the fact that we have multiple translations and editions of the Bible out there. We have the Hebrew Old Testament, but we also have a Greek translation that was translated by Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria, Egypt.

We also have this treasure trove of documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are fascinating for changing, all over again, our notions of what the Bible is. Certain books in the Dead Sea Scrolls are heavily represented and certain books that we think of as biblical are not there at all. The way each community arranges their Bible and what they include in their Bible, and even the shape of certain biblical books, tells us a lot about the sort of shifting notions about what was and was not regarded as Scripture.

So I tried to marshal all of the textual evidence that I could to show people how we might reconstruct the question of Who wrote the Bible?

Q. Any myths out there on the Bibles authorship that you were able to bust?

A. For a long time, I dont think people really cared about who wrote the Bible. That really is a modern question. But when they did start to care, they attributed it to Moses. This is improbable, since the text he was supposed to have written actually describes his own death.

But whats more interesting, is to think about why ancient scholars thought of Moses as the author of the Bible.

Why did they think of Moses as the author? Well, because they defined what an author was differently than we do. For them, an author was an authority figure, an authorizing figure, and even if they were aware that scribes were recopying materials, they attributed it to Moses, as an authority figure.

To explore shifting notions of authorship between ancients and moderns is important for the question of who wrote the Bible. What we understand as an author is different from what an ancient scholar would understand as an author.

Most of all, I want people to hear the many voices that make up the Bible, which give the Bible additional resonances and a depth of dimension that make it timeless.

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Who Wrote the Bible? This UVA Professor Goes on a Passion Quest for Answers - UVA Today

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